Some cast their votes quite widely, choosing eminent figures from twentieth century science and philosophy. Others focused more on people identified specifically with the skeptical movement. With most it seemed a combination. All this seems fitting. “Skeptic” can be defined in a wide variety of ways. Skepticism is entwined with science and philosophy—and with numerous other fields of scholarship, inquiry, and investigation as well.

Although our main interest was in identifying the 10 outstanding skeptics with a 1 to 10 ranking, the voters were encouraged to list other prominent skeptics beyond just 10 if they wished, and many did so. In this manner, nearly 50 different individuals received at least one vote.

The main interest here is not in ranking people in comparison with each other but to honor and recognize those individuals who are recognized as truly outstanding by their peers. In the pages that follow we present photos and brief profiles of those selected. Comments were also solicited, and some of them are included here.

The 10 Outstanding Skeptics of the Century

1. James Randi
2. Martin Gardner
3. Carl Sagan
4. Paul Kurtz
5. Ray Hyman
6. Isaac Asimov
7. Philip J. Klass
8. Bertrand Russell
9. Harry Houdini
10. Albert Einstein

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan was the people’s astronomer, the public’s scientist. In a brilliant career foreshortened by death in 1996 at the age of 62, he used his passion for science, intelligence, charisma, and formidable literary and communications skills (The Dragons of Eden won the Pulitzer Prize and it wasn’t even his best book) to turn several generations of young people on to the wonders of science and the rewards of critical thinking. He had a unique talent to inspire wonder and awe at the true mysteries of science while cautioning against bogus science and the temptations of wishful thinking and self-deception. The result was a nearly unparalleled champion of science and skepticism and foe of pseudoscience.

As a professional astronomer he helped shape and articulate the golden age of planetary exploration when we first sent unmanned emissaries to the major planets. His interests in planetary science, the origins of life, and the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence drove his career, but he ranged freely into fields far beyond astronomy. The world was Sagan’s classroom. He believed strongly in democracy and the ability of the common person to appreciate science if portrayed in a clear and legitimately exciting way. His frequent network television appearances, his popular books and articles, and his highly successful Cosmos television series all brought his messages to the masses worldwide. His last book published before his death, The Demon-Haunted World, ranged over late-twentieth-century fringe science and warned of the perils of a public unable to distinguish real science from bogus science. Other noteworthy books: The Cosmic Connection, Cosmos, Broca’s Brain, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (with Ann Druyan), A Pale Blue Dot, and Billions and Billions.

Other outstanding skeptics who received multiple votes or at least one first-place vote:

• Richard Feynman
• Joe Nickell
• Karl Popper
• H.L. Mencken
• Richard Dawkins
• Stephen Jay Gould
• James Alcock
• Stephen Barrett
• Bart Bok
• Michael Shermer
• Kendrick Frazier
• Mark Twain
• Oscar Pfungst
• Robert A. Baker

In his wonderfully written new book, Barry Glassner reminds us again and again that frequently our fears are grossly exaggerated given the actual frequency of these rare events.

Glassner, a sociology professor at the University of Southern California, uses persuasive logic and well-chosen statistics to demonstrate the infrequency of such events as “road rage” and the rarity of such criminals as “cyber-predators.” Our almost pathological fears do serve some function, however. News media may use these fears to earn higher ratings, politicians may play on our fears during elections, and perhaps, in a sense, even lobbyists for special interest groups may exchange fear for increased fund-raising.

In a chapter detailing “dubious dangers on roadways,” Glassner notes the discrepancy between the perception and reality of road rage. Popular media outlets tend to exaggerate the extent of road rage; for instance, an Oprah Winfrey show featuring road rage seemed to indicate that anyone at any time may be a likely victim. She warned, “We've all been there. It starts with the tap of the horn, and angry gesture . . . this is a show that affects so many people. . . .” A Los Angeles Times story exclaimed, “Road rage has become an exploding phenomenon across the country” and the Pacific Northwest was “plagued by a rise in road rage.” Readers impressed by this hyperbole would have been surprised to read later in the story that only five people were victims of road rage in the area in the past five years. Glassner also cites revealing statistics from a 1997 study by the American Automobile Association. The report noted that of the 250,000 people killed in auto-related deaths between 1990 and 1997, under one in one thousand could be directly attributed to “road rage.” Americans clearly have other things more worthy of worry than road rage.

In a particularly powerful chapter, Glassner demolishes irrational fears about airplane safety. While the airline traveler may feel uncomfortable when turbulence is encountered, or when recalling that she is many thousands of feet over ground in a flying, metal tube with wings, fears of crashes, collisions, and death are greatly exaggerated. As Glassner notes, “In the entire history of commercial aviation . . . fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. The average person's probability of dying in an air crash is about 1 in 4 million, or roughly the same as winning the jackpot in a state lottery.” One reason the general public may continue to fear flying is that journalists often confuse incidence for rates. In recent years, more flights fly, and there have been more accidents, but while the total number of flights has increased, the accident rate has declined. Reporting a given year as “the deadliest in aviation” takes on new meaning when the claim is placed in the context of an increased overall number of flights, the vast majority of which land safely. Another improper skewing of reality occurred in a front-page 1994 USA Today story that warned to “steer clear of commuter planes with fewer than 30 seats.” Fortunately the Federal Aviation Administration responded with information that when Alaskan bush flights, air taxis, and helicopters are removed from analysis, commuter flight accident rates are nearly identical to major carrier accident rates. Airplane crashes often make headline news while car crashes often do not, in part because airline crashes are relatively infrequent and tend to result in a greater number of simultaneous deaths than do auto crashes. What is newsworthy does not always make sense statistically.

Later in the book, Glassner turns to a discussion of youth violence. In the wake of the terrible school shooting tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, many policymakers are rushing to correct what has been viewed as an epidemic of youth violence. Are public fears of a new generation of monster youth unfounded? The media, at least, are fond of reporting youth violence stories. Footage relating to the horrible Littleton event has been played and replayed. One study Glassner cites found that 48 percent of all reports about children on the CBS, ABC, and NBC evening newscasts concerned crime and violence, while only 4 percent of the stories concerned childrens' health and economic issues. Are “killer kids” a growing threat to our cities, suburbs, and rural areas? Probably not. Glassner cites data from criminologist Vincent Schiraldi indicating that “youth homicide rates had declined by thirty percent in recent years, and more than three times as many people were killed by lightning than by violence at schools.”

This is a beautifully written and thoughtfully argued book. In addition to the rich explorations of youth crime, road rage, and airline safety, Glassner turns his talents to discussions of our overblown fears concerning such phenomena as teen pregnancy, racial stereotypes, pedophile priests, crack babies, rare illnesses, and cyberporn. His book offers a much-needed antidote to the pervasive media virus of misinformation Americans encounter on a daily basis. The Culture of Fear should find an audience not only with academic social scientists, but also with worrywarts of every variety.

The Culture of Fear:
Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things
By Barry Glassner
Basic Books, 1999
ISBN 0-465-01489-5
276 pp. Hardcover, $25.

The guide is an odd book indeed. Although purporting to be a field guide, it is really more of an illustrated catalogue of anecdotes of encounters with mysterious primates. The authors have created a classification system encompassing about fifty reports and sightings. They have grouped them into nine categories: Neo-Giant, True Giant, Marked Hominid, Neandertaloid, Erectus Hominid, Proto-Pygmy, Unknown Pongid, Giant Monkey, and Merbeing.

The entries are largely culled from previous books on cryptozoology, with few original sources cited. In nearly every entry, not enough details are given to judge the credibility of the account. Coleman and Huyghe make much of the fact that native peoples have various words for wildmen and other elusive, possibly mythical creatures. But just because a creature has a name does not imply that it actually exists: dragons, pixies, elves, and leprechauns can be described, drawn, and classified too.

Interestingly, the book's premise is at variance with longtime Bigfoot researcher Grover Krantz, who, as the authors admit on page 10, does not see “any compelling evidence for more than one type of hairy biped” and finds “no reason to think it has anywhere near a worldwide distribution.”

The creatures Coleman and Huyghe catalogue have between three and five toes, and fail to account for alleged Bigfoot prints that show two and six toes. They apparently ignored evidence that didn't fit their categories. Or perhaps they assumed all tracks showing two or six toes are hoaxes. If so, by what criterion? Why are three- or four-toed primate footprints any more credible than two- or six-toed ones?

Early in the book, the authors decry a “lumping problem,” that is, that myriad sightings are collected together under homogenous names such as “Bigfoot” or “Yeti.” This, they say, is a problem because it “hides a larger truth, lumps considerable differences, and just plain confuses the picture.”

There is indeed a lumping problem that confuses the picture, but that's not it. The problem is that the authors group eyewitness accounts, folklore, legend, footprint finds, and depictions in native art together as if all have equal weight and credibility. Sources for the field guide include an alarming number of third-hand sources, stories by young children, unnamed, long-dead eyewitnesses, and even the English poet who wrote Beowulf.

Yes, The Field Guide to Bigfoot includes Beowulf, a thousand-year-old poem, as a credible source for an account of an actual mystery primate that may be alive today. For those a little shaky on early English literature, the poem tells the story of the Danish king Beowulf who slew an ugly, hairy giant named Grendel. On your next trip to Denmark, be sure to take this guide so if you see Grendel you'll correctly identify it as a member of the True Giant class!

Even the infamous Minnesota Iceman, a fair exhibit shown in the late 1960s and claimed to be a frozen Bigfoot, appears in the book. It's touted as a real creature, despite strong evidence that it was simply a rubber creature designed by a top Disney model-maker. As Jon Beckjord, director of Project Bigfoot, wrote in the Summer 1982 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, “I'd like to point out that nobody who is involved in Sasquatch investigations has ever felt that this frozen dummy was a Bigfoot. . . .” That doesn't stop Coleman and Huyghe, who quote one cryptozoologist's bizarre theory that “it was a Neandertal killed in Vietnam during the war and smuggled into the United States in a 'body bag.'”

The best thing about the book is the illustrations by Harry Trumbore. He does an admirable job of coming up with slight variations on large, hairy bipeds. Accuracy doesn't seem to be a high priority; with one creature, the Tano Giant (p.98), the account clearly states the creature had no thumbs. That apparently didn't sit well with the authors, who note, “perhaps its thumb was simply small relative to the rest of its hand,” and depict the creature with thumbs anyway.

Along with the individual entries, maps depict the range of each class of creature. My personal favorite is the Merbeing ("water creature") map. According to it, these aquatic creatures roam no less than five deserts, including the Atacama (in Peru), the Mojave (U.S.), the Great Sandy (Australia), and the Sonoran (Mexico).

Over a dozen accounts claim that the creatures were killed. Yet no bones, skeletons, or preserved bodies exist today. This elicits visions of hunters saying to themselves, “Wow! We killed a wild, man-like creature! I've never seen anything like it before! Let's throw it away!”

It's clear that mystery mongering is at work here. In several places, the eyewitnesses themselves admit that it's possible they misidentified an ordinary animal, such as a bear, spider monkey, or baboon. But as long as there's a hint of doubt, Coleman and Huyghe are happy to claim it a mystery, treat it like a real animal, and lump it in with accounts from folklore and poems.

The authors have also written other entries in this peculiar field guide series, including guides to extraterrestrials, UFOs, and ghosts. I suspect the same lax scholarship evident here bedevils those as well.

The Field Guide to Bigfoot,Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates Worldwide
By Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe
Avon Books, New York. 1999.
ISBN 0-380-80263-5
207 pp. Softcover, $12.50.

Here's the story: I lay in bed one evening, half dozing, with the bedroom door shut. My wife gets to bed later than I do, but sometimes she'll come in to find something and then leave, again shutting the door. You must understand: this is a decades-old pattern, one with which I am quite familiar. Well, as I lay there, I heard her footsteps approaching the door. I saw the door open with exactly the same speed as always, and it opened to the same distance as usual. I expected to hear her footsteps coming into the room, but there was no such sound. (As I write this, I realize that I did not hear her footsteps. It was an after-the-fact embellishment obviously supportive of the ghost theory.)

My first assumption was that she had changed her mind, but two considerations suggest otherwise. First, she would have closed the door, and second, there were no footsteps leading away. Okay, it wasn't her so it must have been a puff of wind. But the night was calm and no window was open. The puff of wind hypothesis dissolved.

Now in some consternation, I arose and looked for her. She was not in a nearby room, not anywhere on the bedroom level. I walked further to the little balcony that overlooks the downstairs area and there I saw her, with a bowl of cereal and thoroughly ensconced in a crossword puzzle. Although the circumstances convinced me it could not have been her, I asked. She denied having anything to do with the door that had mysteriously opened and went back to the puzzle. Although she has at times been a trickster, she would always give me a clue about her intent to tease me. Without a triumphant grin on her face, she clearly had not tried to disconcert me.

When I described the door's peculiar behavior she jokingly asked if I thought it were a ghost. I snickered at her and returned to bed. A ghost? Ridiculous. I soon fell asleep. The next morning, dozing in bed, I became aware of the noises-and she did too. One of us said: "Perhaps it was the ghost." We both laughed, but we both listened for more strange sounds. And, of course, they were there.

That evening, in the den watching television, we both heard sort of a combined clink and thud clearly indicating that some hard object had fallen to the floor. I examined the area and could find nothing to account for the sound. Were we disquieted? You bet. The noises continued over several days, and we jokingly got into the habit of evoking the ghost as explanation . . . and I started to take that explanation seriously. As a consequence, the hairs on my arms would stand up when I could not find an explanation for some sound or event.

At the same time, I resisted the "ghost" explanation and wondered about my willingness to accept the possibility. The noises, after all, were really nothing new, just the creaks and groans of the house. They had always been there, but rarely the focus of my attention. Either every house I'd ever visited had a resident ghost (possible, but surely unlikely), or house noises were commonplace, not the production of invisible spirits. But the door incident remained on my mind. I realized, finally, that my mind, operating out of awareness, demanded an explanation of the door's behavior. It wasn't the wind; it wasn't my wife. What the hell was it? I had to know; but only the ghost hypothesis remained.

Because of my training as a Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapist (REBT) I had learned to challenge the notion of demandingness. After some mental work on that I finally realized that I didn't have to know what prompted the door to open; once I achieved that, I stopped fixating on the damned (no irony intended) event. I had made the same error that humans have made since our cave-dwelling ancestors roamed the earth. When rational explanation failed to settle the matter, they invoked spirits and magical events. Any explanation would be better than chaos and, if one could invoke the spirits, it implied power over ugly reality. And we are the genetic inheritors of what worked for survival.

Albert Ellis (the creator of REBT), a highly esteemed psychologist, has suggested that human beings 1) have a strong tendency to be irrational, and 2) have a strong tendency to ignore data contrary to their beliefs. However, this can be overcome by training in critical thinking. That is the essence of his psychotherapy, teaching people how to think about their beliefs regarding reality. We need to teach our children how to think and reason at the earliest age possible, a process that should be ongoing.

No, I don't believe that a ghost opened the door, but that I had entertained the possibility continues to astonish me. Without an understanding of the event, my brain simply created a magical explanation despite my years of looking at the universe in a rational way. We all do that. Our brains fill in the blanks, and without considerable debunking effort we fall prey to such "explanations." Children do this all the time; and for many people nothing changes with age-they continue to explain events with their idiosyncratic construction of explanations that have nothing to do with reality.

When I was a child, I asked my mother to tell me how lightning and thunder are produced. She explained that clouds bumped into each other, producing a spark and noise. I won't tell you how old I was before I figured it out. But, how many more subtle explanations have I (or you) lived by, never noticing their absurdity?

If we embark on such an enterprise, educators had better anticipate a negative reaction from parents. Many parents would become enraged with children who come home and puncture their beliefs. Enraged parents become profoundly interested in their school boards, and school boards often cave in to placate them. An example occurred not so long ago in Colorado. A town put up a library with gargoyles on it as ornaments. Upset parents demanded that they be removed because gargoyles "represent the devil." Explanations of the churchly history of gargoyles did not change their minds and the gargoyles came down.

So, yes, let's see if we can't get the schools to provide some training in how to think and reason. That it will be a difficult battle is of no consequence.

(Shh! I'm trying to figure out what happens to socks that disappear in the dryer. Can it be . . . ?)

You would think that believers in the imminence of Christ's return would be bothered by the fact that, ever since the gospels were written, huge numbers of Christians have interpreted Biblical signs of the end as applying to their generation. The sad history of these failed prophecies makes no impression on the mind-sets of today's fundamentalists. Even Billy Graham, who should know better, has for decades preached and written about the impending return of Jesus. He grants that no one knows the exact year, but all signs indicate, he believes, that the great event is almost upon us.

It is often said that current excitement over the Second Coming, centering on the year 2000, had its parallel in a panic over the end of the world that swept through Christian Europe as the year 1000 approached. But did such panic actually occur? As Stephen Jay Gould makes clear in his wise little book Questioning the Millennium (1997), the answer is far from clear. There is now, he tells us, an enormous literature on the topic that spans the full range of opinion from the claim that Europe did indeed experience "panic terror" to the claim that nothing of the sort took place.

Gould cites Richard Erdoes' AD 1000: Living on the Brink of the Apocalypse (1988) as a recent defense of the panic terror school. A German now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Erdoes is the author of two previous books, The Sundance Principle and American Indian Myths. "On the last day of the year 999," Erdoes begins his history, ". . . the old Basilica of St. Peter's at Rome was thronged with a mass of weeping and trembling worshippers awaiting the end of the world."

At the other end of the spectrum, Gould cites Century's End (1990), by Hillel Schwartz. Schwartz denies that any undue excitement over the Second Coming took place as 1000 loomed. An intermediate view, that there was some excitement but not much, is ably championed by French historian Henry Focillon in The Year 1000 (English translation, 1969).

Gould admits that he favored Schwartz's position until he attended an international conference devoted to "The Apocalyptic Year 1000," held at Boston University in 1996. The conference organizer, medieval historian Richard Landes, convinced Gould that there was considerable "millennial stirring" in the year 1000, especially among European peasants. One major drum beater for millennial terror was a monk named Raoul Glaber. Like almost all such failed prophets, Glaber found an error in his calculations when Christ did not appear. The thousand years, he proclaimed, should not be counted after Christ's birth, but after his death. This postponed the world's end, he said, until 1033.

Hundreds of predictions have been made around the world as the year 2000 approached, about the date of the Lord's return. Here are some recent examples that are especially comic.

In 1988 Edgar C. Whisenant, then fifty-six, a retired NASA rocket engineer living in Little Rock, Arkansas, published a paperback booklet titled 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 88. The publisher, a firm in Santa Rosa, California, claimed they sold or gave away over six million copies. The book predicted that the rapture would occur on September 11, 12, or 13, 1988. When the event failed to take place, Whisenant found a slight error in his calculations, and moved the date ahead to September 1, 1989. When that date also proved wrong, Whisenant decided henceforth to keep his mouth shut. He told a reporter he was under medication to control paranoid schizophrenia, but that his mental condition had no bearing on his calculations.

Robert W. Faid's Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come? was published in 1988 by Victory House, a fundamentalist firm in Tulsa. Faid is identified on the cover as a nuclear engineer, and author of A Scientific Approach to Christianity. He lives in Taylors, South Carolina. Using elaborate systems of numerology, Faid finds that in one system Gorbachev's full name yields 666, and in another system it produces 888, a number Faid identifies with Jesus. Gorbachev is thus shown to be both the Beast of Revelation and the counterfeit Christ. The Second Coming, Faid warns, will take place in 2000 or shortly thereafter. A portion of his crazy book was actually reprinted in Harper's Magazine (January 1989). I have no idea whether Faid today still thinks poor Gorby is the incarnation of Satan.

Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?

Blevins's book is based throughout on what he calls the Bible's Secret Code, a code concocted by other fundamentalists whose books he recommends. The code is simple. Each letter is assigned a number that is the product of 6 and the letter's position in the alphabet. Thus A = 136 = 6, B = 236 = 12, C = 336 = 18, and so on to Z = 6326=156.

Blevins must have labored long and hard at his calculations, applying the code to hundreds of names and phrases to produce relevant sums, and especially the sum of 666, Revelation's notorious "number of the Beast."

Blevins writes that he was surprised to find that Kissinger adds to 666, but he realized at once that Henry Kissinger couldn't be the Antichrist because he failed to fit "Scripture guidelines." He was also amazed that so many common words and phrases, such as New York, illusion, witchcraft, necromancy, Mark of Beast, and Santa Claus add to 666.

If not Kissinger, then who does Blevins think, or perhaps I had best say thought in 1990, is the primary suspect for being the Antichrist? You won't believe it, but the candidate is none other than Ronald Wilson Reagan!

Each of Reagan's three names has six letters, and the entire name has six syllables. This is suspicious enough, but Blevins is compelled to do more. Unfortunately Ronald Reagan is six short of 666, but Blevins remedies this by adding A in front of the name: A Ronald Reagan. That's not all. A tireless Blevins manages to find scores of other phrases about Reagan that add to 666. Here are some of them:

Office of Reagan, Rank of Reagan, A Mark of Reagan, Space of Reagan, Ray of Reagan, Vim of Reagan, Tact of Reagan, Talk of Reagan, Brain of Reagan, Mold of Reagan, Peer of Reagan, Karma of Reagan, Ranch of Reagan, Hope of Reagan, Faith of Reagan, Old Age of Reagan, Creme of Reagan, Reagan in Japan, and dozens of other phrases.

One might object that even in 1990, when Blevins's book was published, Reagan was no longer in power. This doesn't faze Blevins one bit. Does not Revelation 17:8 speak of "the beast that was, and is not, and yet is?" To Blevins this tells us that Reagan will regain power, but now on a global scale. He will rule the world by means of a supercomputer (Blevins's code gives to computer a sum of 666), and by keeping track of everybody with bar codes implanted in hands and foreheads. He will be assisted by the Masons (Blevins believes Freemasonry is a satanic cult), and by the present Pope. Blevins reminds us that Reagan is an honorary Mason, that he believes in astrology and lucky charms, and that 33 is his lucky number. (For more on number mysticism, see "Numerology: Comes the Revolution," by Underwood Dudley, SI 22[5].)

Blevins allows that he is not absolutely certain that Reagan is destined to become the Beast, he says he likes Reagan personally, and hopes Reagan will not turn out to be the Antichrist. However, "the alarm must be sounded." In Blevins's opinion the evidence is "overwhelming" that Reagan is the prime suspect.

Blevins provides a tentative outline of what the next few years have in store. In 1991-94 New York City will be destroyed and UFOs will land. In 1996 Reagan's mind, invaded by Satan, will be transformed into the Antichrist who will rule the world for a thousand years. In 1998 Reagan will be cast into the Lake of Fire, the faithful will be raptured, Jesus will come back, and Satan will be bound for a thousand years. In 3000 Satan will go into the Lake of Fire along with the resurrected unsaved, and Jesus will rule over a peaceful new Earth.

"Most real theologians in our day," Blevins writes, "flatly state that we will not see the year 2000 before the Lord returns! I strongly agree with that statement."

Now that 1998 has passed with no sign of the Lord, and Reagan surely is no longer capable of ruling the world, one would suppose that an embarrassed Blevins would apologize for his blunders and withdraw his book from the market. But no. In 1999 I sent him $16.50 for a copy. It arrived promptly with nary a hint of a disclaimer. Blevins's Vision of the End Ministries must need the money.

In Seoul, South Korea, in 1992, Lee Jang Rim, head of one of some 200 Protestant churches in that country, created nationwide hysteria by announcing that the rapture would take place on October 28, 1992. The prophecy was based on a vision that came to a 16-year-old boy. Twenty thousand Korean fundamentalists in South Korea, Los Angeles, and New York City took the prediction seriously. Hundreds quit jobs, left families, and had abortions to prepare for their trip to heaven. Rim's church paid for costly ads in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. They urged readers to prepare for their journey through the skies, and to refuse to allow 666 to be imprinted in bar code on their forehead or right hand.

Riot police, plainclothes officers, and reporters crowded outside Korean churches, flanked by fire engines, ambulances, and searchlights. Believers took the failure of the prophecy calmly, and there were no reported riots. Only sadness. In December 1992 Rim was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for having bilked $4.4 million from his flock. He had invested the money in bonds that didn't mature until the following year!

In 1992 Harold Camping published, through a vanity press, his book 1994? It predicted that the Second Coming would occur in September of that year. This was followed in 1993 by a sequel titled Are You Ready? Together, the two books totaled 955 pages. Trained as a civil engineer, Camping made enough money running a construction company to found, in 1959, Family Stations, Inc. It soon came to control thirty-nine radio stations. A non-ordained Bible scholar, Camping conducted a nightly radio talk show from his headquarters in Oakland, California. After September passed with no sign of the Lord, Camping changed his date to October 2. When that passed uneventfully, he ran out of excuses and decided against any more date setting.

Among Protestant sects the Seventh-day Adventists continue to be the most vocal predictors of an impending Second Coming, though they no longer set a date for that event. The church had its origin in the teachings of a simple-minded farmer named William Miller. His study of the Bible convinced him that 1843 would be the year Jesus would return. When this didn't happen he moved the date to October 22, 1844. After that prediction also failed, Miller had the good sense to stop predicting, but the undaunted Millerites decided that October 22, 1845, was the correct date. This was later moved ahead to 1851. After that year Adventist leaders wisely realized that such date setting was giving the sect a bad reputation.

In Matthew 24 Jesus describes the darkening of the Sun and Moon, and a falling of stars from the sky, as signs of his approaching return. "Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled."

Liberal Bible scholars have long agreed that "this generation" refers to the generation of those listening to Jesus' words. Because he did not return in that generation, fundamentalists of all stripes have been forced to reinterpret Christ's remarks in less plausible ways. William Miller preached that the darkening of the Sun and Moon actually took place in 1780, and that the falling star prediction was fulfilled in 1833 by a dramatic shower of meteors. The generation witnessing these events, Miller maintained, would be the generation that would also see the Lord return in glory.

Until about 1933 Seventh-day Adventist literature defended these Millerite views. Adventist books included dramatic pictures of the dark day and the falling "stars." The church taught that Jesus would surely return within the lifetime of at least some who had witnessed the 1833 meteor shower. When it became embarrassingly obvious that this could not be, the church quietly dropped from its literature all references to the dark day and the falling stars.

I was therefore surprised when I read The Coming Great Calamity, by Adventist Marvin Moore, published by his church in 1997. Moore edits the Adventist periodical Signs of the Times, and has written three previous books: The Crisis of the End Times, The Antichrist and the New World, and Conquering the Dragon Within.

Ellen White, the Adventist-inspired visionary and one of the faith's founders, defends Miller's views about the dark day and falling stars in her masterpiece The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan. This is very painful now to conservative Adventists who are unable to admit that Mrs. White could be wrong about anything. How does Moore manage to defend Mrs. White? He argues that she was correct in seeing the dark day and the 1833 shower as fulfillments of Matthew 24, but they were only partial fulfillments. They tell us "that the time of the end had begun, not that it was about to end."

The complete fulfillments of Matthew 24, Moore reasons, will be soon, with Earth's destruction caused by "comets, asteroids, and/or meteors." He admits he could be wrong, nevertheless he is convinced that the new millennium will undoubtedly be the century in which stars will seem to fall, the Sun and Moon will be obscured, and the Lord will return. Before he returns, Earth will experience a terrible destruction not seen since the great flood in the days of Noah.

Jehovah's Witnesses have an even worse record of failed predictions than the Adventists. They teach that Jesus returned in 1914, but it was an invisible, spiritual return. However, they also once taught that 1914 would see the beginning of Armageddon, followed by the destruction of all nations and the establishment of God's Kingdom on Earth. When this didn't happen, the date was moved to 1915. After that year passed, the date was pushed ahead again to 1918. Unfazed by the 1918 failure, 1975 was the next selection.

As far as I know, since then the group has stopped proposing dates, although it still preaches that the end times are near and millions now living will never die. It's useless to bring all this up when a Witness knocks on your door because most Witnesses today are ignorant of their faith's bizarre history, or about the errors and sins of Charles Taze Russell, who founded their sect. A good reference on the history of Jehovah's Witnesses is an article in the Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religions, and the Occult (1993), by George A. Mather and Larry A. Nichols, and the many references they cite.

In my next column I will turn from this vast dreary literature about the Second Coming of Jesus to the 2,000-year hope of orthodox Jews for the first coming of the Messiah, an event promised in Hebrew Scriptures.