Far from immunizing the modern world against obvious scams, the legacy of failed prophets seems instead to have built up a cultural expectation of them. Unsurprisingly, given that a fool and his money are soon parted, the number of money-gobbling fakes has multiplied with the advent of better communications technologies. A quick rundown:
UFO cult leader Dorothy Martin predicted flooding and worldwide devastation to take place on December 21, 1954.
Celebrity astrologer Jeane Dixon used the absolutely unprecedented occurrence of the Sun, Moon, and visible planets sort of being kind of close to each other (within 17 degrees of arc, with none of the planets visible during the daytime) to predict the destruction of the world. She would later claim to have predicted the assassination of President Kennedy – shortly after it actually happened.
George Van Tassel, channeling an alien named Ashtar, predicted the end in 1967.
American prophet Herbert W. Armstrong, having unsuccessfully predicted the end in 1936 and 1943, pegged 1972 for the total, absolute, take-it-to-the-bank end of days. Also, 1975.
Pseudoscience
Source: Wikia
The people on that list mostly just made silly predictions, usually citing a mishmash of the bible, crazy number schemas, and their own rectums for sources. Another, purely modern type of prophet may also be found – the pseudoscientist. This sort of doomsday preacher generally skips the religious texts and pitches to a secular audience that doesn’t want to go to church for its sermons anymore. Their usual modus is to glance at the science headlines in USA Today, wildly extrapolate in whatever direction will make them money, then write up a blog article or call in to talk radio shows to get an audience.
Leland Jensen was a good example of this type of doomsday preacher. Technically, he was religious, since he predicted a nuclear disaster and God’s return in 1980, but the splinter faction of the Baha’i religion he founded seems mainly to have been an exercise in mass ego projection, and his “prophecy” was firmly rooted in non-scientific babble.
Jensen told a credulous audience that the close approach of Comet Halley, which has been happening every 76 years for several eons, would end the Earth’s shit in April 1987, which was actually a full year after the comet’s closest approach. It’s hard to parse his nonsense, but he seems to have thought that gravity would stop working the way it always has, and the comet would spiral off course and hit the Earth like an artillery shell – you know, the way it did in 1910, 1835, 1759, 1682, 1607, 1531, 1456…
Another pseudoscientific end was predicted in 1974 by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who also vigorously misunderstood how gravity works and published a book predicting that a close approach by Jupiter (which is never closer to us than 365 million miles) would trigger a wave of earthquakes and destroy civilization.
Jupiter has such high “surface” pressure that hydrogen exists as a liquid at depth. This liquid is metallic, the ocean it forms is almost deep enough to submerge the Earth, and its sloshing currents generate Jupiter’s magnetic field, which – if we could see it – would appear as large in our sky as the full Moon . . . not that John Gribbin would have cared about any of that. Source: Arcadia Street
The year 2000 was another big, round number – based on nothing in particular, with even the length of the year having varied over the millennia – so naturally, the world had to end several times that year. Quite a good living could be had in the late 1990s by various people predicting a ticking time bomb in every computer on Earth crashing civilization on January 1, because programmers in the 1960s chose the wrong number of bits for their operating systems’ calendars.
In the event, one American school district had to use a backup system for student services, $700,000 in tax payments were delayed for 24 hours, and the State of Indiana accidentally issued driver license renewals for five years, rather than the legal maximum of four.
In case you are wondering, the world is still supposed to end, this time because of an arcane statistical argument that predicts the total number of people who will ever live. Mark your great-great-great-grandchildrens’ calendars, because the end is coming around 2200, which is a conveniently round number.
