Comet Apocalypse with Redneck Zombies and Tacos!

This really happened. Yes — we're embarrassed, No — I'm not exaggerating.

Between June and July 2006, my entire family went bonkers. We packed all of our most valuable belongings and pets into a minivan and my brother's sports car, and escaped from Florida to a small town in Georgia, to wait out the giant tsunami that was supposed to devastate all of Florida.

It all started with my younger brother finding some strange website... something like SaveYourSouls.net, where a French scientist was ringing an alarm about an imminent comet fragment impact in the Atlantic Ocean. He was citing the famous Shoemaker–Levy 9 comet that fragmented and collided with Jupiter in 1994 as an example of what was going to happen on Earth, and insisted that the U.S. was withholding this information to avoid mass panic.

My brother, then 18, has always been a beacon of reason, so we didn't just dismissed his newly discovered hypothesis. But we were all very busy — with jobs, errands, and friends to see, so we told him to keep an eye on any additional news about this supposedly imminent event, and let us know if more evidence rose to the surface. He started to dig deeper — as deep as one could dig in 2006 - astronomy events, FEMA drills, obscure GeoCities websites with Deep Impact tsunami scene GIFs.

Then came news of Comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3. It began fragmenting in the mid-1990s, and in 2005 it made its return to the inner solar system, where astronomers observed more breakup. Its flyby was said to happen in 2006, with some fragments predicted to pass relatively close to Earth.

2005 through 2006 was very eventful for comet science:

First, Comet Machholz (C/2004 Q2) — visible to the naked eye, it passed closest to Earth on January 5th, 2005, at a distance of about 0.35 AU (52 million km / 32 million miles).

Then, there was Comet 9P/Tempel 1 — the target of NASA’s "Deep Impact" mission - where on July 4th, 2005, a spacecraft was deliberately crushed into the comet, creating a visible plume.

And lastly, the previously mentioned Comet 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann 3.

Each of these comets had some peculiar rumors that were being spread online:

Mwchholz was said to be an alien craft due to its 'unnatural' green glow.

Tempel 1 was supposedly destroyed by NASA in secret because it was actually on a collision course with Earth.

And Schwassmann–Wachmann 3 fragments were predicted to strike Earth sometime between July and August 2006.

There was still time to worry about the comet, so we just continued about our lives as normal. At that time I was working as a rendering assistant at a small architecture company. My boss was a crazy, eccentric Hungarian ex–glam rock singer, who was very prone to nutty ideas himself, so when I told him about the conspiracy during one of our spiked coffee breaks, he became obsessed too. He started sending me articles about the comet, pointing out how suspicious it was that so little information was being shared.

As time flew by, my family began to whisper among ourselves, ‘What if?’
If this disaster does actually happen, what should we do? We need to leave Florida before the panic starts. We need to find the closest 'high' elevation spot somewhere in Georgia, and a place to stay. We need to decide who to tell — and even worse, who not to tell. We didn't want to needlessly scare our friends and co-workers, potentially getting ridiculed if nothing happened, but we also felt obligated to warn them. After all, it was a matter of life and death. We opted to wait.

Adding to the anxiety, there were also news about worldwide tsunami drills. This, of course, was the result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that caused the death of approximately 230,000 people in 14 countries, including the most impacted: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. But on conspiracy websites, the drills were presented as secret preparations for the massive tsunamis that would follow the comet impact.

Finally, the rumored disaster date was revealed... Everything pointed at July 15th of 2006.

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