One day after the world failed to come to an end, mistaken prophet and California preacher Harold Camping has gone missing, various news organizations are reportingCamping, the 89-year-old founder of Family Radio Worldwide, was nowhere to be found Sunday after his predictions that at 5:59 p.m. ET on Saturday, massive earthquakes would rock the planet and those chosen by God would ascend into heaven, ABC News is reporting. He also predicted that those left behind would witness the destruction of the Earth, which would take place around Oct. 21.
Camping’s home in Alameda, Calif., appeared deserted. The Oakland headquarters of his 66-station network had a sign on the door that read, “This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!” the International Business Times reports.
Camping used billboards, fliers and posters to spread the word. “I am utterly, absolutely absolutely convinced it is going to happen,” Camping said last week.
The figurative drumroll leading up to Saturday — and the anticlimactic non-event — seemed to generate more jokes than fear, Cathy Lynn Grossman reported in USA TODAY’s Faith & Reason blog. Some Rapture believers expressed shock when the end did not take place.
Robert Fitzpatrick, a doomsday believer and retiree who sank almost all he had — $140,000 — into warning fellow citizens about the impending end, told the New York Daily News he did not understand what went wrong.
“I can’t tell you what I feel right now,” Fitzpatrick, 60, said Saturday in New York’s Times Square, after Armageddon failed to happen. “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly because we’re still here.”
Keith Bauer, a doomsday believer who drove his family from Maryland to experience the Rapture at Family Radio’s Oakland offices, told the News he was disappointed.
I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this Earth,” Bauer said.
Camping has had experience with mistaken prophecy. He once predicted the world would end on Sept. 6, 1994, but later said he’d made a mathematical error.
In the buzz leading up to Saturday, clergy in various news reports had pointed out that the Bible says the day of Rapture will not be known.
