7 Times People Predicted the World Would End on a Specific Day and Were Wrong

1. 2012
Anybody that’s been alive for long enough will remember the 2012 world ending debacle. There’s no one individual to blame this one on, just a gross misunderstanding of some basic facts. The whole idea that the world was going to end in the year 2012 is because the Mayan calendar ended on December 21st, 2012. The movie “2012” must be partially to blame for why this belief that the world would end on the year 2012 was so widespread, but that’s just speculation on my part. Who knew that an ancient civilization could potentially be wrong about something?

2. Harold Camping
Harold Camping was a very interesting man. He predicted the end of the world six separate times. Harold was an evangelist who at multiple points during his career as a radio broadcaster, predicted when the rapture was going to happen. One of the more embarrassing times he did it was the first time he predicted the end of humanity; which he said was to be September 6th, 1994. When the end times didn’t happen, he revised his apocalypse dateto September 29th. When this didn’t happen, he changed it to October 2nd.

3. Halley’s Comet
There have been multiple points in history at which people believed that the coming of Halley’s comet was going to bring the end of the world. In 1910, Camille Flammarion predicted that the comet was going to penetrate the atmosphere and snuff out all the life on the planet. People were selling “Comet pills” to prevent the toxic gas from the comet from killing them. In 1986, Leland Jensen also predicted that the comet was going to destroy the world.

4. Edgar C. Whisenant
Edgar C. Whisenant wrote a book called 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988 that, as the name implies, detailed why the rapture was going to happen that year. He predicted that the rapture would occur between September 11th and the 13th. Much like our friend Harold Camping, once his prediction obviously didn’t come true, he shifted it to a different date, September 30th, 1989.

5. José Luis de Jesús
José Luis de Jesús was the self-proclaimed returned form of Jesus Christ, and simultaneously the Antichrist. He had a large cult following, and predicted the world’s governments and economies would all fail on June 30th, 2012. He also said that his followers would get wings and the ability to walk through walls.

6. Nibiru cataclysm
The Nibiru cataclysm is something that’s been around since the 1950’s as an idea, and it occasionally has a resurgence where some new people will say that the world will end. The basic idea is that the apocalypse will happen when a planet sized object known as Nibiru, or sometimes Planet X, crashes into Earth, killing all life on it. The most recent time someone predicted Nibiru would crash into Earth was very recent, David Meade claimed it would happen on September 23rd, 2017. I don’t know about you, but I don’t seem to recall anything crashing into the planet on that date.

7. Y2K
Then there was the time when the entire world thought that the world would end because of a computer bug on the year 2000, it didn’t but Al Gore did lose his election and for some that was nearly as bad as the world ending! The idea is that the world would end on the midnight turn of the millennia because, so many computers would cease to function at once that society was going to collapse. This isn’t as farfetched as it seems, because there were some minor problems with computers reading the year as 1900 instead of 2000, but obviously nothing close to world ending. Mostly just small inconveniences that were fixed.