- Ellijay--While others are celebrating
the new year, Richard W. Noone is fervently preparing for a new ice age.
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- Already, Noone has a two-year supply
of food, and earlier this year he sold his Florida home and moved to the
mountain town of Ellijay to avoid flooding he expects in connection with
the polar ice shift. He is scouting the North Georgia mountains for the
ideal refuge.
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- "It is the area I've chosen based
on a lot of research," Noone said. The homesite "must meet several
criteria . . . because when the food runs out at the grocery stores and
the predators move out of the city, I want to be protected. We all know
what people will do to feed their children or themselves."
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- Within the next six to seven months,
Noone plans to be secure in his new home, far from reach.
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- "Once I move from Ellijay, no one
will know where I live," he said.
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- Noone's research began long before he
made his move to Ellijay. His widely available book "5/5/2000 Ice:
The Ultimate Disaster" lays out the case for his warning that a fateful
planetary alignment on May 5, 2000, will pull the Earth's polar ice caps
into the oceans.
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- What will follow, Noone said, is a global
catastrophe marked by flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes
and climatic changes. As a result, the Earth could spill headlong into
an ice age further chilled by food shortages, eradication of modern conveniences
and a global economic collapse, he said.
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- Scientists scoff at such predictions.
"There is nothing physically significant about an alignment, as far
as the earth's geology is concerned," said nationally known astronomer
Laurence Marschall of Gettysburg College.
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- "That's absolutely silly."
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- But there are many who are as skeptical
of established science as it is of Noone, and the book has won him national
attention as one of the harbingers of what some term "Millennial Fever"--the
belief that, as the year 2000 draws near, so do apocalyptic events. It
may not have been a compliment, but The New York Times Magazine recognized
Noone's prominence in those circles in its Dec. 27 issue, when it named
him to a 29-person list of "America's millennial Chicken Littles"
and pinpointed North Georgia as one of the places where people are predicting
the unpredictable.
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- Noone has plenty of company there, says
Melodie Cunningham. During the six years she has owned her Dawsonville
health food store, she said, she has noticed a dramatic upswing in her
customers' worries about catastrophic events.
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- "I've never had so many people coming
in and wanting to know about food storage and survival," Cunningham
said. "And it's not just people who are following Richard Noone. It's
everyday people, highly educated and upscale."
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- Elizabeth Wells of Sautee in White County
said she, too, has noticed an increased interest in survivalism. A faculty
member of Greenwich University, a distance university that communicates
with its students via electronic means, Wells heads the Department of Earth
Changes.
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- "The collective consciousness is
raising," Wells said. "I think a lot of people are in a panic,
and that is one of the reasons I developed a program to teach other people
what to do. People need to be physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually
set."
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- Cunningham and her family have taken
measures to reduce their worries.
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- "We have a little cabin in the mountains
that's self-sufficient," she said.
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- Noone, too, plans to build a special
home. Central to his survival plan is an energy-efficient, dome-shaped
house featuring foot-thick walls of steel-reinforced concrete.
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- Capable of withstanding powerful tornadoes,
the home will be designed to provide the best possible protection against
the high winds, ice storms and catastrophic devastation that will result
from the ice shift, Noone said.
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- "Anyone can stockpile extra food
and water, as should be done for lesser disasters, tornadoes, hurricanes
and ice storms," Noone said. "My preference is for a home that
can withstand wind gusts of 450 mph."
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- A native of Tennessee, Noone wasn't always
so concerned about the fate of the world. As a boy, he whiled away his
days reading, swimming and traipsing across the rugged terrain of Lookout
Mountain.
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- Part of what he said is an "old
Southern legal family," Noone participated in lively debates and listened
to the courtroom stories told by his grandfather and father, both Chattanooga
attorneys.
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- "Coming from a legal family, I was
taught to be skeptical yet open-minded, and that prepared me for this task,"
he said.
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- That task--gathering research and compiling
theories--began during a road trip following his 1964 graduation from high
school. He and a friend drove along the Interamerica Highway to the Panama
Canal. While in Mexico, they passed an archaeological dig of a pyramid
complex.
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- "That piqued my interest in pyramids
and years later I began my research," Noone said.
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- During the interim, he enrolled briefly
in law school but determined that legal pursuits were not for him. He then
started an Atlanta-based company that imported wigs and jewelry. In 1975,
he sold the company and devoted his time to his studies.
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- Noone's research, however, did more to
generate questions than it did to satisfy his thirst for answers. He decided
to contact the authors of the works he had read about the field.
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- "I was naive and thought I could
call up those hot professors, and, as luck would have it, the day I called,
the secretaries were out to lunch and the experts answered the phone,"
Noone said. "They all helped me over the next seven years. I got a
multi-disciplinary education that you couldn't have bought at Harvard or
Yale."
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- Amazed by the precision with which the
pyramids seemed to be built, Noone came to the conclusion they could not
have been the work of unskilled laborers.
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- "The idea that this (pyramid) can
be built by anything less than a technologically advanced society is ludicrous,"
he said.
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- Wondering what had become of that civilization,
he conducted further research that led him to believe the pyramid-builders
had been obliterated during a catastrophic event, similar to the one he
predicts will begin 16 months from now.
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- Aware that his contentions would likely
be attacked, Noone decided to style his presentation within a legal framework.
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- "Whenever I reach a point of controversy,
where the reader is going to roll his eyes and say, 'I can't believe this,'
I pull in the expert. That way they don't argue with the author, they argue
with the expert.
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- "The facts are undeniable,"
Noone said. "I don't want people to think I am sitting up here with
a turban and a pulsating red ruby. It's 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent
perspiration. We all live on this spinning chunk of real estate and the
more we understand it, the better enabled we are to succeed."
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- Despite his documentation, his book met
with skepticism. Even his family doubted his theories.
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- "With any new discovery you are
given a horse laugh at first, but so much that's in the book has already
come true and/or been confirmed, so now they are quite proud," Noone
said.
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- Although his message seems fatalistic,
Noone is not filled with despair.
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- "The recovery of a civilization
depends on the people. The only reason mankind did not become extinct (in
previous catastrophes) is
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- because of mankind's great distribution
around the planet," he said. "There is, always in the darkest
hour, hope."
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