Simpsons Did It: 10 Times The Simpsons Predicted the Future

The Simpsons have been eerily good at making predictions since the show first aired. The show was only on its third episode back in 1990 when Bart pulled a three-eyed fish from the local fishin' hole. Named Blinky, the mutant fish was one of the first examples of the terrible pollution in Springfield – most notably from the local nuclear power plant that operated beside Bart's fishing spot.

Twenty years later, three Argentinean fishermen were shocked when they pulled up a three-eyed fish from the Chorro de Agua Caliente reservoir. Just like Blinky, this fish was swimming in a body of water that receives water from the local power plant. Unlike Mr. Burns though, the three men were smart enough not to try a taste of the mutated fish and instead turned it over to a lab for testing.

In 2008's "Treehouse of Horror XIX," the opening scene shows Homer trying to vote for Barack Obama, only the machine keeps turning his selection into a vote for John McCain. When the 2012 election rolled around, voters complained their machines were rigged to vote for Mitt Romney when they clicked on Barack Obama.

While other shows have made light of rigged voting machines, a cell phone video of the real-life voting machine shows the error is strikingly similar to the one seen on The Simpsons (although, fortunately, no real voters were swallowed and murdered by their voting machines).

In The Simpson's fourth season, an Itchy and Scratchy movie is released and a billboard advertising the film features Itchy decapitating Scratchy with a movie camera and blood spraying onto the street and cars.

That was in 1992. Fast forward to 2008, when Kill Bill was first played on TV2 in New Zealand and Saatchi & Saatchi was hired to promote the premiere. The team installed billboards in some of the biggest Auckland intersections that appeared to spray blood off the billboard and even onto the street below. The cars that got painted were props, and were driven by innocent passers-by like the couple in the Itchy and Scratchy ad. In 1992 it seemed preposterous that such a gory billboard would exist but once again, The Simpsons were just looking into the future.

Springfield decided to legalize gambling in a season five episode that aired in 1993. As the city comes to resemble Las Vegas, Mr. Burns brings in magicians Gunter and Ernst to entertain the crows in his casino. The two, who performed with trained tigers, were an obvious parody of Las Vegas legends Siegfried and Roy. In the show, the white tiger attacks the magicians after recalling its tranquil past life in the jungle.

In 2003, Siegfried and Roy were on stage with a white tiger when the animal turned on Roy, mauling him in front of a massive audience. While some argued that it was only a matter of time before the wild animal reverted to its natural instincts, The Simpsons' version was undeniably close to the real incident, though it aired almost ten years earlier.

In 2007, The Simpsons Movie made a joke about the NSA listening to conversations of regular Americans that seemed eerily dead on when Edward Snowden blew the lid on real life NSA spying in 2013. However, the reality is that there were stories about the NSA spying on citizens as far back as 2005, even if we didn't know the depth of their actions until 2013.

You might be thinking, so why is this on the list if The Simpsons merely referenced a news story two years after it broke? Well, the The Simpsons Movie wasn't the first time the writers of the show referenced NSA snooping. Just look at this screen grab from the 1997 episode "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)." That's right, in this quick gag, The Simpsons writers made light of NSA spying years before the government agency even started their modern surveillance program as part of the War on Terror.

The Simpsons may not have came up with the idea of reselling cooking oil, which has been recycled and reused to make soap and cosmetics for years, but they did predict a surprising criminal enterprise that arose after biodiesel vehicles were made to run on used cooking oil.

In 1998, Bart and Homer start stealing grease to resell to recycling plants. Ten years later, the New York Times reported a spike in grease theft sparked by the product's price doubling as biodiesel took off.

Coincidence? Maybe, but The Simpsons still did it first.

In 1998, Homer and Marge spend one of the least romantic anniversaries ever at the kid-friendly Up, Up and Buffet, a restaurant built inside of a grounded airplane. While the kids seemed to think the idea was amazing, the idea seemed utterly preposterous to most adults – but that was before The Airplane Restaurant opened in Colorado Springs.

As you might have guessed by the name, The Airplane Restaurant is a restaurant that operates inside of an old, grounded plane. Fortunately for parents who visit, the simulated turbulence created when employees use a stick to push up and down on the wings has remained in the realm of fiction.

Over ten years before Farmville took the world by storm, The Simpsons predicted a day where kids would virtually tend to plants without actually doing any work. To be fair, The Simpsons writers probably couldn't have predicted that Farmville and similar games would be even more tedious than using virtual clippers to cut back a non-existent hedge.

Scientists at CERN only confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson (also known as the "god particle") in 2013, but Dr. Simon Singh says that Homer almost nailed the size of the particle when he decided to become an inventor fourteen years earlier in "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace." Singh says this was probably no coincidence as many of the writers on The Simpsons are also mathematicians who would be interested in the particle that was first theorized by Peter Higgs in the 1960s.

The first episode of season 9 featured the family traveling to New York City. At one point, Lisa holds up an ad offering trips to New York for $9 printed along a silhouette of the NYC skyline. While most people look at this and think that it's an odd coincidence that the flier ended up looking like it says 9/11, they also recognize that the Twin Towers were an iconic part of the New York City skyline and that writers just chose the $9 fare by coincidence.

But there are those out there who believe The Simpsons were mockingly bragging about having advanced knowledge about a plot to destroy the Twin Towers on September 11th. These conspiracy theorists argue that the show is ran by the Illuminati and has made light of the ebola outbreak of 2014 as well. Like many conspiracy theories, this one is hard for the average person to swallow, but those who wear tin hats and constantly worry about Freemasons and the Illuminati will certainly be concerned.