Johnson insisted that the moon missions and the whole space program were a hoax scripted by science fiction writer Arthur C.
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.” 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.īut he was unfazed by aeronautics or the space program. “Australians,” he once elaborated in the Flat Earth News, “do not hang by their feet underneath the world!”īefore 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. “They’re trying to tell you this water’s bent!”Īsked why don’t people fall off if the Earth if flat, Johnson would patiently explain, “There is no edge. “Obviously water’s flat, isn’t it?” he said in a Times interview in 1992. 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.
Johnson was 8 and living in San Angelo, Texas, when he made his commitment to the flat Earth theory. Like the Blounts, they couldn’t see any curve either, thus reassuring themselves that the Earth is flat. 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. 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.Ībout 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.
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