The Prophets of Doom Trivia Quiz

Answer: Halley's Comet

An early example of a media storm caused by fake news, the "comet panic" of 1910 was caused in part by some fairly lurid headlines in newspapers in the USA. Gullible citizens were duped into buying comet-proof umbrellas and bottled air to allow them to survive what they were being told was either an impending collision with a comet or poisoning by the gases contained in the comet's tail as the Earth passed through it.

To be fair to the good people of 1910, it wasn't the first time there was panic about a comet's arrival. The citizens of Paris had also panicked on the publication of a paper by Jerome Lalande about the dangers of near-Earth objects, believing that a comet was on a collision course with the Earth and would destroy all life on the rather arbitrarily selected date of May 20, 1773. Even the man after whom the comet is named, English astronomer Royal, Edmund Halley, posited in 1694 that a comet might have been the cause of the Great Flood of the Bible.

Answer: That she would give birth to the second messiah

Southcott had claimed to experience visions beginning in her forties and claimed she was the Woman of the Apocalypse mentioned in Chapter 12 of the book of Revelations. She wrote down the visions that she received in rhyming couplets and these proved to be hugely popular upon publication. When, at the age of 64, she declared that she was pregnant by immaculate conception she became a figure of great interest.

Apparently she looked like she was pregnant and was declared to be so by a doctor but the date of the supposed birth of the new messiah came and went without any arrival. A different doctor examined her and suggested she was not pregnant, but "oppressed with flatulency". Only a few weeks later, Southcott succumbed to the illness that afflicted her. Her followers believed that she would be resurrected after four days and her son would be born but when this failed to happen, a post-mortem confirmed that she had not been with child after all.

Answer: An ark

Stöffler was a renowned German mathematician and astronomer who published his "Ephemerides" in 1499. In it, he predicted that in February 1524 all the known planets would be aligned (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). His prediction was noted in academic circles but the general public was mostly unaware of its content, as the publication was in Latin.

A decade later, the Italian astrologer, Luca Gaurico sent a letter to the government of the Rhineland. It proclaimed that Stöffler's prophecy, with its occurrence during the water sign Pisces, portended a great flood that would cause great social upheaval. Even though Stöffler denied this, the word was out and with the recent invention of the printing press, it rapidly spread through the printing of pamphlets that extrapolated Gaurico's claim from social upheaval to the end of the world.

One person who was spooked by the prophecy was Count von Iggleheim, who built a three story ark to house his family and friends, stocked with supplies to last for weeks. His construction was a curiosity to most but when on the predicted day of February 24 it started to rain, there was panic among the gathering crowd and the ark was stormed. von Iggleheim refused to let anyone enter, so the crowd dragged him from the vessel and, according to some accounts, he was stoned to death.

Answer: On eggs laid by her hen

The Hen of Leeds became a local legend and received visits from people far and wide who were concerned about the upcoming end of the world. However, it was not quite the prophetic miracle that Bateman had presented. It transpired that the messages had been written on the eggs by Bateman after they had been laid using a corrosive substance.

The eggs were then re-inserted into the hen to be re-laid for the visitors. Poor thing!

Answer: The end of the Mayan calendar

Exactly what would cause the end of civilisation was open to interpretation; a mysterious and as yet unobserved planet on a collision course with Earth; a supermassive black hole at the centre of the universe; or aliens were all posited as culprits. But the reason for the choice of date was the end of the 13th baktun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. A baktun is a cycle of 144,000 days or close to 400 years. The end of the 13th was no more notable than the end of the previous twelve but for reasons unknown, many thought that it represented the end of the calendar and therefore the end of time.

The effect of this misunderstanding was to cause panic in certain circles fueled by the internet spreading the conspiracy theory to a wide audience. The French town of Bugarach saw a huge rise in visitors when its nearby mountain peak, Pic de Bugarach was selected as either a great place to see out the effects of whatever geological transformation was about to take place, or as a garage for UFOs. From the release of the movie "2012" in 2009, sales of underground shelters saw a huge increase in the United States, partly inspired by a marketing campaign that suggested people needed to prepare for the end of the world.

Answer: Christopher Columbus

Like so many of his time, Columbus was a fervently religious man. His "Book of Prophecies" outlined how he saw his great discoveries as part of a wider vision. In particular, with the encounters with the people of the new world, there came an opportunity to spread the word of Christianity around the world.

The book was a collection of stories from the Bible and various ancient apocalyptic sources, that outlined what needed to be done to pave the way for the second coming of Christ and the subsequent end of days. These included the taking of Jerusalem from the Muslims and the discovery of the Garden of Eden, both of which events would be led by the Last World Emperor, who Columbus believed to be his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The date of 1656 by which this had to be completed was calculated by Columbus to be 7000 years after the Great Flood.

Like many great navigators, Columbus understood astronomy and was able to accurately predict a forthcoming lunar eclipse in 1504 when he and his men were marooned on Jamaica after their ships had foundered. This prediction awed the local population to the degree that they offered gifts of food to the men, who had been on the point of starvation.

Answer: Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate was founded in 1974 by Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applegate. Though the cult was based around Christian theology with Nettles and Applegate declaring themselves to be the two witnesses of the Revelation, they combined this with ufology, the investigation of unidentified flying objects.

The core belief was that by following the cult's teachings, followers could transcend beyond humanity and become immortal extraterrestrial beings. This belief was somewhat put to the test by the death of Nettles from cancer in 1985. However the cult somehow survived this rather tricky eventuality by proclaiming that the death of the body was the first stage in ascending to a post-human phase.

This new belief directly fed into the doomsday scenario that Applegate attached to the arrival of Hale-Bopp in 1997. He recorded a video stating that the comet was the sign that they had been waiting for and it was time to "evacuate this Earth". Sadly, when police arrived at their Santa Fe ranch, tipped off by a former cult member, they found all 39 members of the cult deceased.

Answer: Nostradamus

Nostradamus was, in many ways, a man made for the modern social media age. It may seem counter-intuitive but the point of a soothsayer is not to predict the future but to look back after an event to say "I told you so". Therefore vagueness and multi-layered meanings are the key to, in the words of historian Dan Jones, find "the meeting point of cynicism and gullibility."

As such, his quatrains have been interpreted to be predictive of all manner of historical events. The one that perhaps made his name was the prediction of the death of King Henry II of France. The only problem with that was that it was only published after the death, somewhat undercutting its power as a prophecy.

The professor of geology, Alexander Tollmann, had made his name with his hypothesis that Noah's flood had been caused by a comet or asteroid colliding with the Earth. He turned later to interpreting the writings of Nostradamus and one that caused him great concern was the quatrain that claimed that a king of terror would come from the sky in "the year one thousand nine ninety-nine". He publicly proclaimed that a great catastrophe was coming and as the date approached withdrew to a bunker near to Albrechtsberg Castle, which he owned. Not put off by the inaccuracy of his prophecy, Tollmann later published his autobiography entitled "And the truth finally prevails".

Answer: Grigori Rasputin

Rasputin rose from peasant origins to be a friend and confidante of the Russian royal family of Tsar Nicholas II. His position inspired great jealousy among the Russian nobility and made him a marked man. Rasputin told the Tsarina that if he were to be killed by the nobles then the Romanov dynasty would come to an end and none of the family would live more than two years.

In 1916, Rasputin was killed when nobles including Prince Felix Yusupov, the husband of Tsar Nicholas II's niece, laced cakes and wine with poison. After this failed to take effect, Rasputin was shot three times and thrown in the Little Nevka River. As he prophesied, the Romanov dynasty fell just a year later when the Bolshevik revolution overthrew the monarchy and the entire family was executed in July 1918.

His prediction of the end of the world in 2013 was less accurate. He claimed that the Earth would be burned up by a great storm on that day and that Jesus would return to comfort the few that survived.

Answer: Doomsday Argument

The Doomsday Argument uses the total number of people ever born by the time of the calculation to predict the total future human population. It makes the rather large assumption that there is a fixed number of people who will ever be born. That number can be predicted using the probability of any randomly selected person being alive at that time and the position along the normal distribution that they reside.

At the time of Leslie's calculation in 1998, the argument suggested that it is highly likely that by the year 11,118 the last human will have already have been born. Who is to say whether Leslie will turn out to be right but one of the flaws of the argument is that if the calculation was made again today, the predicted outcome would be different. And after all, every prediction that the world would end to date has been wrong so far.