Text messages that have been circulating in the Philippine regarding an earthquake that is to hit the country on the 18th of July 2008 has absolutely no scientific basis.

This is according to Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) director Renato Solidum Jr. Director Solidum said that while it does not hurt to be prepared, there is no scientific basis for such prophecies.

According to the messages, the “prophecy” came from a supposed Brazilian psychic named Jucelino Nóbrega da Luz.

“Dapat tanungin kung totoo ang taong nagsulat. Napakaraming sinabi na event na nangyari pero walang katibayan (First of all we should ask if the supposed psychic exists. There are a lot of supposed prophecies that did not come to pass),” Solidum said.

While the supposed psychic does exist on the Internet and has quite a few detractors, there is actually NO prophecy for an earthquake in the Philippines scheduled for the month of July 2008.

A quick visit to the English translation of Nóbrega’s prophecies reveal that while there have been predictions of flooding in the Philippines in February and July of 2008, there is no foretelling of an earthquake for the country. There is however, one earthquake prophecy for Chile (Item #63).

“Di po iyan prediction kasi wala yang scientific basis. Ito ay sinasabing prophecy o hula. Kahit sinong organization sa buong mundo walang kakayanan na makapagsabing exact magnitude at exact araw (The message circulating via email and text is not a prediction, it has no scientific basis. It is a prophecy that anyone can make),” Solidum said in an interview on local Philippine radio.

He said that to date, there is no organization in the world that can predict the exact date, time and magnitude of an earthquake.

Something you should do before they wise up and take the thing down.

Go to www.google.com.

Enter “earthworm hamburger” as a seach term, with or without the quotes.

Look at the top result. Click on the link and look at the bottom part of the page, where it is all red but otherwise apparently blank.

Click then move the mouse over the blank red bottom part of the page and look at what you see.
Web/html savvy people, take things a bit further and do a “view source” on the page. Do a CTRL+F for an image named 1.jpg and look at the alt-text that comes with each 1×1 px image. Crafty, eh?

This is the work of a group that we in the office refer to as The Barnaby Brothers. You will find their company name in the meta and alt tags in the site mentioned above. What is unclear to me about their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods is did the client company know that the words “earthworm burgers” appear as meta tags on their site? Or maybe they do know and are using it to their SEO advantage?

What this company (the fastfood one) should do is take down this old site so that in time no one will find them in #1 position for earthworm burgers. As it is the cached pages in Google will serve for quite some time after the pages have been removed.

Search engines have long memories.