THE UNEXPECTED COSMOLOGY Rise of the 21st-Century Flat Earth Awakening A Biography Noel J Hadley The Unexpected Cosmology © 2019 Noel J Hadley Firmament Avenue Press, LLC 1st Printing: 2019 2 unexpected [ uhn-ik-spek-tid ] adjective not expected; unforeseen; surprising: an unexpected pleasure; an unexpected development. cosmology [ koz-mol-uh-jee ] noun 1. the branch of philosophy dealing with the origin and general structure of the universe, with its parts, elements, and laws, and especially with such of its characteristics as space, time, causality, and freedom. 2. the branch of astronomy that deals with the general structure and evolution of the universe. 3 4 For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Matthew 12:34 5 6 PROLOGUE CHURCH BELLS RANG… (The Day John Glenn Conquered Heaven) 7 8 “It merely would entail the purge That the just-pausing Demiurge Asks of himself once in so often So the firm firmament won’t soften. There’s always been an Ararat Where someone someone else begat To start the world all over at.” from “A-Wishing Well” (1959) —Robert Frost 9 10 CHURCH BELLS RANG… 1 AWAITING COLONEL JOHN GLENN’S RETURN TO EARTH was a handwritten message which simply read: OK, wise guy. Its author was none other than Samuel Shenton, world renowned and globally reviled flat earthist. In light of the three orbits which Glenn is claimed to have completed on the 20th of February 1962, the space race was perhaps his darkest hour—particularly for those few remaining souls who still retained a faith in God’s Testimony to His own creation. This was the decade in which flat earthists Mark Sargent, Patricia Steere, Bob Knodel, David Weiss, Chris Van Matre, and Rob Skiba were born. Robbie Davidson, Rick Hummer, and Shelley Lewis would follow along shortly thereafter, and before the Apollo missions were over. But their voices would not be heard for nearly another half century. At present, Shenton alone held the torch. For this he was scorned and ridiculed, in part because the press tugged at his enthusiastic and rather childlike heart strings. Theirs was an archeological artifact dangled for the self-flagellating reader, and yet which the vast majority of Americans, caught in the current of Cold War Science, simply wanted buried. The strain was simply too much for him—the hour seemingly too dark. Shenton’s conviction drained him financially and emotionally at a cost to his own health. He would suffer two strokes in 1963. The second left him with distorted vision—a disaster for his signwriting business. And in March of 1971, Shenton would not live to see the Apollo program he vehemently sought to prove as a series of elaborate hoaxes come to a close. Shenton died 68 years young. 11 2 COLONEL JOHN GLENN RECEIVED LETTERS, and oh, how I wish I could get my hand on them. My interest lies particularly with those postmarked in the months leading up to his momentous—though often delayed—flight of passage beyond Earth. It is as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and I fully believe there is something of value for a guy like me buried within them. Glenn himself was not capable of answering the “mountain of mail that was piling up…” He told the March 9, 1962 issue of LIFE Magazine that there were among them “some letters which informed me that the postponements were God’s way of letting us know that we should not be tampering with the heavens.” Glenn addressed those very concerns just as promptly as he’d confessed them by relieving LIFE Magazines readership of any potential doubt in his own spiritual motivations. Glenn was just as morally consciousnesses, clean-cut, and all-around American as the rest of them. Specifically, he was given leave of his quarters in Cape Canaveral now and then, he wrote, either for a haircut or on Sundays a church service in Cocoa Beach. In other words, we should expect no shenanigans, either from ground control or beyond. Regardless of his assurances, in as little as 8 years a poll conducted by Knight Newspapers found that 30% of Americans were “suspicious of NASA’s trips to the Moon,” with the number rising to 54% in some Afro- American areas. But the up-and-coming moon landing deception, I suspect, was not the mere focus of those unanswered letters. They are a narrative of the cosmological nature—religious as well as scientifically inclined—stemming from a then-dying generation. It is a narrative lost now to the ages; erased from public discourse; a conscientious worldview which no doubt lines up with Robert Frosts own words in 1962 when the farmer from Vermont thoughtfully contemplated such puzzling notions as a firm firmament softening. John Glenn kept to church and a proper schedule of haircuts. In We Seven, a collection of essays written by the seven pioneering Astronauts themselves and published following his return to Earth in 1962, Glenn further addressed his religious critics in A Past to Draw On. Here the tone of those phantom letters, I suspect, are hinted at when he writes: “There is nothing superhuman, however, about being an 12 Astronaut. There is nothing spooky or supernatural about flying in space. I have talked to people, both before and after my orbital flight, who seemed to think that both of these propositions were true and that an Astronaut must have to be some sort of Yogi and put himself into a trance of some kind to go through such an experience.” Within a few sentences Glenn adds: “Space flight, like any other kind of flying, is simply the product of normal human skill and technical proficiency. Both of these have to be of the highest order, but there is nothing mysterious or esoteric about either one of them.” “There were a lot of unknowns in the early days of spaceflight,” former astronaut Scott Carpenter, who followed Glenn’s flight with an orbital mission of his own in May of that year, later reminisced. “We were considered guilty of being unable to fly in space and required to prove our innocence, counter to the American custom.” Prove they most certainly did. Perhaps this was NASA’s true intended purpose. As many critics of the Apollo program have noted, very little of their achievements were scientific. With Glenn, the firm firmament was softened. Mission: accomplished. That same March 9, 1962 issue of LIFE Magazine, which depicted the Astronaut and his wife overshadowing even the all-familiar caricature of vice president Lyndon Johnson in a police-line motorcade, reported of Glenn’s Earthly homecoming: “As though swirling down from conquered space itself, a splendor of ticker tape and shredded paper almost blots out the view of Manhattan throngs straining for a glimpse of Colonel John Glenn. Along the traditional Route of Heroes through the canyons of skyscrapers, Glenn and his fellow Astronauts received New York’s greatest acclaim. Despite the windy cold, the crowds all but overwhelmed Glenn by the weight of their numbers and enthusiasm. Bands played and church bells rang, but they were drowned out by cheering that approached the decibel force of a rocket at liftoff. At the end of the parade, the man who had known the utter loneliness of space could only say of the welcome that he had ‘never seen anything like it.’” LIFE Magazine aptly concluded: “…Nor had anyone else.” Whoever the unidentified authors of these letters, I also suspect they were not numbered among those who had “stirred the national pride.” Glenn observed, “As the focus of that pride, I have been almost overwhelmed. I felt this way when I was honored by President Kennedy 13 and by the Congress. But I have felt it even more strongly when I was honored by so many other people. Riding along parade routes in Florida, Washington, New York, and New Concord, my home town, I have looked at all those faces and waved and smiled when I really felt much more.” Indeed, those letter-writers were of a generation who, for the most part, did not understand nor comprehend true Biblical cosmology—by way of argument—but the Spirit of God had not yet been quenched within them that He should fail to whisper: “Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved (1 Chronicles 16:30).” Knowing how something was not right with this historical turn of events, they likely did not feel the American spirit surging within them, nor gladly participate when church bells heralded Glenn’s conquest of space. There is indeed a contrary spirit at work to that of the Holy Ghost. It or he is most certainly American, and more—so much more. He is as old as Babylon itself—and older. There were those in the years leading up to America’s conquest of space—and in the months surrounding it—who perhaps did not connect all the end-times dots, particularly where the coming of the lawless one according to the working of Satan is concerned—”with all power and signs and lying wonders… (2 Thessalonians 2:9)” Even now it is impossible to connect them all. Yet I have personally interviewed a handful of such men who lived the Cold-War propaganda, listened to their better discretion and refused to bow to this patriotic spirit at work, despite not being able to place a finger on the specifics. To be fair, perhaps those who held their breath under the suffocating downpours of paper confetti—which surely lined each parade route in Florida, Washington, New York, and New Concord—did not scoff at the Lord, and God forbid, ask: “Where is the promise of His coming?” Certainly not.