a deception of the public and it isn’t right.”21
Figure 2.2. Map of the earth from a north polar projection. (Courtesy NASA.)
After Shenton’s death in 1971, Charles K. Johnson picked up the mantle and inherited Shenton’s library from his wife. He reorganized the group as the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and Covenant People’s Church, where they maintained their lonely quest at his home in the town of Lancaster in the Mojave Desert.22 They claimed to have reached a membership as large as 3,500, scattered around the world, paying annual dues of six to ten dollars. The society communicated via the quarterly Flat Earth News, a four-page tabloid written and edited almost entirely by Johnson and sent in the mail. As hard-core biblical literalists, they emphasized all the passages that state that the earth is flat. Every few years, they would get smirking coverage in the newspapers, but their membership declined during the 1990s, especially after a fire at Johnson’s house in 1997 destroyed all records and membership contact information. Johnson’s wife died shortly afterward, and then the society itself vanished when Johnson died on March 19, 2001.
Flat-earth thinking might still be a tiny fringe belief with no organized leadership were it not for the internet and the ability of believers all around the earth to find each other and organize a virtual community. In 2004, the Flat Earth Society was resurrected by Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel) as a web-based discussion forum and then eventually relaunched as an official society, with a large web presence and their own wiki.23 As of July 2017, they claimed a membership of five hundred people. However, the publicity from celebrity entertainers and musicians, such as those discussed at the beginning of this chapter, seems to suggest that flat-earth ideas are much more common (see chap. 18), even if the believers are not official members of the Flat Earth Society. There are a number of other flat-earth societies on the internet not affiliated to Shenton’s group. The first Flat Earth International Conference met in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 9 and 10, 2017, with about five hundred attendees.24 In May 2018, there was a three-day flat-earth convention in Birmingham, England, with several hundred attendees who traveled all the way to England to hear a spectrum of speakers with a common belief in the flat earth.25 Even more alarming, about a third of millennials are not convinced that the earth is round (as discussed in chap. 18).26 And there are calls on the internet for a reality show to let the flat-earthers test their ideas and actually try to travel off the edge of the earth!27
In 2018, Netflix produced a documentary about the flat-earthers called Behind the Curve.28 Like most such documentaries, it consists mostly of interviews of the major advocates of a particular idea (in this case, the flat earth) and contrasting views of other interviewees who regard the believers as crazy. It starts with one of the stars of the flat-earth movement, Mark Sargent, a middle-aged, balding man who still lives with his mother and depends on her to feed him. Sargent spouts one incredible claim after another, sitting in his mother’s basement obsessing over little details and posting hundreds of YouTube videos expounding his ideas. He claims as proof of the flat earth that he can see skyscrapers from his mother’s Whidbey Island backyard. However, Whidbey Island is less than forty-eight kilometers (about thirty miles) from downtown Seattle, too close to detect the curvature.
Sargent describes how he obsessed for three solid days trying to track aircraft online that flew near or across the South Pole and then decided there weren’t any such flights. According to Sargent, this proves that Antarctica is not a continent on the South Pole but a giant ice wall on the perimeter of the flat earth. (Later in the same part of the movie, a Caltech grad student pulls up a different flight tracking site and finds plenty of planes flying over parts of Antarctica.) He shows his handmade model of the flat earth with the dome of the sky and stars above it, and the moon and sun rotating in the sky above us, but he does not explain how this would create the phases of the moon or would explain eclipses, which are entirely impossible with his model.
When you argue with a flat-earther, a highly revealing moment is when they fall back on their cop-out “Oh, that’s just math and physics—I don’t believe in those.” In the documentary, Sargent says, “The reason why we’re winning against science is that science just throws math at us,” as if that were some mark of how smart he is and how he is beating science. This is behind much of their thinking: they are only capable of simple intuitive models and are typically math-phobic, so they refuse to do even the simplest calculations that would show why their ideas are impossible. By contrast, since the days of Isaac Newton, the reasons we know the earth is round are best understood by doing mathematical calculations that only make sense in a spherical globe and cannot be accommodated in a flat earth.
But the most revealing moment in the documentary is when the flat-earthers attempt to do experiments to prove their point. In both cases, the experiments actually show that the earth is round, and the flat-earthers refuse to accept the results:
One of the more jaw-dropping segments of the documentary comes when Bob Knodel, one of the hosts on a popular Flat Earth YouTube channel, walks viewers through an experiment involving a laser gyroscope. As the Earth rotates, the gyroscope appears to lean off-axis, staying in its original position as the Earth’s curvature changes in relation. “What we found is, is when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift,” Knodel says, acknowledging that the gyroscope’s behavior confirmed to exactly what you’d expect from a gyroscope on a rotating globe. “Now, obviously we were taken aback by that. ‘Wow, that’s kind of a problem,’” Knodel says. “We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.” Despite further experimental refinements, Knodel’s gyroscope consistently behaves as if the Earth is round. Yet Knodel’s beliefs seem unchanged when discussing the experiment at a Flat Earth meetup in Denver. “We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro. If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad. It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential,” Knodel says to another Flat Earther in attendance.29
The second experiment was run by Knodel’s cohost on his flat-earth YouTube channel, Jeran Campanella. This experiment provides the ending for the film. As described in Newsweek,
Campanella devises an experiment involving three posts of the same height and a high-powered laser. The idea is to set up three measuring posts over a nearly 4 mile length of equal elevation. Once the laser is activated at the first post, its height can be measured at the other two. If the laser is at eight feet on the first post, then five feet at the second, then it indicates the measuring posts are set upon the Earth’s curvature.
In his first attempt, Campanella’s laser light spread out too much over the distance, making an accurate measurement impossible. But at the very end of Behind the Curve, Campanella comes up with a similar experiment, this time involving a light instead of a laser. With two holes cut into styrofoam sheets at the same height, Campanella hopes to demonstrate that a light shone through the first hole will appear on a camera behind the second hole, indicating that a light, set at the same height as the holes, travelled straight across the surface of the Flat Earth. But if the light needs to be raised to a different height than the holes, it would indicate a curvature, invalidating the Flat Earth.
Campanella watches when the light is activated at the same height as the holes, but the light can’t be seen on the camera screen. “Lift up your light, way above your head,” Campanella says. With the compensation made for the curvature of the Earth, the light immediately appears on the camera. “Interesting,” Campanella says. “That’s interesting.” The documentary ends.30
Even
