Armageddon

Sometimes I wonder why I’m so easily duped. I like to think I have critical thought processes, that I can separate the wheat from the chafe. The last couple of days a meme has been bouncing around in my head like a frenzied piranha, feeding on all of my fears and anxieties about the future of our world. The whole debacle started while looking to whore out the new website I started, WinnipegForums.ca. I only knew of a couple of Winnipeg-centric forums on which to announce the new bastion of Winnipeg discussion, one of them from having read forums for a local lan party. I set out to investigate All your base cafe to post a welcome message to anyone who was interested in talking about politics. There, glowing on my screen like a beacon of finality, lay a thread entitled “end of the world is coming? (smells like bs)”. Clicking and following the ether trail I found myself at a religiously tilted pro bush site proclaiming that the end of the world was upon us, that on June 19th the first meteor would strike.


I’m normally quite sceptical about such things but I read them anyways out of a morbid sense that at some point or another, the shit is going to hit the fan. The link was a gathering of a series of posts on some unmentioned (and subsequently ‘mysteriously shutdown’) forum by a person known only as “Aussie Bloke”. AB was very vague on specifics, yet he laid a series of bread crumb clues that started to add up to some interesting coincidences. He claimed that the solar system was on an intersection course with a dust cloud containing three objects – two of which will hit the earth with some certainty, one of which was anomalous and not a meteor / comet or anything that had been seen before.

There are THREE incoming objects. TWO of them we know a lot about…but the third one is an unknown…all we know is it is coming and it has a high probability of hitting us. The other two WILL hit us. Along with these three main objects are many smaller ones…it will rain death all over the world for a week or so. The death rain as we call it will begin late June. Leading up to June you can expect a wonderful light show as millions of small meteorites enter our atmosphere. I keep saying look south…but it is hard for most of the world to do this…unless you live down under and know exactly where to look and WHAT to look for. Immediately preceding the impacts, the earth…in fact the entire solar system…will be shrouded in thick black space dust.

One of the links mentioned was about the sunshine reaching the Earth was dropping by 2 to 3% per decade, an article that I had previously read. I started to do some googling to see what others had written about this subject, and I found articles about how the Federal Reserve has been shifting money around in alarming ways, how the US navy had deployed more carrier groups to sea than had ever been done in history, the seemingly strange increase in the occurrences of large meteorites, and I started to panic. Every piece of new I read added to the puzzle. I, myself, had recently seen an incredibly large shooting star not two weeks ago. The facts were starting to pile up. Armageddon was at hand.
So at this point I was convinced. After relaying these facts to the kitty the next day, we became convinced that this was in fact the End Times, strangely (to me) prophesized and about to inflict incredible hardship on an already overworked system. What would I do? Would I survive? How would we live? The original piece by Aussie Bloke indicated that there would be many years of hardship, as humanity preyed on each other in order to survive on a shattered planet. He claimed that it would get better after that mystical year of 2012, but the years in between would be out of a Mad Max style Sci-Fi novel. Whatever it took to survive. I began to count up my batteries. I also told friends. I told my mother to sell her mutual funds, they wouldn’t matter in 4 days. She told me that if that if it were true, that I should try and have a fun time before the terror began. Better advice I’d never heard. 😉
One day later and this prediction of upcoming horrors haunted me. I scoured the internet for any additional pieces to fit the puzzle. As I figured this cloud of debris was the remnants of a Supernova, and as this cataclysmic event seemed to follow events in the Bible, I figured that the Star of Bethlehem was a star exploding and was also probably the source of our Armageddon. It seemed to make sense in a poetic way. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one to come to this conclusion. Astronomers had located a binary pulsar that would have seemed to have exploded at around the right time to reach Earth at around 2 B.C. So here was the source of our doom, but was it possible? If things happen like they’re supposed to in the Bible, then this would be true. However I decided to try and factor in some good old fashion science and see if the results agreed. This is where the truth and fiction start to diverge.
In order to find out if the binary pulsar in question, 1913+16, was the source of these meteors I had to find out how far away from Earth it was. Mass takes a much longer time to travel than light, so if this pulsar was more than say 50 light years from Earth then there was no way that the meteors would reach us 2000 years later. It just doesn’t travel that fast. So after doing countless searches (apparently binary pulsar 1913+16 is famous for being the first binary pulsar to be discovered) I finally found an article that compared it to another set of pulsars which were much better to study, because at 2000 light years they were 10 times closer than 1913+16. So there it was, one claim shattered. There was no way that the supernova that probably led the wise men to Christ would have ejected the matter that was (apparently) coming to destroy us. With one puzzle piece gone, the whole mess started to fall apart.
Eventually I stumbled upon a thread at Above Top Secret, a website devoted to conspiracy theories and other such topics. This thread contained a message from an anonymous group called “The Monitors” which claimed that the entire theory was an experiment of theirs, run to gauge the response of the general population to Armageddon memes.

Our initial hypothesis was straightforward enough: Given the barest minimum of verifiable evidence, ordinary citizens of average to above-average intelligence could be duped into wholesale belief in a catastrophe scenario, provided there was ample corroboration from equally ambiguous, non-credible sources.

Because of the overwhelming success of this project, we will not be apologizing. You all behaved exactly as we had predicted, falling into 2 camps on either side of the issue. The believers held fast to every scrap of datum, whether it was credible or not. The non-believers grew frustrated and angry as their attempts to apply logic and reason were ignored. Anger and dissent grew and grew, and ultimately the entire story devolved into an unintelligible mass of contradictory assertions and accusations. We are acutely aware that even our own admission in this forum will be viewed as yet more hoax material, albeit more cleverly crafted and well-thought out than standard fare for these pages.

BLIND SKIES is not, as many have claimed, a

4 thoughts on “Armageddon”

  1. 2 things…
    1) to be fair, the bushcountry.org site was just pointing out the Aussie Bloke thing, they said in the 1st part that they did not think it would happen in this time frame.
    2)I think this whole thing has been a “the boy who cried wolf” type of thing. Make a hoax, joke or hollywood-ize a situation until the public gets desensitized and used to the idea that these types of events don’t, can’t and will not happen. I think something along these lines is coming, they are looking for them, but they do not want the world to spire into a state of panic. If a life altering set of meteor were going to hit and there would be a massive change in quality of life, and the general public was told about it, everything would go to crap. No one would go to work, no one would act responsible or fallow laws, it would be an orgy of parties and anarchy. Not something that the powers that be would want. In short, the powerful would loose control and hence their power.
    I think if The Monitors are telling the truth, which at this point it seems they are, it is to test the water and see how the internet people react. Conventional media can be controlled and the media of the internet is more or less a wild card. I think this works in 2 ways to their advantage. One they see how people react to this situation and two, if you can not control a faction of media, and can not silence it when it comes to these types of things, then the next best thing to do is discredit and make it look like a joke and generally untrustworthy. With that said, I think there are a lot of nutjobs on the net. But when the real thing comes, I think we will get the heads up from the internet. Cuz really conventional media, Fox, CNN, CBS, report on things that are either have happened or are happening live. OK end rant….

  2. Another 2 things…
    1)I wish I knew how to spell and have good grammar.
    2)Don’t feel bad or gullible, Chef. At lest you have the ability to consider and have an open enough mind to allow for the possibility of something like this could or might happen. Most people would dismiss it outright, because they cannot allow for the possibility that life could go that way. Like an ostrich burying it’s head in the ground.
    While you an I might have got caught up in some of the emotions of the near doom experience, the part you did not tell your readers was, you were coming up with ways and ideas to help the survivors, if any, band together and go forward. For myself, since I believe that something to this effect will happen, am looking for ways to take more out of the moment and ensure that my family and friends know that they mean something to me.

  3. The trouble with the net is that you can find documentation to back-up any theory.
    If you can ask the question, someone, somewhere, has “the answer”. They also have a webpage. 🙂

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