This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Harold Camping was an American civil engineer who built Family Radio into a large independent Christian broadcasting network, then used his own biblical numerology, developed apart from any seminary training or denominational structure, to calculate specific end times dates on more than one occasion. His first widely publicized date was 1994, a prediction that passed without the event he had forecast, though Camping continued broadcasting and revising his chronology in the years that followed rather than abandoning the method that had produced it.
In his 2005 book Time Has an End, Camping set a new and more specific date, teaching that the Rapture would occur on May 21, 2011, to be followed by the final destruction of the world five months later on October 21, 2011. Family Radio promoted the May 21 date heavily in the years before it arrived, placing the claim on billboards and across its broadcasts, giving Camping's second major prediction a public reach well beyond his network's existing listenership.
The scale of that promotion meant the date's passing became a public event rather than a private disappointment, watched by a wider public that had encountered the billboards and broadcasts even without any prior connection to Family Radio, a reach Camping's engineering background and independent radio network had made possible in a way an ordinary preacher's pulpit could not.