MORE DOOMSDAYS FROM OUR PAST

Time to take another walk down memory lane to Armageddons-that-never-were.

One of the several dates wrongly picked by the Jehovah’s Witnesses following their bungled prognostication of 1874 was 1914. As it happened, 1914 came and went and the world did not cease to exist.

In 1936, some enterprising Doomsters measured the Great Pyramid as Giza, calculated their results and decided this particular year was the End of Days! Well, guess what? That’s right, it wasn’t.

Back in 1889, John Ballou Newbrough, billed as “America’s Greatest Prophet,” pronounced that:

all the present governments, religions and all monied monopolies are to be overthrown and go out of existence. . . . Our present form of so-called Christian religion will overrun America, tear down the American flag, and trample it underfoot. In Europe the disaster will be even more terrible. . . . Hundreds of thousands of people will be killed. . . . All nations will be demolished and the earth be thrown open to all people to go and come as they please.

The foregoing was Newbrough’s prediction for 1947. Given the magnitude of such a prediction, you’d think you’d have heard about it. You didn’t, of course. 1947 was not an exceptional year as years go, but it certainly was not that horrendous.

In 1953, out came the tape measures and slide rules again and more measurements were taken of the Great Pyramid. This was the year of our doom….not!

All was relatively quite on the Doomsday front until the inauspicious year 1974 when a pair of well-educated and seemingly sane astronomers published a book entitled The Jupiter Effect. In 1524 there had been an alignment of planets and it would occur again in 1982 on March 10. The astronomers predicted a dreadful effect on our planet when this alignment occurred. Other astronomers, no doubt distancing themselves from the pair of silly boys, pointed out that nothing would happen. March 10 came and went and earth continued to revolve undisturbed. One of the two astronomers proclaimed, in a face-saving effort, that the earthquakes of 1980 had been a “premature result of The Jupiter Effect.” The world was underwhelmed.

Again, in 1975, the world would end according to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It did not. Go figure.