Strange sounds are happening all over the world. One part airplane flyover, two parts Inception BAHHH! with a dash of wind wooosh for good measure. The clip above is from Budapest, Hungary last week. There are clips from all over the world in the io9 link below.

Some are even calling it the end of the world. The sound of the seventh seal breaking and hell coming to infest Earth.

On the other hand, the crack team at Ask Reddit seems to believe that it’s all hogwash. But if that’s the case, is it coordinated? Are they being produced to spread panic? Plug an upcoming movie?

If it is a farce, it’s a pretty clever one. All you have to do is take footage of the air and layer in the audio. If you really want to sell it, get some people looking up in the air. Or, if you insist on pulling out all the stops, have someone mention there is a strange sounds outside. For “video proof” it’s about as low tech as you get.

[io9]

Harold Camping, who famously predicted the rapture twice in 2011, has retired from his role as host on the Christian station Family Radio Network and from doomsday predictions in general. An aide says Camping will make no proclamations for the coming year.

And as for those persistent theories that the Mayan calendar heralds the end of days in 2012. You know, the ones that threaten to turn all of our New Year’s Resolutions into Bucket List items?

Fake.

One thing is guaranteed, however: Camping will not be jumping on the bandwagon with people who believe the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012 — the date that supposedly marks the end of the Mayan calendar cycle. “Mr. Camping does not believe the Mayan calendar holds any significance at all,” Espinoza said in an email.

I can’t explain it, but I think this makes the 2012 prophecy slightly more credible.

[Life's Little Mysteries]

You might not have noticed, but the world has ended. Harold Camping, the Oakland-based soothsayer who predicted that the world would end in 1994 and in May of 2011 once again foresaw that today would be judgement day. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “But wait, I just bought some Mountain Dew at Safeway and nothing was different. The world can’t have ended.” That’s what you think!

Harold Camping, the Family Radio evangelist who wrongly predicted doomsday back in May, thinks the real end of the world could be today.

In a message on his Web site, Camping declared that today, “at this point, looks like it will be the final end of everything.”

…

Camping also seems to have learned how to better hedge his bets this time “I really am beginning to think as I restudied these matters that there’s going to be no big display of any kind,” he said in an audio address after suffering a stroke in June. “The end is going to come very, very quietly.”

So there! The world totally ended. You were just too busy playing demonic video games and reading satanic books to notice.

[Washington Post]

Something bad is coming (probably). Whether it is plague, zombies, alien invasion, doomsday comets, magnetic pole shifts, or just the general end of the world, and Larry Hall has the perfect opportunity ready for those who want to be prepared. He shelled out $250,000 for a decommissioned Atlas F Missile Base in Kansas and is now selling condos starting at $900,000. Hey, that price includes five years worth of food too. You better hurry up, three of the seven floors are already taken.

“I thought, wow, I can transform it into an ultrasafe, energy-efficient fortress,” Hall says. Then he figured that other people might also sleep better 200 feet underground within epoxy-hardened concrete walls. And with a custom retrofit featuring GE Monogram stainless-steel appliances and Kohler fixtures, they could also eat (and flush) in style. So Hall announced a “condo suite package”—starting at $900,000—that includes a five-year food supply (think hydroponics and aquaculture) and “simulated view windows” with light levels calibrated to the time of day to keep you from going crazy.

[Wired]

A Russian military engineer, Evgeny Ubiyko, is building an $80,000 Doomsday Capsule designed to survive the 2012 apocalypse, as understood from folklore, television and movies. Ubiyko is building his capsule on an abandoned battery farm just outside Moscow.

“The capsule is hermetic, it’s got four layers of insulation. It can float, roll down hills, and land upside down – without being damaged,” Evgeny explains.

“It cannot be destroyed by tremors, or lava, or magnetic storms. This is where the shower will be, and the air purification systems. It can house up to four people for 40 days and costs $80,000.”

I want to reiterate this last point: the inventor claims that this capsule is impervious to LAVA.  That is something that I would like to see in action. Hey, fun fact – if the world doesn’t actually end, Evgeny says the capsules can be used as saunas or industrial fridges.  He strongly recommends that the government order several thousand immediately.

[RT]

The lesser known 5th horseman of the apocalypse is called Lens Flare and he rides a glowing horse.

[Geekologie]

Lately, it is hard keeping track of all the animal die-offs. Thankfully somebody has put together this handy map so that we all can play along at home.

A research team in Egypt has identified a “fresh” crater thought to be formed by a crashed iron meteor, could mean incoming space rocks would hit earth in bigger chunks than we once suspected.

The Italian-Egyptian team that found the crater in pictures recently visited and studied the 147-foot-wide (45-meter-wide), 52-foot-deep (16-meter-deep) hole. The team also collected thousands of pieces of the space rock that littered the surrounding desert.

Current impact models state that iron meteors around this size and mass should break into smaller chunks before impact. (Related: “Comet ‘Shower’ Killed Ice Age Mammals?”)

Instead, the existence of the newfound crater implies that up to 35 percent of these iron giants may actually survive whole—and thus have greater destructive power.

Hold on to your butts.

[Nat Geo]

The sun has awoken from his slumber and you will feel his wrath upon your global positioning satellites and financial services.

Richard Fisher, head of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, explains what it’s all about:

“The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.”

The National Academy of Sciences framed the problem two years ago in a landmark report entitled “Severe Space Weather Events—Societal and Economic Impacts.” It noted how people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina.

A lot of this could be avoided with preparation by those who run the satellites. So we have that going for us.

[NASA]

Phil Plait dissects a recent rumor about the Betelgeuse star. The short version of the rumor? The star is going to go all supernova in weeks or months (not years or hundreds of years) and the brightness could affect crops and cause streaming panic in the streets.

Phil’s rebuttal? Not so much.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start stockpiling canned goods and telling your friends the sky is falling just so in two months when you pal’s newly orphaned children are huddled in your bunker to get away from the blood-thirsty mobs left by a post-apocalyptic society you can say… “I told your pa this was coming, (wistful glance to a bare wall) wish he would’ve listened.”

[Bad Astronomy]

Sweet Jesus.

[Deadspin]

As chronicled in yesterday’s New York Times a new wealth of heroes conceived by one of the fathers of modern comics, Jack Kirby, have been unveiled by California animation company whom he worked for later in his career. The firm that owns them, Ruby-Spears Productions, is planning of making them into new comics, cartoons and films.

But which are we most interested in? Golden Shield of course. According to the article:

Among the unrealized projects that Mr. Kirby helped create or contribute to were “Golden Shield,” about an “ancient Mayan hero seeking to save earth in the apocalyptic year 2012.”

Ever the visionary…

The recent pandemic-themed thriller “Carriers” had a strange journey to DVD – it’s planned theatrical release was winnowed down to 100 screens after its distributor, Paramount Vantage, went belly up; reviews for the low-key, PG-13-rated movie found some critics decrying its lack of gore, others chiding it for being unnecessarily bleak and still others complaining that it didn’t have any zombies (?!?!); and the limited theatrical presence snapped something in Stephen King’s brain, causing the eccentric writer to pen a bizarre and naggy EW column in which he uses the film as an example of a good (but not great) independent movie that didn’t get a fair shot.

Finally, the week before New Year’s, “Carriers” arrived on DVD. And I watched it last night. And it was okay. The film is structured as a classic road trip picaresque, and centers around four compatriots (two brothers and their special lady friends) making their way across a plague-decimated America. They share laughs, make hard decisions, wallow in two-bit nostalgia and, in a controversial turn, never actually make it to White Castle. If you generally enjoy post-apocalyptic cinema, or you want to see Chris Pine flipping over a golf cart, I’d recommend watching it… otherwise, for your convenience, I’ve put together a short list of all the post-apocalyptic clichés it manages to hit during its remarkably svelte 84-minute runtime (plus, DUH!, Spoilers!):

Gas = Guzzled

Given the film’s desert setting and the fact that the characters are first shown in a stolen Mercedes upon which they’ve spray painted the words “Road Warrior,” it’s clear that the writers had Mad Max in mind, but, in “Carriers,” the gas shortage is more a device to force the travelers into tense inter- and intra-character conflicts than a socio-political commentary or PSA from Australia’s leather bondage gear lobby. Plus, I’m unclear as to where all the fuel actually went. I guess with the electricity off, all the sickies had to switch to their gas-powered humidifiers.

“…but the Women Stay!”

Remember in “28 Days Later” when the road-tripping friends found the military base, and the troops tried to imprison the women for use as indentured “repopulation” toys? Well, in “Carriers,” the road-tripping friends find a group of militant survivalists who want to do the same thing… except instead of being a group of defeated and isolated do-gooders whose humanist agenda has been eroded away by cabin fever and their own insuppressible animal nature, the survivalists are just a bunch of horny old dudes.

When the Cat’s Away…

From the Richard Cheese-backed montage of peccadilloes-run-amok in James Gunn’s “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the hilariously surreal drunken “President of this Quiet Earth” monologue from “The Quiet Earth,” the post-apocalyptic film canon is replete with moments in which characters give in to dark urges and wanton destruction in the wake of societal collapse. In “Carriers,” that means driving golf balls through the windows of a hotel in which the characters plan to spend the night. Oh, did I mention that the super flu is airborne? Yeah, definitely break all those windows.

He’s/She’s Already Dead, Man/Bro!

It’s bizarre to think that several reviewers actually complained about the film’s lack of zombies, but I can kinda see why – the viral plague is so contagious, that, once someone in your group contracts it, the party line is leave ‘em or kill ‘em. This inevitably leads to several gratuitously heart-tugging scenes in which characters have to shanghai a loved one or plug an acquaintance after the person in question, who has, of course, been keeping their infection a secret, is outed as a carrier. It’s all the raw emotion with none of the machete-slinging carnage, but if you aren’t 12 years old and at a sleepover, that shouldn’t really matter. The lack of naked boobs, though… it still stings a bit.

I could keep going, but you get the picture. Again, not a bad movie (actually, as King points out in his editorial, the cinematography is beautiful), but nothing you haven’t seen before. Unless you’ve never seen a movie, in which case, you could do a lot worse.