Suggestions that the world is about to end have been made from time immemorial. Sixteenth-century French oracle Michel Nostradamus, various religions, an astrologer with a syndicated newspaper column — even a former U.S. presidential candidate — have all claimed to know when the world will end.
On April 7, 1894 St. Louis, Missouri faith doctor J.S. Willis predicted Jesus would return to Earth Thursday March 6, 1896, at 3 p.m. (Jerusalem time). But before then, Willis promised, the world would be ensnared in a series of wars and revolutions.
During the 1950s, Jeane Dixon, an astrologer who had a syndicated newspaper column, gained fame for her psychic predictions. She wrote in the May 13, 1956, issue of Parade Magazine that the 1960 presidential election would be won by a Democrat who would die in office. (John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.) After foretelling Kennedy’s murder, Dixon later predicted there would be a planetary alignment on Feb. 4, 1962 that would herald the world’s destruction. (She also said the Soviets would put the first man on the moon.)
Television evangelist Pat Robertson in 1980 predicted the world’s destruction, according to the book Salvation for Sale, an Insider’s View of Pat Robertson’s Ministry, written by Gerald Thomas Straub, a former producer of The 700 Club. “He’s had it up to here and the hour of His wrath has come,” Robertson was quoted as saying during a Jan. 1, 1980, staff meeting. “Now if I’m hearing Him right, things are starting to happen. What is started over in the Middle East is not going to stop short of a war.” The war, Robertson said, would herald the end of the world.
During the late 1980s, Elizabeth Clare Prophet stoked fears when she warned of nuclear Armageddon that would come with a nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the United States. More than 2,000 followers left their homes and flocked to her church’s compound near Yellowstone National Park. There they began stockpiling weapons, food and clothing in a system of concrete and steel shelters.
Only last year, Harold Camping, who ran a non-profit radio chain, spent millions of dollars to buy billboard space across the U.S. and print millions of pamphlets warning of doomsday. Camping, who earlier predicted the world would end in 1984, said he used a complex formula relying on numbers in the Bible to conclude the world would end May 21, 2011.
In 1961, a physicist at the University of Illinois named Heinz von Foerster calculated that, on or about Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, the world’s exploding population would become so dense that everyone would be “squeezed to death,” according to the New York Times.
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