Raffaele Bendandi

Raffaele Bendandi (17 October 1893 – 3 November 1979) After the 1908 Messina earthquake, he began studying the tides, and also devised his own form of seismograph. In October 1914 he predicted in his unpublished notes that an earthquake would take place on 13 January 1915 and, after the Avezzano earthquake did occur on that day, killing 30,000 people, he devoted much of his time to studies of past earthquakes and planetary alignments, setting up his own observatory with seismographs.

After serving in the First World War, he joined the Italian Seismology Society in 1920. Over time, he developed his own theories, which he called "seismogenics", about the nature of earthquakes. He believed, unsupported by conventional scientific evidence, that they are caused by planetary alignment in the Solar System – that the Moon, Sun, and other planets have gravitational influence on the movements of the Earth's crust.

In 1931 he published 'Un Principio Fondamentale dell'universo' . However, he never published any account of his forecasting methods. The only systematic approach to the Bendandi methodology and forecasting was carried out by Pescerelli Lagorio and Adriano Ballabene, who developed a software to test his methods. The principles of Bendandi's predictive method were exposed during European Geosciences Union General Assembly (EGU) in Vienna on 15 April 2015.

He resumed publishing forecasts in 1950, and continued making predictions until 1977, but with a break in the late 1960s. Events of 2011 In January 2011, leaflets falsely claiming to come from the Protezione Civile, were distributed in the comune'' of Ciampino, stating that Bendandi had forecast an earthquake on 11 May 2011, and that residents should leave their homes before that day. Rumours continued to spread in particular through social networking sites, and specified that the earthquake would affect Rome. In May 2011 it was reported that people were fleeing Rome in readiness for an earthquake predicted to occur on 11 May. The existence of a prediction for that date was denied by the custodians of Bendandi's papers, There was no earthquake in Rome that day. Nevertheless, some media reports drew attention to the fact that, on the same day, an earthquake hit the town of Lorca in Spain some away. The INGV stated: "There is absolutely no link between Spain and Italy, geologically, or with the prediction of an earthquake in Rome."