The Voyage

by Douglas Falk

John’s eyes wandered down to the blue miniature orb resting in Celeste’s firm grip.

  “And who are they? Which secret society, which group of conspirators sat down and decided to cover this truth up? Illuminati? The Bilderberg Group? Skull and Bones? I’ve heard both of you explain the motive now, and I understand it on a theoretical level, but there’s still a lot for me to swallow.”

  “That is a difficult question to answer, John. I do not know. William does not know. I wonder if we will ever know. But if I were to venture a guess, I would say, ordinary people. Human beings like you and I, and they are upholding this for the greater good. I would imagine that the players who run the show do not gather in a dank, murky basement every night performing blood rituals, nor do they worship heathen gods. I think that it is a fairly small group of high-ranking government officials from all the major countries that have been elected to keep the lie going that started in the fifties by their forebears, when NASA and the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos were founded. They have no choice but to see the lie through, keep expanding it to new horizons, making it bigger. When a lie has grown big and all-encompassing enough, there is no return. So they will keep churning out these faux missions to Mars in the future, because it is the logical next step for the narrative,” said Celeste.

  “I only partly agree, Celeste.” William, who had stayed silent for longer than usual, felt the need to chime in. “I think there is a valid case to be made that this secret is kept from us due to a sort of greater good kind of thing. Like, that the average man would not be able to handle such a large revelation. But who knows? Maybe they are lying to us purely for selfish, malicious reasons. Money, for instance. NASA receives 20 billion dollars a year—let that sink in, John, if you will. That is about 50 million dollars a day. Might be that the funding of NASA is a sort of government black hole budget scheme, where they publicly throw astronomical sums at NASA and then use it for something completely different—same goes for JAXA in Japan and Roscosmos in Russia. It would be a swindle so effortless and so ingenuous…a lie that no outsider can verify, and they would just have to perform a staged fake mission now and then!” William paused and drew a loud sigh.

  “That is true,” said Celeste.

  “And one other thing. Did you know that a huge number of astronauts are Freemasons? An unproportionally large number of them are either listed in Freemasonic lodges or are tied to them in some way, most notably our second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin…a thirty-third degree Freemason out of Montclair Lodge in New Jersey. A man who is more than willing to flaunt his Masonic ring in public, even today. This is not a conspiracy theory I’m peddling here, John. This is true—look it up for yourself. The ratio is frightening when you look into how many of them are tied to Masonry and other secret societies in some way,” said William.

  John gallivanted nervously around in circles in the study of Celeste Wood. He walked slowly towards the large window and took a quick look outside.

  Valhallavägen is a bustling mess today, as always.

  He turned to the right in the great oval room and inspected the enormous oak bookcase that housed hundreds of books. Above the bookcase hung a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton.

  Ah, a copy of the famous portrait by Godfrey Kneller. Gosh, he was a strange man…devoted his entire life to scientific studies. Died alone and childless, and supposedly had no interest whatsoever in women, and he never found a spouse. He never married. I hope don’t face the same end as old Isaac…

  He stretched out his middle finger and gently exhumed some of the books from the case. He pulled out a copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s My Favorite Universe from the stand and pondered for himself.

  The more I think of this, the more bizarre it gets. I’m in the office of a renowned astrophysicist, and I have heard her pontificating about how thousands of years of scientific studies are woefully inaccurate and that theories commonly accepted as truth…are false. For God’s sake! The sharpest minds of mankind thousands of years ago figured out how our cosmology works to a tee. Hearing this…is almost disrespectful. Disrespectful to our ancestors and a slight towards modern-day scientists.

  John gazed from left to right and skimmed through the books. Astronomy literature by Lawrence Krauss, Tyson, Michio Kaku, and the famous Carl Sagan.

  To even consider this hogwash, I would need more solid facts. And I want them now. Should I cast aside all I thought was true about my existence, I want more meat and fewer potatoes.

  John spun around from the bookcase and faced Celeste and William.

  “Professor Wood,” John began.

  “Celeste,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, of course. Celeste. I would like, if you may, to hear something more concrete. Real, hard science instead of speculations and conspiracy theories. Evidence, in other words. What made you flip?”

  Celeste looked at the globe in her hand and had a contemplating look in her eyes.

  “I don’t think there’s any particular proof or experiment that made me flip the switch. It’s a slow, grinding process that took months of research, where I was left standing and finally saw things from a whole different angle.”

  “Okay, but surely there has to be something? A waving red flag that would prompt you to think twice?”

  Celeste looked puzzled.

  “Hmm. Probably when I understood that gyroscopes point unequivocally to the fact that we are on a stationary plane. If you know how gyroscopes work, which I do, there is no doubt at all that the Earth does not rotate, nor is it in any kind of motion. The fact that pilots and other professionals have yet to discover this could be summarised very quickly: cognitive dissonance and a lifetime of indoctrination. Do you know how gyroscopes work, my friends?”

  “I know how they work, but it’s a fairly complex mechanism that is hard to explain to a novice like my green friend here. But all airplanes have them, John. A working gyroscope is of paramount importance to all aviation. The pilots know them as the artificial horizon,” said William.

  Celeste waved her hands. “There is no need to bore John out of his skull with an exact detailed explanation of the properties of the gyroscope. There are more concrete examples than the gyroscope when it comes to this example that should make the most sceptical think twice. While investigating the gyroscope and concluding that it proves that the Earth as we know it is most certainly at rest, I would not say that it is the primary slam-dunk example when attempting to prove whether or not we have been deceived.”

  “The gimbal on the gyroscope ought to roll backwards when flying over a rotating sphere. But it doesn’t, ever. We are not standing on a spinning disco ball, John,” said William.

  John stared at William, trying to wrap his head around what it meant.

  I must look like something akin to a deer in headlights to them right now. What the hell is a gyroscope? Why were we not taught of this in school?

  “Hold on a second now.” John thought he could steer the conversation to more familiar, easily digestible territories. He paused for a second and remembered his trusted Samsung Galaxy phone and pulled it out his pocket and showed it to them.

  “Speaking of aviation and aircrafts. How the hell would this work if satellites aren’t real? I mean, they can’t be, right…in your model? Satellites, I mean. You guys think that orbiting satellites in space is a hoax, am I correct?”

  “You are correct. We do not believe in satellites. Nor do we believe in space,” said Celeste.

  “Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement. The Red Hot Chili Peppers knew their stuff,” said William.

  John rolled his eyes.

  “And the answer you are searching for is called triangulation. Let me guess: you are wondering about how GPS could possibly work without satellites in space?” asked Celeste.

  John nodded.

  “I thought you might. Have you ever seen the enormous radio towers across this country? They are scattered everywhere, and not only in Sweden, mind you. Everywhere in
the civilised world will you find these towers. The whole thing is ground-based. If you think that there is a tinfoil box with wings up there beaming signals down from space to you, well, then…then I have a ten-million-dollar property in Malibu to sell you. No, sir. And even without the towers, there are underwater sea cables connected between every continent in the world. I bet you didn’t know that, did you? Antarctica not included, of course.”

  “Right, because that’s where your little ice wall is, I know, guarded by those pesky penguins. Those ferocious beasts!”

  Celeste was not amused by his jest, so John decided it would be prudent to tread lightly from now on and stick to the topic at hand.

  “What about satellite TV? DirectTV, and so forth. Everyone knows that the satellite dish needs to be pointed up towards space, angled directly at the satellite up there. This cannot be denied…it’s self-evident. I remember very clearly many years ago back when my dad climbed up the roof of our summer cottage and installed the parabola antenna while I was down below and checked the television to see if it worked or not. The slightest tilt my father caused up there and the screen would black out.” John smiled confidently.

  How will this pair of brainiacs explain this one?

  William removed his glasses and polished them gently with his shirt and spoke. “Think carefully now, John. Try to thrust yourself back into the very memory you retold to us just now. Was the satellite dish pointed up to what we have been taught is space…or was it tilted only slightly upwards, or was it perhaps even perpendicular?”

  John obeyed and closed his eyes. He thought back of the days with his parents at the summer cottage at Värmdö. He remembered almost everything—the golfing, walking through the forest at autumn scavenging for mushrooms, the fishing, the bathing. The angle of the parabola dish was aimed was not among those memories.

  “I haven’t got a clue,” John confessed.

  “If you had a clue, you would remember that they are in fact tilted. They are never angled directly up towards space…they are all aimed at something ground-based, most likely a nearby radio tower. Look it up yourself! Drive through any neighbourhood and look at the roofs of any given villa.”

  “Thanks, but I have better things to do than going on a wild goose chase looking for parabola antennas in unknown neighbourhoods.”

  John paused and said nothing for a moment that seemed to last forever.

  “But why? Why would the people providing satellite TV be in on the greatest conspiracy in the history of mankind? Don’t you understand how ridiculous it sounds?”

  “You still haven’t got it, have you? They are not in on it!” William sounded almost angry for once.

  “They are not in on it. Very few people are. The reason why this deception is so ingenious is because of that very fact—a large percentage of those who indirectly or directly perpetrate the fraud are completely unaware of it. They are simply completely indoctrinated and under the same spell as all of us. Think of all the pilots who fly thousands of feet above ground daily but have never even thought to question what they are actually flying over, despite being able to see for miles and miles ahead in all directions from their cockpit windows. They think they see a curve because they expect it to be there, not because there is a curve. Like we have said a million times before, John, it’s all about the programming. It’s the same scenario with the satellite dish engineer who installs your DirectTV. Naturally, he thinks that he is aiming the dish towards an imaginary object floating above in the thermosphere at 2,000 degrees Celsius.”

  William’s barrage of words made John speechless, so he continued.

  “You have to understand, John, that everything split into separate departments. It’s called compartmentalisation. By compartmentalizing all the different subsections within NASA, the Moon landings were so brilliantly faked: some ignorant debunkers seem to slumber under the illusion that for the Apollo program to be a hoax, thousands of people would have to be in on it. Everyone at NASA, from the low-paid wrench-turners, the engineers and the technicians, all the way to the top with the director himself pulling the strings of all these people. This assumption, according to us, could not be further from the truth—creating a spellbinding, believable illusion is much easier when the foot soldiers doing the dirty work are blissfully unaware of what they are partaking in.”

  Fair points. I was just about to ask about the Moon landings.

  John had been on the fence for some time regarding whether the six Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 ever took place.

  How could Nixon possibly have made that live phone call hundreds of thousands of miles away to the Moon in ’69 when my phone fails to receive a signal when strolling down the park? Why did all the video footage appear to be so artificial looking, and why did the Moon rocks brought home by Apollo 11 turn out to be proven fakes? Those rocks Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins gave to the prime minister of the Netherlands were a hundred percent fake, the museum that harboured the rock discovered, some thirty-odd years later. They were not even rocks. Petrified wood! And all the telemetry data, they destroyed all of it! They willfully erased the telemetry data of the very first time a human being walked on a celestial body, the greatest achievement of mankind…because of magnetic tape shortage. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, unless there’s Moon trees growing there they haven’t told us about.

  John eyed the toy globe in Celeste’s lap once again.

  And the Van Allen Belt. Don’t forget the Van Allen belt. How the hell did every single astronaut emerge unscathed from passing through the deadly radiation belt that surrounds the Earth? Thanks to magic, most like. Or like Apollo astronaut Alan Bean said when they interrogated him about this on television. The Van Allen belt just wasn’t discovered at the time, so I guess that makes all the sense in the world. Just about as much sense as placing a bet on Newcastle United to win this season of the Premier League would. There is no way they went…I want to believe, but I can’t. At the very least the footage is fake. That said, even if the Moon landings were staged, leaping from that to the flat Earth is a bridge too far for me. Do they even believe that the Moon is a sphere? Do they think it’s just a projection of some sort? I think I saw their map once, flashing by, but I never bothered spending the time to study something so pointless.

  “Could you show me the map, Celeste? The map of the world, according to you lot. I might have seen something flash by once on the internet, but a more thorough breakdown would be nice. When I saw it I thought you flat-Earthers viewed the world as a floating disc in space, but from what I have learned this is not the case, right?”

  “There is no current working flat Earth model. Four years have passed, and no one has yet produced a map that works right down to the last inch. There is the square map, the diamond map, and the azimuthal equidistant map, which is without a doubt the best representation of the real world out there. It has its flaws, like all maps; the scaling is off the mark and some other minor issues I will get into later. But for all its flaws, it is more accurate than the globe, which is the important part here. We can’t claim to know exactly how the world looks like from above, John, and for a damned good reason. This is the greatest deception ever known to man, and we do not possess the same kind of resources and manpower as the governments of the world do. It would take decades, centuries even, to map the world. How can we trust that the distance from, say, continent to continent, is accurate? They construed this world, and if they lied about the very shape of it, they might very well have lied about the finer details of it too. We don’t have a working model yet, but we don’t need one to know that we are not standing on an oblate pear hurling through infinite space. Wipe the slate clean, John. Unlearn what you have learned.”

  Celeste took a seat by the desk, opened her handbag, and pulled up a Dell laptop on the table and pressed the start button.

  “Care for an M&M?” Celeste pushed the glass bowl filled to the brim with multi-coloured candy to John and William as the Windows log
o popped up on her computer. William grabbed a handful of candies and leaned over Celeste’s shoulder as she punched in the Windows password. John followed suit and leaned over behind as she started up Mozilla Firefox, went to Google, and searched for azimuthal equidistant map, and an intriguing picture came up.

  5

  Hundreds of pages on the Google Images section showed up. The maps varied in size, colour, design, and even had different names—but they all were just different interpretations of the same basic map.

  “We call it the AE map, John. Much easier to pronounce in a rapid-fire kind of way rather than trying to say azimuthal equidistant over and over. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? It’s called The Gleason Map or The Hammond Map by some, but I’ll always think of it as the AE map.”

  The projection depicted the world as seen from above as a circle, with the North Pole in the middle and the continent of Antarctica surrounding the world from all sides, creating a 360-degree ring of ice.

  So, this is their beleaguered ice wall.

  William gently tapped his shoulder.

  “The moment you first lay your eyes on this picture, something strikes a chord, doesn’t it? I mean, sure, a million questions remain unanswered in your head, but it isn’t as easy to just blindly dismiss this map, as you realise that it is far from as ridiculous as the one in your mind’s eye prior to seeing this, how you envisaged the flat Earth. You most likely pictured yourself a two-dimensional flying square with water spilling out at all sides when flat Earth as a real concept was first flung your way. This map is, like Celeste pointed out before, flawed. Flawed would be an understatement, in fact. But it serves a purpose in the sense that you gain an instant understanding for how flights and circumnavigation would work, and of course, the realisation that there might not be a need for any hypothetical edge, as it were. When you see this image, you start toying with the idea for real…”

  “Hold your horses, now. You say that circumnavigation would work if this map matches reality. If that really was the case, then that means that mariners and pilots are constantly adjusting their course, steering them to complete a full circle if that is how circumnavigation really works. The thing is that millions of people have already circumnavigated the Earth from east to west. Let’s say that you take off on a plane at the equator, in uh…northern Brazil.”