March 31: Jesus is Alive in Vancouver and Looks Just Like Abraham Lincoln

On March 31, 1998, the Christian-Buddhist leader of God's Salvation Church, a man named Hoh-Ming Chen, called a press conference to celebrate the success of his prophecy that God would physically appear that day at his church in Garland, Texas. Despite any evidence of God at the church - and despite the failure of Chen's previous prediction that God was going to make a miraculous television appearance earlier in the week - Chen claimed his own presence before reporters was the divine incarnation he and his followers had been praying for.

Prior to this press conference, Chen had claimed he would happily submit to execution if his prophecy failed. So he challenged the reporters in his church to stone him to death if they were unsatisfied with his personal apparition. He stood his ground for several minutes with no stones thrown. (It is unclear whether the reporters were provided with stones.)

In the year before this event, Chen's approximately 150 followers had begun moving from southern California to Garland, where they expected to be met by flying saucers sent from God. Since all of this was happening in the aftermath of the Heaven's Gate catastrophe (see March 26), the group was compelled to calm neighbors by stating publicly that they had no plans to commit mass suicide.

In addition to the flying saucers, other expectations of God's Salvation Church include that Jesus lives in Vancouver, and looks just like Abraham Lincoln (it is not clear whether he also dresses like Abraham Lincoln).

Chen believes the world goes through a cycle of Tribulations, from which God saves a few elect souls in a spaceship and allows them to re-seed the earth after the fires die off. One of the bigger Tribulations was fought between dinosaurs on the plain of Armageddon ten million years ago (ie, 55 million years after the dinosaurs actually went extinct. But this is not the only case in which Chen's grasp of chronology may be questioned. For instance, Chen says the solar system was formed by a nuclear war 4.5 trillion years ago - a thousand times its actual age, not to mention three orders of magnitude greater than the accepted age of the universe.).