Rock Prophecy - TIMELINE - Page 2 of 9 pages:

Below is published the Timeline from Rock Prophecy. This is not the book, it is a chronological list of events surrounding the creation of Rock Prophecy. For a brief background and description of the story, and context for the Timeline below, visit the ROCK PROPHECY PAGE before reading the Timeline.

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June 8, 1996:

NBC-TV, on the verge of announcing its partnership with Paul Allen's Microsoft to launch the cable TV network MSNBC, airs Prophecies IV - The Final Visions. This program reports a future "shift of the Earth's axis, a shift that will trigger a gravitational change." A psychic explains that "in The Bible, Revelation chapter eight, it says that something like a burning meteor hits the Earth and destroys a third of all mankind." Another psychic on the show foresees "a significant drop in population between now and the 22nd century." A professor is interviewed and explains that the drop may be caused by "an asteroid or another extra-planetary body coming into contact with the Earth, and that would cause weather and climate change, like a pole shift."

In The Final Visions an Indian seer predicts that near Seattle "Mount Rainier will erupt." Similarities with Rock Prophecy continue as the program explores beliefs of the Maya Indians.

The Final Visions is a program that makes any prediction about the future seem ridiculous, as if the producer's were intent on persuading the audience that prophecy stories are of interest only to fools. A mystic featured in the show compares our modern world with a description of the fall of Mayan civilization, of which he claims: "Their dogs talked to them, their turkeys talked to them and lectured them about what they'd been failing to do...If you've ever worried about all the things you've got plugged-in in your house...imagine all of them getting a mind of their own and deciding they don't like you. In the previous [Maya] disaster it was just tortilla griddles on the fire, now it will be your waffle iron that will fly in your face; you're putting stuff in your food processor and the next thing you know it's processing you...Cats and dogs, caged birds, all of these will turn against us, all of them will start talking to us, all of them will turn to attack us."

July 15, 1996:

MSNBC goes on the air. This cable-TV channel is a partnership between Paul Allen's Microsoft and the NBC network. NBC and Microsoft teamed up to broadcast news stories. Billionaire Paul Allen, the "third richest American"18 and founder of the Jimi Hendrix Museum, now has influence over the NBC-TV network. What's in store for NBC?

July 28, 1996:

"The Asteroids Are Coming! The Asteroids Are Coming!" is the title of a New York Times Magazine article. The following excerpts from this article relate to my Rock Prophecy manuscript, which had been at the Library of Congress, unpublished, for over a year when this article appeared:

New York Times:

    1) "Very few people will ever have the chance to save humanity from instant doom. One who thinks he might is the asteroid hunter Tom Gehrels...searching for the single object that might end our view of them forever...'We know there's at least a thousand of them, that any of these thousand may have our name on it. The dinosaurs were around for 200 million years and never became smart enough to build a Spacewatch system. We did it, but did we do it soon enough?'"

    2) "From time to time [asteroids] are thrown off course by forces like Jupiter's gravity, and then their orbits can intersect those of the Earth."

    3) "[an asteroid disaster] might do more to change humanity's outlook and behavior than any religion or congress of nations has ever managed to do."

    4) "...one of the estimated thousand-plus giant near-earth objects (N.E.O.'s) is barreling down on us and only a year or so away...what could we do? Say good-bye to each other and regret that we didn't wake up to this sooner."

    5) "The study of asteroid impact has what scientists like to call a high 'giggle factor.'"

    6) "Gehrels pugnaciously deplores all the fighting and all the 'bandwagoneers' whose sudden interest in asteroids was excited by the smell of money and jobs."

August 1996:

Asteroid - Earth Destroyer or New Frontier? by Patricia Barnes-Svarney is published by Plenum Books. The author warns, "All types of evidence keep popping up all over our planet, letting us know that we have not escaped (and will never escape) the attacks from impacting space objects."

December 1996:

A feature article in Reader's Digest titled "On a Collision Course With Earth" reports, "Astronomers have discovered more than 300 objects that could cross Earth's orbit...If an object some 1600 feet wide hit land, the impact would create a three-mile-wide crater and destroy almost 4000 square miles of property...A meteorite about one mile across could trigger a catastrophe in which more than one-quarter of the human population would die...we could face a surprise encounter with a large, previously undetected object...it could be tomorrow."

December 25, 1996:

The Talking Phone Book, a free telephone recording service in New York State, includes this Christmas Day message for callers to listen to:

"No fewer than six of the world's great religions agree...that Earth will undergo swift and cataclysmic changes beginning in 1997, followed by the end of the world on Jan. 16th in the year 2000...Immediately after mankind is wiped out by twin meteorites...and a doomsday comet, God will establish heaven on Earth...That's the word from religion scholar Dr. Marian Derlet, who reached her conclusions on the heels of a 25-year study of apocalyptic prophecies dating back to the year 3500 B.C. The expert now says that 1997 is in fact the beginning of the end and every event that occurs at this critical juncture in history is just another rung on the ladder we are descending on a perilous and dizzying journey to the end. 'This isn't the fantasy of some doomsday cult,' she continues, 'it's a vision that's shared by no fewer than six of the worlds great spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and throughout the Egyptian and Maya belief systems. Earthquakes of unprecedented magnitude, the drifting of entire continents, the shifting of the Earth's poles, terrifying extremes of weather, epidemics, and global war - these are just a few of the prophecies that religions foretold as far back as 3500 B.C. The similarities of the prophecies are uncanny,' said the expert,...'Looking back at my research, comparing the prophecies, it's clear that humanity really has only one religious outlook: in the final analysis, virtually all cultures and traditions have foreseen the same stark vision of mankind's future. I can only believe that all people everywhere throughout history have had an innate understanding of a very definite cycle: a clearly defined beginning and end to all that was, is, and will be.'"

- The Talking Phone Book

December 29, 1996:

NBC-TV, the network that recently collaborated with Paul Allen's Microsoft to establish the MSNBC cable-TV channel, begins a mammoth six week media blitz to advertise a new blockbuster TV miniseries titled ASTEROID, scheduled to air on NBC in mid-February 1997.

January 16, 1997:

The Seattle Human Rights Department files a discrimination complaint against Paul Allen's Experience Music Project and begins to investigate my involvement with the Microsoft billionaire's EMP, aka the Jimi Hendrix Museum.

February 2, 1997:

PBS Masterpiece Theater broadcasts Breaking the Code, a film about Alan Turing, the man who spearheaded efforts to break the Ultra Secret Nazi Enigma machine codes. Turing's brainpower was largely responsible for winning the war for the Allies and saving civilization from a new Dark Age. But instead of being rewarded for his contributions, Turing was arrested and persecuted in England for being homosexual.

February 7, 1997:

Dateline NBC, the network TV news show, reports, "We've been hearing a lot about asteroids lately...We may be the third rock from the sun but there's plenty of others." Dateline coveres the asteroid story with by now familiar mass-audience cliches: "the number of scientists scanning the sky for trouble is less than the staff of a McDonald's restaurant." This 20-minute Dateline NBC segment includes interviews with Eugene Shoemaker and David Levey, who repeat asteroid facts now heard in a dozen other asteroid documentaries that today saturate the airwaves. Corporate executives who control media have by this time shoved the whole space rock issue down everyone's throat. NBC, the network in partnership with Paul Allen's Microsoft, is especially hot on the topic of asteroids. Paul Allen founded Seattle's Jimi Hendrix Museum. If Mr. Allen were to become interested in asteroids, it wouldn't take much for him to initiate media projects on the subject. I'm not saying that all of the entries listed in this Timeline were caused directly by Paul Allen. They wouldn't all have to be. Certain media organizations begin waving the asteroid banner and a trickle down effect sets hundreds of other media outlets following the lead. And soon no one recalls where it all started or when we first began to hear loads of reports about asteroids. But, as Rock Prophecy explains, I had a reason to keep track.

Most of Dateline's televised reports are available on video cassettes for the public to purchase ($24 per cassette). Strangely, this Feb. 7th asteroid report is not for sale from NBC.19 Anyone who has a video copy of this Dateline NBC report, please contact First Century Press .

February 14, 1997:

The FOX TV network broadcasts an hour long prime time special titled Doomsday: What Can We Do? The second half of the show is focused on the ancient asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The narrator asks, "Could history repeat itself? The odds are it could. The only question is when. And if an asteroid was on a final collision course there would be nothing we could do." An official from NORAD explains "we have no weapon capable of going into space to intercept this particular object." A Disaster Psychologist acknowledges that nothing humans do will prevent an asteroid disaster: "There's going to be a lot of feeling of helplessness and powerlessness and people are going to have to deal with the fact that they're not going to be able to do anything to prevent it." The program concludes that "the threat of doomsday should unite mankind as never before, but we should not have to wait until the threat becomes reality."

February 14, 1997:

An episode of Unsolved Mysteries on CBS-TV covers asteroid impacts on Earth. Robert Stack's examination of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs includes comments from Eugene Shoemaker in which Shoemaker repeats his warning about the inevitability of a future impact.

February 15, 1997:

A feature story about asteroids in TV Guide reports "cosmic collisions are the subject of two TV documentaries and three movies hurtling towards your local multiplex."

February 16-17, 1997:

The men who control media climax their blitz with NBC-TV's flashy, super-hyped miniseries ASTEROID. The establishment's policy on impact disasters is mouthed through the story's patriarch grandfather who concludes, "Nobody is to blame. We just got in each other's way." ASTEROID was made for TV by NBC. NBC and Microsoft are partners in major media projects like the MSNBC cable-TV network. Paul Allen is co-founder of Microsoft and the financier of Seattle's Jimi Hendrix Museum. My manuscript about Hendrix and asteroids has been on file and available at the Library of Congress since June 1995. Is it possible that people who are aware of my unpublished writings about asteroids, and Hendrix, issued instructions in 1995 to media producers?: "Do the asteroid story as big as you can!"

"This subject was presented as: 1) a giant asteroid hits the Earth, and 2) the biggest thing to hit television ever," said Sam Nicholson, whose Stargate Films produced the special effects for NBC's ASTEROID miniseries. "The effect of the miniseries is informative as well as being just exciting from the word go," said Nicholson, "and keeping the pedal to the metal through the excitement and pushing the envelope with all of the kind of thing that you find in multi-million dollar features." A huge amount of money produced and advertised ASTEROID for NBC, the Network that is partners with Microsoft. Sam Nicholson's Stargate Films was "pushing the envelope with all of the kind of thing that you find in multi-million dollar features."

"Paul Allen wants to do cool stuff that pushes the envelope of technology," said Mike Slade, president of Paul Allen's Starwave company. Paul Allen is the son of two librarians who invested $500 million into DreamWorks SKG, the movie studio headed by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. "They may use me as a sounding board for some of the new multi-media areas," said billionarie Paul. "All of a sudden you've got pretty incredible assets giving you ability to do a lot of things."

Twenty months earlier my Rock Prophecy manuscript was sent to the Library of Congress. Is it possible that the NBC-Microsoft-Hendrix connection described in Rock Prophecy is a factor in NBC's sudden and extreme interest in asteroids?

February 17, 1997:

NBC Nightly News reports that an undersea expedition has unearthed the first scientific evidence for a massive asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Simultaneously CBS News reports, "drilling deep into the ocean floor off the Florida coast scientists have found the story written in layers of sand, including a two-inch layer of gray clay, indicating life was nearly wiped off this planet for nearly five thousand years after the asteroid hit."

"Will such an asteroid strike again in our lifetime?" asks NBC. "The odds are about the same as winning the lottery."

February 17, 1997:

The PBS News Hour airs a report titled Ground Zero on the theme of an asteroid striking mid-West America.

February 18, 1997:

ABC-TV's Hard Copy reports, "Scientists are right now tracking a new near-Earth asteroid hurtling through space at 50,000 miles-per-hour. It crossed the Earth's orbit last month and experts say it just missed us...the reality might be a lot scarier than anything you'll see on TV." This Hard Copy TV segment features interviews with Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker, and an official of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who reveals, "We find between one hundred and two hundred asteroids a night. Some of them are new, some of them are known."

February 26, 1997:

Microsoft sponsors NBC's National Geographic prime time TV special titled Asteroids: Deadly Impact. This hour long documentary deals in large part with the career of Eugene Shoemaker, who warns, "These things have hit the Earth in the past, they will hit the Earth in the future. It's a catastrophe that exceeds all other known disasters by a large measure." The main focus of this NBC special seems to be to convince the public that the over-reporting of asteroid stories during 1996-1997 was triggered by comet fragments that struck Jupiter in July 1994. But by August 1994, the public and the media had lost interest in the Jupiter story. The 1994 impacts on Jupiter are NOT what caused the 1996-1998 media blitz about asteroids.

If the Jupiter impacts had inspired the men who control media to saturate the airwaves with asteroid stories, we would have seen a mass media blitz during autumn 1994 and into spring-summer of 1995. But during that period there were NO media reports about asteroids, especially in comparison with what the media reported later on in 1996 through 1998. Interest in the asteroid issue remained absent until the end of 1995. There was no renewed public interest in the six Hollywood movies about asteroids made from 1951 through 1984. But long after the 1994 impacts on Jupiter were over, something else happened that pushed the asteroid issue to top priority among the men who control media.

For anyone who follows the order of reports about asteroids the "trigger" point is very clear: the media picked up this story in earnest in late October 1995, five months following the arrival of Rock Prophecy for copyright registration at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Are the contents of Rock Prophecy what compelled the men who control media to initiate an asteroid craze during 1996 and 1997?

It is the winners who write history - their way.

- Elaine Pagels

The intent of NBC's Asteroids: Deadly Impact seems to be to shift the cause of the 1996-1997 media blitz away from Rock Prophecy and blur the timeline of media reports on asteroids. The program makes it appear as though there has been continuous media interest in asteroids ever since 1994. But the blitz began in October 1995, many months after Rock Prophecy was copyrighted. Who might be interested in undermining the impact of Rock Prophecy by saturating the airwaves with asteroid stories and minimizing any Hendrix connection with asteroids?

In February 1997, NBC's Asteroids: Deadly Impact, sponsored by Microsoft, reports that, "Shoemaker was one of the very first to find out if there are bullets out there that might strike the Earth in the future...Before Eugene Shoemaker few people gave impacts much thought, one of the most powerful forces in the making of our planet, and perhaps the deadliest hazard we face."

The writers of Asteroids: Deadly Impact pedestalize Shoemaker as the person who discovered that craters on Earth are the result of asteroids. Only in a quick aside does the program mention Daniel Moreau Barringer. Nearly a hundred years ago Barringer's study of Meteor Crater in Arizona was a major catalyst in the push towards acceptance of the concept of impact cratering on Earth. By comparison, Shoemaker's research in the 1950s and 60s was simply "accepted" by a scientific community that took a half century to catch up to Barringer.

But besides Barringer and Shoemaker, it is Jimi Hendrix who is one of the "few people who gave impacts much thought." Anyone who read Rock Prophecy at the LOC in 1995 learned that Hendrix infused his music and poems with elaborate visions and lyrics about asteroid impacts on the Earth, moon, and planets. Suddenly it became important for the men who control media to saturate the airwaves with asteroid reports. It's as if orders were issued to writers and producers: inform the public that Shoemaker (not Hendrix) gets credit for alerting us to the asteroid threat. Was this the purpose of NBC's Asteroids: Deadly Impact?, sponsored by Microsoft?

Rock Prophecy was read at the LOC in 1995. Were writers and consultants for the men who control media instructed to pump out "treatments" of the asteroid story? Were they paid to frame Shoemaker and the 1994 impacts on Jupiter as the reason for the asteroid craze from 1996-1998?

NBC's Asteroids: Deadly Impact reports that in the search for rocks in outer space "the US Airforce has contributed technology and expertise. Big science has taken up the hunt for asteroids...[and] awaits with all of us the next messenger from the stars. The question is not if, but when...Only a fraction of large Earth-crossing asteroids have been located, this may prove to be the greatest oversight in human history."

Rock Prophecy describes how our vulnerability to collision is no "oversight." Jimi Hendrix is the messenger seer who had foresight of the disaster. He tried to warn us, and there were other visionaries who understood the threat and knew what our race was supposed to do. They too tried to warn us, and were silenced. I tried to warn, and was obstructed. The fact that today we have no defense against asteroids is not an "oversight." Hendrix mentioned deliberate delays in allocating funds to develop a technology that can defend Earth. The battle over this issue unfolds like cosmic drama and mythic religion.

Rock Prophecy explains the specific prediction of Jimi Hendrix that is the real catalyst for late-20th century asteroid hysteria. My book is the original trigger for the media blitz about asteroids, a blitz which is now a familiar story to us all. Rock Prophecy is a story that's been suppressed since 1995. That this book remains unread is important to men who control media. It is important to them that no one knows the Prophecy.

Following the broadcast of Asteroids: Deadly Impact on February 26, NBC's Dateline continues the theme of catastrophe with an hour of "Nature's Wrath" stories about volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.

(continues below ad...)

March 6, 1997:

Seattle's Department of Human Rights informs me that although Paul Allen's Jimi Hendrix Museum is being built in the city of Seattle, the museum offices are currently outside city limits, in Bellevue. Therefore the Human Rights Dept. has no jurisdiction over my dispute with Paul Allen's project! And a dozen attorneys have by now declined to represent my request for justice against Mr. Allen's Hendrix Museum. Please contact First Century Press if you can help report what happened.

March 13, 1997:

CBS Evening News reports the passing of Hale-Bopp comet. An observer comments, "It looks like a fuzzy ball coming at you."

March 21, 1997:

ABC World News reports, "Most ancient civilizations watched the skies, where they believed their gods lived, and used celestial objects as symbols marking events, like the birth of Jesus. Comets were often a source of terror because they are rare, even now they stir up concern, will one strike the Earth?"

March 22, 1997:

Astronomy magazine's cover story is headlined "Comet Hale-Bopp Takes Center Stage." Alan Hale co-discovered this space rock, which is three times the size of an average comet. Writing for Astronomy, Hale notes, "On March 22, 1997 Comet Hale-Bopp is in conjunction with the Sun...It is also nearest the Earth on this date...a total solar eclipse is visible across Mongolia." Hale notes that the appearance of a comet during an eclipse is "extremely rare; less than half a dozen 'eclipse comets' have been seen throughout recorded history."

March 23, 1997:

TBS, the cable-TV channel, airs Fire In the Sky. This hour long show presents "facts from scientists and astronomers that explain why fire from the sky could become tomorrow's news." Shoemaker and Levey are interviewed yet again as Fire In the Sky aims to persuade viewers that "it was a massive impact into Jupiter in 1994 that revealed the magnitude of the threat to Earth." Instead of the Prophecy of Hendrix, we instead hear David Levey's blunt prediction, "Someday the Earth will get hit by a comet and an asteroid. It'll happen, there's no way out of it. It has happened in the past, it will happen again...The chances that we'll die in a comet collision are about the same as the chances that we'll die in an airplane crash, and just think of how much money the U.S. spends on improving aircraft safety."

Like Rock Prophecy, TBS's asteroid documentary points out that "we are the first species to recognize this threat from space and only by dealing with it can we ensure our future on planet Earth...Despite our growing awareness of this potential threat, funding is being cut worldwide for space watch programs."

Fire In the Sky intensifies the alarmist tone with which the media has come to report asteroid stories during the two years following the copyright of Rock Prophecy. TBS concludes with Eugene Shoemaker's bleak warning, "If we fail to respond to the technical challenge of preventing these catastrophes, sooner or later there will be an object, an asteroid or a comet, that will hit the Earth and cause devastation."

March 24, 1997:

Newsweek magazine's cover story is "The Great Comet." "These days," says the owner of the Psychic Eye in Los Angeles, "I've been seeing comets come into my readings about 90 percent of the time."

A feature article in this issue of Newsweek is titled "Attention: Incoming Object - How to defend Earth against collisions." Newsweek explains, "At the moment Earth is defenseless against a large comet or asteroid headed for the planet. Scientists and other star warriors are exploring a variety of defensive schemes...It's Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program, with a vengeance...For more than a decade, U.S. and Russian nuclear strategists have talked about their common enemies from space. The United Nations has sponsored conferences, too. 'During the cold war, I was always hoping we could find an incoming threat,' says Tom Gehrels of Spacewatch. 'Then we could all go after a common enemy.'"

March 28, 1997:

An NBC Nightly News story about comets reports, "Through history they've inspired and terrified. Often believed to herald the birth of a leader: Moses, Christ, Buddha. More often regarded...as an omen of doom...Scientists do believe a comet did wipe out one species here on Earth, the dinosaur, 65 million years ago. And now as we get closer to the year 2000 and the end of the millennium, more and more fringe groups are spreading doomsday predictions of the end of the human species." (Tell me about it, you screwball little turd of Paul Allen!)

April 1997:

The splashy cover story of Popular Mechanics features "Killer Asteroids." The magazine article predicts, "In October 2005 an asteroid nearly 1 mile wide is seen hurtling through space...headed straight for Earth. There isn't enough time to...deflect or destroy it...the very survival of mankind is threatened...As sure as there are stars in the sky, it will happen...a 7 ft. object can produce a..blast the equivalent of igniting 1000 tons of high explosives...scientists estimate there are...2000 Earth-crossers out there, and any one of them could be the doomsday rock...If one of them were on a collision course with Earth, we wouldn't get more than a few months warning."

May 28, 1997:

CBS Evening News reports, "Astronomers assured people that the possibility of a comet actually striking the Earth was rare indeed. But today scientists reported the Earth is virtually under attack by comets, thousands of comets smash into the Earth's atmosphere every day. Dr. Louis Frank discovered the comet bombardment...the comets were photographed for the first time by cameras aboard a new NASA satellite...The new pictures confirm a theory that Dr. Frank has held for more than 15 years, but that no one else accepted."

June 1, 1997:

PBS 24 airs an episode of Astronomy titled Cosmic Travellers: Comets and Asteroids. The program asks, "What would happen if a comet collided with the Earth?"

June 12, 1997:

News-10 NBC reports, "Last week a 53 pound boulder fell from the sky near Moscow into a garden. The apparent meteorite caused no injuries."

Summer 1997:

Reese's airs a TV commercial in which a flying peanutbutter cup saves the world from an incoming flaming asteroid.

July 18, 1997:

Eugene Shoemaker, age 69, dies in a car crash in Australia.

July 20, 1997:

ABC World News reports, "Washington was the scene of another disaster today...the shooting of a movie about a meteor that collides with Earth. At least it has a clear cut storyline. The Republican drama is murkier, a whodunit, or tried to...vote Newt Gingrich out of his job." Gingrich and his "cultural elite" comments are subjects of my article GrinchRich - the D.C. Witch-hunt which kicked off this Timeline more than two years earlier.

July 26, 1997:

The Learning Channel cable TV network begins a week long spectacle called Solar Empire: "Crashing out of control...killer asteroids...one smash hit after another...and we're stuck in the middle of it."

July 30, 1997:

FOX-TV's prime time special Prophecies of the Millennium features a mystic who advises us to, "Watch for something falling from the skies." A Hopi guru predicts, "I see it descending from the skies in the form of...a colliding comet or asteroid."

The narrator reports, "Experts warn that space based weapons would have to be perfected if we hope to defend against a heavenly body on a predicted collision course with Earth." Oliver North appears on screen and warns, "I would suggest to those who think that we could survive the impact of a massive asteroid striking this country, need to think again."

"What if mankind's ultimate challenge," concludes Prophecies of the Millennium, "is coping with the knowledge that, like other species who've come before us, we're here for only a given period of history. What if the prophets are right, and our time is almost up?"

August 11, 1997:

A huge double rainbow over my home is the focus of local media this evening, as meteor showers light up tonight's sky, and the second draft of Rock Prophecy is in the process of being printed out. The April 12, 1995 rainbow was a gateway entrance into the period of Rock Prophecy. This August 1997 rainbow return coincides with the completion of my book, like an exit gateway arching through the sky.

August 12, 1997:

Draft #2 of Rock Prophecy is sent to the Library of Congress for copyright registration.

August 24, 1997:

Cable TV's Family Channel begins airing the movie Doomsday Rock starring Connie Sellecca and William DeVane. This is the asteroid issue dressed down to its lowest common denominator, for grandma and the kids. Doomsday Rock similarities with Rock Prophecy are amazing. DeVane plays the seer who writes a book which decodes, not Hendrix nor Maya Indian predictions, but "Aborigine inscriptions"! The plot boils down to a possessed shaman (William DeVane) vs. the dominators (the U.S. military seeks to silence the seer). A Pentagon official scoffs at how DeVane's book "accompanied a warning of an asteroid that is supposed to hit the Earth. We consider it lunacy...there's a lot of orbit calculations [in the book] and pages and pages of cave paintings from some aboriginal tribe in Australia."

It's as if the writers of Doomsday Rock were instructed to replace the written prophecy of Hendrix with "some ancient prophecy by Australian aboriginals...The aborigines have very powerful spirituality. [We] found this huge cave filled with the most amazing paintings...they had all been done by one single artist. This man had been taken over by what they call the Dream Spirit. The spirit was so strong it could see into the future. There had been a timeline etched into the wall."

Whereas Rock Prophecy explains Jimi's prediction of the 1994 comet impacts on Jupiter, Doomsday Rock explains how historical "events fit into the paintings and the timeline" of the aboriginal prophet, leading to "the demon rock hitting the Earth and destroying it." In other words, the Rock Prophecy concept of a shaman [Jimi] appearing at just the right time in history to predict the Rock is used in this movie called Doomsday Rock.

And instead of Rock Prophecy's description of Maya Indian observations about how the orbits of Venus and the Moon direct asteroids towards Earth, Doomsday Rock reworks the chain reaction formula into a scenario in which a comet "splits, part of it...connects directly with the asteroid...this impact will alter its orbit, sending it towards Earth."

"We are the only ones who believe," laments Sellecca.

"The prophecy is true," DeVane tells her. "Study my book. If they kill me the Earth is doomed...True genius is the gift of being able to find what's always been there waiting to be found."

September 1997:

On tour the Rolling Stones start their shows with giant multi-media enactments of an asteroid flaming into the stadium.

October 15, 1997:

A front page story in USA Today reports President Clinton's veto of a proposed $30 million research project to plan a "space-based system to intercept an asteroid that might threaten Earth."

October 20, 1997:

Two months after draft #2 of Rock Prophecy arrived at the Library of Congress for copyright registration, NBC Nightly News begins a series of reports on "War Between the Sexes."

December 30, 1997:

The Weekly World News cover headlines proclaim "Lost Prophecies From the New Testament Found!" The report predicts that "a massive comet will strike somewhere in Asia, killing millions immediately and spreading choking fallout that will kill millions more over the following weeks...a new land mass will rise from the sea."

On this night the PBS News Hour airs a TV report about Paul Allen's impact in Jimi's hometown of Seattle. Allen is shown playing Hendrix-style guitar music with a rock band.

The following night, New Year's Eve, Asteroids: Deadly Impact, which was sponsored by Microsoft, is re-broadcast on NBC-TV, and dedicated to the recently deceased Eugene Shoemaker.

January 15, 1998:

PBS airs a TV segment of Science Odyssey titled Origins which reports, "Earlier in the century most scientists did not believe that the Earth had ever been struck by large meteors. Craters...were thought by geologists to be made by volcanic action...When the tide shifted in the late 1950s and '60s toward the belief that indeed almost all of these features were a result of meteorite impact, it brought a phenomenal new understanding to the activity in the solar system...Manned exploration of the Moon in 1969 confirmed that moon craters were not the result of volcanoes, as had been largely believed since the time of Galileo, but the result of frequent, often massive asteroid impacts. But if the Moon had been a target, why not the Earth?...Imagine the impact of a typical nuclear warhead multiplied a hundred million times."

January 22, 1998:

At a peak of global hysteria over the sex life of President Bill Clinton, PBS TV airs a show called Eyewitness which warns, "Beyond Mars lies the asteroid belt...fragments are sometimes dislodged from their orbit, traveling as far as the Earth...in 1972 a huge meteorite grazed the atmosphere. Had this fireball hit the Earth it would have exploded with the force of five atomic bombs."

January 1998:

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association sponsors a prime time TV commercial depicting a backyard astronomer who spots an incoming asteroid. In the remaining moments before the end of the world, the astronomer decides to grill himself a thick, juicy steak.

February 1998:

A prime time TV commercial for American Express features Jerry Seinfeld urging Superman to save the Earth from an approching asteroid.

In early February the first page of the Rock Prophecy website appears on the Internet.

All through the winter of 1998 the movie Titanic remains a global obsession. In a subconscious way, mankind senses an impending disaster and sublimates this feeling with fixation on Titanic, relating to the ship as a metaphor for civilization, on a course for collision with a floating mountain. Disaster could have been avoided if everyone were aware of certain details. Rock Prophecy is a about these details.

March 3, 1998:

The third draft of Rock Prophecy, printed out on February 24, 1998, is registered for copyright at the Library of Congress.

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