A short history of failed doomsday predictions
Most fortune-tellers, prognosticators and would-be prophets are usually careful with specifics. But what happens when they’re caught out? It’s bad but not the end of the world, writes Chris Horrie
It has not been a great couple of weeks for Mike Lindell, the engagingly bonkers Trump superfan, fundraiser and principal proponent of the entirely fictitious claim that the electronic voting machines used in the 2020 US presidential election had been tampered with, denying Trump the keys to the Oval Office. First, a court in New York gave the company that makes the machines permission to begin a libel action, which, if successful, will completely bankrupt Lindell. Secondly, a firm, biblical-style prophecy which Lindell made that Trump would be reinstated as president on the highly specific and auspicious date of 13 August 2021 failed to come to pass, resulting in public humiliation in front of an audience of millions.
Earlier this year Lindell said he had somehow obtained packets of data, meaning computer code, taken from communications between electronic voting machines during the 2020 election.
“By the morning of Friday 13th, it will be the talk of the world,” Lindell told a cable TV channel: “People will be saying ‘hurry up, let’s get this election pulled down, let’s right the right, let’s get these Communists out of… erm… y’know… they’re takin’ over, an’ when I say that they’ll… er… tip off the people that were involved’.”
And so it came to pass. On the morning of 13 August, Lindell invited the world’s press to a “cybersecurity symposium” at which his computer coding experts gathered to present their findings. The event had a certain superficial plausibility about it, with Lindell on stage in a nice suit with some nerdy looking tech guys sitting in front of a gigantic PowerPoint projection scrolling rapidly through thousands of lines of blurry computer code, like the cheesy background graphics in The Matrix. When it came to the question of the all-important “packets of data” the experts said in a downbeat and embarrassed way that what they had seen did not prove anything one way or the other. The event promptly descended into the incoherence of a normal Trump flag-waving rally, with the standard calls for a military coup – but not before a rather wholesome seeming elderly lady appeared at the podium, as if from another world, to promote sales of Lindell’s cushions, flannelette bathrobes and toilet accessories. CNN, the US cable network, had hired their own better-credentialed cybersecurity expert to analyse the code and included his thoughts in their coverage of Lindell’s event: “These packets aren’t even packets of bullshit; they are packets of nothing,” he concluded.
Lindell himself looked flustered and angry, but not entirely undaunted. The very fact his experts had said that there was no fraud merely proved the fraud all the more conclusively. This was because the evidence was so explosive that Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the Democrats would be bound to infiltrate the symposium, find the files and alter them before the experts were able to read them. Older readers may recognise in this the plotline of every single episode of Scooby-Doo. CNN was in on the act as well, Lindell said. They had smuggled the BLM activists into the symposium disguised as video technicians. Did anyone believe that CNN would not do that? Could anyone be that naïve? Give me a break. One of Lindell’s organisers played the victim, complaining with seemingly genuine pathos that CNN was just a bunch of bullies, determined to spoil people’s fun. “They just won’t stop fact-checking us,” he wailed. It was the fact-checking, and not the facts, that had led to this latest fiasco. “After this, perhaps they’ll stop fact-checking us all the time.”
Unlike Mike Lindell, people who make equally portentous predictions about the future – including the long awaited Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the related problem of the end of the world – are usually careful to date the event as “soon” or “when the time is right”, since it is never a good idea to be too specific when predicting the future as the merest glance at any popular newspaper or magazine horoscope will confirm.
Thus at least 130 confidently asserted but nevertheless temporally vague predictions of the end of the world have fallen due since The Independent was launched as a newspaper in 1986. This total includes only predictions made by spokespeople for reasonably significant organisations such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses (8 million followers worldwide) the Bahai religion (6 million believers) and Pat Robertson, a former US Republican Party presidential primary candidate. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – of self-appointed, freelance prophets have made end time predictions – and that’s before you get to more empirically and scientifically based theories about planetary collision and exploding galaxies, which are inevitable but scheduled so far into the future that they are not worth worrying about.
Even pop musicians have got in on the act. Some may remember that David Bowie had a 1972 hit with Five Years which predicted global extinction in 1977. But nothing much out of the ordinary happened in 1977 except for the death of Elvis Presley and the UK inflation rate reaching 15 per cent. This was bad but – as was pointed out at the time – not exactly the end of the world. Films about the end of the world, meanwhile, are ten a penny, but usually have a more secular explanation such as asteroid impact. Plots range from hours of art-house Lars Van Trier-type Scandinavian existentialist torture through to just about every other standard popcorn sci-fi fireball movie with an overly-intriguing title that you never wanted to see. There’s even an apocalyptic rom-com called Seeking a Friend for the End of the World starring Keira Knightley and Steve Carell, star of the US version of The Office: “A disastrously dull take on the disaster-movie formula” (Variety); “desperately in need of a good edit” (Vogue).
The religiously motivated have made their own films in addition. The suitably auspicious year 2000 saw the film adaptation of Left Behind, a fundamentalist end times novel about the process of “rapture” – a widely predicted near-future event whereby the faithful will suddenly and without warning disappear and be taken up into to heaven shortly before the end of the world. These disappearances will take place even if, as in the movie, the rapturee is a flying a commercial airliner at the time with hilarious/tragic/dramatic consequences. The film featured babyfaced teen-star turned TV evangelist Kirk Cameron, best known for claiming that the ease with which bananas can be consumed is proof of God’s existence, since a thing so ideally beneficial for humans could only have been created by an intelligent designer. The Washington Post reviewed the film as “a blundering cringefest” with “unintentionally laughable dialogue, hackneyed writing and uninspired direction”. Despite this, the film was remade in 2014, this time starring Nicolas Cage as the vanishing airline pilot. Left Behind II was an even bigger calamity, receiving just a 1 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The reviewer for Christianity Today said the film was “moronic” and gave religion a bad name.
Most contemporary fundamentalist predictions of the Rapture, the Battle of Armageddon and the end of the world can be traced back to the late 19th century and the voluminous writings of Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in the US. Russell was a Philadelphia entrepreneur, and an early adopter of the new technology of photography, which he used to visually recreate scenes from the Bible. Importantly, he also promoted has own brand of “miracle wheat”, which he claimed had magical health-giving properties. When rivals said the wheat and the bread made from it was a scam he sued for libel. He lost the court case. The bread was indeed a scam.
Undaunted, Russell continued to produce a huge numbers of books and tracts mostly on religious topics – improvising and filling out Bible stories depicting such things as Noah’s flood and the life and times of various prophets. Indulging his interest in photography Russell produced a traveling slideshow, very the much the precursor of a silent movie, depicting events in the creation of the world as described in the Book of Genesis.
One of Russell’s themes about ancient times was”pyramidology” – the harmless and still popular pastime of attributing esoteric significance to the Egyptian pyramids. In the 1880s Russell wrote that the Great Pyramid of Giza had been built by ancient Hebrews as an additional and secret book of the Bible “made out of stone” – much as the original 10 commandments had been written on stone, but on a larger scale. The secret message of the Great Pyramid was the exact date of the Battle of Armageddon, the end of the world. The pyramid is exactly 5,460 inches in height. Russell assigned a year to each inch of the pyramid, starting with year zero at the base (zero inches, zero years) and ended at 5460 – the tip of the pyramid (after which no more inches, no more time). The year 5460 in the Hebrew calendar translates to 1914AD in the Julian calendar once you added in 13 years, which was how long Russell thought it had taken to build the pyramid.
The theory raised some immediate and obvious objections. Why had the ancient Hebrews used inches when they had not been invented yet. The first mention of the inch as a unit of measure (equivalent to three grains of barley laid end to end) was in 14th century England. Despite this, the prediction was taken seriously by hundreds of thousands of Russell’s readers and millennial Christians who in the 1890s were already superstitiously nervy about the approach of the round-number year of 1900. Russell had an answer for the sceptics. God had waited until the “last generation” before providing mankind with inches and accurate measuring tools, so that the secret would only be uncovered “in our own day”. (The metric system – another potential numerological fly in the ointment - had arisen from the French revolution, and could be safely ignored since the revolution had been caused by Satan according to Russell.) Either way, the important thing was to eat more miracle bread and its literary equivalent in the form of Russell’s endless series of sensational yet folksy “Bible-based” pamphlets. It was a simpler time, before tabloid newspapers let alone the internet – this was interesting stuff and there was not much else to read.
When 1914 arrived Russell faced what might be called the Lindell problem. The year came. The year went. It was a bad year, to be sure, with the start of the Great War in Europe. But Armageddon it was not. Russell died two years later and was buried under a large gravestone monument in the shape of a pyramid. Some maintained that Armageddon had started right on time in 1914, but the battle would go on for some time, with world events getting steadily worse and ending up in “universal anarchy”. Thus the year of Russell’s prediction had been more like the end of an epoch, rather than the end of everything in one big bang. Others said that he had just got his maths wrong, and moved the date back to 1918. Yet others said that his pyramidical tomb showed that he had been a secret freemason working for Satan all along, trying to corrupt Christianity from within.
When 1918 came and went, the date was moved back to 1920; then to 1925 and then 1931. Each time the deadline was missed there would be further splits and arguments within the Bible Students movement. The Pyramidology was quietly dropped and there was a new focus on the burgeoning Zionist movement, and international efforts to reestablish the state of Israel as an indication that the end of the world was approaching and a marker as to when it would take place.
Yet another faction of Russell’s followers continued to publish his magazinec, The Watchtower, and relaunched themselves as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or, these days, JW.org or JW. The modern day Watchtower claims a worldwide circulation of over 90 million, and individual articles are described using Russell’s terminology as a “spiritual food”. In 1931, the JWs updated Russell’s predictions and began to claim that Armageddon would take place before the end of the 20th century, or at least before the last person who had been born on or before 1914 died. The most likely date for Armageddon, the organisation said, was 1975 because, according to their reading of the Bible, that would be the 6,000th year anniversary of the creation of the world.
Human time and God time, according to JW.Org, are different, somewhat like measuring the proportionate age of dogs in dog years. One year for God equals 1,000 for humans. 1975 would see a global conflagration (nuclear war, asteroid impact, volcanos, earthquakes, plagues of locusts, rivers of blood, etc) which would kill all but a few thousand of the faithful, true believers who then clean things up and live in an earthly paradise for 1,000 years (ie, in God time, a normal Sunday). Any believer unfortunate enough to contract cancer or die in a car crash before the 1975 Armageddon would miss out on the thousand-year rule of Jesus in an earthly paradise lavishly illustrated in JW literature as a sort of multiracial psychedelic 1950s suburban Switzerland, populated with eerily smiley people living in luxurious log cabins and frolicking in sparkling waterfalls. Deadly snakes and spiders and the like will lose their venom, and lions, tigers and other deadly animals will, as in the Garden of Eden, be vegetarian and no longer fierce nor hostile. Also, as added attraction, everyone will live to be 1,000 years old, not in some airy-fairy celestial heaven, but right here on a cleansed Earth, and will still have perfect teeth while inhabiting the body of a 22-year-old athlete, despite subsisting on a high-calorie diet of freely provided magical fruit and Miracle Wheat. Best of all, believers would have the satisfaction of knowing that the non-believers had died in agony as they cleared away billions of their mangled and charred corpses. “Stay alive until ’75” was one slogan used by JW leaders in the ’60s and ’70s. Membership boomed as the big day approached.
But 1975 came and 1975 went. Queen released Bohemian Rhapsody, Brian Clough was sacked by Leeds United and the Cold War broke out between Britain and Iceland. All very troubling events to be sure – but nothing in the way of planetary collision, the oceans filling with boiling blood or even a fair-sized downpour of poisonous frogs.
The failed prophecy caused recriminations and mass defections from the JW.org. Those who remained gamely admitted that they had “over emphasised” the importance of the 1975 anniversary. Armageddon was still due to take place before the last member of the 1914 generation died, which today would mean until the last person who is 108 or older dies. Thus the JW members you often see on street corners offering literature to passersby look extremely nervous. They really do think the world is about to end almost immediately, perhaps even before you finish reading this article.
Most other fundamentalist churches have dropped the idea of a specific date for the end of the world, though some claim that the world has already ended and we are now stuck in some sort of illusory world-is-ending unreal limbo awaiting further developments. One exception to the specificity rule was the fundamentalist Family Radio organisation and its spiritual leader Harold Camping. Family Radio informed its millions of listeners worldwide, many in the Philippines where US religious broadcasting is particularly popular, that the world would end at 5.59pm California time on 21 May 2011. At that exact time all true believers would be transported directly to heaven as part of the Rapture. Sinners would be left on Earth to suffer all manner of tribulations usually depicted along the lines of a Mad Max movie, but with even more torture and cannibalism and less Tina Turner, followed be the physical destruction of the planet and the dispatch of the unsaved into a lake of fire to be tortured constantly for all eternity. The end of the world came and went and nothing happened – except for public order problems in parts of the Philippines where believers had taken to hiding in the forests. Camping declared that despite all appearances to the contrary The End had in fact happened, but that it was “an invisible event” sent to test and indeed strengthen the faith of believers. The “visible” end of the world was rescheduled for October of the same year. October came and went. When the prophecy failed for a second time, Camping appeared to throw in the towel, gamely telling a TV news reporter: “I guess I ought to go and shoot myself now or go upstairs and stay drunk until I die.” Camping did in fact die two years later making this a fairly accurate prediction, relatively speaking.
And what of the fate of Mike Lindell and his failed prediction of the Trump reinstatement? Opinion polls show that around 80 per cent of Republican voters still think that the 2020 election was “stolen” and a third are sure that Trump will be still be reinstated this year, even in polls taken after the collapse of Lindell’s symposium. This was at least the third prediction of a specific date on which the 2020 election result would be overturned.
The first was 20 January 2021, the supposed “Day of the Great Awakening”, coinciding with then president-elect Joe Biden swearing his oath of allegiance. When nothing happened, the day of reckoning was put back to 4 March, which was yet another washout. And then the date was put back once again to Friday 13 August, and now back to “later this year” and so on, most likely until doomsday and perhaps beyond.
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