The World Will NOT End on December 21, 2012

Dec. 14, 2012 - PRLog -- In fact, he and others are going to be saying it for 26 hours straight on McConnell’s popular syndicated radio program, The ‘X’ Zone (http://www.xzone2012.com/), all through Dec. 21, with a little around the edges. He runs The ‘X’ Zone out of his basement studio on a quiet street on southeast Hamilton Mountain, but it reaches listeners and viewers all over the world.

The only thing that’s coming to an end that day are the rumours of our death (yours, mine, the planet’s), says McConnell. They’re not just greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain. They’re completely unfounded.

And don’t blame it on the Mayans.

You might’ve heard about the end of the world, which some — the apocalyp-synchers — say is foretold in the Mayan calendar as happening Dec. 21, 2012.

It’s not, says McConnell. He has studied Mayan culture. He and his wife Laura Rogers actually travelled to Mexico and Guatemala earlier this year and talked to some of the 1.5 million Mayans who live there.

“They’re laughing at us,” says McConnell, “because we’re so gullible.”

When you strip away the “gunk and flamboyant prophesy,” what’s left is an obvious misunderstanding.

It would be like someone prophesying that the world will end on Dec. 31 on the basis of our calendar. It doesn’t end there; the cycle starts over.

But, he adds, some people simply want to believe. They’re catastrophizers. And what they’re probably going to do, starting around Dec. 23, is go ransacking the calendar for another date to pin the end of the world to.

“There have been at least 280 doomsday predictions,” says McConnell. “We’re still here.”

What he dislikes so much about this one is that it seems to have found such a vogue among young people.

“Y2K was more of an elderly concern. Now it’s the kids.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rye8RNzZgBc



His granddaughter at university was telling him that it’s got many of her peers pretty spooked.

On Thursday, Dec. 20, at 11 p.m. Eastern, through Saturday, Dec. 22, at 1 a.m. McConnell will host a live broadcast featuring expert guests and other features aimed at debunking the Dec. 21 “hysteria.”

McConnell, who has had a long career in radio broadcasting as well as research into the psychology behind the paranormal, has been doing The ‘X’ Zone since 1993. It tackles subjects such as UFOs, conspiracies and doomsday crazes — with an open mind but also a readiness to debunk.

The show is popular worldwide, especially in the United States, where it’s carried on radio affiliates from Oklahoma to Oregon, and has almost a million and a half podcast downloads, says McConnell. It’s available online, with video, at www.xzone2012.com.

McConnell, who has also worked as a criminal investigator, says he’s fascinated by mysteries, hoaxes (especially when media are involved) and the challenge of solving them. Everything from War of the Worlds (the Orson Welles broadcast) to Hale-Bopp.

He’s friends with Art Bell and others in the paranormal media programming community and McConnell describes his particular approach as nonsensationalistic.

“I think there are real mysteries but we get distracted by false ones. You have to dig down to the real mystery. There’s an explanation, but to find it is like peeling through the layers of an onion.”

McConnell is a tough critic of UFO sightings, even his own. When he was a boy in Montreal, he and his brother saw in the sky a cigar-shaped light with a circle in it.

“If I were sensationalistic I’d say it was a sighting, but I don’t know what I saw. There might be an explanation. But it piqued my curiosity.”

jmahoney@thespec.com

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