Alternate endings

Dii Se Tiitse-du, Xaza Sae. These words, etched into a llama thighbone at the Oaxaca Bone Museum & Taqueria, are widely seen as offering irrefutable proof that life as we know it will come to an end on a Saturday morning eight years from now. According to Vedic dermatologist Marc Zappe, they were inscribed by a Zapotec shaman some 2,500 years ago, and foretell the opening of small red apertures in the space-time continuum that will wreak untold havoc across the planet. “Suddenly, breakfast in Hong Kong will become supper in St. Louis,” he writes. “And that supper will be served to you by Hitler.”

When dietary mathematician Brian Ob placed an Aztec sun wheel into a modified CD player and ran it backwards, he heard a message from the distant planetoid 3 Reticuli. The Reticulans plan to invade Earth at 6:42 a.m. during their annual Flaying of Men Day holiday, and to wreak devastation across the planet by dinnertime. In his book “The Vivid Goat,” Ob outlines the carnage, complete with a harrowing scene in which Celine Dion is forced to eat her own chin. Despite the “churning, frothing oceans of human viscera” that will ensue, Ob insists the invasion will ultimately prove to be a good thing, ushering in the Age of Very Light Traffic.

On a balmy July evening in 2006, Keith Marr made a startling discovery. Marr, an unemployed reiki dentist, was browsing major league baseball box scores when he spotted a pattern: “With the 1974 Toronto Blue Jays, if you multiply the pitch count on every third at-bat by the batter’s career RBI total and divide that by the combined weight of the rocks at Stonehenge, you arrive at May 27, 2029.” Speaking to Sports Illustrated last year, Marr said: “It is my opinion that the Earth’s poles will undergo a sudden geomagnetic reversal, exposing the planet to solar winds that will make chowder of our eyeballs.” The scientific community is divided on Marr’s theory, with some skeptics observing that the Blue Jays did not actually join major league baseball until 1977.

Only 12 signs of the zodiac? Not according to panchakarma veterinarian Teri Mange, who says ancient Sumerian study guides point to a 13th sign, a star cluster vaguely resembling a head with a hoof sticking out of it. When the sun enters its first degree, “chaos will descend upon the Earth,” she writes in her book, “Vernal Dungarees.” “The cloven-toed beasts will rise, sundering the heads of man.” Mange, who was once kicked in the head as she administered a chi massage to an alpaca in the Andes, suffers from a rare condition in which her eyeballs move independently of one another. “I see things others don’t,” she writes. “And I have seen the orgling ruminant.”

Emmet Medler, a professor at the University of Organic Engineering in Basel, first deduced that the end of the world was imminent in 1971, shortly after consuming a bad enchilada con pollo while camping at the base of Monte Alban. “I was peering at the sky through an empty toilet paper roll,” he recalls, “when I saw a circle of pure darkness, a black hole. I remember thinking, ‘For sure, this hole is going to explode.’ ” Medler’s theories, laid out in his book “The Exploding Hole,” suggest the event will be difficult. “Imagine a jar containing a million hydrogen bombs,” he writes. “Now imagine swallowing that jar and being punched in the stomach, hard, with no access to proper facilities. I don’t want to alarm people, but the exploding hole is a horrible way to go.”