The third week of September will be a busy one in cataclysmic circles. End of the world pronouncements happen at least every other year anymore, but as summer rolls into fall, we will be treated to two doomsdays in 72 hours. There is a day in between, but it’s doubtful it would be a constructive one, being sandwiched between two iterations of the planet being ripped asunder. No rest for the wicked, indeed.

Two doomsayers are going with a Sept. 23 date, with last month’s eclipse being the impetus for our finale. Unlike the Mayan Calendar or Harold Camping predictions earlier this decade, this prognostication is more vague on what will happen that day, with adherents insinuating it might only be the beginning (or middle) of the end. The lack of certainty is why this portent of doom is not receiving near the publicity of Camping and Mayan prognostications. Always remember, if wanting to get significant attention to you coming calamity, be specific on what will happen and when.

Because he didn’t do so, most of you have never heard of journalist Gary Ray. In the publication Unsealed, he wrote that the eclipse was one of several astronomical signs that the rapture is approaching: “The Bible says a number of times that there’s going to be signs in the heavens before Jesus Christ returns to Earth. We see this as possibly one of those.”

Of course, eclipses happened before the First Coming of Christ and have continued unabated in predictable patterns ever since, so there’s no need to assign special significance to last month’s, or think it means the Second Coming is in the offing.  

Ray is even more interested in an astronomical event that will follow the eclipse. He draws attention to a passage in Revelation which describes a woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head,” who will give birth to a boy whose fate is to “rule all the nations with an iron scepter.

Ray interprets this Tolkienesque imagery to be a prediction of the night sky on Sept. 23. Then, the constellation Virgo, postulated by doomsayers to represent the woman in Revelation, will be clothed in sunlight in a position over the moon and under nine stars and three planets. The planet Jupiter, which will appear from our vantage point to be inside Virgo, represents an in utero child. As Jupiter moves out of Virgo, this symbolizes birth.

Even if we concede his analogies to be on point, there is the issue of this stellar alignment being not terribly uncommon. For one thing, the sun being in Virgo happens every year for about a month. Second, on the moon’s orbit of Earth, it ends up at Virgo’s feet once a month. These two arrangements come together once or twice a year.

Now onto the crown comprised of three planets and nine stars of Leo. The issue here is that there are several dozen stars in the constellation. The nine Ray references burn brighter than the rest, but it still requires special pleading to substantially reduce the number of stars in Leo to make the scenario work.

While much less frequent that the alignment mentioned two paragraphs back, multiple planets being at Virgo’s head while Jupiter is at her center and the moon at her feet is a circumstance that happens at roughly 300-year intervals, and all such occurrences have been Apocalypse-free.    

If Ray’s prediction flops like the 8,240 doomsdays that have preceded it, he will recover quickly. He has already postulated that this year’s eclipse may be the start of a seven-year tribulation that will end when another eclipse comes in 2024. Carbondale, Ill., which sits in the center of the “X” formed by the two eclipse paths, will presumably be transformed into Armageddon.  

Ray wrote, “It makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of things that really point us to that.” In truth, it makes no sense and nothing points to a period of horrors. He has merely taken astronomically observable and predictable data and turned it into a baseless assertion that a cataclysm is coming.

If preferring a more secular mass extinction event, we have the latest Nibiru hypothesis. The idea that a rouge planet will end life on Earth got a very late start compared to the Armageddon Industry. But in just 40 years, Nibiru proponents have moved into second place behind the Christian doomsayers in the End Times sweepstakes, and their panicky prognostication pronouncements make frequent Internet splashes.

There have been three prominent failures of Nibiru to annihilate the Earth since 2004. Undaunted, a fresh promise of destruction comes in a 2017 book by David Meade. Like Ray, he cites Sept. 23 as probably just a beginning of the end date, and this mistake is why you likely haven’t heard of his book either.

While not overtly religious (though it does cite Revelation when needing to have a point bolstered), the work does demonstrate a faithful fervor. For example, Meade declares, “The existence of Planet X is beyond any reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty.” Meade is equally convinced that the planet’s existence means we are doomed.

Earlier this year, he claimed that such disparate elements as the position of celestial bodies, Biblical verses, and Pyramid inscriptions have combined to reveal that Planet X and its accompanying apocalypse are imminent. His interpretation is that Nibiru will first be seen in the sky on Sept. 23, then will slam into our planet the following month.

His tortured analysis fixates on the number 33. “When the eclipse begins on Aug. 21, the sunrise will be dark, just as Isaiah predicts. The moon involved is called a black moon. These occur about every 33 months. In the Bible, the divine name of Elohim appears 33 times in Genesis. The eclipse will start in Oregon, the 33rd state, and end on the 33rd degree of Charleston, S.C. Then 33 days after the eclipse, the stars will align exactly as the book of Revelation says they will before the end of the world: 9/23/17. Such a solar eclipse has not occurred since 1918, which is 99 years.”

Since that deviates from the “33” pattern, he finagles that to read “33 x 3.” Besides this special pleading, Meade also demonstrates how simple it is to cherry-pick numbers when trying to prove a point. It took me about 33 seconds to come up with ideas that the run counter to what Meade is peddling. Lucifer, given the astronomy-friendly nickname Morning Star in the Bible, is mentioned in scripture more than 33 times; the number of states the eclipse passed through was less than 33; the biggest astronomical event to occur in the States before the eclipse, Haley’s Comet, took place 31 years prior, not 33. Any number can be arrived at, cited, and said to mean something if the adherent is allowed to choose from every historical event, date, and person.   

But at least Meade sticks with 33. By contrast, the numeral-happy website heavenlysign2017.com  considers dozens of numbers to have sacred, prophetic meaning. Worse, it presents its conclusions in an annoying centered-text format. Author Steven Sewell combines dates for Rosh Hashanah, Christ’s crucifixion, Kepler discoveries, Israel’s founding, Saddam Hussein threats, the Dead Sea Scrolls being made public, Trump attacking Syria, the United States entering World War I, and much more. Out of this gobbledygook emerges an end of the world date of Sept. 21, 2017.

He incredulously asks, “Could all this be a coincidence?” I’m not calling it a coincidence. I’m calling it leaching onto whatever historical events, dates, or persons one feels like manipulating, then twisting and tossing them into a gumbo that results in an idiosyncratic version of evidence.