Charles K. Johnson, president of the International Flat Earth Research Society

In the wild 1978 Hollywood thriller Capricorn One, jittery federal officials foist a faked manned mission to Mars on an unsuspecting American public, then claim that the space capsule, including its three astronauts, tragically incinerated upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. An unwitting nation mourns. After playing along with the charade for months in seclusion, the trio of still-very-much-alive fly guys?James Brolin, Sam Waterston and (gulp) O.J. Simpson?correctly deduce that, given their recent "deaths," the sand in their respective hourglasses is really about to run out. The astronauts' continued existence contravenes the "truth," and therefore they must be rubbed out. So begins a hyperkinetic 90-minute chase, with Brolin, Waterston and O.J. attempting to outwit space agency lizard Hal Holbrook and his cadre of helicopter-flying assassins.

The film's revelations came as no cosmic slap upside the head to Charles K. Johnson, who, as president of the International Flat Earth Research Society, realized from day one that all of NASA's projects were choreographed hoaxes. For example, Johnson contended that the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing and moon walk were filmed secretly at Meteor Crater in central Arizona, with a script written by science fiction behemoth Arthur C. Clarke. "It's all one big lie," Johnson sniffed to the Augusta Chronicle in 1998. "It's nothing more than a piece of clever, stage-managed, science-fiction trickery."

Back in the fall of 1980 a then-56-year-old Johnson similarly pooh-poohed the impending maiden voyage of the space shuttle, built and tested at Edwards Air Force Base, a mere six miles north of his remote five-acre spread in Southern California's Mojave Desert. "Do you know what they're doing at Edwards right now?" he rhetorically asked Science Digest at the time. "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."

Typical Johnson humor. From his tumbleweed-pummeled hillside home in the community of Hi Vista?20 miles east of Lancaster, a half-mile from his nearest neighbor, and light-years from a world inhabited almost exclusively by sphere-deluded "globularists"?Johnson, along with his wife Marjory, secretary of the Flat Earth Society, devoutly carried the flickering torch for the world's dwindling "planists," people who adamantly insist that our planet resembles a pancake, an LP record, or a pizza pie (take your pick). No winking postmodernists, the Johnsons were entirely, forgive the expression, on the level, basing their beliefs on a curious mix of Biblical scripture?the most oft-cited entry being "the four corners of the earth," from Revelation?and copious empirical experimentation.

"The facts are simple," Johnson declared to Science Digest. "The earth is flat. Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world. The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I'd say that the dome of heaven is about 4000 miles away, and the stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston."

Resolutely precise at times, Johnson's cosmology also asserts: (1) An Earth of indeterminate dimensions, with a centrally located magnetic north (North Pole), plus a wall of ice believed to be 150 feet tall at the perimeter. No one has yet reached the edge.

(2) The sun and moon, each 32 miles in diameter, circle Earth at a height of 3000 miles at its equator, located midway between the North Pole and the ice wall. Each functions as a "spotlight," with the sun radiating "hot light," the moon "cold light." Their apparent rising and setting are caused by optical illusions.

(3) Gravity doesn't exist: "It's like some weird religious doctrine that you can't explain."

Surrounded by Joshua trees and creosote bushes, the Johnsons' outpost functioned for nearly 30 years as world HQ for the Flat Earth Society, run out of their house's spare bedroom. The couple moved to the desert in 1972 after Charles assumed presidency of the society. Previously he worked for 25 years as an airplane mechanic in San Francisco, where in 1959 he met Marjory, an Australian. (Johnson never grew weary of repeating this jibe: "My wife was born in Australia. You'll have to ask her, 'Did you ever hang by your feet when you were in Australia? How was it?'") In the Mojave they made do without a conventional electrical line (a generator provided power) and running water (they hauled it uphill from a tank), but allowed a telephone. Both Johnsons practiced vegetarianism. An inveterate animal rescuer, Johnson took in and cared for a pack of dogs and a handful of cats, not forgetting the gaggle of chickens that roamed the premises.

They certainly looked the part of central-casting fringies. A photograph in the 1984 book Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions freezes them in an American Gothic-gone-Dogpatch pose, with a gray-bearded Charles dressed in his polyester Sunday best. "We're two witnesses against the whole world," Johnson admitted to Science Digest. "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."

To stave off periodic loneliness, he attended to his flat-earth ministry: replying to queries mailed in from all over the world ("Everybody who writes gets an answer"), serving a constituency he claimed topped out at 3500, and devotedly cranking out Flat Earth News, the organization's quarterly newsletter. Chain-smoking his own exquisitely hand-rolled cigarettes and mainlining liters of coffee, Johnson composed fractured prose chockablock with capital letters, boldfaced type, and exclamation points for articles whose headlines screamed "WORLD A STRETCHED OUT PLANE" and "CHALLENGER BLOWN UP BY GOD" and, finally, the resolute "GOD SAYS EARTH IS FLAT."

With complete disregard for orthodox punctuation and syntax, these stories proclaimed the most recent findings regarding government scheming, or fervently reiterated the planist worldview. A representative passage from a 1988 issue about the space shuttle program reads: "[M]edia moguls went to ask Mr. Bush?was the earth flat? BUSH as well as Reagan. So he used the same praise about the phonie the Carnie ANTI-CHRISTS the slobbering foul degenerate dogs, the 'astronauts' in Discovery, he said to the Degenerate anti-christs, YOU made us proud, etc... BUT he then went on to say, EARTH IS FLAT, GOD EXISTS. HE IS IN HEAVEN, A PLACE, THAT IS UP ABOVE EARTH, ABOVE THE USA. THAT HE BELIEVED AT DEATH OUR SOUL GOES TO HEAVEN ABOVE THIS FLAT EARTH!"

In addition to former Presidents Bush and Reagan, Johnson often pointed out that history teems with many flat-earth notables, among them Jesus, Moses, George Washington, Columbus, and the triumvirate of FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

Once wound up Johnson could claim just about anything, occasionally weaving at-the-moment newsmakers into wide-eyed conspiracy theories: The "Space Shuttle Caper," as he termed it back in 1984, functioned as a cover for airlifting John De Lorean's cocaine; and the 1994 arrest of O.J. Simpson could be traced to his appearance in Capricorn One?"They're finally going after O.J. because he helped unmask the space hoax."

To help such hard truths go down easier, Johnson sprinkled into the newsletter personal doggerel ("Why God Made Little Girls"), reprinted excerpts from William Carpenter's 1885 manifesto One Hundred Proofs That the Earth Is Not a Globe, and ceded the editorial floor to Marjory.

Born July 24, 1924, in San Angelo, TX, Charles Kenneth Johnson caught on to the globular fraud as a schoolboy while contemplating a lake near his west-central Texas home. "Obviously water's flat, isn't it?" he snorted to the Los Angeles Times in 1992. "They're trying to tell you this water's bent." He made his first official flat-earth inquiries in 1942, contacting planist mullah, ardent creationist and apocalyptic windbag Rev. Wilbur Glenn Voliva just prior to the latter's death in Zion, IL, ground zero for the movement. Guruship then fell to Englishman Samuel Shenton and his wife Lillian, who founded the International Flat Earth Research Society in 1956; before Samuel died in Dover in 1971, he requested that Johnson succeed him. And so it came to pass.

The mantle carried with it a rich history dating back to the sixth century, when Greek businessman and geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote Christian Topography, the first documented planist work. But flat-earthers enjoyed their widest sway in England from the end of the 18th to the turn of the 20th centuries. Foremost among them was Samuel B. Rowbotham?he called himself "Parallax"?who in the mid-19th century conducted experiments along a straight six-mile length of canal in Cambridgeshire known as the Old Bedford Level. He recorded his data in Earth Not a Globe and Zetetic Astronomy (zetetic derives from the Greek verb zeteo?to seek, to inquire), thereby setting in stone the cosmology mouthed by all subsequent true believers, including Charles Johnson. Buoyed by such evidence, adherents banded together to form the New York Zetetic Society in 1873 and the internationally minded Universal Zetetic Society in 1892.

A persuasive lecturer, Parallax converted many to the cause. Perhaps his most passionate disciples were John Hampden and the aforementioned William Carpenter, who in 1870 represented the planists in a disputatious £500 wager with a prominent globularist based on refereed observations at the Old Bedford Level. The participants wound up in court. Following an ambiguous ruling, Hampden hounded and slandered his adversaries, while Carpenter proselytized in the U.S.

These men gave way to Elizabeth Anne Mould Williams, who in 1874 became Lady Blount upon her marriage to Sir Walter de Sodington Blount. Taking control of the Universal Zetetic Society, Lady Blount wrote, edited and published its house organ The Earth; authored countless planist polemics in other magazines and pamphlets; dashed off flat-earth verse set to music; and in 1898 published the zany novel Adrian Galileo, which features as its heroine a crusading zetetic who closely resembles herself. She, too, repaired to the Old Bedford Level to prove the earth's flatness, this time via photographs.

The zetetic scene shifted to the U.S. in the early 20th century, led by Rev. Voliva, general overseer of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church of Zion, IL, a town located north of Chicago on Lake Michigan just south of the Wisconsin border. A refuge for moral zealots, Zion was founded in 1901 by spiritual healer Rev. John Alexander Dowie, who in 1906 was thrust aside as its patriarch by his assistant Voliva. The new boss ran Zion as a theocratic dictatorship, with the flat earth as one of its numerous tenets.

In her 1994 book Kooks, Donna Kossy quotes Voliva as laying down the zetetic law to his votaries in December 1915: "I believe this Earth is a stationary plane; that it rests upon water; and that there is no such thing as the Earth moving, no such thing as the Earth's axis or the Earth's orbit. It is a lot of silly rot, born in the egotistical brains of infidels. Neither do I believe there is any such thing as the law of gravitation. I believe that is a lot of rot, too. There is no such thing! I get my astronomy from the Bible."

No less colorful, Charles Johnson lived up to this legacy when he inherited leadership of the Flat Earth Society. In addition to his ALL-CAPS exhortations in the group's newsletter, he spoke before local Elks, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, dispensed quotable interviews to eager reporters on significant anniversaries of Columbus Day and the Apollo 11 moon walk, and even appeared in an ice cream commercial. (Although dead serious in his beliefs, he did not lack a sense of humor.) And together with Marjory he revived an honored zetetic tradition by measuring the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea near the Mexican border. Conclusion: Earth still flat.

But by 1994 Marjory's declining health?a semi-invalid, she required supplemental oxygen?forced Charles to place Flat Earth News on hiatus so he could care for his wife. He barely hustled her to safety when a fire swept through their home in late September 1995, destroying everything, including the society's membership rolls, records and back issues of the newsletter. The Johnsons relocated to a dilapidated trailer on their property, but Marjory deteriorated further, eventually dying in mid-May 1996.

Their Hi Vista neighbor Jill Fear signed on as Flat Earth Society secretary, and she and Charles, who moved in with his brother Jackie near Lancaster, began republishing Flat Earth News while gradually rebuilding the organization. By the time Johnson died in his sleep, age 76, on March 19, the group boasted more than 100 members. Speaking over the phone from her home, Fear promises to "follow in his footsteps" by continuing to put out the newsletter (P.O. Box 2533, Lancaster, CA 93539, or call 661-727-1635).

In the aftermath of the fire that leveled his home five and one-half years ago, Johnson graciously encapsulated his mission for the Arizona Republic. "We're not enemies of America," he explained. "But we don't believe the hoax that the world is a globe. The average person goes along with it because they haven't given much thought to it. If you like the spinning ball, stay with it. But we just want to give people an opportunity to get out of the herd and think for themselves."