The Date of the Apocalypse

  • A curious thing happened on May 21: nothing. You probably weren't surprised, unless you had been listening to Harold Camping, the California radio evangelist who predicted that the Rapture described in the Bible would begin at 6 p.m. that day. The doomsday prophet, who blamed the failure of a 1994 end-time prediction on a mathematical error, soon backtracked on his May 21 claim, saying that the end of days had actually begun in an invisible, spiritual sense and that the world would be physically destroyed on Oct. 21. That leaves his followers (like the man below), some of whom quit their jobs and sold their possessions in anticipation, with five more months to wait and the rest of us wondering if for the 89-year-old Evangelical pastor, the third time might actually be the charm. (Probably not.)