ON THIS DAY IN WEIRD

On This Day in Weird, May 5...

2000: Spokesmen for the Nuwaubian Nation—a religious movement founded by Black Muslim defector Dwight York in the 1980s—predict a planetary alignment on this date, causing a "star holocaust" that will pull the planets of our solar system toward the sun with cataclysmic results. As usual in such end-of-the-world scenarios, nothing happens. Author Bill Osinski, in his book Ungodly: A True Story of Unprecedented Evil (2007), details York's "religious" notions drawn from a wide range of UFOlogy, New Age occultism, pseudoscience, Afrocentrism and black supremacism. Today, the Nuwaubian Nation is ranked as a black hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.