‘Late Great Planet Earth’ Author Hal Lindsey Dies at 95

Staff Writer

Hal Lindsey, the TV host, evangelist, and author of the infamous book The Late Great Planet Earth, passed away on November 25, 2024, at the age of 95.

Born in Houston in 1929, Lindsey became a household name after releasing The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970, which sold more than 36 million copies and became the most read book of the decade by Christians and non-Christians alike, even having a film about it narrated by Orson Welles.

Here, he popularized dispensational premillennialism with a doomsday bent, tying modern events to biblical ancient prophecy and scaring the hell out of the masses while doing so.

This teaching was his bread and butter, along with making apocalyptic predictions that never came to pass despite being based on “clear bible prophecies.” For example, in a message given in 1979, he predicted an all-out nuclear war before 1989, an invasion of Israel by Russia, the world running out of raw materials before 1990, and the meltdown of major nuclear power plants and the destruction of the nation’s damns in 1982. He also told folks that the rapture was at hand and would occur in their lifetimes.

In short: he was a notorious bible prophecy teacher whose prophecies and predictions never came to pass.

He would later write 30 more books, including the sequel The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon which furiously hinted and suggested that Jesus would return in 1988, coming as close as possible to setting the date without ever definitely doing so.

He spent the next 40 years of his life collecting wives (he was on his fourth when he passed away) and making an astonishing amount of false prophecies and predictions that never came to pass. One reader described him this way:

Every 3 years, Hal Lindsey writes a new book denoting how the world will end in 5 years. Each subsequent book explains how he WASN’T wrong in the previous book and the world will really end in 5 years. . . . He has followed this pattern for 3 decades and is now acknowledged as “the foremost authority on Biblical prophecy in the world today.”

Along with his books, he spent years sharing his message on his broadcast shows International Intelligence Briefing Read and The Hal Lindsey Report, which appeared on TBN and Daystar.