The sky is falling, again, as three upcoming movies explore the end of days, the apocalypse or whatever you want to call the dead-end ash heap that strikes fear in the hearts of true believers — and conjures visions of box office gold in the minds of Hollywood executives.
The Road, which opens Nov. 20, hurls Viggo Mortenson into a brutal landscape of cannibal-infested devastation as envisioned by novelist Cormac McCarthy. In The Book of Eli (January 2010), Denzel Washington takes it on the chin as a road warrior making his way through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Most pressing: Disaster auteur Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (pictured), which opens Friday, dramatizes a world-ending perfect storm of comets, floods and fires, supposedly predicted by the ancient Mayans’ ingenious calendar.
These disaster flicks represent the latest in a long and flaky line of doomsday scenarios from scientists and charlatans alike. Centuries before the Y2K scare prompted people to stock up on canned goods and a first-aid kit — just in case — earthlings worried that the worst was yet to come.
Here’s a journey back in time that looks at 14 of the apocalypse’s greatest hits.
1988: Rocket scientist gets Rapturous
NASA staffer Edgar Whisenaut publishes 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. The book sells more than 4 million copies, but nobody disappears.
1983: Guru says ruin will reign
On behalf of Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, his secretary Sheela Silverman predicts floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions topped off with nuclear devastation in Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Bombay.
1974: Bunker mentality
Children of God cult leader David Berg pegs the Comet Kohoutek to destroy Earth in 1974. (Berg also predicted that California would soon fall into the sea and that Jesus would arrive in 1993.)
1960 and 1953: Pyramid schemes
Books by Scottish astronomer C. Piazzi Smyth (Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid) and David Davidson (The Great Pyramid, Its Divine Message) declare that symbols embedded in Egypt’s mysterious landmarks spell the end of life as we know it in 1960 and 1953 respectively.
1953: Atomic clock-watchers
The Doomsday Clock, dreamed up by scientists in 1947, tick-tocks to within two minutes of the dreaded midnight hour six years later after the United States and Russia detonate thermonuclear devices. Thankfully, it never goes straight-up 12 (although the Doomsday Clock does leave its mark on classic comic book series Watchmen).
1936: The Second Coming
America’s heartland is literally covered in dust as Hitler begins exterminating Europe’s Jewish population amid a worldwide depression. Not surprisingly, evangelist Herbert W. Armstrong finds a ready audience for his message that Jesus will start the world over from scratch in 1936. (When that doesn’t happen, Armstrong revises his apocalypse deadline to 1975.)
1919: Catastrophic convergence
Meteorologist Albert Porta reports that six planets will align to generate a magnetic current that will blow up the sun to explode and destroy Earth.
1914: World War I: We’ve only just begun
Jehovah’s Witnesses compute that World War I hostilities mark the start of Armageddon, pointing to biblical prophecies in the Book of Daniel.
1891: Consensus — it’s all over now
Sixteenth-century mystic Mother Shipton and Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr. agree that the world will implode in 1891 year. (It doesn’t.)
1844: The Great Disappointment
In 1843, Baptist preacher William Miller convinces followers to sell their worldly possessions in advance of mass destruction fated to occur in 1844. A few months later, the planet’s anticlimactic resilience is dubbed “The Great Disappointment.”
1850: An angel speaks
Seventh-day Adventists founder Ellen G. White writes that an angel told her an upcoming batch of plagues signal the end of the world: “‘Get ready, get ready, get ready…. Now time is almost finished.”
1555: Rats, fleas and Nostradamus
As the bubonic plague kills a third of Europe’s population, a French physician named Nostradamus publishes The Prophecies and becomes the world’s foremost seer. (By some interpretations, his colorfully ambiguous rhyming quatrains predict a doomsday date of 2012. Coincidence?)
500 A.D.: Hippolytus’ false alarm
Anticipating similarly inspired prophecies that would transpire in 1000, 1500 and 2000, the round-numbers at the half-millennium milestone prompts philosopher Hippolytus to warn that the world is due to expire.
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