Judging by the amount of news coverage it generated throughout 2012, you would’ve thought the Mayan apocalypse paranoia was the next Y2K. You may have known a few people who took the Y2K threat way too seriously. But if you’re like me, most of your acquaintances had a reasonable degree of concern but weren’t expecting the world to go Mad Max. As for the 2012 Mayan Calendar End Times paranoia, though, I don’t know a single person who gave this even the slightest shred of credence. Of course, this is aided by the fact that I don’t have any insane people in my immediate circle. So, was all the news coverage just pandering to the silliness of the idea as a whole and thus became a self-propagating cycle? Or was there a not-insignificant number of people who actually thought John Cusack had it right and we’d be done for once December rolled around?
I have absolutely no doubt some people believed it.
WARNING – ANECDOTE:
My mother honestly believes (because she saw it on the internet/ the TV) that cut up onions placed in various locations around the house will prevent her from getting the flu, AND that the Vatican is likely covering up alien spacecraft landings.
I wish to God I was making this up.
Let me just say about the Y2K business. It was the people who took it “way too seriously” who prevented it from being serious. Some of them, anyway.
As for the original question, I certainly don’t know anyone who did anything but laugh. But I saw a Mayan exhibit at the Musee de la Civilization in Hull, QC that went to some effort to debunk it. So someone must have taken it seriously. All kind of nuts around.
I frequent a forum where many people not only took it seriously, but were disappointed that nothing happened.
The Mayans?
Nope, they flat out denounced it sometime last year.
It was all just a mistranslation!
The Mayans were actually trying to warn us of the Alpacalypse, a supposed event in which too many alpacas being shorn at once created a crash in the price of scarves and those silly hats with the cords hanging from the earflaps.
It turned out we missed the Alpacalypse after all – but it was a close shave.
I believe that our own kanicbird is convinced that something happened, but us non-believers didn’t notice. This is not snark, this is from his (His, right, not hers??) posts.
I believe there are some news sources that said Nancy Lanza was arming her house, and training her two sons in the use of weapons, in case of a panic bought on by the Mayan apocalypse, although they may just be conjecturing. After Adam’s rampage, I began to hear a change in the what was coming out regarding the Mayan apocalypse – that it wasn’t discovered by calculating from the Mayan Long Count calendar, but was a vision some US authors had while doing the drug-induced spirit quest … and it was always meant to be a world-wide spiritual change and never an apocalypse. And that on the Dec. 21st they were “feeling it.” So, if you were looking for someone to go crazy … well, we got at least one.
NASA got more than 2,000 emails about it, some of which were painfully desperate.
Because you can’t put it on the Internet if it isn’t true. 
Every calendar has to end!!! It doesn’t mean the world will end as well. People!!!
I swear on my eyes, when I tried to convince her otherwise about the onions she said “It’s on the internet!”
Reported by various news agencies… apparently a town in France was overcrowded with visitors because that specific town was supposed to be a safe haven.
I knew people who believed it. Not because of the Mayans, but because some “scientist” on TV somewhere said the Mayan calendar ending correlated with the magnetic poles switching, or Planet X approaching, or some such nonsense.
Funny enough, this was all in 2011 or before. This past year all those people got on the bandwagon of ridiculing the apocalypse believers. I don’t know what caused them to change their minds, but I saw very little apocalypse belief in 2012.
Look, folks, it’s not the end of the world if the Mayans were wrong.
Yeah, but those people prevented the problems way before the news reported that it might be a problem. For example, the father of one of my college roommates was in charge of Y2K upgrades at a nuclear power plant, and completed the work in 1996. That didn’t stop the press from reporting in 1999 that the power plants might melt down.
Who knew that the Mayans were such Francophiles?
Since much of this will be anecdotal, let’s move it over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Absolutely. I read it on the internet.
More topically, when the subject came up during December, I generally pointed out that I owned a calendar that ends on December 31, 2012. Did the people who made that calendar expect the world to end that day? No, they expected me to have bought a new calendar by then. I had a lot of people react to this line of logic with some variant of “Huh, I never thought about it like that.”