In September, to much fame, a man who claimed to have studied astronomy in Kentucky and deciphered the Book of Revelations predicted an ominous sign would appear on September 23 and foretell the world's end.
"It's a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number," David Meade told the Washington Post then.
A series of catastrophic events would follow the omen, he claimed, culminating in the appearance of a mysterious planet called Nibiru and the end of "the world as we know it". Meade's claim sold a lot of tabloids and YouTube ads. When September 23 passed with no omens or calamities, Meade revised his very numerologically significant date to October 15, which also came and went uneventfully.
You might think two consecutive misfires would quash the Nibiru theory. Instead, it's simply transcended its erroneous author.
Meade isn't even mentioned in the latest batch of tabloid stories, which quote yet another doomsday theorist to warn that the end of all things is not on September 23 or October 15 - but now November 19, when Nibiru is supposed to set off cataclysmic earthquakes.