Apocalypse Now? : Ted Daniels chronicles a host of predictions of doomsday in his newsletter. As the millennium nears, he can hardly keep up.

It’s Millennium Time, and Doomsday Man (a.k.a. Ted Daniels) is busy sifting through predictions about the end of the world:

* Elderly Nazis hiding beneath the South Pole are plotting to take over the planet with help from space aliens.

* A monster quake, due by 1997, will make Phoenix a seaport, split the continent in two and cough up Atlantis from the depths.

* Jesus Christ will return this month. (And if he doesn’t, at least six other messiahs are already roaming the globe, biding their time until Judgment Day.)

These and other forecasts are printed in Millennial Prophecy Report, a 10-times-a-year newsletter that tracks 1,100 groups that believe the apocalypse is at hand.

Daniels, who founded the newsletter two years ago, says the glut of “propheteering” is inspired by anxiety about the year 2000.

“It’s like when the odometer ticks over in your car . . . (but) on a global scale,” he explains. “I talked to one guy who videotaped his car turning over to 100,000 miles. If it’s that important when your car does it, imagine what it’s like for the planet. . . . It’s gotta have meaning, right?”

Daniels, 55, decided to chronicle the phenomenon. A folklore scholar by training, he works out of a cluttered office at the top of his Philadelphia home. There, a fiery-winged wooden mermaid floats under the ceiling, African masks peer from the walls and an eerie, carved New England church with flames shooting out the windows looms over various stacks of books, magazines and papers.

Each week, a two-foot pile of prophecies and prognostications arrives in the mail. The bulk of it is from fringe Christian ministries, flying saucer freaks and Sedona, Ariz.--”the Vatican City of the New Age movement,” Daniels says.

Despite the philosophical disparities among such groups, Daniels sees a few common threads.

Almost without exception, he says, they focus on a prophecy in which some sort of divine or cosmic power wipes out world evil and ushers in an era of peace and beauty.

Christian soothsayers, for example, typically describe a cataclysmic battle between good and evil, followed by the reign of Christ. Several New Age seers theorize that a “parallel planet” is headed toward Earth and that enlightened humans will be able to jump ship and live in harmony on the new world.

One UFO group, meanwhile, believes the Earth is about to enter a galactic “photon belt,” which will blot out the sun and cause a 3 1/2-day worldwide electrical blackout (akin to the 3 1/2-year tribulation foretold in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations). During that time, space-alien troops will invade to “cleanse the planet,” and believers are to stay indoors and not look outside.

In the last prediction, Daniels sees a space-age recapitulation of the Old Testament Passover story, in which Jews were able to avoid the angel of death by staying in their homes and sprinkling lamb’s blood on their door posts.

Indeed, Daniels regards the space creatures who show up in many end-time predictions as nothing more than “angels and demons given a high-tech dressing.”

In that sense, they are nothing new. History, it seems, is full of unusual doomsday forecasts.

Early church father Hippolytus, for instance, analyzed the dimensions of Noah’s Ark to calculate that the world would terminate in AD 500, according to author Russell Chandler’s “Doomsday” (Servant Publications, 1993), a historical overview of apocalyptic predictions.

Explorer Christopher Columbus, on the other hand, declared himself a messianic figure in 1501 and said the planet would expire in 1656, Chandler writes. Meanwhile, in France, Nostradamus scheduled Armageddon for 1999, reportedly hinting that it would begin with a Chinese submarine invasion of Italy.

Other students of The End, according to “Doomsday,” include Joseph Goebbels, Jehovah’s Witnesses (with no fewer than seven incorrect predictions) and members of the “yeller’s sect,” who interpret a Bible verse about Jesus returning with a shout as meaning that they must go around constantly screaming his name to spark Armageddon.

Prominent evangelists have also dabbled in what one Christian author calls “Last Days Madness.” Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, once predicted that Jesus would return by 1981, and broadcaster Pat Robertson flatly guaranteed that The End would begin in 1982 with a Russian invasion of Israel, says Chandler, a former religion reporter for The Times.

There also is Salem Kirban, a self-styled Armageddon expert who in 1981 advertised the nation’s “first toll-free prophecy hot line,” and who believes that killer bees fulfill biblical predictions for a plague of locusts in the last days. (In contrast, end-times evangelist Hal Lindsey, a former Mississippi River tugboat captain whose “Late Great Planet Earth” was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, sees the locusts as nuclear missiles launched from space platforms or Cobra helicopters spraying nerve gas, Chandler’s book notes.)

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Millennial fever isn’t solely driven by the calendar. It can flare during any period of “intense and rapid social change,” Daniels says. And it feeds off deep-rooted cultural, psychological and religious images.

“Everybody has a creation myth,” he explains. “Without fail, those stories begin in Paradise and then--through accident, sin or (some other circumstance)--the world changes to what it is now. . . . Under the right conditions, people are desperately going to try to find a way to get back to that Paradise.”

Just before the turn of the century, for instance, a Paiute ranch hand known as the Indian Jesus had a revelation in which God restored the buffalo herds, revived dead Indian ancestors and destroyed white settlers (except--conveniently--for their carbines and ponies).

In similar fashion, New Hampshire doomsdayer Gordon-Michael Scallion predicts that a superquake will soon sink California, raise Atlantis, rip the continent in half and cause the United States to revert to a peaceful, 13-colony government.

“What Scallion is picking up on,” Daniels says, “is a very prevalent and underground mistrust . . . (and) hatred of the federal government--its arrogance, its unapproachability, its being completely beyond our influence.”

Scallion is one of Daniels’ favorite subjects, partly because of the seer’s intriguing political predictions, but also because he is one of the few forecasters who admits to mistakes (the quake was supposed to happen a few months ago, but now has been rescheduled for sometime before 1997).

Other forecasters of note: Harold Camping, an Oakland radio evangelist who has disturbed many fellow Christians with predictions that Jesus will return this month, and “the Hollow Earth people,” who believe leftover Nazis from World War II are hiding in secret, subterranean cities, accessible only through a passageway allegedly discovered by antarctic explorer Adm. Richard Byrd. The Nazis are said to be procreating like mad in preparation for a doomsday offensive that will be joined by UFO allies.

Not surprisingly, Daniels--a former agnostic who is “coming around” to believe in “an intelligence in the universe”--places no faith in these or any other predictions printed in his newsletter.

It’s purely an academic interest, he says. Millennial Prophecy Report is intended as a reference for scholars, journalists and law enforcement agents dealing with such sects as the Branch Davidians of Waco, Tex. (a group that had eluded Daniels’ attention until the siege).

So far, Daniels has had better luck finding Armageddon prophets--more than 1,000 in the United States alone--than subscribers, about 200. That’s partly because of poor publicity, a situation he hopes to remedy with an advertising blitz; but also partly because the eight-page newsletters contain little more than verbatim excerpts of often incomprehensible prophecies. It can make for tedious reading.

Daniels acknowledges that even he doesn’t understand a lot of the material he prints. He calls it a crazy quilt of pseudo-quantum physics, the Heisenberg Principle and “shameless borrowing from any and all religions.”

But he believes the people who produce the prognostications are sincere.

The career pattern of most prophets, he says, is remarkably similar: “The (person) begins his, or--more often--her life on the margins of society. She doesn’t fit in, in some way or another. She could be very sick, or poor or doesn’t know who her parents are. . . . Then, at some point, she undergoes a major crisis, (such as losing) a close relative or (having) a near-death experience . . . and (receives) a vision of the future and of heaven.”

Prophets in centuries past used to see hell also, Daniels adds, “but that’s gone off the map now . . . a reflection of cultural influence on visions.”

In any case, the prophet emerges from this experience utterly transformed, he says: “No longer a nebbish, he or she now possesses tremendous sexual attractiveness and confidence. If they were sick, they are healed. . . . And there is an ability to perform miracles, (such as) faith healing.”

As an example, Daniels cites a Jewish-born Florida travel agent whose business hit the skids and who then had a vision of herself in Christ’s tomb at the moment the stone was being rolled away. She heard a voice instructing her to believe in the Second Coming but answered: “I can only believe in the First Coming. I’m a Jew.”

The voice, however, was ultimately convincing, and the woman now leads a New Age group in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., that believes humans must make “an evolutionary leap to a new spiritual dimension,” Daniels says.

Such claims are proliferating as the year 2000 draws nigh. The current outbreak of end-of-the-world Angst may, in fact, be unprecedented. The late psychic Edgar Cayce foresaw a “shifting of the poles” in 2000-2001, says “Doomsday,” and the live psychic Jeane Dixon has predicted a 1999 holocaust followed by an era of peace. The list goes on.

Environmentalists warn of eco-disasters. Astronomers fret about comet collisions. And evangelical Christians have turned Armageddon into a cottage industry.

“The millennium,” Daniels says, “is a hot property.” So hot that he even had to change the name of his newsletter--originally titled Millennium Watch--after a New Age group threatened to sue.

“They claimed to have exclusive commercial rights to the word millennium ,” he says. “Imagine a New Age group claiming exclusive rights to an ancient Christian concept.”

Actually, everyone seems to be after a piece of the millennium.

Arcade games, comic books, movies and music are loaded with apocalyptic imagery, says Daniels, who wishes he could expand the scope of his newsletter to keep tabs on it all.

Even limited to his current focus, however, he sees years of work ahead.

Unless one of the doomsday forecasts turns out to be right, he figures, the fascination with The End is barely beginning: “If I wanted to, I think I could still be publishing 20 years from now.”