Cassandra was a pseudonym of William Connor, long standing British journalist

Painting by Evelyn De Morgan

In Greek mythology, Cassandra ("she who entangles men") (also known as Alexandra) was a daughter of King Priam of Troy and his queen Hecuba, who captured the eye of Apollo and so was given the ability to see the future. However, when she did not return his love, he placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. Thus Cassandra foresees the destruction of Troy (she warns the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and her own demise), but is unable to do anything about them. Coroebus and Othronus came to the aid of Troy out of love for Cassandra.

After the Trojan War, Cassandra is taken as a concubine and sex slave girl by King Agamemnon of Mycenae after being raped by Ajax. Unbeknownst to Agamemnon, while he was away at war, his wife, Clytemnestra, had begun an affair with Aegisthus. Upon Agamemnon and Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae, Clytemnestra asked her husband to walk across a purple carpet; he initially refused then gave in and entered, not believing Cassandra's warnings. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus then murdered Agamemnon, and then Cassandra. Some information says that Cassandra and Agamemnon have twin boys Teledamus and Pelops, who are killed by Aegisthus.

Homer. Iliad XXIV, 697-706; Homer. Odyssey XI, 405-434; Aeschylus. Agamemnon; Euripides. Trojan Women; Euripides. Electra; Apollodorus. Bibliotheke III, xii, 5; Apollodorus. Epitome V, 17-22; VI, 23; Virgil. Aeneid II, 246-49.

In literature

Cassandra has been a very popular subject for tragedy and romance.

• It is the name of a novel by the French writer La Calprenède .

Cassandra Syndrome

The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem.

The Cassandra Project

The Cassandra Project is a term of art used to describe an event prediction project funded by the CIA or other intelligence agency.

With the assistance of defecting soviets and the CIA’s own operatives, the initial phase of the project was to find and train individuals who possessed the ability of remote viewing. Progress was made, but this early project (Project Star Gate) was abandoned as too unpredictable.

The project was restarted at Los Alamos National Laboratory and shifted to mathematical model schemes and use of heuristics. Later, more computing power (supercomputer) was added and finally using genetic programming along with some brilliant creativity the project was able to produce more accurate models.

The downsides of the project were the requirement of human input (butterfly effect), the prodigious need for information (IMINT), and the problem of the scale of the predictions – some modeling can predict only large movements of society (like the fictional psychohistory of Isaac Asimov), while others can produce specific outcomes but only for random events (see infinite monkey theorem).