A Quick Look Back at the Future

While the psychics are fervently predicting the major events to occur in 1989, here are some of the 1988 forecasts that didn’t quite come true, as taken from a poll of top psychics by the National Enquirer: Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev would divorce his wife, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II would step down from the throne, actor Burt Reynolds’ career would skyrocket with two hit films, prehistoric dinosaur eggs would be hatched by scientists and an electronic microchip implanted in the brain would be discovered as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. A few forecasts came close. Denver psychic Lou Wright said Sarah Ferguson would have a baby, but the actual prediction was that the Duchess of York and Princess Diana would have babies on the same day and that Fergie would have a boy. She had a girl. Meanwhile, National Examiner psychic-astrologer Belle Starr foresaw an end to the Iran-Iraq war but said it would occur when millions of Iranians drowned themselves in the Persian Gulf after a dying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the entire nation to join him in the hereafter.

--One-time surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould will soon have two new arrivals--a book and a baby. The book, her first, will be on her unsuccessful legal fight to keep Baby M, the child she agreed to bear for a New Jersey couple. The pregnancy, her fifth, occurs in the midst of planning a 22-city tour in support of the book, “A Mother’s Story,” due in March. “The book’s focus is going to be a lot about the ills of how people are affected by surrogacy,” said Robert D. Arenstein, Whitehead-Gould’s attorney. William and Elizabeth Stern, granted custody of Baby M by the New Jersey Supreme Court, had tried to stop Whitehead-Gould from writing the book, arguing that it would exploit the child. But a Superior Court judge ruled that the account could cover Whitehead-Gould’s relationship with the child up until her second birthday.

--Britain’s Prince Charles could have been hoofing it down to the winner’s circle, but his first victory as a racehorse owner was scotched when the horse failed a drug test. Britain’s Jockey Club is investigating how the prince’s horse, Devil’s Elbow, came to be doped before winning a novice hurdle race at the Worcester track on Dec. 5. Traces of the banned substances caffeine, theophylline and theobromine showed up in the tests. Officials said such substances are sometimes in contaminated feed, and samples from the horse’s training yard were being analyzed. The gelding came in at 5-1 odds, and the prince will have to repay the more than $1,000 that he won in prize money.