Nostradamus 'quote' was modern invention

Internet

Did Nostradamus foretell the downing of the World Trade Centre towers?

Within minutes of last week's catastrophic collapse, a quote circulated on the internet, claiming that in 1654 the French astrologer wrote this quatrain: "In the City of God there will be a great thunder / Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb / The third big war will begin when the big city is burning". That might seem persuasive until you learn that Nostradamus died in 1566, and that nowhere in his deeply confusing, garbled works does anything resembling those phrases appear.

It is a hoax. But the fact that it exists shows that, to the conspiracy theorists, disaster is the oxygen of creativity.