It could be something beyond the individual intelligence. For example, as a kid, I grew up in the 90s with the anticipation of civil war and that it would be in the 2020 timeframe that it would occur. I anticipated something akin to Q in my highschool years - a shadowy group from classified projects forgotten which would rise out of the shadows in the 2018 timeframe as China capitalized on a growing unrest between communist forces on the coastlines and non-communist forces within the heartland.
It wasn't all done in a vacuum - my father was a very intelligent man. I read many books from retired service members - from Clancy, Brown, Riker.
There are certainly strange rhymes which play out across time with no obvious or direct connections to some kind of precise plan. I often wonder if a sufficiently powerful computer program or alien species would truly agree with our assertion we are, in fact, individuals. If looking at us on a longer time scale or from aggregate levels that we, ourselves, can only compare to ourselves - do patterns emerge which indicate something else is going on?