21 May 2011 - The Day The World Didn't End
Eighty-nine-year-old tele-evangelist Harold Camping had prophesised that the "Rapture" would begin with powerful earthquakes at 6 p.m. in each of the world's regions, after which the good would be beamed up to heaven.
Saturday morning, Kiwis confirmed there were no signs of the dead rising from the grave, nor of the living ascending into the clouds to meet Jesus Christ, the Daily Telegraph wrote.
Vicky Hyde, spokesman for the New Zealand Skeptic Society, said she was confident the Rapture was not imminent.
"These kind of predictions come up particularly in times of economic or social uncertainty - which is pretty much almost every year actually, you can track them, whether it's commentary impacts or the rapture or giant space aliens or something," the newspaper quoted her as saying.
"And the only thing they have in common is they are all wrong," she added.
Camping spread his message of doom via Family Radio, which has a network of 66 radio stations and online broadcasts.
After today's day of reckoning, he said non-believers would suffer through hell on earth until Oct 21, when God would pull the plug on the planet once and for all.
But after incorrectly predicting the end of the world in 1994, Camping's prophecies have been met with derision. And it seems this time he was wrong again, the newspaper said
