Modern flat Earth beliefs

For the Belgian band, see Flat Earth Society (band).

The Flat Earth model depicts Antarctica as an ice wall surrounding a disk shaped Earth

The Flat Earth Society (also known as the International Flat Earth Society or the International Flat Earth Research Society) was an organization that sought to further the belief that the Earth is flat rather than a sphere. The modern organization was founded by Englishman Samuel Shenton in 1956, and later led by Charles K. Johnson, who based the organization in his home in Lancaster, California. The formal society appears to have disbanded after Johnson’s death in 2001, while its name continues to be used by various web sites.

Origins of the Flat Earth movement

Main article: Flat Earth

The belief that the Earth was flat was almost universal until about the 4th century BC, when the Ancient Greek scientists and philosophers proposed the idea that the Earth was a sphere, or at least rounded in shape. Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to provide evidence of a spherical Earth in 330 BC. By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe that the Earth was a sphere.

However, throughout history, many continued to support the notion of a flat Earth. Modern hypotheses supporting a flat Earth originated with English inventor Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). Based on his interpretation of certain biblical passages, Rowbotham published a 16-page pamphlet, which he later expanded into a 430-page book, Earth Not a Globe, expounding his views. According to Rowbotham's system, which he called "Zetetic Astronomy", the earth is a flat disc centered at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice (Antarctica), with the sun and moon 3000 miles (4800 km) and the "cosmos" 3100 miles (5000 km) above earth.

Rowbotham and his followers gained attention by engaging in public debates with leading scientists of the day. One such debate, involving the prominent naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, concerned the Bedford Level experiment (and later led to several lawsuits for fraud and libel).

After Rowbotham's death, his followers established the Universal Zetetic Society, published a magazine entitled The Earth Not a Globe Review, and remained active well into the early part of the 20th century. After World War I, the movement underwent a slow decline.

Flat Earth Society Origins

In 1956, Samuel Shenton took over the Universal Zetetic Society and founded the Flat Earth Society. The organization took a hit when satellite images taken from outer space showed the Earth as a sphere rather than flat, but they were not fazed. Shenton remarked: "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye".

The society also took the position that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax, staged by Hollywood and based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke, a position also held by others not connected to the Flat Earth Society. On hearing this, Clarke sent a facetious letter to NASA's chief administrator:

"Dear Sir, on checking my records, I see that I have never received payment for this work. Could you please look into this matter with some urgency? Otherwise you will be hearing from my solicitors, Messrs Geldsnatch, Geldsnatch and Blubberclutch".

In 1971, Shenton died and Charles K. Johnson became the new president of the Flat Earth Society. Under his leadership, over the next three decades, the group grew in size from a few members to about 3,000. Johnson distributed newsletters, flyers, maps, and other promotional materials to anyone who asked for them, and he managed all membership applications together with his wife, Marjory, who was also a flat-earther. The most famous of these newsletters was The Flat Earth News, which was a quarterly four page tabloid. Johnson paid for this tabloid through annual dues of members, which ranged from $6–$10 over the course of his leadership.

United Nations flag

The most recent world model propagated by the Flat Earth Society holds that humans live on a disc, with the North Pole at its center and a 150-foot (45 m) high wall of ice at the outer edge. The resulting map resembles the symbol of the United Nations, which Johnson used as evidence for his position. In this model, the sun and moon are each a mere 32 miles (52 km) in diameter.

A newsletter from the society gives some insight into Johnson's thinking:

Aim: To carefully observe, think freely, rediscover forgotten fact and oppose theoretical dogmatic assumptions. To help establish the United States...of the world on this flat earth. Replace the science religion...with SANITY.

The International Flat Earth Society is the oldest continuous Society existing on the world today. It began with the Creation of the Creation. First the water...the face of the deep...without form or limits...just Water. Then the Land sitting in and on the Water, the Water then as now being flat and level, as is the very Nature of Water. There are, of course, mountains and valleys on the Land but since most of the World is Water, we say, "The World is Flat". Historical accounts and spoken history tell us the Land part may have been square, all in one mass at one time, then as now, the magnetic north being the Center. Vast cataclysmic events and shaking no doubt broke the land apart, divided the Land to be our present continents or islands as they exist today. One thing we know for sure about this world...the known inhabited world is Flat, Level, a Plain World.

We maintain that what is called 'Science' today and 'scientists' consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the 'Priest-Entertainers' for the common people. 'Science' consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of gibberish theory-theology...unrelated to the real world of facts, technology and inventions, tall buildings and fast cars, airplanes and other Real and Good things in life; technology is not in any way related to the web of idiotic scientific theory. ALL inventors have been anti-science. The Wright brothers said: "Science theory held us up for years. When we threw out all science, started from experiment and experience, then we invented the airplane." By the way, airplanes all fly level on this Plane earth.

The Flat Earth Society recruited members by attacking the United States government and all of its agencies, particularly NASA. Much of the society’s literature in its early days focused on interpreting the Bible literally to mean that the Earth is flat, although they did certainly attempt to offer scientific explanations and evidence.

The group rose to about 3,000 members during its peak under Charles K. Johnson. It is questionable though how many of those members actively furthered the Flat Earth Theory, and how many of those members were even supportive of the theory. Another large challenge facing the Flat Earth Society was public ridicule. The organization faced overwhelming scientific evidence and public opinion that maintained that the Earth was a sphere. The term flat-earther became commonly used to refer to an individual who stubbornly adheres to discredited or outmoded ideas.

The society began to decline in the 1990s, and was further affected by a fire at the house of Charles K. Johnson which destroyed all of the records and contacts of members of the Flat Earth Society. Johnson’s wife, who helped manage the database, died shortly thereafter. Charles K. Johnson himself died on March 19, 2001. There is no evidence that the Flat Earth Society has survived him. However, proponents of the theory maintain various websites and forums.

Flat Earth Society today

In August 2008 the BBC reported on believers of the Flat Earth idea, describing one of the interviewees as ”moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website”, without providing a URL. This person stated his intentions to better connect members of the Flat Earth Society across the world.

As of September 2009, two web-based discussion forums - theflatearthsociety.org/forum/, and www.theflatearthsociety.net/forum/ exist. The forums do not share the same content; they have different bulletin boards, users and postings.

Some of the postings appear to exhibit a genuine belief in the flat earth idea, and a FAQ is available. At www.theflatearthsociety.net, the global moderator bears the user name James McIntyre, just as the interviewee in the BBC report of August 2008. In a posting of July 2007 2008, McIntyre calls for recreation of a flat earth believers organisation.

One parody web site that claims to represent the Flat Earth Society states that it has existed as an organization since 1547. They provide a mission statement and a form that interested individuals can fill out to join, however it is clearly a parody.

Current proponents of the Flat Earth Society do not have a central alternative theory; different members have unique ideas on how the Earth is constructed. Some advocate the idea that the Earth is utterly flat, while others advocate a disk construction. The lack of alternative theory further affects the legitimacy of the group and the willingness of individuals to join the Flat Earth Society that may have been skeptics of the spherical theory.

Physics of a Flat Earth

The modern Flat Earth Society describes the Earth as being a disc with a diameter of about 40,000 km (24,900 miles) and a circumference of 126,000 km (78,225 miles). The sun and moon are both described as discs about 52 km (32 miles) in diameter (although some such sources say they are spheres) following closed paths about 4,800 km (3,000 miles) above the Earth, and the stars about 160 km (100 miles) higher.

The Flat Earth Society also maintains that the Earth is accelerating upward at a rate of 9.8 m/s², thereby simulating gravity, under the influence of a form of dark energy. Any flat Earth model that admitted that matter that is part of the Earth attracts all other matter making it up would have to account for such a disk failing to collapse on itself. In a few Flat Earth models, however, other planetary bodies such as the moon and sun are described as exerting gravitational forces, lessening the apparent weight of object elevated above the earth; they also describe such forces as explaining the orbits of spacecraft.

In such accounts, the stars and planetary bodies above the Earth revolve (at least roughly horizontally) above it, thereby causing sunrise and sunset to occur, and as the sun moves farther from an observer, its apparent size decreases to one too small for the eye to detect.

Advocates explain the sinking ship effect by a series of perspective laws, in which a ship on the horizon intersects with the vanishing point, causing it to appear as if it is sinking. The Flat Earth Society holds that there are multiple first-hand accounts of the hulls of ships reappearing after the image is viewed through a telescope or binoculars.

A diagram depicting Flat Earth Seasons.

The exact explanation for lunar eclipses in the Flat Earth theory is vague. However, two commonly accepted hypotheses are the Shadow Object Theory (that an object undiscovered and undetectable by science obscures the moon causing moon phases and lunar eclipses) and the Reflection hypothesis (the sun's light reflects off the Earth and reflects back to the moon, with some areas of the Earth being less reflective than others, thus producing shadows). There is also a minority which believes moon phases are caused by weather patterns on the moon.

The Flat Earth theory maintains that as the sun orbits over the Earth, that the sun's orbit radius changes, causing it to be directly overhead at different locations at different times of the year.

Flat Earth Society also does not have an answer for the discrepancies that arise in surface distances between a round Earth map and that of the flat Earth equivalent.

The Flat Earth Society also has no explanation for the observable travel time between the most distant regions, consistent with a spherical earth, and the least distant regions, inconsistent with the great distance in a flat earth model. For instance, a traveler from Australia to South America, would have to traverse a great distance across Antartica, or the sea on flat Earth, but the distance is significantly shorter in the spherical earth model. This can apply for any traveler by plane, or sea, no matter what flat earth model is used.

The existence of the South Pole, especially the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (continuously inhabited since 1956), also seems to contradict the Flat Earth Society's belief that Antarctica is the edge of the Earth, though the present use of McMurdo Station as the sole point of access to the Pole (both by air and over the McMurdo-South Pole highway) might be used by flat-earthers to support their claims.

The Flat Earth Society in popular culture

• English musician Thomas Dolby, who has released an album called The Flat Earth used the name Flat Earth Society for his website forums, and has linked to information in regards to the flat earth hypothesis in the past.
• In the film Hopscotch, Miles Kendig (Walter Matthau) jokes that he is bequeathing all his money to the Flat Earth Society.
• In the 1980s, talk show host Wally George often sparred with and ridiculed members of the Flat Earth Society on his show Hot Seat. Australian talk show host Don Lane also had Flat Earth Society advocates on his show.
• A tourism commercial for Newfoundland and Labrador states that the Flat Earth Society believed that Newfoundland and Labrador was one of the four corners of the world.
• California-based punk rock band Bad Religion include a song entitled "Flat Earth Society" on their 1990 album Against the Grain (as well as their compilation album All Ages), written by Brett Gurewitz. A prominent feature of the song is the refrain "lie, lie, lie", indicating a strong denunciation of the society and its theories. The band has produced similar songs criticizing other movements it views as pseudoscientific.
• UK band Carter USM make reference to the Flat Earth Society in the song Senile Delinquent on their 1995 album Worry Bomb.
• Terry Pratchett's popular Discworld series of fantasy novels take place on a flat, disc-shaped planet which sits on the back of four elephants, which in turn stand on the back of a giant spacefaring tortoise named The Great A'Tuin. The cosmology of Discworld is such that occasionally an elephant has to lift its leg to allow the Discworld's sun to rotate unhindered around it. Pratchett's vision of a flat earth owes more to ancient depictions of the cosmos than it does to Zetetic astronomy. However, it does parody the Flat Earth movement by the inclusion of the Omnian religion (in Small Gods), who believe that the Discworld is actually a sphere.
• Klutz Press mention the Flat Earth Society in the book "Mother Nature Goes Nuts!" in a section about the argument on global warming, saying how it is practically impossible to get everyone on earth to agree on one thing.
• In the Stephen King book The Mist, the main character uses the name Flat Earth Society to describe a group that refuse to accept the presence of monsters in the mist outside. The reference is a clear satire of the society as people who refuse to believe what is clearly the truth and end up getting themselves killed in stubborn ignorance.
• In Asimov's book Forward the Foundation, there is a mention of a movement on the planet Helicon called Globalists, who claimed that Helicon was the only inhabited planet in the Galaxy, and the Galactic Empire was a fraud created by the government. While initially very successful, eventually its actions caused a decline of Helicon's trade with other planets, and an economic crisis the Globalists could not explain. After that, they suffered a rapid decline, and were relegated to a status similar to that of FES.

Flat Earth as a motive of parody science

In a satirical piece published 1996, Albert A. Bartlett, an emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, uses arithmetics to show that sustainable growth on Earth is impossible in a spherical Earth since its resources are necessarily finite. He explains that only a model of a flat earth, stretching infinitely in the two horizontal dimensions and also in the vertical downward direction, would be able to accommodate the needs of a permanently growing population and economy.

The purpose of this piece is to demonstrate the impossibility of permanent growth rather than to advocate the idea of a flat earth, given that it does not present any evidence for a flat infinite earth but rather lists a number of reasons, which make this very unlikely, making the satirical character of this essay clear

If the “we can grow forever” people are right, then they will expect us, as scientists, to modify our science in ways that will permit perpetual growth. We will be called on to abandon the “spherical earth” concept and figure out the science of the flat earth. We can see some of the problems we will have to solve. We will be called on to explain the balance of forces that make it possible for astronauts to circle endlessly in orbit above a flat earth, and to explain why astronauts appear to be weightless. We will have to figure out why we have time zones; where do the sun, moon and stars go when they set in the west of an infinite flat earth, and during the night, how do they get back to their starting point in the east. We will have to figure out the nature of the gravitational lensing that makes an infinite flat earth appear from space to be a small circular flat disk. These and a host of other problems will face us as the “infinite earth” people gain more and more acceptance, power and authority. We need to identify these people as members of "The New Flat Earth Society" because a flat earth is the only earth that has the potential to allow the human population to grow forever.”

The satiric nature of the piece is also made clear by a comparison to Barlett's other publications, which mainly advocate the necessity of curbing population growth.

See also

• Hollow Earth
• Nicolaus Copernicus

Additional resources

• Archival documents: (No longer available, but can be found at The Wayback Machine) The Papers of the Flat Earth Society, University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections and Archives, reference GB 141 FES. The collection comprises in 31 boxes and folders the papers of the Flat Earth Society during Samuel Shenton's involvement with the society (1956-1971). The material includes incoming and outgoing correspondence, promotional material such as leaflets and posters, magazines, manuscripts, lecture material including maps and diagrams, photographs, press cuttings, notes, books on astronomy and the Earth, and various other ephemera.
• Earth Not a Globe Online text of Samuel Birley Rowbotham's 1881 treatise on Zetetic (Flat Earth) Astronomy.
• $5,000 for Proving the Earth is a Globe, Oct. 1931 article from Modern Mechanics and Inventions about Voliva and his flat earth cosmology.
• The Flat Earth Professor Donald Simanek's web page on the history of flat earth movements.
• The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A Fraud! Says This Prophet by Robert J. Schadewald. Science Digest, July 1980. A very detailed look at the Society and its leader. Schadewald was president of the National Center for Science Education and an expert on alternative earth movements.
• Looking for Lighthouses by Robert J. Schadewald, Creation/Evolution #31 (1992). This article explains the use of lighthouse data by Samuel Rowbotham.
• Scientific Creationism, Geocentricity, and the Flat Earth by Robert J. Schadewald, from the Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1981–1982. Describes the movements leading to the Flat Earth Society and discusses parallels with creationism.
• The International Flat Earth Society. By Robert P. J. Day, 1993. Documents the full Flat Earth Society newsletter. Part of the Talk.Origins archive on the Evolution/Creationism archive.
• Holding, James Patrick, 2000. Is the ’erets (earth) flat? TJ 14(3):51–54.
• Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 1997. Inventing the Flat Earth : Columbus and Modern Historians ISBN 0-275-95904-X
• Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 1997. The Myth of the Flat Earth (No longer available) (summary of above book).
• Strickland, Jonathan, 2008. Top 10 Space Conspiracy Theories

Further reading

• Raymond Fraser (2007). When The Earth Was Flat: Remembering Leonard Cohen, Alden Nowlan, the Flat Earth Society, the King James monarchy hoax, the Montreal Story Tellers and other curious matters. Black Moss Press, ISBN 978-0-88753-439-3
• Martin Gardner (1957). Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-20394-8, chapter 2, pg 16-27
• James Randi (1995). An Encyclopedia of claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-13066-X, pg 97-98. (Available online)
• Robert Schadewald (1981). Scientific Creationism, Geocentricity, and the Flat Earth, Skeptical Inquirer, vol 6, #2, Winter 1981-82, 41-48.
• Ted Schultz, editor. (1989). The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, Harmony Books, ISBN 0-517-57165-X, pg. 86, 88, 166.
• William F. Williams, editor. (2000). Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, Facts on File, ISBN 0-8160-3351-X, pg 114-115.
• Benjamin Deeb (2005). Planet Earth: Alternate Theories of Shape and Size, NYR Press, ISBN 0-5173-4859-X
• Christine Garwood (2007) Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Pan Books, ISBN 140504702X
• Robert Schadewald (2008). Worlds of Their Own - A Brief History of Misguided Ideas: Creationism, Flat-Earthism, Energy Scams, and the Velikovsky Affair, Xlibris, ISBN 978-1-4363-0435-1, Part III, chapters 11,12 and 13, pg 85-126

External links

• www.theflatearthsociety.org The Flat Earth Society forum
• www.theflatearthsociety.net International Alliance of Flat Earth Groups
• References to the Flat Earth Society by the Library of Congress
• Book chapter on FES by Sir Patrick Moore
• Lyrics to the song "Flat Earth Society" by Brett Gurewitz