If you live in Missouri, there’s an important question for you: Do you still have stuff in your “Browning bunker?” In 1990, a climatologist named Iben Browning predicted that the hatchet-shaped New Madrid seismic fault zone had a 50/50 chance for a megaquake on the scale of the horrific seismic jolts that dismantled the area in 1811. The earthquakes were so bad that they caused the Mississippi River to flow backward. They rang church bells in Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia and could be felt as far away as Canada. Browning’s prediction — set around Dec. 3, 1990 — set off emotional and psychological quaking throughout the Mississippi Valley and beyond. All over the St. Louis area, people began supplying their Browning bunkers with bottled water, medicine, canned foods, soup packets, first-aid kits, phone books, financial records, and so on. Many out-of-state relatives urged family members in the St. Louis area to leave town, or move away for good. Browning based his forecast on weather patterns and conditions, and a good many people believed him — even though this was the same person who studied the feasibility of arming whales with hydrogen bombs and turning them into weapons. Earlier that year, he won the first Chicken Little Award of the National Anxiety Center for "scaring the daylights out of people in seven Midwestern states," providing one of the most dubious news stories of the year and demonstrating the way anyone with a Ph.D. is given free reign to create a high level of public anxiety. Needless to say, Brown’s prediction failed to come true.
