Fears that the end of the world is nigh have spread across the world with only days until the end of the Mayan calendar, with doomsday-mongers predicting a cataclysmic end to the history of Earth.
Cubans participate in a Mayan
ritual at Bacuranao beach in eastern Havana. Photo:
AFP/Getty
Ahead of December 21, which marks the conclusion of the 5,125-year "Long
Count" Mayan calendar, panic buying of candles and essentials has been reported
in China and Russia, along with an explosion in sales of survival shelters in
America. In France believers were preparing to converge on a mountain where they
believe aliens will rescue them.
The precise manner of Armageddon remains vague, ranging from a catastrophic
celestial collision between Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru, also known as
Planet X, a disastrous crash with a comet, or the annihilation of civilisation
by a giant solar storm.
In America Ron Hubbard, a manufacturer of hi-tech underground survival
shelters, has seen his business explode.
"We've gone from one a month to one a day," he said. "I don't have an opinion
on the Mayan calendar but, when astrophysicists come to me, buy my shelters and
tell me to be prepared for solar flares, radiation, EMPs (electromagnetic
pulses) ... I'm going underground on the 19th and coming out on the 23rd. It's
just in case anybody's right."
In the French Pyrenees the mayor of Bugarach, population 179, has attempted
to prevent pandemonium by banning UFO watchers and light aircraft from the flat
topped mount Pic de Bugarach.
