What specific predictions did Edgar Cayce reportedly make about future U.S. presidents?
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Executive summary
Edgar Cayce is widely reported to have made several striking statements about future U.S. presidents: that the 44th president would be Black and “the last one,” that two presidents would die in office or face untimely deaths, and that turmoil and possible use of nuclear weapons were foreseen in presidential contexts (as recounted in multiple popular sources) [1] [2] [3]. These claims circulate mainly in secondary summaries and New Age sites; the reporting assembled here does not include a direct citation of Cayce’s original trance transcripts from the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), which limits verification [4].
1. The headline claim: “The 44th U.S. president would be black and he would be the last one” — what sources say
Multiple online retellings attribute to Cayce a prophecy that “the 44th US president would be black and he would be the last one,” a formulation that leapt into popular circulation especially after Barack Obama’s election; Unexplainable.net reproduces that wording and connects it to further dramatic outcomes, including nuclear action attributed to the same numbered president [1]. Other New Age and prophecy blogs repeat the same sentence without furnishing primary-document references, indicating the claim’s popularity in secondary retellings but not confirming provenance in Cayce’s documented readings [5].
2. Predictions of presidential deaths and domestic turmoil — the 1939 reading often cited
Several summaries point to a 1939 Cayce reading that warned of “turmoil” and anticipated the deaths of more than one U.S. president, including language reported as “before you have the second of the Presidents that next will not live through his office,” which commentators link to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1945 death and John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in retrospective interpretation [2]. Times of India and Listverse both note that Cayce is “said to have predicted the untimely deaths of two US presidents,” showing how that 1939 phrasing has become a focal point for claims about Cayce’s presidential forecasts [3] [2].
3. Nuclear-trigger and end-of-presidency implications — dramatic extensions in popular accounts
Some accounts extend the “last president” line into a prophecy that the 44th would “pull the nuclear trigger” or preside over an ending of the U.S. presidency; such extensions appear in interpretive articles that connect Cayce’s geopolitical warnings to singular presidential acts, but these dramatic formulations are largely present on interpretive websites rather than in checked primary-source transcripts provided here [1].
4. Context: Cayce’s method, transcription, and why provenance matters
Reporting notes that Cayce spoke in trance and that his secretary Gladys Davis Turner transcribed his readings from the 1920s until his death — the ARE holds those records — a fact often invoked to argue for verifiability; however, the assembled secondary sources in this set do not reproduce or cite the specific ARE reading numbers or transcript text for the presidential claims, leaving a gap between popular paraphrase and archival verification [4]. That gap matters because Cayce’s readings are long, metaphorical and sometimes vague, and popular summaries frequently compress or dramatize lines for effect [6].
5. Alternative readings and the record of hits and misses
Advocates highlight Cayce’s reputed correct forecasts (economic crises, world war) as grounds for crediting his presidential predictions, while skeptics point to failed, date-specific predictions such as the non-occurrence of catastrophic U.S. city destruction by 1998 or Atlantis re-emerging by the 1960s as evidence of overreach; both strands of judgment are present in the reporting [4] [6]. The sources assembled here show that much of the popular narrative about Cayce and U.S. presidents rests on secondary summaries and retrospective interpretation rather than transparent primary-source citation [3] [2].
6. Bottom line: what can confidently be said from this reporting
From the materials surveyed, it can be confidently reported that popular accounts attribute to Cayce a 1939 warning about presidential deaths and turmoil and the specific oft-repeated claim that the 44th president would be Black and “the last one,” with some outlets adding that this figure would be associated with nuclear action; however, the present sources do not provide the original ARE reading citations or verbatim trance transcripts to confirm wording or context, leaving provenance and interpretation unresolved [2] [1] [4].