Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Riffing on the end of the world

For a while now, pundits and other big foreheads have speculated that the approaching shadow of the millennium will wig us out. Apocalyptic prophecy and a gathering sense of foreboding, they say, will launch a regular "X-Files" casting call of social misfits into fevered imaginings of The End: alien abductees, pseudo mystics, half-baked cultists, sky watchers, crystal clutchers, religious fundamentalists -- their loopy energy working back into mainstream life until we all have the jitters.

Do you feel anything?

Me either.

OK, that Y2K computer bug has me (and a lot of others) a little edgy. Should I stock up on bottled water and withdraw my $48.37 from the bank on Dec. 31, or, as I tend to do, trust the alarmists to be completely wrong? I suppose I'll wait for a sign from a higher power -- my wife -- before deciding.

Otherwise, though, the few events that smack of apocalyptic prophecy -- didn't the Book of Revelations mention the rise and fall of a beast much like ABC's Dan Dierdorf? -- haven't spooked me. After all, America has long been home to millennial jumping beans, according to a new book by journalist Alex Heard, "Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America." The book is his guided tour of the doom-minded fringe cultures you'd expect to be agitated about the year 2000. Charismatic religions have been bracing for the imminent return of Christ for a century (and, in fact, Christians have been waiting for it almost since he died). Saucer cults have had the welcome mat laid out for our space brothers since the Roswell incident in 1947.

Whether it's for Jesus or E.T., we're still waiting.

"I don't think the predictions have panned out as expected," KLAS Channel 8 journalist George Knapp wrote me a while back. To the sound of much mocking from his contemporaries, Knapp has been, ahem, probing supposed alien phenomena for years. "In the past year or so, I'd say the number of UFO sighting reports coming to me has decreased."

It's not necessarily that fewer alien craft are buzzing our small townships or probing luckless rural victims, he says. In fact, perhaps there have been too many. "I see a definite UFO burnout factor," Knapp writes. The 1997 anniversary of the seminal Roswell Incident produced enough media coverage to choke a black hole. "Aliens are everywhere," Knapp says. "You can't watch TV for 10 minutes without seeing aliens either in TV shows or, more likely, in advertisements." That, he suspects, has cooled the ardor of the apparition-minded.

Ask distributors of mail-order UFO products. "They say UFO videos are dead meat," Knapp says. "People aren't buying them this year. The same is true for UFO books."

Alan Gudaitis demurs. He's the state director for the Mutual UFO Network. From his perspective of 40 years of avocational UFOlogy, he calls this an "extremely fertile" period for all things UFO. "There could be an unfolding soon," he says. Meaning: The continual roll-out of UFO product -- films, "The X-Files," alien-autopsy videos, syndicated series based on Gene Roddenberry's napkin doodles -- just might be the government's way of getting us ready for the truth. The alien excess Knapp sees as causing burnout, MUFON sees as a sort of pop-culture prophecy. "There could be some things coming down the pike in the next year, two years, three years or something."

But that has everything to do with a readiness of the people to accept the reality of alien life, and nothing whatsoever to do with the year 2000. "We certainly do no subscribe to that at all," he says.

"That's really just a date," his wife, Sandy, adds.

On that, if not on alien life or ancient predictions, most of us seem to agree. Hardly anyone besides survivalists, hardcore fundamentalists and media assignment editors seems to think the millennial countdown is worth bothering about. It could be we're just not close enough to 2000 yet; these days, social trends have the life span of fruit-fly larvae. Perhaps things will get really weird in October.

But until then, at least, what little doomsday fever there is makes for the occasional burp of entertaining farce. Consider the spectacle of a Circus Circus spokeswoman, in what must be something of a personal apocalypse, forced by the media to respond with a straight face to a website that identifies Luxor as the Tower of Babel from the Book of Revelation.

Or what about Jerry Falwell? He recently claimed that the antichrist is a Jewish male living among us at this very minute, prompting the liberal weekly The Nation to lay odds on the identity of the beast: New Age doc Andrew Weil (2 to 1), Disney boss Michael Eisner (3 to 1), Henry Kissinger (also 3 to 1), Adam Sandler (6 to 1) or William Shatner (12 to 1).

My money is on Sandler. That "The Waterboy" topped $155 million strikes me as a cataclysmic sign of some sort.

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