X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)

X-Day is a traditional part of the Church of the SubGenius, a religion formed as a parody of cults and extreme religious groups, and their pamphlets and claims. X-Day fell on July 5, 1998, the scheduled "end of the world", and has been celebrated on July 5 each year since then. From its inception in 1980, the Church had prophesied that an army of alien invaders (known as the "X-ists" or "Men From Planet X") would land on the planet Earth and destroy the world of "normals", "pinks", and "glorps," while the members of the Church of the SubGenius would be rescued by the aliens and taken away into space. Chapters 10 and 11 of Revelation X: The "Bob" Apocryphon supplies additional details as to the precise kinds of fates which supposedly await the "pinks" and "normals" (as well as SubGenii who have not paid their membership fees) left behind when X-Day comes, saying, among other things, that those who are not immediately killed by the aliens will be enslaved by a society of evil clowns known as the "Bozo Cult" until eventually their souls are devoured by the Elder Gods. The book also tells readers that if they want more information, they should send one million dollars to Ivan Stang so that he can remake his 1973 film Let's Visit the World of the Future.

When July 5, 1998 arrived and no alien fleet appeared in the sky, members of the Church began citing a large number of conspiracy theories to explain why the predicted end of the world did not take place. The manual page of the ddate program claims that the Church "declared that it had got the year upside down" and that X-Day will actually take place in 8661. The most popular explanation for the failure of the prophecy in the Church is usually summarized with the statement, "the calendar is wrong and July 5th, 1998 has not really arrived yet." Because of this, the Church has held annual gatherings around July 5 of each year since 1998 to celebrate X-Day and greet the arrival of the anticipated alien "Sex Goddesses." No flying saucer rendezvous has been confirmed as of 2013, but members of the Church have been undaunted. A more recent theory suggests that the X-ists did indeed come to Earth on July 5, 1998 as foretold by "Bob," but through one of the most pervasive Conspiracy coverups, Earth and Mars were switched, and the "Earth" we know is actually Mars. And thus, as there was nobody on the True Earth at the time of their arrival, there was nobody there to witness the Rupture.

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