5 Times Doctor Who Literally Predicted the Future IRL (by Accident), Ranked

Here are five times Doctor Who accurately predicted the future, but we never noticed.

5. Fake News

Former U.S. President, Donald Trump, gave rise to what came to be known as “fake news” back in 2017. Tom Baker’s Doctor called him out forty years ago – in 1977’s The Face of Evil, the Fourth Doctor famously says, “You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views.”

4. Margaret Thatcher

Britain’s first female Prime Minister was elected in 1979. Yet Doctor Who predicted Margaret Thatcher’s vicious reign four years earlier. In 1975’s Terror of the Zygons, the Doctor’s UNIT pal, Brigadier gets a phone call from Madam Prime Minister! Who would’ve thought?

3. BBC Three

The BBC first launched its youth channel in 2003, and it was even home to Doctor Who Confidential at one point. Over thirty years earlier, in 1971’s The Daemons, the Third Doctor and Jo discover an ancient alien amidst an archaeological dig, which is coincidentally covered by none other than BBC Three!

2. Ice Volcanoes

In 1973, Planet of the Daleks aired. The Third Doctor, Jo, and the Thals (the other inhabitants of the Daleks’ home planet) fight the Daleks, and they decide to explode the volcano (the ice one, not the lava one) to stop them. In 1989, the world found out that ice volcanoes are not just a sci-fi plot device – they are real, and they exist on Triton, one of Neptune’s moons.

1. NFTs

The Fourth Doctor once uncovered a major NFT scam, but it wasn’t called that in 1979. Still, City of Death follows Count Scarlioni as he duplicates the Mona Lisa and offers the fake pieces to rich people for a hefty sum. NFTs may not have been a familiar concept back then, but Douglas Adams was definitely on to something.

Doctor Who, please don’t predict another pandemic or World War III or anything like that. We’ve had enough of those…