The end of the world came as Harold Camping predicted it would -- a very subtle apocalypse that many on the planet failed to notice. When the end of the world failed to happen on Camping's predicted date of May 21, he set another date in October for the end of the world.

According to Camping, the end will come very, very quietly, by Oct. 21 without any pain and suffering. And lo and behold he was right. Oct. 21 came and went and there was no pain and suffering of apocalyptic proportions, probably due to the fact that the Apocalypse failed to materialize again.

Camping shouldn't be too ashamed, he's just the latest in a long line of doomsday prophets that were rudely awakened to the reality that the world and humankind was still around. In fact from the following list of radical doomsday prophets some of them have gone on to form religions that are still around today. Here are some of the most famous failed doomsday prophecies.

1. Millerites and the end of the world in 1844

Back in 1844, New York farmer turned Baptist minister William Miller predicted the end of the world after his studies of the bible revealed that Jesus Christ would return to Earth on Oct. 22, 1844. About 50,000 people were convinced by Miller's calculations and followed Miller in his church. After said date passed without a sign of the Savior, Miller recalculated and said that 1845 was the year. Again Jesus Christ failed to RSVP Miller and the poor minister was left devastated. A small remnant of his church survives as the Seventh Day Adventists and still believes in the end of the world.

2. Jehovah's Witnesses

Perhaps the group most famous for having failed doomsday predictions are the Jehovah's Witnesses, mainly because they've predicted so many end of the world days and still kept on going. Founded by a follower of William Miller, the Jehovah's Witnesses have set the end of the world for 1874, 1914, 1918, 1920, 1925 and 1941, and all passed without the return of the Son of God. Of course the Jehovah's Witnesses weren't fazed by their repeated failures and simply attributed it to an invisible return of Jesus. Perhaps the most notorious instant of their doomsday scenario was their 1975 end of the world, which saw members selling their homes and quitting their jobs. The fallout when that end of the world didn't happen was disastrous to the church which saw massive amounts of followers leaving.

3. Heaven's gate

Heaven's Gate followers believed that the Earth was about to be recycled and that their only chance of being saved was to leave on a spaceship that rode on the tail of the Haley-Bopp comet. The followers then committed mass suicide in a mansion in Santa Fe, Calif., shocking the world and showing how far cults would take their doomsday scenarios.

4. Jeanne Dixon

Jeanne Dixon, who is best known for predicting the assassination of JFK, also predicted the end of the world in 1970.

"I have seen a comet strike our Earth around the middle of the 1980s. Earthquakes and tidal waves will befall us as a result of the tremendous impact of this heavenly body in one of our great oceans..."

The comet never materialized as did her prediction that world peace would reign in 2000.

5. Pope John XXXIII

Pope John XXIII had a private journal where he kept the accounts of his visitations from the Virgin Mary. According to him, Mary told him that there would be war in the 90's and the earth will experience massive flooding, violent earthquakes world-wide famine and global devastation. Of course since the prophecy was vague enough, all of those events could have taken place in a number of ways and they could be interpreted as events like the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan and the global economic meltdown.

Of course now that we're entering 2012 the predicted end of the world from the Mayan myths, expect another slew of end of the world predictions in the next year. Can Doomsday prophets just have T-shirts made that say "I survived the end of the world and only got this stupid shirt?" They'll make a fortune.