A mountain looming over a French commune with a population of just 200 is being touted as a modern Noah's Ark when doomsday arrives - supposedly less than nine months from now. A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers - or esoterics, as locals call them - have descended in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach. They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age. For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which, at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbires mountain range, possesses an eery power. Often called the upside-down mountain" - geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up. Since the 1960s, it has attracted New Agers, who insist that it emits special magnetic waves. Further, rumours persist that the country's late president Franois Mitterrand was transported by helicopter on to the peak, while the Nazis, and, later, Israel's Mossad, performed mysterious digs there. A grizzled man wearing a white linen smock, who calls himself Jean, set up a yurt in the forest a couple of years ago to prepare for the earth's demise. "The apocalypse we believe in is the end of a certain world and the beginning of another," he offers. "A new spiritual world. The year 2012 is the end of a cycle of suffering. Bugarach is one of the major chakras of the earth, a place devoted to welcoming the energies of tomorrow."