Apocalypse Not

Barack Obama has now been inaugurated and completed the first day of his Presidency, and the apocalyptic predictions of the "Parowan Prophet," Leland Freeborn (Disaster predicted in Obama's path, Peter H. King, LA Times, 13 December 2008), have not been borne out. "Readers remember me," Freeborn wrote in a letter to The St. George, Utah, Spectrum & Daily News on 08 December 2008,

...also known by millions who have heard me on talk radio stations in the United States, across Canada, Ireland, Australia and Europe warning of World War III. They know me as the "Parowan Prophet."

I have passed 100,000 hits on my Web site with free survival information. Google has my site listed. Now I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president.

I said on my home page in August that if he lost, to expect to see the "Riots" that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn't lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008 as I said.

King reported visiting Freeborn shortly after his letter was posted to get a read on the pre-inaugural mood in Parowan, and discuss his prophecy that in response to "the riots" the Soviets would rain down nukes on the US, killing at least 100,000,000.

Freeborn conceded that he’d issued similar warnings many times before, and still the world kept spinning. Prophecy, he said, is not an exact science.

“I’ve been at it for 30 years, and I have always really believed it,” he said. “Now, if we go on, that’s great. Maybe we can get some more people to repent.”

King's story ends with the following parting gesture from Freeborn:

He presented us with brown medicine bottles filled with iodide crystals – to ward off the effects of radiation.

“I don’t think you are going to finish your trip back East,” the Parowan Prophet said, urging us to reconsider our journey to the inauguration.

I visited Freeborn's website recently, and I can report that he's not only an idiot, he's a racist idiot. At the inauguration, his homepage declares in underlined text, "...millions of Blacks will be gathered within just a few square miles of area. The largest gathering of Blacks in the history of the world. Even a small "Nuke" would burn 25 square miles." Elsewhere he invites the reader to find out "[w]hat God's prophets have said for thousands of years about Blacks." Happily, the underlined link didn't work, and I wasn't inclined to search his site too thoroughly, if you know what I mean. I couldn't resist checking out the photos, though, which seem to fall into three general categories, being either of him, his "ParowanProphet.Com" billboard and likewise decorated RV parked defiantly in front of various Latter Day Saints temples (he's apparently an outcast from the main LDS Church), and numerous images of nuclear detonations ("Hell's Fire will burn children too! And it will start newspapers on fire 20 miles away."). Following what must be one of the unwritten rules governing the design of crank websites, Freeborn's is a welter of text in constantly changing colors and font sizes ranging from very small to very large, shifting between left justified and centered format, without any apparent organizing visual or dramatic principle. Together with randomly placed capitalization and underlining, the whole effect is like listening to a guy alternately whispering and shouting irrational drivel directly into your ear.

It is nice to know that, since nothing Freeborn warned about has happened yet, we still have time to repent - or perhaps get something done - before the next predicted Apocalypse. In the meantime, as one HowardStucki commented beneath Freeborn's letter:

Hey Parowan Prophet....tell me who is going to win the super bowl this year. Thank you. I'll send you a check. Just a thought.