Students in Giles County, Virginia didn’t return to school as scheduled this week, because someone discovered a bizarre Internet rant on an obscure website dedicated to conspiracy theories, prophecies and UFOs.
The wide-ranging article — titled “The Next School Massacre Target?” — revolves primarily around a map of attack sites that appears in a scene in the most recent Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” reports Roanoke’s CBS affiliate, WDBJ.
One site is called Sandy Hook. Another is Narrows. Consequently, the author suggests, schools in Narrows, Virginia could possibly be targeted in a new school shooting.
Concerns about student safety prompted school officials in the rural Virginia county to cancel classes.
“We have to take this as serious information,” Giles County Sheriff Morgan Millirons told WDBJ.
On New Year’s Day, police issued reverse 911 calls to parents about the webpage.
“We just want to emphasize that no threat has been made to any school system here in Giles County,” Millirons added.
Millirons told WDBJ that the sheriff’s office has fielded many calls from worried parents.
“If I was a parent and did not know about this, I would be upset, and you can’t blame a parent for being upset,” he said.
Wednesday was a work day for teachers and school officials. Police presence in and around the county’s five schools was reportedly high and will remain high when students return Thursday.
“The sheriff’s gonna be at a school,” Chief Bentley Ratcliffe of the Narrows Police Department assured WDBJ.
The website, Revelation Now, has apparently been suspended.
“If you’re the owner of this website, please contact FatCow Web Hosting,” reads the flying-bovine festooned webpage.
A cached version of the page explains the author’s theory that the Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society, shrewdly announce their evil plans in popular media. In this case, the author speculates, a character in “The Dark Knight Rises” knowingly references “SANDY HOOK” on a map, 1 hour and 58 minutes into the film.
“The next strike zone on the map is ‘NARROWS’ and just on a hunch I entered ‘NARROWS SCHOOLS’ into GOOGLE Search and this is what I discovered,” coolly analyzes the author. “Narrows Elementary Middle School and Narrows High School, located in Narrows, Virginia.”
The cached webpage goes on to discuss ancient Egypt and the Mayans, the Epistle to the Ephesians in the New Testament and, of course, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
According to another cached page, Revelation Now is (or at least was) a comprehensive online community for people seeking “repressed information” that is often mystical in nature and “not robustly covered by main stream [sic] media.”