See The Fake End-Of-World Broadcast That Panicked SoCal

LAKE FOREST, CA — An ominous prediction that the world would end Saturday, Sept. 23 shocked southern California residents as they watched cable television.

Lake Forest Cox Cable watcher Stacy Laflamme was on her couch watching HGTV when she heard an ominous voice declare Thursday that the world was ending. The interruption came at just after 11 a.m. in the form of an onscreen emergency alert followed by a voice.

"Realize this: extremely violent times will come," a male voice said (see the YouTube video below). Laflamme told the Orange County register she was alarmed.

“It almost sounded like Hitler talking,” said another woman who was interviewed on KTLA. “It sounded like a radio broadcast coming through the television.”

Across social media, viewers said they were disturbed by the messages that interrupted everything from C-SPAN to Bravo.

“I was definitely startled, because the volume increased exponentially,” said Diamond Bar resident Erin Mireles, who was watching Spectrum Cable when her show was interrupted. “I wasn’t alarmed in the sense of thinking something was wrong, because I assumed it was some sort of hack. My channel changed back to Bravo after a couple minutes.”

According to Cox Cable spokesperson Joe Camero, the emergency broadcast happened during an emergency test being run across radio stations in the area. Camero said that cable television will "pick up such alerts" and that viewers should have just seen a normal test of the emergency broadcast system.

“With these tests, an emergency tone is sent out to initiate the test,” Camero said in the Register report. “After the tone is transmitted, another tone is sent to end the message. It appears that the radio station (or stations) did not transmit the end tone to complete the test.”

The first alert (garbled in this below video) appears to be channeling a Christian radio message regarding the last days, from II Timothy, Chapter 3, verses 1-4.

A YouTube commenter deciphered the text, which appears to be a Bible verse from II Timothy, Chapter 3: 1-4.

"in the last days, extremely violent times will come..." The speaker goes on to explain the meaning of the Bible verse he is quoting from II Timothy 3:1. After that he refers to "verse 4," (of II Timothy chapter 3) which says people will be "lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God." The theme music sounds like it was a Christian radio broadcast of a previously recorded sermon. Look up II Timothy 3:1-4 for my references.

According to another YouTuber, a second alert came across CTV shortly after the first.

The second alert (video above) was more garbled, with a voice that was either laughing or terrified.

"The space program made contact with... they are not what they claim to be... disasters are coming... the government knows about them..."

Some conspiracy theorists, such as David Meade, say this is a great time to head for the hills and that Planet X will strike the earth ending life as we know it.

NASA debunked the theory, with the asteroid watch crew saying via Twitter:

"Same hoax, different date. This particular hoax reappears every couple of months with a new date attached to it. All fake," NASA Asteroid Watch tweeted.

Cox Communications says that it was just a radio station that didn't turn off regular programming, according to Media Relations spokesperson Ceanne Guerra.

According to Cox, technicians shut down the emergency test as soon as they became aware of the problem. Both Cox and Spectrum are investigating who sent out the alert and whether it was done accidentally or on purpose. Where the audio came from, both say, is unclear.

“We have confirmed that we were fed an incorrect audio file,” said Dennis Johnson, a spokesman for Spectrum.