The end of the world is nigh – again.Doomsday prophet Harold Camping is once more predicting an apocalypse, and apparently we don't have long left. The 90-year-old California radio mogul has pointed to October 21 on the calendar, by which date he reckons it will “probably” all be over.
But this time around he is not warning of souls burning up and ascensions to heaven from the sidewalks of Manhattan. Instead Camping, the owner of the Family Radio Network, believes it will be a much quieter affair.
“I really am beginning to think as I restudied these matters that there's going to be no big display of any kind. The end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month. It will happen, that is, by October 21," he stated in a recent radio recording.
Camping became infamous earlier this year for incorrectly heralding the arrival of the Rapture on May 21. Followers across the U.S. spent millions on advertising campaigns warning people of the eventual non-event.
Despite admitting that he was “flabbergasted” that the world still existed, Camping insisted his erroneous warning had in fact been correct - but that only a spiritual "Judgment Day" had occurred.
Nonetheless, reports suggest Camping didn't take the whole episode too well and suffered a stroke in June. But he has made a partial recovery since and is now back to broadcasting – until Oct. 21, of course.
How do these prophesies usually get started
Unusual planetary alignments are a common culprit when it comes to doomsday prophecies (along with comets or asteroids). The technical term is Syzgy, and it narrowly refers to a three-body system -- usually the sun, the earth, and either the moon or another planet in the solar system that is either in conjunction or opposition to the other bodies.
But in the broader sense, it's applied to any unusual conjunction of planets. The term might be familiar to fans of The X-Files; it was the title of an early episode in the series, where a key plot rested on an unusual planetary alighment.
So these kinds of predictions are common; they're also usually wrong, and this year's motley collection of Ig Nobel doomsday prophets is no exception. I suppose they can take comfort in the fact that they're in very good company. Here's just a sampling of famous failed Doomsday predictions from eras past, most of which sought to place the blame squarely on the cosmos.
The five biggest predictions for the end of the world between 1666 - 2012
September 2, 1666. The number 666 is described the mark of the beast in The Bibles Book of Revelation. In Christian tradition the Europeans worried as the year 1666 approached. It certainly was not helpful that the year before in 1665 a plague wiped out 100,000 people, a fifth of London's population, leading many to predict the end of times. Then on September 2, 1666 a fire broke on in a bakery on London's Pudding Lane, over three days over 13,000 buildings were destroyed and tens of thousands of homes. At the end of the day fewer then ten people perished in the blaze.
1881. A 16th-century British prophetess named Mother Shipton supposedly wrote that the world would end in 1881, although the publisher of said prophecy, one Charles Hindley, later admitted he made the whole thing up to sell more books. That didn't stop Scottish astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth from finding "clues" in the Great Pyramids of Giza indicating the world would indeed end in 1881.Mother Shipton's Greatest Prophesy
"Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye.
The world upside down shall be
And gold be found at the root of a tree.
Through hills man shall ride,
And no horse be at his side.
Under water men shall walk,
Shall ride, shall sleep, shall talk.
In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black, in green;
Iron in the water shall float,
As easily as a wooden boat.
Gold shall be found and shown
In a land that's now not known.
Fire and water shall wonders do,
England shall at last admit a foe.
The world to an end shall come,
In eighteen hundred and eighty one."
May 18, 1910. This date marked the return of Halley's Comet, along with the usual doomsday fears -- in this case, the suspicion that the human race would be wiped out by noxious gases in the comet's tail. When Halley's comet swung by Earth on April 29, 1987, doomsday prophet Leland Jensen predicted a collision between it and the Earth that would lead to mass extinction. He, too, was wrong. Coincidental side note: author Mark Twain -- born in 1835, another Halley's Comet year -- correctly "predicted" he would die when the comet returned in 1910. Sometimes the universe just likes to mess with you.
December 17, 1919. A meteorologist named Albert Porta raised the specter agian of a rare conjunction of planets that would "cause magnetic current that would pierce the sun, cause great explosions of flaming gas and eventually engulf the earth." It caused a few suicides, alas, before Porta was proven wrong.
March - May 1997. Another comet struck fear in the hearts of doomsday disciples in 1997 when Comet Hale-Bopp passed close to Earth. An amateur astronomer mistakenly believed the comet was trailing a mysterious "companion object" and the rumor quickly spread over the fledgling Internet (remember Usenet?). This and a few other rumors combined to the tragic mass suicide of the Heavens Gate cult members.
2012
The year 2012 means many things to many people, few of which bring good news. This belief cites 2012 as the year humans will undergo a physical and spiritual transformation, while some people predict that sometime that year, Earth will collide with a black hole or a planet named Nibiru. But perhaps the most popular belief is attributed (falsely, many scholars argue) to the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar from the ancient Mayan civilization. Interpretations suggest that the fourth world, in which we live now, will end on Dec. 21, 2012.Source: News Discovery
