Benjamín Solari Parravicini
Benjamín Solari Parravicini was an Argentine visual artist, known for his supposed psychic abilities to forecast future events. Among his claimed predictions were the launch of Sputnik 2, the advent of television, the development of artificial insemination, the September 11th terrorist attacks, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Cuban Revolution and the rise of Fidel Castro, and many other historical events.
Biography
Benjamín Solari Parravicini was born on August 8, 1898, in Buenos Aires, to Benjamín Tomás Solari and Dolores Parravicini Noriera, was the oldest of eight siblings and was nicknamed Pelón due to his baldness.He dedicated his life to painting and had a pretty successful career; in 1927, during an art exhibition in Buenos Aires, Parravicini was congratulated by then President of Argentina, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, who was present in the display. Later on, he got an award at an international art display that took place in the capital city and was invited to exhibit some of his drawings in Liège, Belgium, where he won a gold medal and even impressed King Albert I, who bought one of his works.
He was also an art professor at the Spanish lyceum of Buenos Aires; and the city municipality appointed Parravicini as both manager of the Arts Department and director of the exhibition gallery, roles which he fulfilled for several years.
Artistic works (exhibitions)
- 1927 – Exposición comunal.
- 1929 – Amigos del Arte.
- 1935 – Camuati
- 1947 – Asociación para la Promoción de las Artes.
Paranormal abilities
Through his childhood, Parravicini claimed to have contact with fairies, angels, and duendes and was allegedly able to find lost objects and even lost people with ease. This behavior worried his father, who had his son undertake several medical tests to prove if he had an illness of some sort, to negative results. Sometime later, the young Parravicini started talking about a "war that would go off in 14", which became the first of his several premonitions as World War I would begin that year.Between 1936 and 1972, Parravicini made more than a thousand "prophetic" drawings, which he described as "psychographies". His supporters credit him with having accurately predicted various major world events, including the arrival of television, satellite communication, in vitro fertilization, that the first being in space would be a dog, and the September 11 attacks; the latter gained the artist worldwide attention in the aftermath of the attacks, with the image of the "prophecy" depicting two sketches of the Statue of Liberty, one with buildings going down on the background and a message that stated the following:
Parravicini claimed several times that, at first, due to his Catholic beliefs, he destroyed the drawings because they did not make sense to him, and that, while making the drawings, he felt that his hand was being guided by an external entity and that he heard a voice during the whole process.