Rogue waves are devastating extreme events that occur in many natural systems, and a lot of work has focused on predicting and understanding their origin. In optically injected semiconductor lasers rogue waves are rare ultra-high pulses that sporadically occur in the laser chaotic output intensity. Here we show that these optical rogue waves can be predicted with long anticipation time, that they are generated by a crisis-like process, and that noise can be employed to either enhance or suppress their probability of occurrence. By providing a good understanding of the mechanisms triggering and controlling the rogue waves, our results can contribute to improve the performance of injected lasers and can also enable new experiments to test if these mechanisms are also involved in other natural systems where rogue waves have been observed. Extreme events are often catastrophic ones, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, supernovas, stock market crashes, etc. [1][2][3][4][5]. Ocean rogue waves, also referred to as freak waves, are several times the average height of surrounding waves and have steep, fast rising, and fast falling sides, like "a wall of water" [6][7][8][9]. They are a topic of intensive research as they can develop suddenly even in calm and apparently safe seas and have been responsible for several boat accidents, representing a major challenge for the design of off-shore platforms for the oil and gas industry.In optics, Solli et al.[10] have shown that extremely broadband radiation can be generated from a narrow-band input, with a long-tailed distribution similar to that of ocean rogue waves. Since then, optical rogue waves have been observed in several systems [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25], and their study has advanced the research in the field, in a way that has been compared to the introduction of optical systems to study chaos in the 1980s [26].In lasers, rogue waves occurring in the form of giant intensity pulses capable of producing catastrophic optical damage have been observed in pump-modulated [19], Raman [20], mode-locked [21][22][23], and optically injected lasers [24]. In Ref.[24] the rogue waves were studied in the framework of a simple and deterministic model that exhibits two types of chaos: one in which rogue waves do not appear consistently and one in which they are relatively frequent [24]. Since a deterministic chaotic system possesses some correlation length, the rogue waves in the system should have some degree of predictability.Here we show, experimentally and numerically, that these optical rogue waves can indeed be predicted with a long anticipation time as compared with the laser characteristic time scales. In addition, we show that an external crisis-like process [27,28], in the form of the crossing of the attractor, developed from one fixed point, with the stable manifold of another fixed point, gives rise to an expanded attractor that supports trajectories with rogue waves. We also show that noise can be exploited for either enhancing or suppressing ...