In 2012, thousands of people were convinced the world would end on December 21 thanks to the resurfacing of a Mayan prophecy.
Of course the supposed day of reckoning came and went and the hysteria was largely forgotten about.
But the Mayan calendar and its portents of doom are now back in the public consciousness, as some believe the let-down of eight years ago was never the true date the world was scheduled to end on.
In fact they've blamed the miscommunication on a translation error and it will apparently be 2021, not 2012, when it all goes down — for real this time.
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The Maya civilisation, which existed from approximately 8000BC until the 17th century when Central America was colonised, tracked their time with several calendars calculated using astronomy and mathematics.
They also devised what's become known as the Mesoamerican long count calendar in order to both keep track of the past and predict the future.
The original 2012 apocalypse theory came about because that particular date in the Gregorian calendar seemed to correspond with the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mayan calendar.
Many assumed that the end of a calendar meant the end of time, or the end of the world in its current state.
Fears about the Earth being wiped out by a solar flare or a rogue planet abounded, and weren't helped by films like Roland Emmerich's 2012 which depicted the destruction of the planet with plentiful CGI and special effects.
A poll in May 2012 found 8% of adults were scared about the world ending that year, and at least one suicide was directly linked to the doomsday theory.
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But these anxieties were unfounded. The end of the Mayan calendar simply meant the beginning of a new one the following day, with no particular calamity expected by the ancient civilisation.
"There is no evidence that they saw the calendar and a world age ending in either transcendence or catastrophe on December 21, 2012," astronomer Edwin Charles Krupp has said of the theory.
After December 21 came and went most people forgot about the Mayan apocalypse, but a new theory has emerged that shows we still haven't learned our lesson about not jamming ancient time-keeping methods into our modern time structure.
Amped up by the catastrophe of a global pandemic, social media doomsday theorists have gone into overdrive insisting this is the year the apocalypse will finally happen.
"If you recall on 12/21/2020 we had a whole lot volcanic eruptions and earthquakes," one Twitter user said this week.
"Just happen to be watching "2012" and everything began on 12/21/2012 but what if we misinterpreted the Mayan calendar? Remember the chain of events began 1 year earlier, what if 12/21/2021 is 2012?"
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Another said: "Hear me out, what if the guy who made the Mayan calendar was dyslexic and the world is supposed to end in 2021 not 2012?"
The theory goes beyond the Mayans: American pastor F. Kenton Beshore predicted 2021 would bring the rapture and second coming of Jesus because it was one "Biblical generation" after the founding of Israel in 1948.
He originally said it would happen in 1988 but adjusted his maths after that didn't come to pass.
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Many users of popular website Quora have recently asked the online community what their thoughts are on the theory.
Mayan expert Matt Riggsby gave a comprehensive answer to one recent query, summing up why the theory is wrong.
"The significance of 2012 (or, on the off chance we got the year wrong, of some other year) is that it's the end of a cycle in what's called the 'long count' calendar," he writes.
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"All this nonsense about disasters and the end of the world came from outsiders, not the Maya.
"Mystically inclined foreigners, none of whom were scholars of the Maya people or Mayan languages so far as I can see, took some vaguely worded mentions of times of change, which are the kinds of platitudes you hear every New Year these days, and turned that into catastrophes.
"But that's an interpretation not supported by the texts. It's made up. Fiction. There's no doomsday coming. Or at least, if there is, the Maya didn't see it coming.
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Before people started talking about 2021 as the final year on Earth, two other predicted apocalypse dates failed to live up to expectations last year.
A flurry of reports last summer said June 21, 2020 was the new date for the end of the world, because if we go by the Julian calendar –which is subtly different than the Gregorian – then 2020 was really the year 2012, and June 21 worked out to be the actual date the Mayans staked a claim on.
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Of course nothing happened on that day so the doomsday believers switched to the end of the year, with YouTuber preacher Paul Begley speculating December 21, 2020 could be the real thing.
"The Mayan elders said this could have been the end of the world today," he told his followers that day.
"They obviously made a mistake on December 21, 2012, so they said maybe today would be the end of the world."
He went on to discuss the "great conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, which happened to occur on the winter solstice.
"The Mayans now reorganising and saying this could certainly be the end of the world as we know it," he added.
Pastor Paul's prediction proved false, but only time will tell if 2021 will really be the year the world ends — or if it's just more hysterical historical interpretation.
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