“Life is so fleeting, seems to me makes the little difference what I eat, what I wear, just feel I might make my life count…to have done something worthwhile, to be an aid in God’s creation. I can look myself in the mirror without shame, and look the world in the eye…I know I’m doing my ‘bit’, and am true to my vision, so can’t complain.” Charles K. Johnson, the Last Iconoclast
The Flat Earth News Library by Charles K. and Marjory Johnson
29 Issues of the Flat Earth Newsletters
****
from Flat Earth by Christine Garwood:
“Besides the flat earth issue, his most pressing concern during he 1990’s had been the deterioration in Marjory’s health; she had emphysema, needed a wheelchair and was dependent on supplementary oxygen to breathe. As her condition worsened, so did the couple’s situation. Johnson was watching television one Wednesday afternoon in September 1995 when he noticed that the front porch of their house was in flames.
Too fierce to control, the fire swept through their home, and although he managed to carry Marjory and their pets to safety, everything they owned-their household goods and personal possessions, the society’s library, archives and membership lists – was destroyed.
The house and it contents were not covered by insurance, and with no money to rebuild, nowhere to live and no record of their twenty- three-year mission, they moved into a dilapidated trailer next to tehsited of their former home. The episode was a substantial blow, especially to an elderly couple who had worked for years, despite financial constraints, to abide by their belierf and, moreover, were given to seeing signs and meanings, divine blessings and cursed in external events.
It seem that Marjory, Johnson’s wife of thirty-five years, never truly recovered from the shock and she died in May 1996 at the age of 75. “When the house burned with all her treasures, ” Johnson subsequently told the Boston Globe, “she gave up the will to live.”
Local authorities subsequently evicted Johnson from his trailer because it lacked the required wooden foundations or sidings. Devastated by the loss of his wife and homeless again, he moved in with his brother in nearby Lancaster. “It’s very lonely without (Marjory), he told the Boston Glove, ‘but (she) wanted to keep the work going so I’m forcing myself to go on.’
…On Monday, 19 March 2001, Johnson died at at the age of 76. He was buried in the Joshua Memorial Park on the outskirts of Lancaster, while obituaries appeared in papers from Dublin to New York to Canberra to Calgary – from all areas of the globe that he had refused to believe existed.
******
(Ed ~ Mr. Johnson appears genuinely legitimate, as does his Australian lass, Marjory. Unfortunately, it appears, or in heliocentric language, it is “apparent” – not what your really seeing that newly relaunched (2009) The Flat Earth Society website and is bunk.
FES has been co-opted and infiltrated and not what it seems. Just read this press release upon their “re-launch”. I worked in finance for 24 years and it reads exactly like a business marketing launch campaign to me. here. You can also read some debunking of FES here)
****
Reprinted from Science Digest, July 1980
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
“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.”
— The end —
Postscript: Much has changed since I wrote this article, both in the world at large and in Charles Johnson’s life. In late September 1995, the Johnsons’ venerable high-desert home caught fire. Charles managed to pull Marjory, by then a semi-invalid on supplemental oxygen, to safety, but everything else in the house was destroyed—their personal possessions, the Flat Earth Society library and archives, the membership list, everything. Having no fire insurance, the Johnsons were unable to rebuild. A dilapidated old house trailer, bought as a storage shed, survived the fire, and they took refuge there. A few months later, Marjory fell and broke a hip. She survived hip replacement surgery but never recovered her strength. On May 16, 1996, she died.
The Flat Earth Society lives on, still doing business at Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93534. Charles Johnson has immersed himself in rebuilding the membership roster. Publication of the Flat Earth News, in hiatus since 1994, will resume with the December 1996 issue.
R.J.S. (10/6/96)
Postscript: Bob Schadewald, author of this essay, died March 12, 2000 at age 57. Charles Johnson died March 19, 2001 at age 76. For nearly 30 years Charles fought the lonely and futile battle to “restore the world to sanity.”
*****
International Flat Earth Research Society known as FLAT EARTH SOCIETY
Charles K. Johnson, President
Marjory Waugh Johnson, Sec.
Telephone: (805) 727-1635
PO Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93539
Aim: To carefully observe, think freely rediscove forgotten fact and oppose theoretical dogmatic assumptions. To help establish the United States…of the the world on this flat earth. Replace the science religion…with SANITY
The International Flat Earth Society is the oldest continuous Society existing on the world today. It began with the Creation of the Creation. First the water…the face of the deep…without form or limits…just Water. Then the Land sitting in and on the Water, the Water then as now being flat and level, as is the very Nature of Water. There are, of course, mountains and valleys on the Land but since most of the World is Water, we say, “The World is Flat.” Historical accounts and spoken history tell us the Land part may have been square, all in one mass at one time, then as now, the magnetic north being the Center. Vast cataclysmic events and shaking no doubt broke the land apart, divided the Land to be our present continents or islands as they exist today. One thing we know for sure about this world…the known inhabited world is Flat, Level, a Plain World.
We maintain that what is called ‘Science’ today and ‘scientists’ consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the ‘Priest-Entertainers’ for the common people. ‘Science’ consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of jibberish theory-theology…unrelated to the real world of facts, technology and inventions, tall buildings and fast cars, airplanes and other Real and Good things in life; technology is not in any way related to the web of idiotic scientific theory. ALL inventors have been anti-science. The Wright brothers said: “Science theory held us up for years. When we threw out all science, started from experiment and experience, then we invented the airplane.” By the way, airplanes all fly level on this Plane earth.
Our Society of Zetetics have existed for at least 6,000 years, the extent of recorded history. Extensive writing from 1492 b.c. We have been and are the Few, the Elite, the Elect, who use Logic Reason are Rational. Summed up, we are Sane and/ or have Common Sense as contrasted to the “herd” who is unthinking and uncaring. We have absorbed the Universal Zetetic Society of America and Great Britian, ZION U.S.A., the work of Alexander Dowie 1888, Wilber Glen Voliva 1942, Samuel Shenton, Lillian J. Shenton of England 1971. Zetetic: from Zeto, to seek and search out; Prove, as contrasted to theoretic which means to guess, to hope, to suppose, but NOT to ‘prove’. Science ‘proves’ earth a ‘ball’ by ‘scripture’ words. We PROVE earth Flat by experiment, demonstrated and demonstrable. Earth Flat is a Fact, not a ‘theory’!
Our aim is not to ‘disturb the herd’ or wreck the Government, but rather to be an aid to the Elite Human Being in coming to KNOW earth flat…to then FREE his or her mind from such blind unreasoning ‘theory-superstition’ and so go on “to carefully observe…think freely…rediscover forgotten facts and oppose theoretical dogmatic assumptions.” As Sir Fields, owner of newspapers in England, has said about us, “They are the Last pocket of individual Thinkers in English speaking world.”
I sometimes call myself the Last Iconclast. Science is a false religion, the opium of the masses. I myself count it as a begining of Sanity to confess ‘the creation proves there was a Creator’ so a God or Creator…Exists. From a life-time of study, of seeking out a proving things, from the study of 6,000 years of recorded history, from observation, from experience, from Common Sense Observation, have concluded the 10 Commandments are in fact good Laws of Living and Behavior for oneself and all in contact with you…truley ‘Laws of Physics for Living.’ That is my opinion. The Fact the Earth is Flat is not my opinion, it is a Proved Fact. Also demonstrated Sun and Moon are about 3,000 miles away are both 32 miles across. The Planets are ‘tiny.’ Sun and Moon do Move, earth does NOT move, whirl, spin or gyrate. Australians do NOT hang by their feet under the world…this is a FACT, not a theory! Also a Fact the Spinning, Whirling, Gyrating Ball World Planet, Globe Idea is Entirely 100% now and at all times in the Past, a RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE…a Blind Dogmatic Article of Faith in the Religion for the Blind unreasoning beast of prey. No earthly reason for a Sane, Upright Member of the Elite Elect Humans to subscribe to it. Also a Fact, today the Elite of Earth ALL live on the Flat World. Only the illogical, unreasoning “herd”…prefers the way-out occult weird theology of the old Greek superstitution earth a spinning ball! Both Copernecious and Newton, the inventors of the “modern” superstitions (400 year OLD modern) have said: “It is not possible for a Sane reasonable person to ever really believe these Theories.” Thus sayeth Newton-Copernecious. What sayeth THOU?
*****
WIKIPedia, Charles K. Johnson
Obituaries
Charles Johnson; Longtime Leader of Flat Earth Society
“We have studied the Earth,” he assured anybody who would listen, “and found it flat.”
That plane Earth, he insisted, is of unknown dimensions, a disc with the North Pole in the center and impenetrable Arctic ice 150 feet high all the way around.
The sun and moon, each 32 miles in diameter, circle the disc at a steady height of 3,000 miles, with so-called rising or setting only an optical illusion.
Charles K. Johnson, irrepressible advocate and president of the International Flat Earth Society for nearly three decades, has died. He was 76.
Johnson died March 19 in Lancaster, near Hi Vista, where he had moved the iconoclastic society’s headquarters in 1972 after he succeeded the late Samuel Shenton of Dover, England, in the presidency.
The ever-quotable Johnson also wrote and published the entertaining if somewhat eccentric Flat Earth News, which once boasted 3,500 subscribers.
His Flat Earth Society has ambiguous historical roots but is in spirit related to the Universal Zetetic (investigative) Society founded in England in 1832 by Sir Birley Rowbotham, who wrote “Earth Not a Globe.” Advocates have traditionally used carefully chosen Bible passages to substantiate their assertions, supplemented by purportedly scientific observations of bodies of water.
About 1888, England’s Sir Walter de Sodington Blount and his wife made a series of experiments on a canal called Old Bedford Level, proving, they said, that the Earth had no curvature. Almost a century later, Johnson and his late Australian-born wife and chief adjunct, Marjory, checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea. Like the Blounts, they couldn’t see any curve either, thus reassuring themselves that the Earth is flat.
Johnson was 8 and living in San Angelo, Texas, when he made his commitment to the flat Earth theory. He spun a globe in his class, concluded that what his textbook said about gravitation was absurd and gazed at a nearby lake, observing no curve.
“Obviously water’s flat, isn’t it?” he said in a Times interview in 1992. “They’re trying to tell you this water’s bent!”
Asked why don’t people fall off if the Earth if flat, Johnson would patiently explain, “There is no edge. As far as we know, it’s endless.”
“Australians,” he once elaborated in the Flat Earth News, “do not hang by their feet underneath the world!”
Before moving 20 miles east of Lancaster to a Mojave Desert cabin with its own generator and water tank, Johnson had worked 25 years as an airplane mechanic in San Francisco. He ran the Flat Earth Society within a figurative stone’s throw of Edwards Air Force Base, a crucible for National Aeronautics and Space Administration programs.
But he was unfazed by aeronautics or the space program. He discounted filmed walks on the moon beginning with Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969, snorting: “Anyone flying that far would freeze to death.”
Johnson insisted that the moon missions and the whole space program were a hoax scripted by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and filmed at Meteor Crater in Arizona.
When the space shuttle Columbia first landed next door at Edwards in 1981, he scoffed: “This airplane landed, but it’s just a simple, stupid old airplane carried piggyback and dropped over Lancaster. . . . It hasn’t orbited the Earth–that we know.”
Just as glibly, Johnson dismissed the scientists who first convinced human beings that they were clinging to a spinning globe: Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who 500 years ago theorized that the planets revolve around the sun and that the global Earth turns on its axis; Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who used a telescope to prove that Copernicus knew what he was talking about; and England’s philosopher mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, who established the laws of gravity and motion.
“Scientists consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the ‘priest-entertainers’ for the common people,” Johnson said in the Flat Earth News. ” ‘Science’ consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of gibberish theory-theology . . . unrelated to the real world of facts, technology and inventions, tall buildings and fast cars, airplanes and other real and good things in life.”
To the surprise of most historians, Johnson had his own list of flat Earth believers.
“Moses was a flat-Earther,” he said in several interviews. “The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1492 BC (biblical scholars date the Exodus to 1491 BC) when Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai.” Presumably, had the Earth been round, they would have fallen off before reaching the biblical promised land.
Jesus believed in a flat Earth, Johnson said, because he ascended to heaven, and if the Earth were a ball, “there [would be] no up nor down.”
Christopher Columbus was a flat Earth believer too, Johnson told The Times, discussing events of 1492: “He had enough sense to know that if the world was a ball, he would have fallen off.”
The Last Iconoclast
iconoclast (n.) “breaker or destroyer of images,” 1590s, from French iconoclaste and directly from Medieval Latin iconoclastes, from Late Greek eikonoklastes, from eikon (genitive eikonos) “image” + klastes “breaker,” from klas- past tense stem of klan “to break” (see clastic). Originally those in the Eastern Church in 8c. and 9c. whose mobs of followers destroyed icons and other religious objects on the grounds that they were idols. Applied to 16c.-17c. Protestants in Netherlands who vandalized former Catholic churches on similar grounds. Extended sense of “one who attacks orthodox beliefs or institutions” is first attested 1842.