Doomsday leader quits

R

Redeemed

Expert Member
Joined
Oct 7, 2008
Messages
2,916
Reaction score
14
10 December, 2012 00:01

BELGIAN author Patrick Geryl has tried for five years to convince the world that a 200ha South African farm will be the safest place on earth when the Mayan prophecy of doomsday dawns on December 21.

But now, less than 12 days before the world is to end, Geryl has retreated and would rather stay at home than haul 150 families in an "unsinkable" boat to the farm.

Geryl, the self-appointed "person responsible for reconstructing the new world", announced in 2007 that he had identified a farm as a bunker for doomsday devotees who wanted to be saved from the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis of December 21 2012.

He claimed to have spent more than R1.2-million on plans to buy the bunker and his followers were asked to pay at least R100000 each .

But very few bought into his plan and now Geryl blames his diabetes for keeping him away from South Africa on December 21.

Believers expect planetary alignments on December 21 will disrupt the earth's gravity, a mysterious planet will collide with Earth and gigantic flares from the sun will wipe out all humans.

But Dr Chris Engelbrecht, an astrophysicist at the University of Johannesburg, said there is no evidence to suggest the Mayans saw December 21 as doomsday.

He said the summer solstice might be behind the catastrophic planetary alignment theory.

"Planetary alignment is rather rare and there definitely won't be any such movement of celestial bodies in December. The next decent alignment will occur on September 8 2040.

"We experienced alignments in the not so distant past, in 1962, 1982 and 2000, and there were no noticeable effects on earth."
Click to expand...
Sauce.
 
Why would they need a bunker for protection if ALL humans are to be wiped out?
 
He claimed to have spent more than R1.2-million on plans to buy the bunker and his followers were asked to pay at least R100 000 each .
Click to expand...


Not doing it out of his love for his fellow man, then ?
 
Hmm, I was actually expecting more doomsday cult news and mass-suicides by now. This is the big one, after all.
 
D.B.Cooper said:
Hmm, I was actually expecting more doomsday cult news and mass-suicides by now. This is the big one, after all.
Click to expand...

"Doomsday believers flood Turkish village"

Sirince, a village of around 600 inhabitants, has a positive energy according to the doomsday cultists, who say that it is close to an area where Christians believe the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven.
Click to expand...
Business is booming for those who know how to exploit this.

The Mayan prophecy has sparked a tourism boom in the village, which is now expected to host more than 60,000 visitors according to local media.
Click to expand...
 
D.B.Cooper said:
Hmm, I was actually expecting more doomsday cult news and mass-suicides by now. This is the big one, after all.
Click to expand...

French hamlet tipped to survive doomsday

Up in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a tiny village nestled amid breathtaking landscapes and eagles in flight, a man in a woolly hat pushes a wheelbarrow up a narrow street, whistling to himself as the smell of woodsmoke drifts out of chimneys. The only sight slightly out of place are 20 zombies, staggering wild-eyed and bleeding, down the mountain path. But, unlike most of the bizarre things said about this place, the zombies at least make sense. “We’re making a pastiche film about the apocalypse for our university,” says Joel, 23, a pharmacy student from Montpellier dressed in a torn grey suit with two black eyes and a dribble of blood from his mouth. His student friend, a dwarf in a cow suit, adds: “Bugarach was the perfect setting. Everyone knows this village as the world centre of armageddon, we couldn’t resist.” Bugarach, with its two narrow streets, 176 residents, little agriculture, scores of wild orchids and virtually no pollution, was barely heard of a few years ago. Now, it’s arguably the most famous village in France, known variously as “the village at the end of the world”, the “chosen village”, or as CNN put it, “the doomsday destination”.

According to a prophecy/internet rumour, which no one has ever quite got to the bottom of, an ancient Mayan calendar has predicted the end of the world will happen on the night of December 21, 2012, and only one place on earth will be saved: the sleepy village of Bugarach. The mayor, Jean-Pierre Delord, a farmer in his 60s, first spotted the apocalyptic forecast online two years ago after being alerted by a villager. He mentioned it at a council meeting, suggesting special security measures, perhaps army logistics, to handle an influx of visitors in December 2012. Someone at the meeting told the local press and before long world news agencies and Japanese TV crews were pacing the cobbles asking baffled villagers their views on armageddon.

The French government’s dedicated sect-watchdog, known as Miviludes, was soon on the case, keen to prevent any apocalyptic sect activity, or ritualised suicide by doomsday cults such as the Order of the Solar Temple, which lost members in ritual killings in the Alps in 1995.

At the tiny town hall, the leftwing, independent mayor of 36 years, Jean-Pierre Delord, is dressed in jeans. “The Bugarach sign at the entrance to the village has been stolen for the third time — that costs a lot of money, you know,” he sighs. Not to mention the pebbles taken from the mountain above the village and sold online as talismans, something he has filed a legal complaint about. Or the online sale of “prayers”. There was even one idea by a budding entrepreneur to charge hopefuls five euros to send their last wills and testaments to Bugarach to be buried underground there for the end of the world, but it never happened.

Mystery mountain

But in Bugarach, says Delord, “it’s all about the mountain”. At 1,320m, the peak of Bugarach looms over the village. It sits alone, not part of a range, and some believe its spooky shape inspired the mountain in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind . Known as the “upside down mountain”, it is a geological oddity whereby the lower layers of rock are mysteriously younger than those at the top. It is also host to a bewildering number of caves.

Delord rejects suggestions by some that he stoked the media frenzy himself. But does he believe the world will end on December 21? His eyes widen. “Of course not. This is the 183rd end-of-the-world prophecy since antiquity. But I can’t take the risk of a lot of people coming here, trying to climb the mountain and getting hurt.” He wants the local authorities to shut off mountain paths and control any crowds.

The oddity is that tourist bookings this year seem to be down slightly, not up. The usual walkers, eco-tourists and people coming for spiritual retreats seemed put off by news crews doing lives-to-camera on armageddon. One Estonian rambler had taken refuge in Rennes-Le-Bain’s thermal springs saying, “I went for one walk around Bugarach and was stopped by two TV crews asking if I’d prepared for the apocalypse.”

In Bugarach, looking around the tiny church, Barbara Delahaye, a Spanish tourist in her 50s and a fervent Catholic, said there was no harm in all the fuss. “As Christians, one must always be prepared for the end of the world, it’s not a bad thing to be kept aware of that.”

In her restored terraced house, Valerie Austin, the local choir leader, summed up the odd atmosphere. “People come and look at us villagers as if we’re all peculiar and in contact with some other world. I’m just waiting for one of them to give us a banana, I feel like a monkey at a zoo. We, the people that live here, have nothing to do with this,” she says.

Austin, a music teacher from Northumberland, moved here 24 years ago because “all the things I thought important in life seemed to be here: beautiful scenery, no pollution, clean water and kind of authentic, old-fashioned lifestyle.” She manages a holiday cottage that lost bookings over the summer because “people who wanted a quiet holiday were put off by the media buzz”. The choir couldn’t plan their usual pre-Christmas concerts in local villages because they weren’t sure whether there would be mayhem on the roads.

Does she believe any of it? “The Mayans couldn’t even predict their own downfall, could they?” she sighs. One of the most far-fetched claims has been of an apocalypse-inspired property boom in Bugarach as people allegedly rushed to set up home near safety. If prices have gone up in recent years, it has only been part of the long-running general move of city-dwellers looking for the rural dream. “For sale” signs dot the village and neither sales nor prices have soared. “Why would you buy a house if the world was about to end?” asked one villager.

John Argles, a builder from London, was mid-construction on his dream house by the stream. An “atheist and a realist” he was surprised when people asked him if he’d come for Doomsday. “That had nothing to do with it,” he says. It was the nature, including its resident flock of vultures, that had tempted him. “It’s the nearest thing to utopia I could find.” He plans to meet friends for a celebratory drink in the local bar on December 22.

Whatever its origins, the Bugarach prophecy has implanted itself in France’s collective consciousness. Nicolas D’Estienne d’Orves, a novelist and opera critic for Le Figaro, released a book on it recently, The Village of the End of the World . A documentary on the life of villagers, “The World Stops at Bugarach”, will air on French TV, fittingly, on December 20. D’Estienne d’Orves says it was “impossible” to get to the bottom of the genesis of the Mayan Bugarach rumour. “It was grabbed on to because this is a place where there’s nothing, so you can easily project your fantasies on to it. It’s like filling a balloon with air,” he says.

The French government, however, is obliged to take it seriously. More than 700km away in his Paris office near the prime minister’s residence, Serge Blisko, head of Miviludes, says he would be advising local authorities on how to prepare policing and keep an eye for gurus and sects exploiting people. “After these moments, there can be a danger of psychological collapse. If fragile, vulnerable people expect an event like the end of the world and it doesn’t happen, they can feel let down and in anguish,” he says.

Over the next weeks, the state will decide what level of security is needed in the village on December 21, whether to close mountain paths and how to handle any visitors. Although if it’s snowing and icy, it would be almost impossible to access it by car via the death-defying canyon bends of the nearby Gorges of Galamus.

At the town hall, the mayor, while hoping the fuss would soon be over, was still proud of his village’s fame. “If I had had to pay a communications agency for this kind of publicity, it would have been a fortune,” he says.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-pape...tipped-to-survive-doomsday/article4179834.ece
 
Well, it may as well be the end of the world. It's -1 outside and i have to go the shop :(. F###ing Russians. This icy weather is from Siberia. The "beast from the east" as they call it here :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X