The moon will shine from noon until nine

The moon will shine from noon until nine is a phrase Dan Lafferty recounted as a private revelation in prison and later treated as a sign of Christ’s return. Its significance lies in the interpretation he built around it: he believed the sign would confirm his prophetic role as Elijah and announce the beginning of God’s thousand-year reign. The book presents the phrase not as an independently verified prophecy, but as a statement whose meaning Dan came to assert through his own religious reasoning.

The phrase and its reception

A year or two after he was incarcerated, Dan said, he was pacing in his cell in the middle of the day when he heard a voice unlike the revelations he associated with the School of the Prophets. The instruction was, “Write this down: The moon will shine from noon until nine.” He did not know what it meant at the time. Over the years he returned to the puzzling words, and said that he had only recently worked out their meaning.

The phrase’s plain, compressed form contrasts with the elaborate explanation Dan later attached to it. He could not explain how the moon would shine in daylight, and acknowledged that he did not know how the event would happen. Nevertheless, he was certain that when it did occur, it would be unmistakable. In his account, uncertainty about the mechanism did not weaken his confidence in the sign.

A sign of Dan’s prophetic role

Dan interpreted the noon-to-nine moon as the sign of Christ’s return. He also believed that God had designated him as Elijah, whose task was to tell the righteous who their Father was at the appointed moment and thereby initiate the thousand-year reign of the Kingdom of God. He said he was sure he would identify Christ when He returned. The phrase thus became more than a prediction about an unusual celestial event: in Dan’s account, it was bound to his own identity and mission.

That claimed mission also shaped Dan’s retrospective explanation of his actions. He said that taking the lives of Brenda Lafferty and Erica Lafferty had, in part, foreshadowed the prophesied day when Christ’s angels would separate those who did not belong to Him from His kingdom. Dan interpreted those angels not as heavenly beings, but as men on earth carrying out what they understood to be their Father’s work. The phrase sits within this larger apocalyptic framework, in which an anticipated sign, a personal prophetic calling, and violence he described as religious duty were made parts of a single interpretation.

Dan’s account of Ron’s attack

Dan also used his claimed role to explain why Ron Lafferty had tried to strangle him with a towel in 1984. In Dan’s interpretation, the devil had disclosed Dan’s identity as Elijah to Ron before God had disclosed it to Dan himself. Ron, Dan surmised, had therefore been instructed to kill him in order to prevent him from announcing Christ’s return. Dan connected that explanation to his belief that Christ could not return unless Elijah fulfilled his calling.

This account gives the phrase a further function in Dan’s narrative: it helps him organize both a future expectation and a past act of violence into a story about his own prophetic importance. The book records his interpretation as his belief, while leaving the promised sign and its meaning unconfirmed.