I’ve recently come across a few online documents which claim, and hold on to your respective cloaks, daggers and feathered hats, that due to some calendar falsifications by some unknown conspirators, the misinterpretation of historical documents, and by plain accident, the early middle ages, between 614 and 911 A.D. never happened.
This is called the Phantom Time Hypothesis and was either discovered, or entirely made up by Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz and his team, who even published a scientific paper on it and has spawned quite a few followers.
For instance, a man named Heribert Illig and his group, went hunting for gaps in history, and found a few, a gap of building in Constantinople (558 AD – 908 AD) and a gap in the doctrine of faith, especially the gap in the evolution of theory and meaning of purgatory (600 AD until ca. 1100). From all of this data, they have become convinced that at some time, the calendar year was increased by 297 years without the corresponding passage of time.
The even claim that Charlemagne is a fictitious character. If so, who invented school?
Of course this theory would change a lot of things, if it were true, this would be the year 1714. The Y2K bug, that some might remember as one of the biggest non events, only surpassed by Harold Camping’s prediction of a rapture and apocalypse earlier this year, hasn’t actually happened yet, which explains why computers kept running properly, planes did not drop out of the sky and the elevators kept on ferrying people up and down their towery prisons also known as “offices”.
Speaking of the rapture, if The Phantom Time Hypothesis is indeed fact, then we’re all going to be OK for three more centuries, 297 years to be exact. Hopefully by then we’ll have developed a resistance to all the doomsayers and weird conspiracy theorists.
[…] The next full desktop version of Ubuntu is due out next spring, should be 12.04, and according to Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, will have no major changes. The full mobile versions should be released much too late, in 2014. According to the Mayans, by then, we’ll be installing it on slates of rock by using buckets of sand for storage, unless of course this guy is right. […]