Thanks for responding. I finally looked at your website (interesting stuff, some familiar, some not), and read the other Nostradamus article. We probably won't agree on how accurate the "Hitler" quatrain is, so I won't discuss it further. I will, however, mention something brought to mind by your wondering-how-he-does-it question.

This will be weird. It's from an author whose four books I own, have read, and generally value greatly. This particular part, maybe 1% of the whole, I find very, very hard to wrap my wits around. The author is Dr. Michael Newton, a clinical hypnotherapist, whose books derive from the commonalities found in his over 7,000 cases investigating Life Between Lives (his terminology). So he doesn't recount his own personal experiences or imaginings, but common reports from his subjects in deep hypnosis who had not been briefed in advance on what to expect (this is pre-Internet).

I'll quote a paragraph from page 262 of his book Destiny of Souls, in a section entitled "The screening room of future lives". I'd like to quote much more, but ...

Reports of what goes on in these screening rooms are very consistent between hypnosis subjects. Their affirmations of what they all see boggle the mind. Still, while in the Ring, people are not able to view events into the future beyond the next immediate life span of the bodies presented to them. Evidently, this might cloud the way souls see the lives they are viewing.

The whole chapter is about souls being shown snippets from a few possible future lives, so that they can pick which one they think will be most valuable to their spiritual development.

This is (maybe!) some empirical evidence to add to the dry philosophical debate of destiny versus free will. If one in the spirit world between lives can be shown life 50 years in the future, why not 500? The principle would seem to be similar.