Is that you, Satan?

A disturbing new billboard is showing up all over the country, and people are getting very worried.

On the huge black billboards, "6 + 6 + 06" is followed by this warning: "The signs are all around you."

On Friday, Coast to Coast AM posted a photo of the billboard snapped by a listener of the paranormal radio show. "Steve" photographed the sign near Chicago.
But that's hardly the only town spooked by the creepy signage.

Dozens of people have blogged about the mysterious billboards, with many assuming the warning is the work of some fundamentalist Christian group trying to scare people by noting June 6 of this year could be written as the infamous "mark of the beast," 666.

A few sign watchers suspect the advertising campaign is just clever early marketing for some kind of scary movie that will be released on June 6 -- which falls on a Tuesday, just a day before the popular summer-blockbuster release date of Wednesday.

Those suspicions were somewhat confirmed when the same advertisement began appearing on the wildly popular MySpace web community for teenagers.

Rupert Murdoch's MySpace.com has become the ultimate marketing tool for corporations chasing teen dollars.

But it was all a mistake

666 continues to fascinate Americans, even after the number itself has been proven to be a simple typographical error passed on for nearly 2,000 years.

Born-again Christians, doom-addicted Catholics and would-be Satanists should have been devastated in May 2005 when it was revealed that the oldest recovered copy of the Book of Revelation text gives the unholy number as 616, not 666.

The papyrus copy dates to about 300 B.C.E., which made it the most ancient version of Revelation yet discovered, a whole century earlier than the previously known oldest copies of the book. (Bizarrely, Christians attacked the recently restored Gospel of Judas because it "only" dated back to 300 B.C.E.)

A form of ancient numerological code, the 616 most likely referred to Roman Emperor Caligula, whose name could be written as 616 -- and who was known then and now as a psychopathic sadist who especially enjoyed torturing the Jews.

It was Caligula's plot to put his own likeness inside the Temple of Jerusalem that firmed up his reputation in Judea in the tense years around 40 B.C.E. The mad emperor wanted the Jews to worship him, not their own god. Historians mark the outrage as the beginning of the end for Jerusalem.

Fed up with occupation and insanity, a new breed of apocalyptic Jews became popular with the increasingly bitter Jews. John the Baptist and Jesus the Nazarene were two early examples, but a steady stream of would-be messiahs preached revolution all the way to the end.

The Roman military finally destroyed the temple in 70 C.E., chasing most of the Jews away and creating yet another Diaspora. The early Jesus movement in Jerusalem believed a new kingdom would arrive in their lifetime, right there in Judea.

It didn't. It was left to later Christians to explain why Jesus didn't return as promised to rule an independent Israel. A large part of that explanation has been the heavily coded Book of Revelation, which used symbolism and numerology to bolster the faith of a now-forgotten sect of Gnostic Christians.

The mistranslated number of the beast was a disastrous typo that has wreaked havoc on thousands of apocalyptic preachers and heavy-metal album covers. But all parties simply ignored last year's archaeological proof and continued pretending the beast's number was 666.
The 616 problem was hardly unknown to biblical scholars before last year. Many scholarly translations of the New Testament have a footnote on the famous verse 13:18 that says the number could be 616 and not 666.