Asteroid Apocalypse 2015 — Still On! Impact Remains ‘Imminent,’ Says ‘Prophet’ Who Predicted Disaster
The great asteroid apocalypse of 2015 missed its deadline, as the entire month of September came and went without a massive impact from a giant meteor slamming into the planet and ending civilization as we know it. The asteroid strike was predicted to hit sometime between September 15 and September 28. Clearly, however, nothing of the sort actually took place.
But before the global population gets too comfortable, the self-styled “prophet” who claims to have originally predicted the asteroid apocalypse now says that the human race is not out of the woods yet — asteroid-wise.
Puerto Rico-based Reverend Efrain Rodriguez posted an online message this week, claiming that the feared asteroid impact could still be “imminent,” because in his original prophecy issued five years ago, he never gave a specific date for when his asteroid apocalypse prediction would be fulfilled.
Rodriguez wrote a letter to the United States Space Agency NASA in 2010, in which he claimed to have received word directly from God that a massive asteroid was hurtling straight toward Earth, on a deadly collision course.
But the prediction of a specific date in September of 2015, the reverend says, was added on to his prophecy by someone else, likely one of the thousands who took his original prediction and ran with it, as the asteroid apocalypse rumor spread virally on the internet.
“We want to clarify something. The date of September 23, or 24 of 2015 as the fulfillment date for the asteroid impact does NOT come from us,” wrote Rodriguez, or his representatives. “Neither does any other future date. These dates do not come from Prophet Efrain Rodríguez and they do not come from his managers of the Facebook pages, web page and documents.”
The September 2015 prediction, whether it came from Rodriguez or not, took hold in the public imagination to such an extent that NASA — which usually withholds comment on conspiracy theories, UFO reports, and similar claims — jumped in to the controversy, flatly denying that the Earth was in any danger from an asteroid strike.
“There is no scientific basis — not one shred of evidence — that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates,” Paul Chodas, manager of the NASA Near-Earth Object Office, says in a press release issued in late August. “If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction in September, we would have seen something of it by now.”
In fact, according to new reports, NASA is indeed hard at work, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, devising potential method to protect the planet from incoming asteroids, even potentially launching spacecraft at the asteroid to push the giant space rock off course — reminiscent of the scenario shown in the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster, Armageddon.
Though Rodriguez had originally warned that inhabitants of his native Puerto Rico would be forced to evacuate their homes, the latest statement from the “prophet” walked back that claim as well.
“There are several published messages/videos in the social media instructing and calling people to move from where they live, to abandon the east coast of the United States, to seek shelter elsewhere etc.,” he wrote. “Those generalized statements do NOT come from us. From the very beginning, Prophet Efrain, as well as The Page Managers, have instructed people not to move anywhere unless you receive specific instructions from the Holy Spirit.”
Though there is no asteroid on course for Earth any time in the near future, at least not according to NASA, there will be a giant asteroid, known as “Vesta,” close enough to humanity’s home planet to be visible in the night skies for the first two weeks of October, 2015, but the rock will not come anywhere close enough to set off an apocalypse.
[Images: Vadim Sadovski / Shutterstock / YouTube Screen Capture / Touchstone Pictures Publicity Photo]
