The morning of 5 July 1998.
Nothing came. The membership had gathered at a campground in western New York and stayed up for it. The explanation offered — that the date had been printed backwards, or that Bob had sold the planet's coordinates and pocketed the fee — became the mechanism by which the date is rescheduled every year since, and the failure became the festival.
The Book of the SubGenius had fixed the arrival of the Xists for 7 a.m. on 5 July 1998, and the church sold memberships against it for fifteen years. When the morning came and nothing did, the explanations offered were in keeping: that the date had been printed backwards and the real one is 3000 years later, that Bob had sold the coordinates of the planet and pocketed the money, that the Xists had come and left unimpressed. The church did not lose members. What it did was convert the failure into the liturgy — the annual rescheduling is now the rite, and the effigy burned at dawn is the response to a god who took the money and did not deliver. It is the most functional response to a failed prophecy on record precisely because the church never needed the prophecy to be true.
The same ground, other faiths
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