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that is one fucked up guy!
---------------------------------------------------
The Flat-out Truth:
Earth Orbits? Moon Landings?
A Fraud! Says This Prophet
The idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses,
Columbus, and FDR all fought...
Copyright 1980 Robert J. Schadewald
Reprinted from Science Digest, July 1980
"The facts are simple," says Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research
Society. "The earth is flat."
As you stand in his front yard, it is hard to argue the point. From among the Joshua trees, creosote
bushes, and tumbleweeds surrounding his southern California hillside home, you have a spectacular view
of the Mojave Desert. It looks as flat as a pool table. Nearly 20 miles to the west lies the small city of
Lancaster; you can see right over it. Beyond Lancaster, 20 more miles as the cueball rolls, the Tehachepi
Mountains rise up from the desert floor. Los Angeles is not far to the south.
Near Lancaster, you see the Rockwell International plant where the Space Shuttle was built. To the north,
beyond the next hill, lies Edwards Air Force Base, where the Shuttle was tested. There, also, the Shuttle
will land when it returns from orbiting the earth. (At least, that's NASA's story.)
"You can't orbit a flat earth," says Mr. Johnson. "The Space Shuttle
is a joke--and a very ludicrous joke."
His soft voice carries conviction, for Charles Johnson is on the
level. He believes that the main purpose of the space program is to
prop up a dying myth--the myth that the earth is a globe.
"Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world," he
contends. "The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I'd
say that the dome of heaven is about 4,000 miles away, and the
stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston."
As shown in a map published by Johnson, the known world is as
circular and as flat as a phonograph record. The North Pole is at the
center. At the outer edge lies the southern ice, reputed to be a wall
150 feet high; no one has ever crossed it, and therefore what lies
beyond is unknown.
The sun and moon, in the Johnson version, are only about 32 miles in diameter. They circle above the
earth in the vicinity of the equator, and their apparent rising and setting are tricks of perspective, like
railroad tracks that appear to meet in the distance. The moon shines by its own light and is not eclipsed by
the earth. Rather, lunar eclipses are caused by an unseen dark body occasionally passing in front of the
moon.
Johnson's beliefs are firmly grounded in the Bible. Many verses of the Old Testament imply that the earth
is flat, but there's more to it than that. According to the New Testament, Jesus ascended up into heaven.
"The whole point of the Copernican theory is to get rid of Jesus by saying there is no up and no down,"
declares Johnson. "The spinning ball thing just makes the whole Bible a big joke."
Not the Bible but Johnson's own common sense allowed him to see through the globe myth while he was
still in grade school. He contends that sensible people all over the world, not just Bible believers, realize
that the earth really is flat.
"Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common sense," he says, "they don't believe idiotic
things such as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized
that the earth is flat."
He pauses for a sip of coffee, his eyes sparkling with animation. At 56, Charles Johnson is a bearded,
distinguished-looking man who drinks coffee seemingly by the gallon. He chain-smokes, hand-rolling
cigarettes so skillfully that they seem factory made. Unlike the stereotypical prophet, he has a wry sense of
humor and a booming laugh. Fond of plays on words, he consistently pronounces Nicolaus Koppernigk's
Latinized surname as "co-pernicious."
The Flat Earth Society's presidency descended upon Charles Johnson in accord with the last wishes of its
founder, Samuel Shenton, an Englishman who died in 1971. The society, which will round out a
quarter-century next year, is a spiritual inheritor of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in
England in the last century.
The cosmos of the Zetetics.
Picture © 1992 by Robert Schadewald.
Under Johnson's full-time presidency, the society's paid-up membership has grown from a few persons to
a few hundred. Membership is open to anyone who is regarded as sincerely seeking the truth; prospective
members must sign a statement agreeing never to defame the society. Part of the $10 annual dues pays for
a subscription to the Flat Earth News, a marvelously outspoken four-page tabloid quarterly with an
editorial style reminiscent of 19th-century rural journalism.
Johnson's office is barely controlled chaos. Books, papers, and files are everywhere; his desk is covered
with correspondence. The flow of letters, still increasing, now runs around 2,000 a year, or a half-dozen
every day. Some are properly addressed (Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93534), but he receives any mail that
reaches Lancaster with "flat-earth" on it. And such letters sometimes come from the far edges of the world
(an expression which Johnson and his membership accept quite literally). Rummaging in a box on the
floor, Johnson produces inquiries from Saudi Arabia, Iran, India.
"Everybody who writes gets an answer," he reports. "An application or whatever is called for. We serve
our purpose in keeping it alive. Whosoever asks, receives." The "we" includes his wife, Marjory, who is a
native of Australia. The Johnsons met by chance in 1959, when they both went into a San Francisco store
to buy the same record, Acker Bilk's haunting "Stranger on the Shore." They discovered that they had
more in common than their tastes in music. They're both vegetarians, for one thing, but the overriding
interest is geography
"Marjory has always known that the earth is flat, too," says Charles Johnson. "As far as she knew,
everybody in Australia knew it. She was rather shocked when she arrived here and found people speaking
of Australia as being 'down under.' It really offended her. She would get in quite heated arguments with
people who seemed to accuse her of coming from down under the world." Ultimately, Marjory Johnson
swore in an affidavit that she had never hung by her feet in Australia.
As secretary of the Flat Earth Society, she assists in running it, and writes a regular column in the News.
She has also helped her husband perform experiments to determine the earth's shape. If it is a sphere, the
surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe
and the Salton Sea (a shallow salt lake in southern California near the Mexican border) without detecting
any curvature.
Their home is a half-mile from the nearest neighbor. Friends drop by now and then, but their primary
companions are a half-dozen dogs, several cats, a flock of chickens, and a myriad of sparrows roosting in
a Joshua tree just outside the door. No electric-power line runs to the house, for which water must be
carried up the hill. The physical isolation is the ultimate in privacy--but another kind of isolation proves to
be less desirable.
"We're two witnesses against the whole world," observes Charles Johnson. "We've chosen that path, but it
isolates us from everyone. We're not complaining; it has to be. But it does kind of get to you sometimes."
In spite of the loneliness and the frustrations, they press on. Charles Johnson claims that most of the
people who shaped our modern world were flat-earthers, and some of them didn't have it easy, either.
You weren't aware that flat-earthers have played an important part in history? Well, conventional
histories don't make that clear. But inasmuch as revisionist history is in vogue, Charles Johnson should be
recognized as one of the leading practitioners.
"Moses was a flat-earther," he reveals. "The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1492 B.C., when Moses led
the children of Israel out of Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai."
Conventional biblical chronology dates the Ten Commandments to 1491 B.C., but it may be imprecise.
Perhaps Johnson prefers 1492 for the symmetry. It was, after all, in 1492 A.D. that another famous
flat-earther made history.
Have you heard the story about Columbus's problems with his crew? As some tell it, the crew nearly
mutinied because they regarded the earth as flat, and feared they might sail off its edge.
"It was exactly the reverse," explains Johnson. "There was a dispute out on the ship, but it was because
Columbus was a flat-earther. The others believed the earth to be a ball, and they just knew that they were
falling over the edge and couldn't get back. Columbus had to put them in irons and beat them until he
convinced them they weren't going over any curve, and they could return. He finally calmed them down."
Johnson believes that the ball business--though it goes back to the Greek philosophers--really got rolling
after the Protestant Reformation.
"It's the Church of England that's taught that the world is a ball," he argues. "George Washington, on the
other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions." If Johnson is
right, the American Revolution failed. No prominent American politician is known to have publicly
endorsed the flat-earth theory in the past two centuries. Nevertheless, Johnson contends that this nearly
happened right after World War II, not for the U.S. alone, but for the entire world. Consider the United
Nations:
"Uncle Joe (Stalin), Churchill, and Roosevelt laid the master plan to
bring in the New Age under the United Nations," Johnson discloses
with confidence. "The world ruling power was to be right here in
this country. After the war, the world would be declared flat and
Roosevelt would be elected first president of the world. When the
UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco, they took the flat-earth
map as their symbol."
Why declare the world flat? Johnson responds that a prophesied
condition for world government (Isaiah 60:20) is that the "sun shall
no more go down." This could be fulfilled by admitting that sunrise
and sunset are optical illusions. The UN did adopt for its official
seal a world map identical with the one on Johnson's office wall.
But Franklin Roosevelt died coincident with the UN's birth, and the other imminent events described by
Johnson never came about.
What did happen, according to conventional historians, was that Russia and the U.S. began space
programs. After the Russians sent up Sputnik in 1957, the space race was on in earnest. The high point
came in 1969, when the U.S. landed men on the moon.
That, according to Johnson, is nonsense, because the moon landings were faked by Hollywood studios.
He even names the man who wrote the scripts: the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. But he
acknowledges that the moon landings were at least partly successful.
"Until then," he says, "almost no one seriously considered the world a ball. The landings converted a few
of them, but many are coming back now and getting off of it."
Perhaps the Space Shuttle is intended to bolster the beliefs of these backsliders. Whatever its purpose,
Johnson is convinced that it is not intended to actually fly. Because it was built and tested almost in his
back yard, he knows many people who worked on it. What they've told him about some aspects of its
construction only reinforces his convictions.
"They moved it across the field," he sneers, "and it almost fell apart. All those little side pieces are on with
epoxy, and half fell off!"
The Shuttle had other problems besides heat resistant tiles that wouldn't stick. For instance, when the
testers tried to mount it on a 747 for its first piggy-back test flight, it wouldn't fit.
"Can you imagine that?" chortles Johnson. "Millions of dollars they spent, and it wouldn't fit! They had to
call in a handyman to drill some new holes to make the thing fit. Then they took it up in the air--and some
more of it fell to pieces."
If the Shuttle ever does orbit on its own, it's supposed to return to Edwards Air Force Base. To Johnson,
that's appropriate enough.
"Do you know what they're doing at Edwards right now?" he asks. "'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' is
made right where they claim they're going to land the Shuttle. Edwards is strictly a science-fiction base
now.
"Buck is a much better science program, considerably more authentic. In fact, I recommend that the
government get out of the space business and turn the whole thing over to ABC, CBS, and NBC. The tv
networks do a far superior job. They could actually pay the government for rights, and it wouldn't cost the
taxpayers a penny."
Flat Earth Society members are working actively to bring the Shuttle charade to an end. They hope to
force the government to let the public in on what the power elite has known all along: the plane truth.
"When the United States declares the earth is flat," says Charles Johnson, "and we hope to be instrumental
in making it do so, it will be the first nation in all recorded history to be known as a flat-earth nation.
"In the old days, people believed the earth was flat, because it's logical, but they didn't have a picture of
the way it was, as we have today. Our concept of the world is new.
"Marjory and I are the avant garde. We're way ahead of the pack."
that is one fucked up guy!
---------------------------------------------------
The Flat-out Truth:
Earth Orbits? Moon Landings?
A Fraud! Says This Prophet
The idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses,
Columbus, and FDR all fought...
Copyright 1980 Robert J. Schadewald
Reprinted from Science Digest, July 1980
"The facts are simple," says Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research
Society. "The earth is flat."
As you stand in his front yard, it is hard to argue the point. From among the Joshua trees, creosote
bushes, and tumbleweeds surrounding his southern California hillside home, you have a spectacular view
of the Mojave Desert. It looks as flat as a pool table. Nearly 20 miles to the west lies the small city of
Lancaster; you can see right over it. Beyond Lancaster, 20 more miles as the cueball rolls, the Tehachepi
Mountains rise up from the desert floor. Los Angeles is not far to the south.
Near Lancaster, you see the Rockwell International plant where the Space Shuttle was built. To the north,
beyond the next hill, lies Edwards Air Force Base, where the Shuttle was tested. There, also, the Shuttle
will land when it returns from orbiting the earth. (At least, that's NASA's story.)
"You can't orbit a flat earth," says Mr. Johnson. "The Space Shuttle
is a joke--and a very ludicrous joke."
His soft voice carries conviction, for Charles Johnson is on the
level. He believes that the main purpose of the space program is to
prop up a dying myth--the myth that the earth is a globe.
"Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world," he
contends. "The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I'd
say that the dome of heaven is about 4,000 miles away, and the
stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston."
As shown in a map published by Johnson, the known world is as
circular and as flat as a phonograph record. The North Pole is at the
center. At the outer edge lies the southern ice, reputed to be a wall
150 feet high; no one has ever crossed it, and therefore what lies
beyond is unknown.
The sun and moon, in the Johnson version, are only about 32 miles in diameter. They circle above the
earth in the vicinity of the equator, and their apparent rising and setting are tricks of perspective, like
railroad tracks that appear to meet in the distance. The moon shines by its own light and is not eclipsed by
the earth. Rather, lunar eclipses are caused by an unseen dark body occasionally passing in front of the
moon.
Johnson's beliefs are firmly grounded in the Bible. Many verses of the Old Testament imply that the earth
is flat, but there's more to it than that. According to the New Testament, Jesus ascended up into heaven.
"The whole point of the Copernican theory is to get rid of Jesus by saying there is no up and no down,"
declares Johnson. "The spinning ball thing just makes the whole Bible a big joke."
Not the Bible but Johnson's own common sense allowed him to see through the globe myth while he was
still in grade school. He contends that sensible people all over the world, not just Bible believers, realize
that the earth really is flat.
"Wherever you find people with a great reservoir of common sense," he says, "they don't believe idiotic
things such as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized
that the earth is flat."
He pauses for a sip of coffee, his eyes sparkling with animation. At 56, Charles Johnson is a bearded,
distinguished-looking man who drinks coffee seemingly by the gallon. He chain-smokes, hand-rolling
cigarettes so skillfully that they seem factory made. Unlike the stereotypical prophet, he has a wry sense of
humor and a booming laugh. Fond of plays on words, he consistently pronounces Nicolaus Koppernigk's
Latinized surname as "co-pernicious."
The Flat Earth Society's presidency descended upon Charles Johnson in accord with the last wishes of its
founder, Samuel Shenton, an Englishman who died in 1971. The society, which will round out a
quarter-century next year, is a spiritual inheritor of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in
England in the last century.
The cosmos of the Zetetics.
Picture © 1992 by Robert Schadewald.
Under Johnson's full-time presidency, the society's paid-up membership has grown from a few persons to
a few hundred. Membership is open to anyone who is regarded as sincerely seeking the truth; prospective
members must sign a statement agreeing never to defame the society. Part of the $10 annual dues pays for
a subscription to the Flat Earth News, a marvelously outspoken four-page tabloid quarterly with an
editorial style reminiscent of 19th-century rural journalism.
Johnson's office is barely controlled chaos. Books, papers, and files are everywhere; his desk is covered
with correspondence. The flow of letters, still increasing, now runs around 2,000 a year, or a half-dozen
every day. Some are properly addressed (Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93534), but he receives any mail that
reaches Lancaster with "flat-earth" on it. And such letters sometimes come from the far edges of the world
(an expression which Johnson and his membership accept quite literally). Rummaging in a box on the
floor, Johnson produces inquiries from Saudi Arabia, Iran, India.
"Everybody who writes gets an answer," he reports. "An application or whatever is called for. We serve
our purpose in keeping it alive. Whosoever asks, receives." The "we" includes his wife, Marjory, who is a
native of Australia. The Johnsons met by chance in 1959, when they both went into a San Francisco store
to buy the same record, Acker Bilk's haunting "Stranger on the Shore." They discovered that they had
more in common than their tastes in music. They're both vegetarians, for one thing, but the overriding
interest is geography
"Marjory has always known that the earth is flat, too," says Charles Johnson. "As far as she knew,
everybody in Australia knew it. She was rather shocked when she arrived here and found people speaking
of Australia as being 'down under.' It really offended her. She would get in quite heated arguments with
people who seemed to accuse her of coming from down under the world." Ultimately, Marjory Johnson
swore in an affidavit that she had never hung by her feet in Australia.
As secretary of the Flat Earth Society, she assists in running it, and writes a regular column in the News.
She has also helped her husband perform experiments to determine the earth's shape. If it is a sphere, the
surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe
and the Salton Sea (a shallow salt lake in southern California near the Mexican border) without detecting
any curvature.
Their home is a half-mile from the nearest neighbor. Friends drop by now and then, but their primary
companions are a half-dozen dogs, several cats, a flock of chickens, and a myriad of sparrows roosting in
a Joshua tree just outside the door. No electric-power line runs to the house, for which water must be
carried up the hill. The physical isolation is the ultimate in privacy--but another kind of isolation proves to
be less desirable.
"We're two witnesses against the whole world," observes Charles Johnson. "We've chosen that path, but it
isolates us from everyone. We're not complaining; it has to be. But it does kind of get to you sometimes."
In spite of the loneliness and the frustrations, they press on. Charles Johnson claims that most of the
people who shaped our modern world were flat-earthers, and some of them didn't have it easy, either.
You weren't aware that flat-earthers have played an important part in history? Well, conventional
histories don't make that clear. But inasmuch as revisionist history is in vogue, Charles Johnson should be
recognized as one of the leading practitioners.
"Moses was a flat-earther," he reveals. "The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1492 B.C., when Moses led
the children of Israel out of Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai."
Conventional biblical chronology dates the Ten Commandments to 1491 B.C., but it may be imprecise.
Perhaps Johnson prefers 1492 for the symmetry. It was, after all, in 1492 A.D. that another famous
flat-earther made history.
Have you heard the story about Columbus's problems with his crew? As some tell it, the crew nearly
mutinied because they regarded the earth as flat, and feared they might sail off its edge.
"It was exactly the reverse," explains Johnson. "There was a dispute out on the ship, but it was because
Columbus was a flat-earther. The others believed the earth to be a ball, and they just knew that they were
falling over the edge and couldn't get back. Columbus had to put them in irons and beat them until he
convinced them they weren't going over any curve, and they could return. He finally calmed them down."
Johnson believes that the ball business--though it goes back to the Greek philosophers--really got rolling
after the Protestant Reformation.
"It's the Church of England that's taught that the world is a ball," he argues. "George Washington, on the
other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions." If Johnson is
right, the American Revolution failed. No prominent American politician is known to have publicly
endorsed the flat-earth theory in the past two centuries. Nevertheless, Johnson contends that this nearly
happened right after World War II, not for the U.S. alone, but for the entire world. Consider the United
Nations:
"Uncle Joe (Stalin), Churchill, and Roosevelt laid the master plan to
bring in the New Age under the United Nations," Johnson discloses
with confidence. "The world ruling power was to be right here in
this country. After the war, the world would be declared flat and
Roosevelt would be elected first president of the world. When the
UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco, they took the flat-earth
map as their symbol."
Why declare the world flat? Johnson responds that a prophesied
condition for world government (Isaiah 60:20) is that the "sun shall
no more go down." This could be fulfilled by admitting that sunrise
and sunset are optical illusions. The UN did adopt for its official
seal a world map identical with the one on Johnson's office wall.
But Franklin Roosevelt died coincident with the UN's birth, and the other imminent events described by
Johnson never came about.
What did happen, according to conventional historians, was that Russia and the U.S. began space
programs. After the Russians sent up Sputnik in 1957, the space race was on in earnest. The high point
came in 1969, when the U.S. landed men on the moon.
That, according to Johnson, is nonsense, because the moon landings were faked by Hollywood studios.
He even names the man who wrote the scripts: the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. But he
acknowledges that the moon landings were at least partly successful.
"Until then," he says, "almost no one seriously considered the world a ball. The landings converted a few
of them, but many are coming back now and getting off of it."
Perhaps the Space Shuttle is intended to bolster the beliefs of these backsliders. Whatever its purpose,
Johnson is convinced that it is not intended to actually fly. Because it was built and tested almost in his
back yard, he knows many people who worked on it. What they've told him about some aspects of its
construction only reinforces his convictions.
"They moved it across the field," he sneers, "and it almost fell apart. All those little side pieces are on with
epoxy, and half fell off!"
The Shuttle had other problems besides heat resistant tiles that wouldn't stick. For instance, when the
testers tried to mount it on a 747 for its first piggy-back test flight, it wouldn't fit.
"Can you imagine that?" chortles Johnson. "Millions of dollars they spent, and it wouldn't fit! They had to
call in a handyman to drill some new holes to make the thing fit. Then they took it up in the air--and some
more of it fell to pieces."
If the Shuttle ever does orbit on its own, it's supposed to return to Edwards Air Force Base. To Johnson,
that's appropriate enough.
"Do you know what they're doing at Edwards right now?" he asks. "'Buck Rogers in the 25th Century' is
made right where they claim they're going to land the Shuttle. Edwards is strictly a science-fiction base
now.
"Buck is a much better science program, considerably more authentic. In fact, I recommend that the
government get out of the space business and turn the whole thing over to ABC, CBS, and NBC. The tv
networks do a far superior job. They could actually pay the government for rights, and it wouldn't cost the
taxpayers a penny."
Flat Earth Society members are working actively to bring the Shuttle charade to an end. They hope to
force the government to let the public in on what the power elite has known all along: the plane truth.
"When the United States declares the earth is flat," says Charles Johnson, "and we hope to be instrumental
in making it do so, it will be the first nation in all recorded history to be known as a flat-earth nation.
"In the old days, people believed the earth was flat, because it's logical, but they didn't have a picture of
the way it was, as we have today. Our concept of the world is new.
"Marjory and I are the avant garde. We're way ahead of the pack."
