The "Official Center of the World"

"Around 30 years ago, Jacques-André Istel turned to his wife, Felicia Lee, and said, 'We’re going to sit in the desert and think of something to do.'

"Hardly an enticing proposition, but by then, Lee was surely used to her husband's hare-brained schemes.

"In 1971, at great risk to himself and his then bride-to-be, Istel piloted the couple on a round-the-world flight in a tiny, twin-engine plane that had hardly the oomph of a Chevrolet automobile. Before that, there was the whole business of convincing people to jump out of planes: in the 1950s, after returning home from the Korean War, where he served with the US Marines, Istel developed parachuting equipment and techniques that made it possible for the average Joe to leap out of an airplane at 2,500ft and land as if having tumbled from a 4ft bookcase. Soon, Americans by the thousands were enjoying the latest craze: skydiving. . . .

"And so, in the 1980s, the couple moved to the far south-east corner of California, a few miles west of Yuma, Arizona, off Interstate 8, where Istel had acquired a 2,600-acre parcel of land several decades earlier. Apart from a good aquifer, this particular patch of the Sonoran Desert had little to recommend it. But 'we realised that we loved it - the calm, the beauty,' Istel said.

"With nothing much around apart from an RV park and some impressively tall sand dunes, the couple's desert refuge was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. So it made sense, at least in Istel's fervid imagination, to put it in the middle of somewhere. In 1985, the French-born parachuting pioneer cajoled California's Imperial County Board of Supervisors into designating a spot on his property as The Official Centre of the World. (Audacious, perhaps, but not necessarily inaccurate, given that anywhere on the Earth’s surface could be the centre.)"

A recent BBC report profiled Istel's initiative, including the establishment of the community of Felicity, California.

To access the complete BBC report, please visit:

BBC: Travel: A strange museum at the 'centre of the world' (2 JAN 19)

Related link:

Roadside Amrica: Official Center of the World, Felicity, California