This harbinger of doom is an 89-year-old former civil engineer who broadcasts daily on the Family Radio Network, which is funded entirely by its listeners and has assets of $120 million and owns 66 radio stations in the US and others around the world.
Which just goes to show the gullibility of Americans.
Mr Camping has said, “We’re not talking about a ball game, or a marriage, or graduating from college. We’re talking about the end of the world, a matter of being eternally dead, or being eternally alive, and it’s all coming to a head right now.”
A billboard campaign spreads the message with signs that proclaim: “Blow the trumpet, warn the people!”
Don’t believe him? He cites everything from earthquake and tsunami to gay pride as indications of impending doom.
“All the stealing, and the lying, and the wickedness and the sexual perversion that is going on in society is telling us something,” he says.
“So too is the gay pride movement. It was sent by God as a sign of the end.”
So there, it must be true.
Mr Camping does not believe in evolution and has predicted the end of the world before. He was left with a red face when apocalypse now failed to happen on September 6, 1994, but his belief and his following has remained undiminished.
His latest prediction is based on bible study and mathematics. And the amazing gullibility of his followers.
Me? I’ll certainly be prepared. I’ll buy a new umbrella for summer.