Supermoon Lunar Eclipse 2015
A supermoon lunar eclipse will occur Sunday, Sept. 27. Reuters

Lunar phenoms always cause a stir, and this Sunday's event -- the first supermoon total lunar eclipse in 30 years -- has prompted many prophetic declarations from all corners of the Internet. Is the rare celestial happening, sometimes called a blood moon, a sign that end times are nigh or just another astronomical event? Let's take a look at some of the more prominent doomsday scenarios associated with September's full moon.

The Blood Moon Prophecy

Promoted by John Hagee, a nondenominational pastor from Texas, this lunar eclipse prophecy has been around since 2014, when the tetrad started -- Sunday's total lunar eclipse is the last of a lunar tetrad, a series of four eclipses, occurring six months apart, that began April 15, 2014. Hagee cites a passage from Joel 2:31 in the King James Bible that he claims predicts the end of days with the arrival of a blood moon. "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord comes," reads the biblical passage.

Aiming to bolster the prophecy, Hagee said NASA had confirmed the lunar tetrad was the first in 500 years, but a quick search reveals NASA's actual stance contradicts the pastor's claim. "During the 21st century, there are 8 sets of tetrads, so I would describe tetrads as a frequent occurrence in the current pattern of lunar eclipses," Fred Espenak, NASA eclipse expert, said of the lunar tetrad in 2014. Lunar tetrads can be somewhat rare -- Espenak notes there were no lunar tetrads from 1600 to 1900 -- but it's mostly random. From 1901 to 2000, there were five lunar tetrads. The current century -- 2001 to 2100 -- will see eight lunar tetrads, according to NASA.

"The last blood moon is coming. Are you ready?" Hagee asks in a video promoting a special program titled "The Revelation of the Four Blood Moons," airing Sunday.

Mormon End Times

More recently, Mormon author Julie Rowe has made headlines regarding the upcoming supermoon lunar eclipse. September's full moon is a sign of an upcoming apocalypse, Rowe writes in several novels. And it seems some people in Utah believe the same, as they have been purchasing 72-hour emergency kits, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Doomsday prophets like Rowe and others break history up into seven-year cycles, with the last event, the stock market crash, occurring in 2008. The Jewish High Holy Days and the lunar eclipse are signs of a possible earthquake in Utah, technological disruptions and general chaos.

Mass Antelope Death

The death of 140,000 saigas -- a critically endangered species of antelopes -- in May remains unexplained by scientists and conservationists. Saiga die-offs are not uncommon -- 100,000 saigas died in 1984 and scientists observed smaller die-offs in the 2000s -- but there was little data to help scientists solve this mystery. Experts hypothesize an environmental factor could have made the saiga susceptible to bacteria such as pasteurella and clostridia, Nature reported. But some claim the saiga die-off was a sign of the apocalypse. That prophecy didn't gain a lot of traction.

Individually, a supermoon and a total lunar eclipse are not rare occurrences. But the combined supermoon lunar eclipse happens every 30 years or so. The next supermoon eclipse will happen in 2033.

Doomsday prophecies aside, Sunday's eclipse will just be a fun astronomical event. "The only thing that will happen on Earth during an eclipse is that people will wake up the next morning with neck pain because they spent the night looking up," Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.