-Caveat Lector-
> Sunday, March 25, 2001
>
> 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!"
>
> More:
>
>http://www.latimes.com/communities/news/north_san_fernando_valley/20010325/t000025955.html
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