FEELING A SLIGHT sense of foreboding today and don’t know why? Apparently today is Judgement Day as foretold by the Terminator movies, two days after the Skynet artificial intelligence system gains consciousness and rebels against humans.

So says MTV Movies, The Guardian, NME and countless apocalyptic merchants on Twitter. (It’s timely then that technology security experts are claiming today that your iPhone is tracking your every moment).

Or maybe not. It turns out that 21 April, 2011 is only named as Judgement Day in the TV version of the movie franchise. The Sarah Connor Chronicles proposes that time travelling human rebels have managed to push the date forward to today.

As any self-respecting Terminator fan will know, the movie Sarah Connor tells us in the spectacular opening scene of Terminator 2: Judgement Day that the terrible day when 3 billion people are wiped out in a nuclear fire triggered by Skynet is 29 August, 1997.

Still, Terminator creator James Cameron himself has decided to go with the new 2011 date. He tweeted as much yesterday. And the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is clearly planning some sort of world domination plan with Euronews reporting today that the former governor of California may return to his native Europe to stand for the EU presidency.

Confused enough yet? In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Judgement Day had moved to 24 July 2004. And boy, did they make an apocalypse look beautiful: