11 Most Chilling End Of The World Predictions Famous People Had

Anyone who has walked around a major metropolis like New York City knows that you don't have to look far to find someone predicting the end of the world is imminent. But while unknown street preachers might scream about the apocalypse at pedestrians every day, it is less common for someone who is already well-known to put their name on an end of the world prophecy. After all, everyone who ever made one of those predictions in the past has been wrong ... at least as of this writing.

Some famous people did have thoughts on when and how the world would end, though. They range from legitimate scientists worried about climate change to cult leaders who used their prophecies to exert control over and inflict suffering on their followers. One thing they all have in common? The endgame scenarios they predict are pretty awful. Here are the 11 most chilling end of the world predictions famous people had.

The People's Temple is most famous for the massacre of almost 1,000 people that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. One of the reasons Jim Jones was able to convince many of his followers to die by suicide and kill their own children and the elderly with cyanide was because he had been preaching the end of the world for decades at that point.

Jim Jones started his infamous cult in Indianapolis in 1954. In the beginning, it was simply a church with a progressive bent. Jones seemed to walk the walk when it came to working to improve life for Black people, both locally and in his congregation. But his preaching eventually took on a different tone, and one of the things he continually spoke about was the imminent end of the world. 

Just what would cause the destruction of humanity varied: As with many in the 1960s, he felt nuclear war could happen any day, but he also worried about race wars and fascist takeovers. He predicted 1967 as the year that the U.S. government would start a genocide against Black citizens and/or nuclear war would break out. In 1965, Jones moved his church from Indiana to California, and two years later, his end of the world predictions failed to come to pass. But he continued to preach that the end was coming, eventually moving his congregation to Guyana, in part to increase their chances of surviving nuclear war. 

While plenty of cranks have claimed to know when the world would end in a horrible fashion, lots of very smart people have done so as well. The famously brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking predicted the end of the world multiple times — or at least, he believed there were many ways humanity could be destroyed in the future. In the 2018 documentary "The Search for a New Earth," the late physicist predicted that thanks to global warming, the Earth could become a "gigantic ball of fire" by 2600. While this might seem like a long time away, for a man used to dealing with time on a galactic scale, it presented a sense of urgency. "I am convinced humans need to leave Earth and make a new home on another planet," Hawking said in the documentary. "For humans to survive, I believe we must have the preparations in place within 100 years."

But even if humanity managed to turn it around on the climate change front, there were plenty of other ways Hawking believed we were courting our own destruction. In 2014, he said that if we ever developed a true artificial intelligence, it could destroy its creators. And he thought we should stop sending messages to space to try and make contact with extraterrestrials. "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said (via BBC News).

When it comes to famous predictions of Armageddon, one name stands above the rest. In several of his hundreds of quatrains, the 16th century French astrologer Nostradamus predicted the end of the world — at least according to people over the centuries who have tried interpreting the cryptic writings. Nostradamus has been given credit for allegedly predicting everything from the French Revolution to the atomic bomb to the presidency of Donald Trump.

Of course, it's much easier to see parallels to things that have already happened in the writings of Nostradamus. And since the world has yet to end, people are left guessing about the meaning of his works. Some of these attempts have been wrong. In 1990, some saw the war in the Persian Gulf as the beginning of the end, pointing to a translation of one quatrain that said in part, "In the year 1999 and seven months, from the sky will come the great king of terror. He will revive the memory of the king of the Mongols." According to UPI, believers saw the Gulf War as the natural beginning of the end of the world, which would start in the Middle East and lead to nuclear attacks on the U.S. within a decade.

Nostradamus' quatrains about suffering due to wars, famine, and plenty of other horrors have been used to predict the end of the world many times before. But his most famous book, "The Prophesies," includes predictions up until the year 3797. Some believe this is when the end will really come.

Charles Manson was the leader of the infamous Manson Family, which is most notorious for the 1969 Tate-La Bianca Murders in Los Angeles, California. Less well-known is why Manson believed Sharon Tate and the others needed to die in the first place. Manson had been raised in a strict Christian household. During his many stints in prison before arriving in California, he was also exposed to the Nation of Islam's reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation. All of this, combined with the apocalyptic feeling that was just starting to become part of the zeitgeist, solidified into a twisted theology all Manson's own. 

The cult leader taught his followers that "Helter Skelter," a horrific race war, was imminent. He said this conflict would result in Black people killing almost all white people on Earth, and white people would murder each other as well. Of course, Manson and his followers had a plan to be some of the only white survivors: Their group would live in a pit until most other white people were dead, at which point they would emerge to lead the Black population. According to the virulently racist Manson, they would be incapable of governing themselves.

But it seems the race war that Manson believed was going to lead to him being revered as the return of Jesus wasn't happening fast enough. Many believe that he had his followers kill some white people to make it look like the murderers were Black, though others contest this theory. To this day, it's unclear how many people died because of Charles Manson's cult and why exactly they killed.

Jeane Dixon might have just been remembered as one of the many alleged psychics plying their trade in the mid-1900s if it wasn't for one incredibly lucky prediction. In a 1956 article in Parade magazine, she prophesied that a Democratic president would be elected in 1960 and then assassinated. When John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963, she made sure people remembered that she foresaw it years earlier. However, cynics pointed out that Dixon made many other predictions that never came anywhere close to true, including three of the Beatles being maimed in a horrific accident and the Soviet Union beating the U.S. to the moon in the Space Race.

Later in her career, she began predicting the end of the world. A comet was supposed to hit the Earth in the 1980s, causing untold destruction. But this would not be the end, as that would not come for several more decades. In her 1972 book, "The Call to Glory," Dixon claimed that everything would fall apart around the year 2000, with nuclear war in the Middle East. Then, in 2005, China would start conquering the world, leading to years of war involving almost every country on earth. There would be so many dead bodies that the resulting diseases would kill even more people than the nuclear bombs. Then the Antichrist would appear. Dixon predicted the final battle, or Armageddon, would come around 2020.

Louis Farrakhan is the leader of the Nation of Islam, a controversial Black nationalist group. As well as being accused of spouting antisemitic beliefs, he has said that the U.S. government used AIDS to kill Black men and that 9/11 was a false flag. So of course he also has thoughts about what will bring on the end of the world.

The founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, wrote about a UFO in the 1930s, and Farrakhan claims to have seen the craft first-hand when he was abducted by the aliens. But while he was returned to Earth unharmed, the rest of us may not be so lucky: According to Farrakhan, the UFO will eventually destroy the United States.

In case you were worried this prediction might be accurate, Farrakhan has been wrong about the end of the world at least once before. He was invited to visit Baghdad with other Muslim leaders in 1991, just days before Operation Desert Storm began. After returning home, Farrakhan announced, "This war, should it start in a few days, will be that which the scriptures refer to as the War of Armageddon which is the final war ... it will engulf the entire planet" (via "In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and The Nation of Islam" by Mattias Gardell). When this didn't happen, the Nation of Islam's newspaper, The Final Call, explained the conflict was the first domino that would eventually lead to the end of the world.

Painters aren't usually the kind of people you associate with end of the world predictions, but Sandro Botticelli was special. The Renaissance artist was influenced by the teachings of radical preacher Girolamo Savonarola, who was executed in 1498. One of his famous sermons went into a vision he had and how it connected to the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

Thanks to Savonarola and political upheaval in Europe, Botticelli believed he was living in the end times, and he put his prediction of the end of the world in the only painting he ever signed. "The Mystical Nativity" shows the birth of Jesus, but it includes unexpected details and themes usually associated with nativity paintings, as well as a long inscription. While the inscription might not have been part of Botticelli's original plan for the painting, art historians are sure he added it himself.

Written in Greek, it translates as, "This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh chapter of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth chapter and we shall see him buried as in this picture." In other words, what he painted was what he believed was coming — a version of the Biblical description of Armageddon, complete with the Antichrist.

Martin Luther was busy in the early 1500s. Most notably, he managed to jump-start the Reformation, when Christians moved away from the Catholic faith and started various new Protestant religions. One of his most important contributions to this movement was translating the Bible from Latin to everyday German so that any person (at least the literate ones) could read it. Interestingly, he made some decisions in his translation that show he was not a huge fan of the Book of Revelation. This was unexpected, since Luther was a firm believer that he was living in the end times described in that book.

The Protestant reformer was so sure the end of the world was going to happen any day that he didn't think he would get to finish translating more than a book of the Bible before then. He was sure it would end before 1548 (although he tried to avoid putting a definite date on when), that the Pope was the Antichrist, and that wars, storms, and the pleasure-loving younger generation would bring on Armageddon. In a sermon, he said that the situation in Germany was so intolerable to God that if the last day didn't come soon, the country would still be destroyed either by enemies or from within. However, in other writings, Luther gave humanity a little more time, saying the world might last another one hundred or even three hundred years.

There were plenty of reasons people wanted to sail around the globe in the 1400s: money, prestige, adventure. But ushering in Armageddon? You wouldn't think that would be considered a good reason to risk your life colonizing far-off lands. But Christopher Columbus predicted he would bring on the end of the world with all the exploring he did, and yet he set off anyway. If you know anything else about the man, this is probably not that surprising. Considering he had no problem with the deaths of thousands of people in the Native American populations he enslaved, why would he stop to consider if single-handedly ending humanity as a whole might not be a great idea? 

Believing the world was coming to the end of its 7,000-year life, Columbus wanted his discoveries to eventually allow Spain to retake the Holy Land and bring on the Apocalypse. He also thought other events were necessary to bring on the end, including the spread of Christianity across the world and the discovery of the Garden of Eden's location. On his journeys, Columbus attempted to do both. Starting about a decade after he "discovered" the Americas, Columbus put down his thoughts on all of this in his book, "Book of Prophecies." At that point, he had been arrested and shunned, so he might have been trying to make himself feel better by putting his achievements in a truly Biblical context — one that would lead to millions more people suffering thanks to his actions.

Isaac Newton is one of the most famous intellectuals of all time, a household name even centuries after he died. These days, he is known for his academic achievements like inventing calculus and the theory of gravity. But the scientist was also a big believer in things that are considered a lot less scientific today, like alchemy and Biblical prophecies. And Newton's fascination with the latter is why he predicted the end of the world. 

Usually, Newton was only interested in trying to decipher the cryptic meanings behind Biblical prophecies. For example, he was particularly obsessed with the idea of the Jewish people returning to the Holy Land, where he believed they would all need to be converted to Christianity before the world could end. But while his contemporaries were putting dates on this occurrence, usually ones quite close to their own time, Newton was sure it was hundreds of years in the future. In fact, it was rare that Newton believed in putting a date on any future predictions.

There appears to have been one big exception: Twice he wrote down his belief that the world would end and/or that Jesus would return in the year 2060. This belief came toward the end of Newton's life and was a notable departure from his regular theological writings, especially since he seemed quite insistent that this was the correct date. According to the polymath, the end would be preceded by epic wars and other disasters.

The Western United States at the end of the 1800s was not a great time to be a Native American, as you might imagine, and their persecution resulted in protest movements and apocalyptic beliefs. The biggest was probably the second Ghost Dance movement, started by a Paiute tribesman named Wovoka (who went by Jack Wilson in white society) after falling into a trance and seeing how the end of the world would come in 1890. He saw a future where the ghosts of his people's dead ancestors would return, along with the huge herds of buffalo, and the white colonizers would be driven out.

The dances and prophecies of Wovoka terrified the white populations in the west. As the movement spread, colonizers retaliated with violence, including the Wounded Knee Massacre. While the original date given for this otherworldly return passed, in 1894, a newspaper reported that Wovoka had a new prophecy. This time, the world would end by being destroyed by a flood of water coming down from the mountains and killing everything. However, somehow life would continue, and after plants and animals returned to the plains, the Native American tribes would as well.