As doomsday scenarios go, it's got everything you could ask for: Ancient prophecies, a rogue planet, the reversal of Earth's magnetic poles - and a worldwide conspiracy to conceal the truth.
John Kehne can't say how it all adds up. But come Dec. 21, 2012, he's expecting something big.
"We're seeing now, and will continue to see, more and more disasters, both man-made and natural," says the Maryland native, whose "official" Web site on the subject features a clock counting down to the end of the world as we know it.
"On that day, we will reach a pretty major disaster," Kehne says. "What that is, I'm not really sure. Earthquakes are a definite possibility." Nonsense, say skeptics, who dismiss the claims of a growing body of magazine stories, books, Web sites and, on Friday, a blockbuster Hollywood movie.
"We're pattern-seeking primates," says science historian Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society. "We look for patterns to connect A to B. And often A really is connected to B and B really is connected to C. The problem is we don't have a baloney detection module in our brain to help us tell the true from the false patterns."
The Internet chatter and late-night radio talk is building with the release of "2012," a film by serial doomsayer Roland Emmerich, who previously assaulted Earth with aliens in "Independence Day" and global warming in "The Day After Tomorrow."
The movie draws on the apparently popular belief that the ancient Maya predicted the end of the world, possibly in a collision with the as-yet undetected planet Nibiru, when their calendar ends on the Winter Solstice three years from now.
"Good luck everyone!" declares 2012warning.com, a Christian-themed Web site. "Remember to pray, for prayer is the ONLY way."
On the bright side: Some interpretations have the intelligent inhabitants of Nibiru making contact with Earth, perhaps to raise humanity to a new level of consciousness.
The shifting complex of ideas animating such beliefs do contain elements of truth. For example, the long count calendar used by the Maya does conclude a 5,125-year Great Cycle on or around Dec. 21, 2012. But the Maya themselves did not equate the date with the end of the world, and in their writings predicted events they said would take place long after it.
"I've got a calendar on my wall that ends on Dec. 31," says Ben Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. "I'm not particularly worried that there isn't going to be another one after it."
The comparison is apt, according to University of New Hampshire anthropologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck.
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