The mysterious 16th century prognosticator known as Nostradamus made several startlingly
 accurate predictions about the future.
 His revelations coincide with the equally accurate predictions of a little-known 12th
 century Catholic priest, Saint Malachi.
 Both futurists included in their writings suggestions of an apocalypse sometime near
 the year 2012.
 Fire, flood, war, famine, plague, anarchy, the end of the world.
 These are the apocalyptic visions of history's prophets of doom.
 The most famous of these mystics is the 16th century French writer Michel Nostradamus.
 He made over 1,000 prophecies before his death in 1566.
 I believe the main reason why Nostradamus has been so popular is because he's been so
 successful.
 Nostradamus accurately predicted the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the stock market
 crash of 1929.
 But one dire prophecy remains unfulfilled.
 Nostradamus writes that the head of the church will be taken prisoner and his palace will
 go up in flames.
 Scholars have interpreted this to mean the dissolution of the Catholic Church.
 But Nostradamus was not the first seer to predict the end of the Pope and the Catholic
 Church.
 400 years earlier, a little-known Irish priest named Malachi had an eerily similar vision.
 He was on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1138 AD, and as he came over the final hill and saw
 Rome, he fell into an ecstatic trance.
 And his scribe wrote down these three to four-word Latin phrases that came in sequence, 112 phrases.
 It was later understood that each phrase stood for every pope, the current pope that lived
 at his time, Cestulianus II, till the final pope of Domesday.
 That is 112 references.
 We are down to two more in the list of Saint Malachi before Doomsday.
 While Malachi was struck by ecstatic visions, Nostradamus claimed to see the future by staring
 into a chalice of water.
 Their methods differed, but the vision was the same.
 The end of the church would mean the end of the world, and the end of the world would
 come soon after the year 2000.
 It's a dire prediction, and a date within our lifetime that has been embraced by modern-day mystics.
 I mean a great change.
 I don't mean the five-cent cigar or Medicare reform.
 I mean ordinary space and time is going to disappear.
 Terence McKenna is an author and explorer who lives on the big island of Hawaii, where
 he awaits what he believes will be the end of the world as we know it.
 For McKenna, and hundreds of people who have come to embrace his apocalyptic warning, the
 Doomsday Clock will run out on a very specific date.
 I predict the most novel event in the history of the world in 2012.
 And for a conservative mind, that might look like Doomsday.
 But it isn't Doomsday.
 It's simply that we are moving deeper and deeper into uncharted territory, novel territory.
 And that's frightening to some people and exhilarating to others.
 While McKenna's message is much like that of Malachi and Nostradamus, his medium is
 decidedly 21st century.
 McKenna's crystal ball is a personal computer, running software of his own design called
 Timewave Zero.
 I believe that we have in fact discovered the structure of time itself.
 McKenna developed Timewave Zero in 1970, after studying the ancient Chinese fortune-telling
 system known as the I Ching.
 And out of that came a mathematical algorithm that obviously wanted to be a calendar.
 And when I looked at it as a calendar, I saw that it described the ebb and flow of change
 in history.
 When McKenna placed the I Ching's pattern of peaks and valleys over the timeline of
 history, he made a startling discovery.
 When the I Ching system dipped, so did the fortunes of the planet.
 Here 1356, the Black Death, a third of the population of Europe, dies.
 And here, the culmination of the Italian Renaissance in 1492 with the discovery of the New World.
 Over here, the American and the French Revolutions.
 Here's World War II.
 And here's us.
 Because his computer system provides a remarkably accurate picture of the past, McKenna is confident
 it will prove to be an accurate picture of the future as well.
 So the predictions of the past give us confidence that what it's saying about the future will
 also turn out to be true.
 On December 21st, 2012, the time wave dips off the chart and into infinity.
 McKenna does not know what will occur on that date, only that it will be the most significant
 point in human history.
 One of my guesses is that what we will discover in 2012 that will make this true is time travel.
 If technologies that could move through time were developed around that time, it would
 explain why the wave could no longer give a linear description of the unfolding of events,
 because the unfolding of events would go non-linear at that point.
 Nearly 500 years ago, Nostradamus predicted similar changes in the time-space continuum
 that would occur soon after the year 2000.
 He sees a change in mankind, a new humanity, a new culture that ultimately leads to the
 human race leaving the planet Earth, they're living in the planets of the constellations
 Cancer and Aquarius.
 So when you look up tonight at the sky and you see the stars of the Aquarius constellation,
 you're seeing the future of humanity.
 While many of his dire predictions have come true, Nostradamus never claimed his prophecies
 were irreversible.
 In fact, he once wrote, "The one who is reasonable can learn from my prophecies how to find the
 right path."
 Next, if you think crop circles are fakes...
 More than 5,000 years ago, in Egypt, in the Maya Kingdom, and in North America, people
 inscribed their pyramids, temples, and totems with the same story of a vastly sophisticated
 civilization that had vanished beneath the waves.
 Before telephones, telegraph, or transatlantic trade...
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