Issue 1648 - Fortnightly, 2012

• "The Final Days" - story by Falco Pellerin and art by Sal Velluto.

Our new story in this issue is guaranteed to create controversy! It is, after all, based on an old ‘belief’ of the same sort of theoretical ‛fact’ that keeps the Nostradamus ‛prediction industry’ going from marketing strength to strength and making sizeable profits for publishers and TV documentary producers.

Cynics will doubtless agree with The Phantom that our world is not about to disappear in just over a month! End-of-the-world believers will, however, doubtless support the surprisingly popular theory our world will come to an end on December 21, this year! The end-of-the-world theorists cling to an inscription translated from a stone carving discovered in Guatemala.

The carving is some 1,300 years old and is commonly referred to as the Maya Calendar. The December 21, 2012 date is definitely shown on the ‘calendar’, but is simply indicated as an ‘end date’, meaning the end of 2012 in Maya terms. The Maya civilisation, advanced as it was in mathematics, astronomy, agriculture and basic surgery, never allowed for leap years in its calendar system.

Thus, the projected date of December 21, 2012 as the ‘end of the world’ is way off track! Of more interest to many will be the fact that cults still abound in this enlightened age and that sufficient gullible people can easily be found to pour their money into them! That part of Falco Pellerin’s story is absolutely true.

Key into relevant websites on your computer and you will be surprised. While you’re at it, look up American ‘preacher’ Jim Jones and his infamous ‘People’s Temple Agricultural Project’, better remembered as ‘Jonestown’ in Guyana. In 1978, hundreds of people, including many children, followed Jones and his lieutenants to that part of South America to escape what they were told was over-control of their lives by the United States Government. In November that year, a then physically and almost certainly mentally ill Jones convinced his followers to follow him in a protest mass suicide....