Residents of Southern California were stunned yesterday morning when their avocado toast breakfast was suddenly interrupted by an ominous "end-of-world prediction" that took over their TV's, interrupting their normal programming for a full minute. Among other things, the broadcast predicted that "extremely violent times will come."
“Realize this, that in the last day extremely violent times will come."
"The term means hard. Harsh. Hard to deal with. Vicious. Dangerous. Menacing."
Not surprisingly, the triggered Californians flooded social media with clips of the warning and their personal horror stories which were summarized by The Orange County Register:
Erin Mireles of Diamond Bar was watching the Bravo channel on Spectrum’s cable system when her show was interrupted by the alert.
“I was definitely startled, ’cause the volume increased exponentially,” she said. “I wasn’t alarmed in the sense of thinking something was wrong, ’cause I assumed it was some sort of hack. My channel changed back to Bravo after a couple minutes.”
Stacy Laflamme of Lake Forest said she was watching the HGTV channel via Cox Communications about 11:05 a.m. when suddenly an emergency alert flashed across her screen followed by a voice.
“It almost sounded like Hitler talking,” she said. “It sounded like a radio broadcast coming through the television.”
Of course, the "Emergency Alert" was made all the more alarming given that Christian numerologist David Meade has made news throughout this week with his own prediction that the end of the world will come tomorrow...so please adjust your party plans for tonight accordingly.
According to Christian numerologist David Meade, verses in Luke 21:25 to 26 signify that recent events, such as the recent solar eclipse and Hurricane Harvey, portend the apocalypse.
The verses read:
“25: There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.'
"'26: Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.'
Saturday's date, Sept. 23 was pinpointed using codes from the Bible, as well as a "date marker" in the pyramids of Giza in Egypt.
Unfortunately, in the end, the whole thing was just a technical glitch that resulted in a local radio broadcast being sent out over television stations during what should have been a regular test of the emergency alert system.
The problem occurred because of one or more radio stations conducting an emergency test, Joe Camero, a spokesman for Cox, said Thursday.
Cable systems pick up such alerts, and viewers should have seen just a typical emergency-broadcast test.
“With these tests, an emergency tone is sent out to initiate the test,” Camero said. “After the tone is transmitted, another tone is sent to end the message. It appears that the radio station (or stations) did not transmit the end tone to complete the test.”
Then the broadcast picked up some audio feed that bled into the alert.
Camero said Cox technicians shut down the emergency test as soon as they became aware of the problem.
“We don’t want to alarm anyone with any false emergency alerts,” he said.
That said, you should probably still plan to party tonight like the end of the world will come tomorrow...just in case.