The Cuckoolander Was Right in Literature.
- In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Alien Bodies, UNISYC (the ruthless future version of UNIT) is represented at the auction by Colonel Kortez, who insists on describing nearly everything as "not what it seems". His subordinate officer has privately concluded he has a form of paranoia called Displacer Syndrome, the Doctor thinks he's "rather confused", but every single one of the things he mentions turns out to not, in fact, be what it seems.
- In Animorphs #14, "Crazy Helen" happens to be right that aliens are behind the weird horse behavior, and there is alien technology at Zone 91, though she thinks they're stereotypical Martians rather than Yeerks or Andalites. Of course, she thinks aliens are behind everything.
- Area 51: People advocating fringe theories of the government covering up UFOs and world cultures all stemming from one source are proven right in the books. It's mentioned that all of human history will now have to be rewritten as a result of what's revealed.
- Ascendance of a Bookworm: When Rozemyne goes missing for an extended period of time mid-way through Part 5, one of the signs that she's still alive is that the handful of name-sworn that she has at that point, who are in a Can't Live Without You situation towards her, are perfectly fine. Among them, Hartmut, who is her literal Hero-Worshipper, claims that because all of Rozemyne's namesworn can feel her mana growing at an unusually fast pace, Rozemyne's body must be rapidly growing, as well. He's insistent enought about this that a female six-year student leaves her clothing behind when Rozemyne has yet to return by the time she graduates. The two attendants who appoint themselves as the "care for Rozemyne whenever she shows up again" team and are the first people from Ehrenfest to see Rozemyne physically aged up by several years upon her return are amazed that Hartmut was correct about that specific detail.
- By the Light of the Moon: Jeff goes through this twice, once when stockpiling supplies and building a shelter, and again when trying to warn his community of preppers that nuclear (well, meteor) winter will render their homes uninhabitable.
- Caging Skies takes place during the aftermath of WW2. When the Betzler family are ordered to take in the Polish men under communist Germany's rule, Johannes' Racist Grandma suspects that they're not who they say they are and they could be spies. It is later revealed that they are Russian refugees fleeing the Soviet Union.
- In Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, one man wages a terrorist campaign against the government because he believes a telepathic alien has infiltrated it and is directing the course of humanity towards destruction. Initially laughed off (the ideas at any rate) as lunacy, it turns out he was indeed correct.
- In Darkness Visible, Robbie, William Marsh's loony younger brother, gives Lewis vital clues as to what the hell is happening in London. However, it takes some time for Lewis to realise, since Robbie has wrapped what happened to him into a deranged fantasy.Robbie: They sounded like angels speaking in my head. They spoke about the tide. Oceans singing black songs and requiems for fallen God and empires. The dark tide shall rise, rise through the houses of the dead.
- The Day Santa Stopped Believing In Harold: Downplayed. Santa's theory about Harold's non-existence was pretty wild and mostly incorrect, and he was wrong when he said that Harold was too young to bring out the snacks. However, he was right when he said that Harold's dad is the one who leaves the snacks (though Harold does help).
- Played with in The Dresden Files. The short story "Aftermath" is told from Murphy's POV. In it, she reveals that anyone who is not in the most detailed version of the know sees Harry as a possibly autistic Cloudcuckoolander who believes in "magic". Yet that same man goes on to routinely provide valuable help to the police, dispel any mystery and basically accomplish the impossible even if he won't quite say what's going on.
- In The Faerie Wars Chronicles, Alan Fogarty is a crazy old man who believes that faeries inhabit his garden, that Little Green Men in flying saucers are kidnapping people all the time, and that the FBI is after him. The hero of the story humors him... until he discovers a fairy in Fogarty's garden. Later, it's revealed that demons from a Hell Dimension (who look oddly similar to the zeitgeist little green man) do in fact kidnap people regularly from their stereotypical flying saucer airships. Also, he used to be a bank robber, so his paranoia about the FBI is at least somewhat justified.
- In A Fire Upon the Deep, there's a galaxy-spanning Usenet-like network where various aliens discuss the book's crisis, from a number of different perspectives. One particular alien, "Twirlip of the Mists", is talking through several layers of auto-translation software on an extremely low-bandwidth connection, so most of what it says sounds rather bizarre. It's pretty much all exactly right, though, including such apparent nonsense as "hexapodia is the key insight".
- Foundation And Chaos: One of the characters references a lunatic fringe group which committed suicide when told by creatures inhabiting the defense platforms of the impending end of Trantor. When you read the earlier novel, you find the creatures indeed said this and they were right — the Galactic Empire is collapsing and Trantor lies in ruins in later Foundation novels.
- In Good Omens, a tabloid has printed such stories as Jesus' face being seen in a Big Mac, Elvis working in an American burger joint, Elvis having been abducted by aliens, Elvis' music curing cancer, and werewolves being the Children of Rape between a woman and Bigfoot. A footnote comments that "Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true." Several hints throughout the rest of the novel imply it's Elvis working at the burger joint.
- Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter is a font of wisdom despite being a complete Cloudcuckoolander.
- She's a Ravenclaw for a reason, and her answers to the Ravenclaw Tower's questions in Deathly Hallows were pretty smart. She takes after her father Xenophilius, who is just as strange, but 100% correct about The Deathly Hallows.
- Some of the stories from The Quibbler have a grain of truth to them. For example, Sirius may not be Stubby Boardman, but it does get right that he was an innocent man falsely imprisoned.
- For the first four books, Hagrid's status as the Fluffy Tamer and Admiring the Abomination, usually the Monster of the Week is regarded with bemusement and dread by Ron, Harry and Hermione, but even Hermione, highly friendly and compassionate, has a nervous breakdown when he returns to Hogwarts with his Giant Half-brother who he's trying to teach English, not caring that it could possibly endanger every student at Hogwarts. Everyone expects this to be Hagrid's greatest folly but it turns out that Hagrid's crude attempts at teaching his brother English and civilizing him actually work.
- Also from Harry Potter, Sybill Trelawney is an amiable lunatic who everyone thinks is a complete fraud... until she issues two True Prophecies that affect the plot of the entire series. She actually predicts a lot of minor stuff, but she seems so much of a fraud that nobody seems to take her words for any merit; probably because she has the habit of hopelessly misinterpreting the actual omens she sees. It's heavily implied that she has the gift, passed down from previous generations, but just can't control it, making her most genuine prophecies in a trance-like state that she doesn't remember afterward.
- In Book 3, Trelawney predicts that Harry will DIE. ...And she is absolutely right — she's just four books early. Moreover, every prediction she makes in the opening fusillade of her first class does, eventually, come true in some capacity.
- Or, taken another way, she specifically sees Harry encounter the Grim, a specter of death that takes the form of a large black dog. Her vision was much more literal than even she expected: Harry does, in fact, have a very significant encounter with a large black dog (which resembles, but is not, the Grim) by the end of the year.
- It can't help that one of the few times she's right even she doesn't believe it: in HBP when she's reading cards and draws the Knave of Spades "a dark young man, possibly troubled, one who dislikes the questioner" just as she's standing next to Harry's hiding spot, only to decide that couldn't possibly be right. She might actually have some talent aside from the two Voldemort related prophecies she doesn't remember but is simply unable to differentiate it from her desperate guessing since she wants it so much.
- Another one she gets right is the tarot card of the "Lightning Struck Tower" — a card which figuratively means great calamity and/or change. And then there's the chapter by the tarot card's name, where a green bolt of "lightning" hits Dumbledore at the top of a tower and kills him. Yeah, that certainly changed things, and not for the better.
- And in The Prisoner of Azkaban, one minor gag comes about when Harry and Ron are eating lunch with a few of the professors, and Professor McGonagall tries to offer Trelawney a seat at the table; Trelawney refuses to sit down, since that would bring the number of people at the table up to thirteen, meaning that the first to get up would be the first to die. Unbeknownst to her, there already were thirteen people at the table, since Scabbers (actually Peter Pettigrew) was in Ron's pocket. Dumbledore is the first to get up from the table, and he is indeed the first of the characters in that scene to be killed off, dying at the end of The Half-Blood Prince.
- Played with in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Ford Prefect appears to be a Cloudcuckoolander to the humans he interacts with — he spends a considerable amount of his life drunk, he tends to insult astrophysicists when he is, and he often lapses into distracted moods wherein he stares at the sky and claims he is looking for green flying saucers. However, when he flippantly informs everyone at a local bar that the world is about to end, he's absolutely right. Somewhat averted in that Ford Prefect is not what he seems — he's simply an alien trapped on Earth and desperate for a ride off the planet, so he has advanced technology and actually knows more about what's going on than anybody else around him.
- The Hunger Games: In Catching Fire, it turns out that Wiress' mumbling of "Tick tock" isn't just insane talk. She's actually figured out the configuration and theme of the arena and is trying to tell the other contestants. Katniss figures this out later on. "Tick tock, tick tock, the arena's a clock."
- In The Jungle Book story "The King's Ankus", White Hood is an elderly cobra who has apparently gone senile. He guards the treasure room of an abandoned city and rants about how he is a loyal guard to the king, ignoring Kaa and Mowgli trying to tell him that the city has been abandoned for several years. When Mowgli manages to steal an ankus from the treasure room, White Hood rants that the artifact will only bring death. Mowgli later learns that he is right when he discovers men are so consumed by greed that they are willing to kill each other for the artifact. Mowgli is forced to track it down and return it to White Hood to prevent more deaths.
- Lizard Music: The Chicken Man is the only other character (besides the narrator) who knows about the Lizard Music program.
- Metro 2033 has Khan, the man who claims to be Genghis Khan's last reincarnation. He says a lot of weird stuff about the Metro's spiritual nature, and it's possible that he's just kind of insane, but he also has a preternatural sense for when things are going to go wrong and inexplicable things do happen in the Metro.
- Despite often engendering befuddlement and bewilderment in many he comes into contact with, Psmith almost never lets anything ruffle him, since almost any obstacle that comes his way he can eventually overcome. Even his most outlandish schemes seem to end as he intended.
- Darcy in Quicksand House is a basket case with a tendency to start stabbing the walls with a knife because she thinks they're her mother, so it's easy to dismiss anything she says. She's right about a few things, though, such as the children's mother not being trustworthy and that going into the basement to try to find her being a really bad idea.
- Atlas is an Artificial Intelligence computer in the series Relativity. It often comes across as a Cloudcuckoolander simply because it doesn't understand the subtleties of human nature...or, sometimes, the real worldnote . However, in the story "Those Who Wander", it actually guessed the villains' motives perfectly. ( Milking venom from Brazilian Wandering Spiders to create a cure for erectile dysfunction.)
- The Sherlock Holmes parody "The Case of the Mental Detective" in Soft Pawn, a chess fun book by William R. Hartston. All clues in the case of the hated chess master (not related to Bobby Fischer) killed by eleven knives in the back point to...eh, a typewriter thrown from a giraffe unicycle by an Irish sailor with a cold called Keffeagh Q. Bacdabb?!? ("Bacdabb?" "Actually Mac Nabb, but he's got a cold.") But, being Sherlock Holmes, he's of course right. ("You got me, it's only fair I turn myself in.", as Bacdabb confesses.)
- A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Lysa Tully is crazy ten times over, but her warning to Catelyn about the Lannisters' treachery doesn't seem to be far off, only she lied. The murder of her husband, which was what supposedly tipped her off to the Lannisters, was perpetrated by her.
- Once upon a time, Princess Shireen had a terrifying and creepy friend named Patchface who nonsensically blathered on about what he knows of the goings on under the sea. Most of said blatherings are really, really accurate prophecies.
- The Orks as a race in The Sovereign Stone Trilogy. They're massively into reading omens before making any remotely significant decision, causing most members of other races to dismiss them as superstitious Cloudcuckoolanders. That said, Ork characters accurately predict events in the trilogy using said aforementioned omens with a striking degree of accuracy, and in the third book, when the protagonists try to fool the Ork leader with a fake omen into helping them, she sees through it immediately, and is in fact mildly offended that they seem to think she "can't tell the difference between an omen sent by the gods and an omen sent by an elf"note .
- Star Wars Legends: He's not crazy, per se, but in Iron Fist, during a tactical planning session, Face Loran comes up with three wild theories about how events are unfolding (and also a farcical plan to sabotage Warlord Zsinj by impersonating a comedy troupe to get close to him) — namely, that the Empire is building a new Super Star Destroyer, that Zsinj plans to steal it, and that Ysanne Isard is still alive. He's right on all three counts, even though the Isard prediction wasn't meant to be serious. Later in the book, Wedge makes another deduction that Zsinj has given The Mole in his organization false data implying he intends to attack the Republic capital, Coruscant, for valid reasons — but he is also able to name Zsinj's true target: Kuat, the shipyard planet building the Super Star Destroyer Zsinj intends to steal.
- The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: Like most of court jesters and buffoons, Fortún Paja is considered crazy, or at the very least quite nuts. However, King Ferdinand III keeps him around not only because of his jokes and gags, but also because Fortún often gives good advice. The King himself remarks this after Fortún correctly points out that the enemy will very quickly take back the city which he has just conquered if he leaves now: "I have always heard that the crazy sometimes offer good advice".
- In Janet Evanovich's "Seven Up", bounty hunter heroine Stephanie Plum is initially skeptical toward Mooner's worries about his friend Dougie (and a roast from the freezer) disappearing, and later doubts his claim that his assailant was an elderly lady, since Mooner is notorious as a Cloudcuckoolander and a stoner, who's lately taken to running around costumed as a superhero. Of course, it turns out he was actually telling the truth.
- Ira Tabankin is rather fond of writing unhinged-sounding survivalists building bunkers over the objections of their family and community, only to be proven right.
- The Shelter Jay Tolson spends millions in lottery winnings buying a farm with a fortified castle for a house, and a bunker beneath it.
- We Knew They Were Coming has Troy, and other survivalists, being discreetly backed by the government to prepare for disaster without ever explaining what for.
- The Trees of Pride: Defied by Squire Vane, whose particular strain of Scully Syndrome compels him to utterly dismiss any idea which has been presented to him in the form of a popular legend, no matter how much evidence there may be for its validity.
- Donny DaCosta from Troubleshooters might be crazy and spot aliens all over the neighborhood, but when one of them turns out to be a terrorist...
- In The True Meaning of Smekday, Gratuity's mother Lucy insists that aliens are trying to talk to her through a mole in her neck. She disappears shortly before the Alien Invasion by the Boov. Later on, Gratuity finds out that the Boov were talking to her through the mole on her neck, and abducted her to teach them English.
- In Vampire Academy, Alice the supposedly crazy feeder is the first to note the sightings of ghosts as a sign that the protective wards around the Academy are failing. She is right. At least 50 Strigoi break through the weakened wards.
- In The Will of the Empress, Zeghorz seems crazy to start with, but it turns out that he actually hears and sees things on the wind, making all of his babbling completely true.
