Nostradamus

Nine hundred quatrains, vague enough to be eternal, precise enough to keep selling.

The 1555 'Prophéties': 942 quatrains of deliberately scrambled French, Latin, and Greek, published by a plague doctor who'd learned that specificity was fatal in an age of heresy trials. The documented hits (a 'young lion' killing an old one in single combat — Henri II died of a joust splinter four years later, as the court noted with horror) are outnumbered thousandfold by retrofits; the famous 9/11 quatrain is a proven fabrication. He remains in the web as the archive's control experiment: what prophecy looks like when the pattern-matching is done by the reader.