Date: ca. 1800–Present
Location: The Earth
The Conspirators: World governments
The Victims: The world population
Out of all the conspiracy theories in the book, you’ve almost certainly heard this one before: the Earth is flat. The conspiracy theorists who believe this to be true think that the flat Earth is the greatest of all secrets, and that keeping it from the public is the ultimate act of control. As long as this most enormous of all possible truths is hidden from us, we remain under the control of the powerful elite, and are subject to whatever abuses they wish to impose. Many theorists who think the Earth is flat feel that it is their patriotic duty to believe; for if an immoral government is imposing a false claim on its people, resistance to that claim becomes a moral imperative, in their minds.
The Earth is round.
Popular notions that ancient people believed the world was flat turn out to be almost universal, but are also almost universally false. Since the ancients first began forming concepts of the cosmos, humans have always understood the Earth to be a globe. Pythagoras noted this as early as the sixth century B.C.E., followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and others. More than 2,200 years ago, ancient computations had the circumference of the Earth to within 2 percent accuracy. Educated populations worldwide have always known that the Earth is round.
It was not until the 1800s in England that a significant number of otherwise well-educated people discarded the notion of a round Earth. This view rose from the world of biblical literalism. A few Christian fundamentalists pointed to a number of Bible passages that they believed, when interpreted literally, proved the Earth must be flat. For example, references to “the four corners of the Earth” appear in Revelations 7:1, 20:8, and Isaiah 11:12, and references to “the ends of the Earth” appear in Psalms 67:7, 98:3, and Isaiah 45:22. All of which appear to suggest that the Earth has edges. Matthew 4:8 speaks of “all the world’s kingdoms” being visible from a single mountaintop, which could only be the case if the whole Earth was a flat plain. Biblical flat-Earth enthusiasts continue these odd interpretations ad nauseam with further verses about waters, the sky, compass directions, you name it.
Most influential among these was a gentleman named Samuel Rowbotham, who called himself Parallax. Parallax decided that the promotion of a flat Earth should be his life’s work, and he wrote, lectured, and debated about this idea tirelessly. He also came up with a number of experiments that were designed to prove the flatness of the Earth. He called his science Zetetic Astronomy (zetetic drawn from the Greek word for “inquiry”) and, in 1865, published Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe, which became the magnum opus of flat Earthism. In his view, expressed in the book, the North Pole lay at the center of the flat Earth, and Antarctica was an ice wall that surrounded its circumference. The sun was never more than 400 miles overhead, and the stars were some 1,000 miles away. Biblical literalists joined his Universal Zetetic Society in droves.
Flat Earthism languished for a few decades with no clear leadership until 1956, when English sign painter Samuel Shenton took up the torch and formed the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), which worked to continue the ideas of the Universal Zetetic Society. Shenton’s view of the Earth was similar to Parallax’s, but he also believed that the mythical ancient society of Atlantis was located under the North Pole and would occasionally launch flying saucers through a hole in the center of the city to periodically visit us. When astronauts working for NASA’s Gemini program began sending back photographs of the Earth taken from space, Shenton developed convoluted explanations for everything in the sky that could be seen from the Earth. For example, although watching satellites passing overhead at night might prove to some of us that they are orbiting a spherical Earth, Shenton claimed in 1957 that Sputnik was merely circling overhead. In dismissing this as proof of a spherical Earth, he made the analogy of Sputnik to a sailboat, asking “Would sailing round the Isle of Wight prove that it were spherical?” Membership in the International Flat Earth Research Society dwindled to only twenty-four by the time Shenton died in 1971, insisting to the last that the Moon landings were fake.
For the next twenty-five years, the flat-Earth belief was led by Charles and Marjory Johnson, who lived in a remote desert homestead in California and called themselves the Covenant People’s Church. They formed the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and took over where Shenton left off, publishing their periodical, Flat Earth News. The Johnsons pushed their fire-and-brimstone version of biblical literalism about as far as possible, but peppered it with broad-spectrum conspiracy-mongering. The Johnsons fervently promoted any and every crank theory of the universe, crank theory of physics, whatever, that came along—anything that would support their view that believed science is a deceit.
This was the Apollo era of the Moon landings, and the Johnsons spent a lot time disputing the validity of the Moon landings. The couple devoted much of their newsletter space to charging author Arthur C. Clarke and film director Stanley Kubrick, who cowrote the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, with faking the Moon landing, as had Shenton before his death. The Johnson’s house burned down in 1995, leaving them destitute, and the publications ceased.
With the onset of the twenty-first century and the rise of the Internet, flat-Earth believers have had ample venues for propagating their beliefs. The biblical literalism angle has largely dwindled away, replaced by alternative science claims, conspiratorial distrust of authority, and ignorance-based ridicule of sciences such as global warming and quantum physics, which are all claimed to be part of the master plan to hide the greatest truth of a flat Earth.
Although the Earth’s spherical shape is a self-evident fact supported by so much blatantly obvious proof that it should be unnecessary to even discuss, it can still be an interesting intellectual exercise to find these proofs. Perhaps the best is the existence of time zones, and how we can pick up the telephone in the daytime and talk to someone in another country where it is dark. If the Earth were flat and the sun merely circled above it such that the region below it were most brightly lit, there can be no spot on that flat plane from where the sun would not be visible. That’s not an illuminati lie, it’s geometry.
With telescopes we can watch planets such as Jupiter and Saturn and see their cloud features rotate out of view and back in. We can watch the phases of the Moon change as its spherical surface rotates in and out of the sunlight, and we can even see the curved edge of the Earth’s shadow darken part of the Moon during a lunar eclipse. And if we look at the stars at night and compare their positions simultaneously from different places around the world, there is no possible model to explain what we see except that of the observation being made from points on the surface of a sphere with a radius of 3,957 miles.
Although many obvious facts don’t seem to be worth explaining, it’s always interesting to learn how we know what we know.