Johnson also claimed the moon landing was filmed in Arizona, with a script by Arthur C. Roosevelt was a fellow flat-earther, and that the Yalta conference was designed to usher in a new age of truth under the fledgling United Nations unfortunately, FDR died before the spinning-ball hoax could be exposed. Insisting that the fallacy of a globular earth was central to science’s evil plan to destroy all faith in God, Johnson held that Franklin D. They were all conspiracy theorists, because they believed the authorities went to great lengths to conceal the truth. From the 1970s until his death in 2001, former plane mechanic Charles Johnson ran the International Flat Earth Research Society from his desert ranch in California. In the US, a Scots-born faith-healer called Alexander Dowie founded the utopian colony of Zion, Illinois, with flat-earth doctrine enshrined in its city code, before being disgraced as a fraudster. The idea that the crew of the Santa Maria were terrified of tumbling over the edge was the invention of Washington Irving, creator of Rip Van Winkle, whose fanciful 19th-century biography of Columbus provided a heroic foundation story for the United States.Īs Christine Garwood documents in her fascinating book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, the leading figures in 19th- and 20th-century flat-earthery were a marginal and unsophisticated bunch of cranks: Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who spoke to packed but mocking houses in Victorian England Lady Elizabeth Blount, the philanthropist wife of a Shropshire baronet and a signwriter from Dover called Samuel Shenton, given unexpected exposure by the indulgent astronomer Patrick Moore. Every significant thinker has believed the earth is a globe since Pythagoras in the 6th Century BC. Five minutes on Google dispelled that myth. I had a dim, primary-school recollection that the bishops who tried to turn Queen Isabella against Christopher Columbus thought the world was flat, as did all his crew.
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