Does That Ache Mean a Quake?

The truth is out there.

In Pasadena.

There on a tree-lined street sits a white stucco house that is one of the city’s oldest homes. But no one lives there.

The building is currently occupied by a U.S. government agency that has filled it with computers, maps, graphs and various electronic instruments. In what used to be the dining room, tucked under a desk, is an unassuming, two-drawer file cabinet.

Inside are hundreds of earthquake predictions made not by scientists but by self-described psychics and researchers who use non-mainstream indicators--planetary positions, psychic phenomena, cloud formations, nervous tics, radon gas, the behavior of whales or just plain pains in the derriere--to make their forecasts. One of those predictions, called in by a woman in Oregon who says she can hear earthquakes coming, went into the file in 1994, just days before the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake, the anniversary of which is almost upon us.

Sound like story material for “The X-Files”? Perhaps, but the truth out there is perhaps all the scarier because some people believe it.

The house serves as the local field office of the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency keeps the amateur earthquake predictions on file for a less-than-scientific reason.

“We do this to dispel the claim that there is some kind of [government] conspiracy against these people, that we refuse to acknowledge them,” said Linda Curtis, a USGS public affairs officer who is the keeper of the files.

Curtis has been keeping the files since she began working for the USGS 19 years ago. So far, the Oregon woman’s prediction three or four days before the Northridge earthquake that a major temblor would soon hit Southern California has been the only one Curtis considers a true “hit.”

But also on file are numerous other forecasts from the same woman that did not come true.

“The predictions we get are mostly just wrong,” said Curtis, spreading the files across a conference table. Some included complex, homemade graphs and colorful, hand-drawn maps.

Some are simple, like the e-mail that read, “I have received information that on Sunday morning, May 25, 1997, there will be a significant earthquake in the Santa Clarita area.”

A more poetic letter forecast a major shaker for July 11, 1991. It included a plea: “Use this letter to warn the people of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Warn all the people of the world. I am a man of science.”

Many of the predictions came from people experiencing pains and aches that they believed were effected by some sort of force that precedes earthquakes. In January 1966, a woman wrote that her pains were “strongest around my left knee at the inner cordial tendon,” which she believed meant a huge earthquake would soon be striking the San Fernando Valley.

“I’ve got one guy who calls to tell me he has a pain in his butt,” Curtis said. “He thinks it’s significant.”

Charlotte King, the woman who claims to be able to hear earthquakes in the making, said she knew there was going to be a quake in 1994 not only because of sounds she heard, but also pains she felt.

“My heart was bothering me a lot,” said King, speaking from her home in Salem, Oregon. “That meant something was going to happen in Southern California.

King said that different parts of her body correspond to specific locales.

“The stomach is Mammoth, the back of the head on the left side is the Cascades and on the right side is Kilauea.”

She couldn’t explain this, she just knew it to be true from experience.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” King asked.

Some contact Curtis with predictions that are suspiciously general.

“Something like, ‘I predict there is going to be an earthquake somewhere in the next week,’ ” Curtis said.

“The more vague, the more chance you have of being right.”

And then there are the predictions Curtis describes as “shooting fish in a barrel.”

Recently, some of her regular callers and e-mailers have been predicting earthquakes in the Mammoth Lakes area, where shaking from volcanic activity has become a common occurrence, sometimes reaching more than 2,000 quakes per week.

“I could predict those,” Curtis said, adding that King sometimes calls after a major earthquake has struck.

“She calls me to predict there will be aftershocks,” Curtis said.

Because she’s willing to talk to the non-pros, Curtis said she gets some ribbing from the scientists in residence at the USGS office and at Caltech’s famed seismology lab nearby.

“They call me ‘prediction central,’ ” said Curtis. “But they’re more than happy to turn over to me the calls and letters that come in.”

The amateur earthquake predictors are also grateful that she’s there.

“She took me serious,” King said. “She took down what I had to say.”

For Curtis, it’s all in a day’s work.

“We’re a government agency, and I really do believe in our motto that we are here to serve the public,” Curtis said. “Most of these people who call or write are genuine in their beliefs, I think. Most of the time I don’t mind listening to them a bit.”

She was willing to openly ridicule only one letter writer, a man who claimed he could predict earthquakes by how heavy he felt. “I weigh in at around 200,” he wrote, but before a recent quake he “felt like I weighed 250 or 300 pounds and could hardly get out of bed.”

The letter addressed to the USGS seemed hardly wackier than scores of others in her collection. But Curtis pointed to the end, where the man described himself as a “government purchasing agent.”

“As if that,” Curtis said with a laugh, “gives him any credibility.”