According to a report from the New York Daily News, Robert Fitzpatrick spent $140,000 for an ad campaign for signs on subway cars and bus shelters around the city reading "Global Earthquake! The Greatest Ever - Judgment Day: May 21." "I'm trying to warn people about what's coming," Fitzpatrick. "People who have an understanding [of end times] have an obligation to warn everyone."
Fitzpatrick told the newspaper how it will go down:
"It'll start just before midnight, Jerusalem time: It'll be instantaneous and global," he said. "There are too many scriptures talking about 'sudden destruction.'"
Fitzpatrick is obviously a big believer of evangelist Harold Camping, who claims to have calculated the date of Armageddon using clues from the Bible.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it didn't think twice about accepting Fitzpatrick's campaign.
"It's an individual's prerogative to spend their money as they see fit," said MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz.
However an atheist group said the MTA should not have allowed the ad blitz.
"Doomsday cults are money-making enterprises," said David Silverman, of the American Atheists. "I wonder what is going to happen on May 22 when people no longer have their possessions or their savings and we are all still here and they don't have their rapture."
But Fitzgerald is not worried about that. "It is the date," he stubbornly said.
