Harold Camping

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Harold Camping was an American civil engineer who built Family Radio into a large independent Christian broadcasting network, then used his own biblical numerology, developed apart from any seminary training or denominational structure, to calculate specific end times dates on more than one occasion. His first widely publicized date was 1994, a prediction that passed without the event he had forecast, though Camping continued broadcasting and revising his chronology in the years that followed rather than abandoning the method that had produced it.

In his 2005 book Time Has an End, Camping set a new and more specific date, teaching that the Rapture would occur on May 21, 2011, to be followed by the final destruction of the world five months later on October 21, 2011. Family Radio promoted the May 21 date heavily in the years before it arrived, placing the claim on billboards and across its broadcasts, giving Camping's second major prediction a public reach well beyond his network's existing listenership.

The scale of that promotion meant the date's passing became a public event rather than a private disappointment, watched by a wider public that had encountered the billboards and broadcasts even without any prior connection to Family Radio, a reach Camping's engineering background and independent radio network had made possible in a way an ordinary preacher's pulpit could not.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When May 21, 2011 passed without the Rapture Harold Camping had predicted, he did not immediately concede the date had failed. He first stated that an invisible, spiritual judgment had in fact occurred on that day, a claim that preserved the specific date while relocating the predicted event from a visible worldwide occurrence to one no observer could confirm or deny.

That explanation did not hold for long. In the months that followed, Camping and Family Radio acknowledged that the prediction had been wrong, a public reversal of a claim the network had spent years promoting on billboards and across its broadcasts to an audience well beyond its own regular listeners. The acknowledgment closed out the most publicized failed date of Camping's career, following directly on an earlier unfulfilled prediction he had made for 1994.

Camping suffered a stroke shortly after the reversal and died in 2013, two years after the acknowledgment and just short of two decades after his first publicized date had already passed without the event he forecast. His career left behind two dated predictions built from his own reading of biblical chronology rather than from any institutional teaching, each promoted through the broadcasting network he had built from an engineering career rather than a theological one.