as you may remember, May 21, 2011, was supposed to be the end of the world.
The apocalyptic prophet HAROLD CAMPING warned of massive earthquakes and bodies being ejected out of graves on Judgment Day. Through his broadcasting company, Family Radio, Camping's End Times' prophecy was heard in 62 countries, with tens of millions spent on a massive billboard campaign.
His message made headlines and provided punch lines for late night talk show hosts.
last night @ the STEVE ALLEN THEATER, filmmaker ZEKE PIESTEUP talked about his experience working with
Camping during the final two weeks before May 21 and showed clips of his doco about the bizarre preacher.
the event was presented by CAFE INQUIRY.
Piestrup was the only journalist who had daily, close contact with Camping, filming and speaking with him before and after his call-in radio show, "Open Forum." He and co-producer Bailey Damast posted daily countdown videos with this footage, working 19-hour days to document in real time the last days of this doomsdayer.
ironically it was doomsday only for Camping.
On June 9, 2011, Camping suffered a stroke and was hospitalized.
On June 23, Camping’s Family Radio station announced that it would replace his show, Open Forum, with new programming.
Harold Camping, a 1942 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who started out in Christian broadcasting in 1958 with one San Francisco AM radio station that eventually became a broadcast empire, proclaimed the doomsday date in 2008.
Since then, the ministry has unleashed a giant effort to spread the word. The message has gone out over the ministry’s 216 AM, FM and low-power radio stations, plus two TV channels in the United States. And, there’s been an international effort with shortwave radio, satellite broadcasts, a website, 5,500 billboards (400 in India; 2,200 across the United States, including many around the Bay Area), and 100 million pamphlets in 61 languages, according to the ministry.
Camping oversees about 100 staff members and volunteers, a mix of ages and races, at the ministry’s unkempt Oakland headquarters, situated between a custom auto shop and a psychic near the Oakland airport.
The ministry’s finances, however, are anything but downscale: an annual budget of $36.7 million in 2009, according to the organization’s most recent IRS financial disclosure filings. As a nonprofit, commercial-free broadcasting operation, the ministry is supported by listener donations — $18.3 million in 2009 alone.
The IRS records revealed $34 million in investments, $56 million in assets and $29 million in mortgages. Camping received no salary in 2009 — in fact, he loaned the ministry $175,516 that year. On Monday he said he was draining ministry reserves to pay for the May 21 campaign.
Tom Evans, a ministry spokesman, wouldn’t make the budget available, but said it was in the “tens of millions” of dollars.
Camping previously prophesied the apocalypse for September 1994 — a calculation he now admits was flawed.
Camping, whose ministry is fundamentalist Christian but not affiliated with mainstream churches, described may 21st, 2011, as the beginning of five months of hell on earth: the Rapture. Beginning by time zone until the world is encompassed, the relative few saved by God will ascend to heaven, while seven billion will be left to suffer and die.
Devastating earthquakes will strike, he said, unearthing corpses of previously dead sinners to be “desecrated and shamed,” followed by a series of calamities until Oct. 21, when the planet will be obliterated.
Camping said that may 21st was the 7,000th anniversary of Noah’s flood. Once again, he said, God has been angered by mankind’s sins, like the growing acceptance of homosexuality.
Working-class people have reportedly liquidated bank accounts to support Family Radio’s campaign. During a ministry call-in talk show, a man said he intended to go to work this week and proselytize colleagues about May 21, knowing he would probably be fired.
Zeke Piestrup, an outside documentary maker working with the ministry, said, “I’m a little nervous for these people.”
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