What is up with people being so obsessed with the end of the world? Harold Camping whipped Christian believers into a frenzy last year with his two predictions that the rapture was going to happen in May and then October when the first date passed us by. This just leaves us with one of the oldest end of the world theories – the Mayan calendar that calls for an apocalypse on December 21 of this year. Some new age practitioners have found their salvation from the end of the world inside a mountain.

The Independent is reporting that a bunch of new age hippies have descended upon the residents of the small French community of Bugarach. They aren’t interested in the people residing in the village, they care more about the mountain near it. This mountain, called Pic de Bugarach, is apparently magic and full of aliens. The new agers believe that the aliens are going to pop out of the mountain and whisk everybody in the immediate vicinity to a new world on December 21.

This isn’t a small congregation of people either. There are estimated to be about 100,000 people who are planning on climbing up the mountain during the end of the world festivities. According to one of the devotees, this mountain is one of the “major chakras of the earth” and will be “welcoming the energies of tomorrow.”

While I would be inclined to dismiss these new agers as people who have watched Escape from Witch Mountain and Close Encounters of the Third Kind too many times, there may be something to all of this. That something is increased tourism dollars for the people in the village. They are already making money from the people who are traveling there. The mayor of the village, Jean-Pierre Delord, is planning on holding an end of the world party. Turn it into an international event and the money will just flow in. Why do these people need their money when the world is going to end so soon?

But I digress, it’s obvious that the world isn’t going to end on December 21. The scientists who are paid to prove these crazy theories wrong have already proven all the claims of the Mayan apocalypse to be natural occurrences with no danger of ending the world. The other big world ending events this year, a giant asteroid and solar flares, have also missed us. Let the hippies have their fun now and help them get back up when they finally realize the past year has been a Close Encounters reenactment that went nowhere.