Over the past few weeks, web chatrooms devoted to alien conspiracies, doomsday cults and numerology - the belief that numbers have mystical significance - have been buzzing with talk of 09/09/09. Some warned of an outbreak of killer swine flu. Others that the world would be sucked into a black hole created by the Cern particle collider in Switzerland.Instead, the most exciting thing likely to happen today is the release of a Beatles computer game and the announcement of a new Apple iPod. It's been a miserable few years for fans of Armageddon dates. The millennium passed without a single horseman of the apocalypse, while 06/06/06 turned out to be a rather uneventful Tuesday.
Believers had high hopes for 09/09/09, particularly in the UK where 999 is the emergency phone number. Users of the alien-earth.org website combined Nostrodamus, the Book of Revelation and the Mayan prophecies with fears about the Cern Large Hadron Collider in Geneva in their gloomy predictions.
'Note that 999 is 666 upside down,' wrote one. 'Did Nostrodamus warn us from 400 years ago about creating a Doomsday Machine with the Cern LHC?' On www.revelation13.net, numerologists were concerned about swine flu. 'The world population officially reaches 6.8billion near November 2009, and Revelation 6:8 is about the fourth horseman, Death, so will death ride then? Could this be a mutation in swine flu H1N1 making it a deadly worldwide plague?
'Note that "nein" in German means "no" so 9-9-9 could mean "no-no-no".' However, numerologist and 'soul coach' Pauline Rose said: 'Nine is the number of completion so hopefully more positive things will start to happen. 'We have all had a tough nine years and there have been all sorts of tests for people all over the world.' (Daily Mail)
