SAN DIEGO (CBS 8) - Local billboards are claiming the end of the world is near, but who is this predicting this judgment day, and is anyone buying it?
A Christian fundamentalist group headquarted in Oakland is spearheading this campaign using billboards to prophesize and publicize the end of the world in just 38 days, based on it's leader's interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation some are calling fanatical.
"This will be super super activity of God working in a way this world has never known," Harold Camping said.
Harold Camping, the 89-year-old Christian fundamentalist and founder of Family Radio Network, says May 21 is judgment day, the second coming of Christ, and the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.
Getting their message out on billboards around the country, he and his followers say believers will be taken to heaven while a massive earthquake will cripple the entire planet, which he says God will later destroy in a giant fireball on October 21.
"The underground is getting ready. Earth is burned up," he said.
While not everyone is taking the prediction seriously, others who do believe say no one but God knows when the rapture will come.
"There is a specific date and time, but do we know what it is? No. That I do believe -- that we don't know," Christian Rosemary Matthew said.
"I don't think I particularly believe the world is going to end, and that soon, and I think if it was, I don't want to have to think about it," San Diegan Leah Winstead said.
Others point out this isn't the first, or only, apocalyptic prediction out there. In fact, Harold Camping had inaccurately forecast that the world would come to an end back in 1994, 17 years ago. He later admitted those calculations were off, but believes this time he has it right.
While the Family Radio Network forecasts the end of the world arriving next month, some others believe it will actually come on Dec. 21 of next year, at the end of the Mayan calendar.
Others, of course, believe both predictions are nonsense.
