Apocalypses that never came to pass! From the end of a 5,125-year calendar to a terrifying prediction.


8. UFO Prophets

Since the 1950s, individuals have blended their biblically apocalyptic fears with their anxiety of extraterrestrials. One of the more popular accounts came at the hands of Dorothy Martin, a woman who had dabbled in automatic writing, a purported psychic ability in which one writes without consciously considering the words they put to paper. Much of her beliefs came from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics system, a precursor to modern-day Scientology. Through her writings, she came to lead a group of followers called the Seekers, convincing them that she had received a psychic message from the planet Clarion. Martin and her group prepared for the arrival of a flying saucer to provide them safe exit as the world was to end in a global flood scheduled for December 21, 1954. When this didn’t come to happen, Martin was driven into hiding as threats of arrest and commitment to a psychiatric ward loomed.

7. The Jupiter Effect

One of the best selling books of 1974 was “The Jupiter Effect”, written by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann in which they outlined a number of upcoming catastrophes set to happen in conjunction with a major planetary alignment. This alignment, involving all the planets of our Solar System uniting on the same side of the Sun, all within a 95-degree arc. This event had long-been tracked by astronomers, who knew that the tidal forces of the other planets would have little-to-no effect on the climate of the Earth’s surface. But Gribbin and Plagemann ignored this fact, instead focusing on the potential effects of solar wind during this time. They claimed the resulting effects on Earth’s atmospheric conditions would mess with the speed of its rotation and trigger a number of natural disasters, including a massive earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. When these catastrophes failed to happen on March 10, 1982, the authors published “The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered” just a month later. In it, they hypothesized that the “Jupiter Effect” had actually taken place in 1980, retroactively blaming it for the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Gribbin would later go on to confess he didn’t like his “Jupiter Theory”, stating “I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.”