Do flat earth societies still exist

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Q.� But they weren't really serious

A. Oh yes. Johnson, and followers maintained that our planet was a disc - of unknown dimensions - with the North Pole in the middle.

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Q.� What about the other planets

A.� The Sun and Moon, each 32 miles in diameter, circled the disc at 3,000 miles above. Sunsets, he said, were optical illusions.

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Q.� And the moon landings

A.� They were, he said, were filmed in Arizona with a script by science-fiction writer Arthur C Clarke. The whole space programme was a hoax by the superpowers. Obviously.

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Q.� Where did he make up these weird ideas

A.� He didn't. The society was an English invention. Johnson took it over in 1972 upon the death of Samuel Shenton of Dover, Kent, who had formed the society in 1956. The society traced its origins from the 1790s, when Sir Richard Phillips (1767-1840) put forward the flat or 'planist' theory. Phillips, among other occupations, dealt in patent medicine and founded The Leicester Herald. He was also jailed for selling atheist literature.

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Q.� Any more

A. The Universal Zetetic Society was founded in 1873 by Sir Birley Rowbotham - nicknamed Parallax.� His optical experiments in 1838 along six miles of the Old Bedford Level, a canal in Cambridgeshire, convinced him that the Earth was not curved. He wrote tracts Earth Not a Globe and Zetetic Astronomy (from the Greek zeteo, 'I find out for myself'). The known world was a circular plane, he said, with the North Pole at its centre, the South Pole at its circumference, marked by an impenetrable wall of ice. Rowbotham made many converts at his lectures. The Universal Zetetic Society was founded in New York in 1873, and soon had branches worldwide. Sir Walter de Sodington Blount also backed the theories with experiments.

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Q.� But, er, why

A.� Johnson insisted that scientists - 'witch doctors, sorcerers, and priest entertainers', he called them - invented the globe theory to destroy Christian beliefs. The earth was flat because Jesus ascended into heaven - and if earth were a ball, there would be no up or down.

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Q.� So much of it was based on religious cults

A. �Often. Take the town of Zion, Illinois, for example. It was ruled from 1906, by the Rev Wilbur Glenn Voliva, a flat earth fundamentalist, as a dictatorship until his death in 1942. He banned tobacco, alcohol, cinemas - and globes. Women were not allowed to cut their hair. In 1922, Voliva founded a radio station that preached flat earth dogma.

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Q.� Let's hear a bit more from Mr Johnson.

A.� There's plenty:

• 'The Space Shuttle is a joke - and a ludicrous joke.'
• '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.'
• 'It's the Church of England that's taught that the world is a ball ... George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.'
• 'Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt laid the master plan to bring in the New Age under the United Nations. The world ruling power was to be right here in [America]. 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.'

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By Steve Cunningham

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