LANGDON, N.H. — The owner of a business who claimed he would provide atheist rescuers for Christians’ pets left behind in the Rapture now says his service was an elaborate hoax and never had any clients.
Bart Centre, who lives in New Hampshire, came clean after the state Insurance Department delivered a subpoena because he appeared to be engaged in “unauthorized business of insurance” through his Eternal Earth-Bound Pets business.
“Eternal Earth-Bound Pets employs no paid rescuers,” Bart Centre wrote in a blog post March 16. “It has no clients. It has never issued a service certificate. It has accepted no service contract applications nor received any payments — not a single dollar — in the almost three years of its existence.”
Centre’s business was reported widely by Religion News Service (RNS), NPR, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, CBS News, the British Broadcasting Corp., Bloomberg Businessweek, The Huffington Post and other media outlets in the past year.
The subpoena, a copy of which Centre provided to RNS, requests a March 29 meeting and copies of applications for “‘Rapture’ coverage.” Richard McCaffrey, the compliance and enforcement counsel who delivered the subpoena, said the subpoena could be withdrawn but the investigation is continuing because of what he considers Centre’s contradictory remarks. “He was either lying to the newspapers or he’s lying now,” McCaffrey said.
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