I’m still working on that piece about General Karpinski, lately of Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but I didn’t want to leave you without something to contemplate, so I’ve pulled out of the file a wonderful little piece from Bush Country.

It seems the end of the world was upon us last month. I’m still pinching myself in hopes of establishing once and for all my own corporeality (which is not the same as corpulence, by the way) after this dire event. I worry that events like those described below have occurred and I just didn’t notice.

Before laying out the evidence, Bush Country reassures its readers with this:

... Although the information in this article points to "apocalyptic" events within a month's time frame, unless the Anti-Christ is revealed to the entire world in June, we believe they will not occur. Why? We believe a pre-tribulation rapture event will take place but in order for it to take place, scripture points out that the Anti-Christ will be revealed to the world before this rapture occurs. Therefore, unless the entire world is introduced to the Anti-Christ in June, we have to believe these events will not be taking place, so you should rest safely on that. The coincidences are incredible though and do lead one to check your salvation.

I was not totally reassured. It seems to me that George Bush comes as close to the Anti-Christ as I want to get.

So Bush Country published an email from “Aussie Bloke,” who purports to be a Dr. Elford Gartrell, an Australian scientist.

Ok...here it is. I AM DR GARTREL. [Unfortunately, Dr. Gartrell has not learned to spell his own name.] Happy now? As for what I know....I've already told you. You want bloody details....you have them already. You want to know what will happen?...read the above posts. You don't believe me?...YOUR problem! YOU have brains...USE THEM... The times locations and eta of the cloud and objects has already been posted. NOW all you have to do is hope to hell that someone out there copied it. NOW...GET THE WORD OUT!!!! THIS IS LEGIT. FAREWELL TO ALL. SEE YOU IN ETERNITY.

Yes, Aussie Bloke was predicting a comet arrival, which taken together with an expansion of the M3 money supply and a naval deployment to the Pacific, pretty much cinched the case for the end of the world. As a prelude we had a meteor sighting near Grover’s Mill, New Jersey and strange “lights” over Washington State on June 4.

Now another website, Christian Media Daily, turned up evidence that it was all a hoax done by a group calling itself “Blind Skies”

You are all to be commended for your exemplary performance these past several weeks. Your unwitting participation in BLIND SKIES has proven most informative, and quite frankly entertaining to many project members. To say that it got out of hand would be an exercise in understatement.

Our initial hypothesis was straightforward enough: Given the barest minimum of verifiable evidence, ordinary citizens of average to above-average intelligence could be duped into wholesale belief in a catastrophe scenario, provided there was ample corroboration from equally ambiguous, non-credible sources.
...
BLIND SKIES is not, as many have claimed, a ´PSY OP´. Although we have an affiliation with the government, our mandate was not intended to be any sort of disinformation campaign, mass brainwashing, or subliminal manipulation. We conducted a serious experiment to study the panic reflexes of a virtual community, and quite frankly the experiment ran away from us. AUSSIE BLOKE has now become our Frankenstein´s Monster.

This surely looks like Bush Country to me.