No. You’re wrong, and some is everyone else who says this. Hal Lindsey specifically said in his books that we as Christian people will NOT know the exact time of The Lord’s return. He did say that the conditions of those times had remarkably similar parallels to the times of the Lord’s return as described in Scripture. It is only ill-informed people who attribute this erroneous statement to Hal Lindsey. I, for one, wish they would get their information straight.
I never said he named a date. He just artfully hedged, so as to scare Christian nervous Nellies, by saying things like “the 1980s may be the last decade before Christ’s return.” He also made much of the fact that this event “may well” happen once Israel was a generation old. When that didn’t happen, he reinterpreted the “Biblical” length of a generation. Finally, when that didn’t happen, he shifted again calculated the generation as beginning in 1967 (not 1947). When the second coming didn’t happen again after the close of that generation....well I lost track.