When was the last prediction of the world ending

World ending Saturday? Here are 8 times the world was supposed to end, and didn't. Show Caption. Hide Caption. The world's going to end eventually, but not like this! Many 'doomsday' predictions have surfaced over the years. Here's a look at four of the most notable ones. Share your feedback to help improve our site! She even predicted she'd die of old age at 88 -- she died at Even Browne's most famous prediction, about a mysterious respiratory illness in , looks different in a critical light.

Snopes, the fact-checking website, said, "lobbing vague claims about likely events does not a prediction make," when examining Browne's prophecy. It rated her prediction as not true or false but as a "mixture" containing significant elements of both truth and falsehood. Many repeat myths about Revelation. If there was a prize for the most misunderstood source for bad predictions, it would go to the Book of Revelation.

It may be the Bible's ultimate crossover -- no other book's imagery and language has so penetrated popular culture. Even people who have never read the Bible are familiar with its references: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the Red Dragon, and the seven bowls of plague.

Revelation is filled with such contagious imagery that one theologian who has studied its text calls it a "multimedia" book whose popular images operate like an infectious disease. Empty shelves in a supermarket in London, Thursday, March 19, Beal says many people quoting Revelation get the meaning and the symbolism wrong. Many people, for example, believe that the "Rapture" -- when it's believed that Jesus returns at the end of the age and all Christians, dead and alive, will rise up in the air to meet him -- is in Revelation.

Not true, says Beal. There is no explicit mention of the Rapture in Revelation. There are references to the concept in scriptures like 1 Corinthians , which says, " For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. But Beal says the Rapture theory actually originated in the 19th-century work of a theologian named John Nelson Darby. A police officer checks the temperatures of passengers at a checkpoint in Manila, Philippines, on March 16, How about the Antichrist?

Isn't that in Revelation? Nope, Beal says. The writer of the first book of John in the New Testament warns of generic "Antichrists" who deny that Jesus is the messiah. But there is no figure like the central character in the film, "The Omen," a cunning son of Satan with the number stenciled on his body.

Stores sold Y2K emergency kits with nonperishable food before New Years Day in , when people thought computers that operated government records, utility systems, banks, and anything containing some kind of computer chip would crash and cause apocalyptic chaos.

While it didn't prove necessary, it did result in better computer systems. When it opened in , there was speculation that the swift movement of subatomic particles in its tunnels could create a black hole that would swallow up the Earth. CERN scientists reassured the public that even if a small black hole was created, it would disintegrate immediately , according to LiveScience.

The world hasn't been swallowed up yet. Radio and television preacher Harold Camping predicted that the world would end on May 21, He said that only three percent of the population would survive by way of God bringing them into heaven, according to The Washington Post. The popular theory stemmed from the fact that the Mayan calendar supposedly ended on that date after 5, years.

According to legend, the village of Bugarach in France would be the only place on Earth that would be spared. The end of the world was predicted to occur on December 21, , when one of the great cycles in the Mayan calendar came to an end. Faced with the wealth of alarmist information available on the world wide web, even NASA was compelled to publish an information page about why the world would not end on December 21, See our countdown to the end of the Mayan calendar.

The world was also supposed to end on October 21, American radio host Harold Camping had arrived at the date for the apocalypse through a series of calculations that he claimed were based on Jewish feast days and the lunar calendar. In addition to his claims about the end of the world, he also predicted that on May 21, , at precisely p. Those who were not raptured, he said, would have to remain on Earth to wait for their doom five months later.

According to media reports, some of his followers quit their jobs, sold their homes, and invested large amounts of money in publicizing Camping's predictions. When the Rapture did not occur, Camping re-evaluated his predictions saying that the event would take place simultaneously with the end of the world.