Spring-ish 2003 CE - Some time around late spring/early summer the Earth is due to see the super-close fly-by of a giant comet...Or is that a rogue planet?...Well, a big ol’ hunk’a space...stuff, anyway, and the results will not be pretty. At least, that’s the word from Nancy the Emissary, an odd little woman who communes telepathically (at perilous risk to her life, natch’) with space aliens dubbed Zetas. Of course, Nancy’s terrestrial fans and followers call themselves Zetas, too. So, it gets a bit confusing. Actually, most of what Nancy and her Zeta chums go on about is a bit confusing...even to themselves.

  As a whole, the Zeta cult is probably the most all-inclusive kook catcher the world has yet seen. In fact, it would take a lot less time to enumerate what they don’t believe in, than what they do. The ideological equivalent of drift nets, Zetas love to co-opt every loony, paranoid belief that floats their way. From UFOs as agents of the Lord to New World Order scares to Oaspe spirits to vampires to Bill Gates as the Antichrist to conspiracy theories about TWA 800 to tales of sheep-chomping Chupacabras, if they’ve heard of it, they believe in it.

  The real meat of their hysteria-spiced ramblings, however, is that big ol’ comet/planet thingy (better known as "Planet X" to rant radio and tabloid junkies or "Nibiru" to UFO cranks with a pseudo Sumerian astronomy fixation) and how it’s going to whip past Earth and, via its mighty magnetic pull, stop the home world dead in the middle of its rotation. The litany of resulting “earth changes” they give, awful as they are, are hilariously trifling compared to what might actually happen if the planet did suddenly put the orbital brakes on. (if one even wants to speculate on the impossible ...sort of like “What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?”) Not content with just that one disaster, the Zetas carry on with tales of killer green meteors, wandering continents, soaring temps and....oh, I bet you’re ahead of me, already...polar shifts! Their sprawling websites are kind of a hoot. Almost every other word on every page is a link to yet, another page. So, wading through it all might take some time and patience...As to whether either of those will be rewarded, is a matter of personal taste.
(The Bad Astronomy website, a treasure trove resource for debunking all manner of cosmological crackpottery, now has a very fine section on the whole Planet X bid'nez. Well worth the mouse-click over. Thanks to "The Fool" for the heads-up.)

May 5, 2003 CE - For a taste of Afrocentrism taken to its tacky wacky extreme, just mosey on down Hwy. 129 to Eatonton, Georgia to the festive 19-acre compound known as "Tama-Re". Intended as a neo-Egyptian holy-of-holies, complete with 40 ft. pyramids, huge sacred statues, obelisks and even a sphinx, the place actually looks more like a tatty roadside themepark. Kind of a Two Flags over Cairo, minus the coasters and the water slides. Founded by the self-stamped "Supreme Being of This Day And Time, God in Flesh" Malachi (formerly Dwight) Z. York, who hails from the planet Risq (formerly Sullivan County, N.Y.), this burgeoning little burg is said to be ground zero for the May 5, 2003 spaceship scoop-away of the residing "Nuwaubians". And will they ever be glad to be winging the heck away from this doomed planet full of inferior white people! Whew!

  Whatever you do, though, don't call the Nuwaubians a cult! Heck, don't even call them a religion! As far as they're concerned, they're just a bunch'a regular folks gathering together to celebrate their cultural roots...which just happen to wander back to ancient Egypt before hanging a hard right into outer space. Oh, they're also big on buying up as much of the local real estate as possible and declaring themselves a sovereign country under their second title, "The Yamassee Native American Moors of The Creek Nation". Find that one on a map of the Nile Delta, I dare you.
(Thanks to GrgTabi for the "Factology" site ref.)

October 30 - November 29, 2003 CE - Shoko Asahara may not be able to see his hand in front of his face, but he seems to have no trouble whatever peeking into the future. Funny how that works. Anyhow, according to the jailbird leader of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult, these are the dates between which the human race will be all but wiped out in a world-wide nuclear war. The sole exceptions to the casualty list presumably being his toxin-happy followers.

2003 CE - Sun Magazine decided to move on from Pope John XXIII to even bigger game when they insisted that Jesus Christ prophesied the end of the human race via a ripping nuclear holocaust this year.

2003 CE - Well, I got'cher good news and yer bad news. The good news is Sree Vishiva Karma Veera Narayana Murthy (say that ten times fast, I double dog dare you) is just about ready to pop down planet-side to start up a hippy-dippy, love-in style 108 (why the extra eight? I dunno) year reign of dharma...presumably without Greg. The bad news is, the dharma part of the program will be preceded by four years of blood rains, bad currency, an explosion of incurable deadly diseases and...gasp...male goats with milkable mammary glands! I ask you, is there no line of decency these deities will not cross?!

Any ol’ time between now and 2004 CE - James Harmston is what’cha might call kind of a Renaissance guy. He’s a one-time real-estate agent gone hyper-survivalist, Mormon Armageddon oracle, Moses confidante and, oh, yes...Joseph Smith reincarnation. Oddly enough, the Mormon Church seems singularly non-plussed by Jimmy/Joe. So much (or little) so that they’ve excommunicated him and his merry pack of apocalypse panters. No matter! Jimmy/Joe simply went off to Manti, Utah and started his very own “True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days”,...proving that the good Lord doesn’t pick his prophets based on their grammatical skills. Digging in with stores of food and armed to the eyeballs, Jimmy/Joe & Co. have created their own little fortified island of paranoid, polygamous, splinter-Mormon splendor, intent on waiting out the approaching End Times...as well as the escalating law suits pressed by ex-members claiming J/J swindled them out of thousands.

Also sometime between now and 2004 CE - The Weekly World News has a talent for consistently turning even tiny tid-bits of real-and-for-true fact into great, heaping shovel-fulls of eyeball-popping inanity. Example: FACT - Astronomers have recently determined that the number of earth path-crossing asteroids has been over-estimated. The real figure is only half what they had previously thought (which was approx. 1,400). WWN FUTZ - That leaves 700 homicidal, blood-thirsty, doom-crazed, rogue planetesimals zinging over our heads in utterly erratic, fiendishly unpredictable orbits!!! And at least one of these cosmic candle-snuffers is certain to smack straight into us sometime in the next four years!!!!

  Well, I suppose consistency could be considered an admirable quality, in and of, itself...And, in this case, it would obviously be all by itself.

We’ve also got between now and 2005 CE - ...to ponder the possibilities of getting “mooned” in a serious way. Not content with ordinary asteroid obliteration, the Weekly World News folk have scared up one Mark Crealer, purported astronomer, who insists that our planet’s Lunar pal has been getting far, far too friendly of late and that this sudden cuddliness is sure to come to no good end. Specifically, he referred to a degradation of its orbit and a most embarrassing and inconvenient collision to take place in a very short span of time. Well, I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking that this is just a perfect example of the pitfalls of over-familiarity of solar satellites in a work environment.

2005 CE - Evangelist George Curle has this year marked on his calendar as the definite, absolute, gotta-be date for the Second Go-’round. One hopes he only marked it in pencil.

February 13, 2006 CE - And after that brief interruption, the Weekly World News is back at'cha, again. This time predicting that hydogen bombs tucked into cozy spots in Washington, London and Tel Aviv will be simul-detonated by terrorists. (as opposed to, say, Girl Scouts) This, the WWN assures the reader, will kick-start WWIII and Armageddon...Or at the very least, another 12 hour memorial break in programming on the Home Shopping Network.

2006 CE - Apparently forgetting that he’d already prophesied a humanity-annihilating nuclear war back in 2003, an absent-minded Jesus comes back to Earth this year...according to Sun Magazine, that is.

2006 CE - A British cult going by the name of “The Family” (no relation to Manson, one presumes) has put the national security service, M15 on alert of late. It seems the little bug-a-boos are planning on seeing in Armageddon in 2006 from a clutch of well-stocked caves in India. Just shows you to what extremes a true Englishman will go to get a decent curry.

2000 - 2007 CE - Elohim City in Muldrow, OK is an armed fortress of militia headcases presided over by one Robert Millar. A sometime Mennonite who now preaches a pot-luck doctrine of Christian Fundamentalism, astrology, pyramidology and wild-eyed racism, Bobs holds the fort with his merry band of redneck weirdoes anticipating the invasion of America by “Asiatics”. Of course, they’ll only need to hold off long enough for Jesus to swoop down, wipe the wicked from the face of the Earth and remake the world into one big militia freak’s paradise.

2001 - 2007 CE - Refusing to let go of his prized Psalms-as-year-book-markers theory, even though it nose dived into the conceptual compost heap back in 1988, J.R. Church has simply re-focused on a new set of dates. In his “Prophecy In The News” TV show and newsletter, J.R. was busily tossing his Psalm salad to convince his followers that the Trib was a definite “go” for 2001, with Christ’s big Second Coming Out party scheduled for 2007. Instead, prophecy repeated itself as the Trib was a definite “no” for 2001. And I’d bet we won’t even have to wait for its companion to chug unadventfully by before J.R. just reschedules the Psalm dates, yet again. Depending how his health holds up, he’s pretty much set until 2050.

2007 CE - Those merry apocalypsos who set their alarms according to Israel’s political ups and downs will be getting all wet and wiggly over the fact that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, which put Jerusalem back under Jewish management. Expect the hype and hysteria that calmed down after 2000 to heat up again to scorching as the year goes on.

March 26, 2007 CE - Let's stop off for a little prophetic nosh from that bastion of credibility, The Weekly World News. It seems that on the stroke of the 7th hour of the 7th day of the 7th Hebrew month of 2007, (that would be Nisan, calculating from Tishri, which falls in September of 2006) Jesus will simulcast his big comeback in every capital city in the world. The WWN doesn't bother to say what sort of deal the Boss's kid makes for the smaller markets or anyone who still doesn't get cable.

April 29, 2007 CE - With New World Order nonsense running like a tape loop through his tiny mind, Pat Robertson once again prophesies a “collapse of the Gentile powers” and the rise of a millennial Christ-o-thon for this date. Using the literary works of loony-toon white supremacist writers Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins as his inspiration, Patsy concocts another paranoid End Time scenario in his tread-worn tome “The New Millennium”. Any bets on what date he'll be pointing to by April 30?

September 12-13, 2007 CE - Marilyn Agee flails about for yet another date and comes up with this one for her End of the Age/New Abridged Trib and Rapture combo. A completist, she also pins down...

April 6-May 31, 2008 CE - ...as the Second Coming/Armageddon due date. No point in feeling bad for her when this date fails just like the rest. Like all others of her ilk, where Doomsdays are concerned, Mar’s got a million of ‘em.

Any ol’ time between 1999 and 2009 CE - When Jerry Falwell isn’t manfully hunting down such threats to American society as homosexual Teletubbies, he can often be found inserting both of his own feet and any available others into his mouth on the subject of the Antichrist. This time, the sheep manure spewing from his lips had to do with his belief that the Antichrist was almost certainly already alive and plotting and, most importantly,...a Jew. When called on this prize stupidity, he did back down and apologize. Though it was clear that the popular pinhead hadn’t the vaguest notion exactly what it was he was apologizing for.

July, 2009 CE - A breathtaking, lengthy total solar eclipse will be visible from China on this date. Should be great news for travel agents and doompeddlers from here to Beijing.

2000 - 2012 CE - Jack Van Impe, that bottomless pit of Doomsday dribblings, is at it again. This time hawking his latest exercise in right-wing, apocalyptic paranoia pushing, “2001: On the Edge of Eternity”. With hysterical screeds against everything from Islam to atheists, earthquakes to biochip implants of the Beast, Van Impe proves he’s on the edge, all right... of lip-lathering, dribble-cup filling insanity.

2012 CE - In the market for another killer comet? No problem! Bible Code ninny Michael Drosnin (fresh from his failed prediction of total annihilation via WW III in 2000) let his computer do the wanking through the Pentateuch and found a “hidden message” spelling cosmic catastrophe for poor ol’ dumped-on planet Earth in 2012. Of course, Mikey’s fond of backing out of his claims only nanoseconds after he makes them, so he should have weaseled out of this prophecy completely long before it officially fizzles.

2012 CE - Not content to advertise his Yoga classes like a normal person, Drunvalo Melchizedek came up with a whole alternate universe of bizarre reasons to learn how to breathe deeply and meditate. He says it’s all necessary to master the creation of the Merkaba, (well, of course it is, silly!) a means of Ascending into the 4th Dimension. According to Dru, this is all super-important because the world will be going aloha-oy sometime this year and the 4th Dimension will be the in-place, after that...Actually, it’ll be the only place, after that.

2012 CE - You might have noticed by now, that there tends to be a bit of a bandwagon mentality amongst apocalypse panters. Just let one date or mode du doom get a hint of publicity, and suddenly, everybody has a prophetic clone of their own to share. “Dr.” Rebecca S. Harrison (known to her pals as “St. John” for whoknowswhat gender confused reason) is just such a one of these party crashers, as her end date doesn’t seem to be based on anything more than the pure pop appeal of 2012. Not that any of her other visions hold more deductive weight, mind you. Reba (or John) just seems to enjoy babbling endless prophetical declarations, all lovingly steeped in overwrought verbiage and very bad grammar. Like her contention that she personally fulfilled part of White Buffalo Calf Woman’s prophecy, (though, in what way, she neglects to mention) that Jesus will be returning for his encore on May 17, 2000 and that a big, bad, Gilgamesh-esque battle is scheduled to start in June of 2003.

  I have to admit, though, that she has nailed a true Great Time of Fasting, to take place between August 20 and September 30. Oh, yes, she’s a little late on the start date. But, who doesn’t recognize the proper ritual for swimsuit season?