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Des projections centrales comme celle-ci (à partir du pôle Sud) ont été cooptées comme images du modèle de la Terre plate, l'Antarctique étant représenté comme un mur de glaceentourant un disque.

22 images de la Terre vue de l'espace par le Deep Space Climate Observatory. Cette vision scientifique contemporaine de la Terre comme un globe sphérique en rotation est contestée par les croyants en une Terre plate.

Les croyances modernes en une Terre plate sont partagées par des organisations et des individus affirmant que la Terre est plate en dépit de deux millénaires de consensus scientifique et d'innombrables preuves empiriques, allant des circumnavigations des explorateurs du XVI^e siècle aux images de la Terre vue de l'espace. Les croyances en une Terre plate forment une pseudoscience ; leurs avocats sont considérés par les experts comme des dénialistes.

Ces groupes sont apparus au milieu du xix^e siècle mais leurs adhérents actuels ne sont pas tous sérieux. Ceux qui le sont sont souvent influencés par des idées religieuses ou conspirationnistes. Les réseaux sociaux ont permis une diffusion croissante de ces théories, amenant leur promotion par des individus non affilés à ces organisations.

Historique

De nombreuses cultures anciennes pouvaient croire que la Terre, le Soleil, la Lune, les étoiles et les planètes étaient plats, car ils peuvent parfois apparaître ainsi à une échelle locale ; c'est ce que semble confirmer la carte babylonienne du monde. Cependant, les Grecs de l'Antiquité ont clairement démontré que ces corps étaient sphérique, une conclusion qui est devenue le consensus scientifique. Contrairement à la croyance populaire selon laquelle la Terre était généralement considérée comme plate jusqu'à il y a quelques centaines d'années, la forme sphérique de la Terre est largement acceptée dans le monde occidental (et universellement par les érudits) depuis au moins l'époque hellénistique (323 av. J.-C. – 31 av. J.-C.). Ce n'est qu'au 19^e siècle que le concept de Terre plate (à ne pas confondre ave le mythe selon lequel on croyait la Terre plate au Moyen Âge) a connu un regain d'intérêt.

19^e et début du 20^e siècle

Carte de la Terre plate par Samuel Rowbotham.

Carte de la Terre plate, dessinée par Orlando Ferguson (en) en 1893.

La croyance moderne en une Terre plate a pour origine les ouvrages de Samuel Rowbotham. Sur la base de conclusions tirées de l'expérience de Bedford Level, Rowbotham a publié un pamphlet intitulé Zetetic Astronomy, qu'il a développé dans son livre Earth Not a Globe, dans lequel il propose que la Terre soit un disque plat centré au pôle Nord et délimité le long de son bord sud par un mur de glace, l'Antarctique. Rowbotham soutenait en outre que le Soleil et la Lune se trouvaient à 4800 km au-dessus de la Terre et que le « cosmos » se trouvait 200 km au-dessus. Il a également publié un dépliant intitulé The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scriptures (« l'incohérence de l'astronomie moderne et son opposition aux Écritures »), dans lequel il affirme que « la Bible, ainsi que nos sens, confirment l'idée que la Terre est plate et immobile et cette vérité essentielle ne doit pas être mise de côté au profit d'un système fondé uniquement sur des conjectures humaines ».

Rowbotham et ses disciples attirèrent l'attention en utilisant avec succès des arguments pseudoscientifiques dans des débats publics avec des scientifiques de premier plan comme Alfred Russel Wallace. Rowbotham créa une Société Zététique (Zetetic Society) en Angleterre et à New York, y envoyant plus de mille copies de Zetetic Astronomy.

En 1877, un de ses disciples, John Hampden, publia A New Manual of Biblical Cosmography. Rowbotham écrivit des études affirmant que la disparition progressive des navires à l'horizon n'était qu'un effet de perspective.

Après la mort de Rowbotham, Lady Elizabeth Blount (en) établit une Société Zététique Universelle (Universal Zetetic Society), dont l'objectif était « la propagation des connaissances relatives à la cosmogonie naturelle en confirmation des Saintes Écritures, sur la base de recherches scientifiques et expérimentales ». La Société publiait un magazine, The Earth Not a Globe Review, et resta active jusqu'au début du xx^e siècle. Un journal promouvant ces théories, Earth: a Monthly Magazine of Sense and Science, était publié entre 1901 et 1904, édité par Lady Blount. Elle soutenait que la Bible était l'autorité incontestable en ce qui concerne le monde physique et affirmait qu'on ne pouvait pas être chrétien tout en croyant que la Terre est un globe. Parmi les membres notables figuraient E. W. Bullinger (en) de la Trinitarian Bible Society (en), Edward Haughton, modérateur principal en sciences naturelles au Trinity College de Dublin, ainsi qu'un archevêque. Elle a reproduit les expériences de Rowbotham, suscitant quelques contre-expériences, mais l'intérêt pour le sujet a diminué après la Première Guerre mondiale. La Société Universelle Zététique « a été relancée sous différents noms au fil des années : en 1956, 1972 et 2004 ». Ce mouvement a donné naissance à plusieurs livres défendant l'idée d'une Terre plate et immobile, notamment Terra Firma de David Wardlaw Scott.

On trouve également à cette époque, parmi de nombreux autres promoteurs de cette théorie :

• William Carpenter (en), un imprimeur originaire de Greenwich, partisan de Rowbotham. Carpenter publia Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed – Proving the Earth not a Globe (Analyse critique de l'astronomie théorique – Montrant que la Terre n'est pas un globe) en huit parties à partir de 1864 sous le titre Common Sense (Le Sens commun). Il émigra ensuite à Baltimore, où il publia One Hundred Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe (Cent preuves de ce que la Terre n'est pas un globe) en 1885. Il y écrit : « Il existe des fleuves qui coulent sur des centaines de miles en direction du niveau de la mer sans descendre de plus de quelques pieds – notamment le Nil, qui, sur mille miles, ne descend que d'un pied. Une étendue plane d'une telle ampleur est tout à fait incompatible avec l'idée de la convexité de la Terre. C'est donc une preuve raisonnable que la Terre n'est pas un globe. ». Il ajoute également : « Si la Terre était un globe, un modèle tel qu'une petite boule serait le meilleur – parce que le plus fidèle – pour un navigateur en mer. Mais un tel objet n'existe pas : avec un tel jouet comme guide, le marin ferait assurément naufrage ! C'est une autre preuve de ce que la Terre n'est pas un globe. ».
• John Jasper (en), un esclave américain ami de Carpenter, devenu prédicateur, se fit l'écho des sentiments de son ami dans son sermon le plus fameux, « The Sun do move » (c'est le Soleil qui bouge), prêché plus de 250 fois, toujours sur invitation. Dans un compte-rendu écrit de son sermon, Jasper déclarait utiliser fréquemment le verset : « J’ai vu quatre anges debout aux quatre coins de la Terre » et poursuivait en argumentant : « Nous vivons donc sur une Terre à quatre coins ; alors, mes amis, pouvez-vous me dire, au nom de Dieu, comment une Terre avec quatre coins peut-elle être ronde ? ». Dans le même article, il ajoutait : « Si la Terre est, comme certains le disent en défendant leur théorie, peuplée de l’autre côté, ces gens seraient obligés de marcher sur le sol avec les pieds vers le haut, comme des mouches au plafond d’une pièce. ».

Le 20^e siècle

La Flat Earth Society

En 1956, Samuel Shenton (en) créa l'International Flat Earth Research Society, plus connue simplement sous le nom de Flat Earth Society, comme succédant à l'Universal Zetetic Society. Étant donné l'intérêt de Shenton pour les sciences et technologies alternatives, l'accent mis sur les arguments religieux était moins prononcé que dans la société qui l'avait précédée.

Malgré une large publicité, la course à l'espace éroda le soutien de Shenton en Grande-Bretagne jusqu'en 1967, lorsqu'il commença à attirer l'attention pendant le programme Apollo. Lorsque les images satellitaires montrèrent la Terre comme une sphère, Shenton déclara : « Il est facile de voir comment une photo comme celle-là pourrait tromper un œil non averti ».

Les récits historiques et la tradition orale nous disent que les terres pouvaient autrefois former une seule masse, peut-être carrée, avec le pôle Nord magnétique en son centre, comme aujourd'hui. De vastes événements cataclysmiques et des secousses ont sans doute fracturé cette masse, divisant les terres pour former les continents et les îles tels qu'ils existent aujourd'hui. Une chose est certaine à propos de ce monde : le monde connu et habité est plat, de niveau, un monde de plaines.

-Brochure écrite par Charles K. Johnson, 1984.

Après la mort de Shenton, Charles K. Johnson (en) hérita d'une partie de sa bibliothèque et créa en Californie l'International Flat Earth Research Society of America and Covenant People's Church, dont il devint président. Au cours des trois décennies suivantes, sous sa direction, la Flat Earth Society atteint 3500 membres.

Johnson publia de nombreux documents et gérait toutes les demandes d'adhésion. Sa publication la plus célèbre était Flat Earth News, un tabloïd trimestriel de quatre pages. Il s'appuyait sur la Bible pour justifier ses croyances, et voyait les scientifiques comme des imposteurs cherchant à remplacer la religion par la science.

Après différentes représentations possibles, la Flat Earth Society a finalement proposé pour la Terre un disque ayant le pôle Nord pour centre et à sa périphérie un mur de glace de 50 mètres, l'Antarctique. La carte qui en résulte ressemble au drapeau des Nations unies, ce que Johnson utilisa comme argument pour sa position. Dans ce modèle, le Soleil et la Lune ont chacun un diamètre de 50 kilomètres. Cependant, sous cette apparence de scientificité, Eugenie Scott considère le groupe comme « un exemple de théologie littéraliste biblique extrême, affirmant que la Terre est plate puisque la Bible dit qu'elle est plate, quoi que la science puisse dire. ».

Selon Johnson, la société commença à décliner après qu'un incendie dans sa maison en 1997 détruise tout ses documents et les contacts des autres membres ; de plus son épouse, qui gérait la base de données, mouryt peu de temps après. Johnson lui-même mourut le 19 mars 2001 ; la société ne comportait plus alors que quelques centaines d'adhérents.

Un mouvement parodique au Canada

La Flat Earth Society of Canada fut fondée le 8 novembre 1970 par le philosophe Leo Ferrari, l'écrivain Raymond Fraser (en) et le poète Alden Nowlan (en), et fut active jusqu'en 1984. Ses archives sont détenues par l'université du Nouveau-Brunswick.

Se nommant eux-mêmes des « planoterrestrialistes », leurs objectifs étaient très différents de ceux des autres groupes de partisans de la Terre plate. Ils affirmaient qu'un problème prédominant de la nouvelle ère technologique était la tendance des gens « à croire aveuglément aux théories et à ignorer les preuves apportées par leurs propres sens. ».Les intentions de la Société étaient clairement parodiques, comme on peut le voir dans les écrits de Ferrari attribuant tous les maux possibles (du racisme aux inégalités de genre) au modèle de la Terre sphérique. Ferrari prétendait même avoir failli tomber « du Bord de la Terre » à Brimstone Head, sur Fogo Island, lieu dont il affirmait que c'était un des quatre coins du de la Terre.

Ferrari fut interviewé en tant qu'« expert » dans In Search of the Edge ([À la recherche du Bord]), un faux documentaire de 1990. Le véritable objectif de ce film, financé partiellement par le Conseil des arts de l'Ontario et par l'Office national du film du Canada, était de promouvoir l'esprit critique et l'éducation aux médias chez les écoliers, en « essayant de démontrer de manière convaincante quelque chose que tout le monde sait être faux ».

Les croyances au 21^e siècle

Réapparition

In 2004, Daniel Shenton (sans relation de parenté avec Samuel) ressuscita le groupe à partir d'un forum sur Internet. Cela amena finalement à la recréation officielle de la Flat Earth Society en octobre 2009, et à la création d'un nouveau site Web, présentant une collection de documents sur la Terre plate, ainsi qu'un wiki. De plus, la société commença à accepter de nouveaux membres (pour la première fois depuis 2001), le musicien Thomas Dolby étant le premier de ces nouveaux convertis ; en 2015, plus de 500 personnes étaient devenus membres (toutefois, les inscriptions semblent s'être arrêtées depuis cette date).

Une scission de la société en 2013 a amené à la formation d'un autre site internet, proposant lui aussi un forum et un wiki.

Kay Burns (en), une artiste multi-média, a recréé la Flat Earth Society du Canada comme projet artistique, avec son alter ego Iris Taylor comme présidente. Burns created an installation entitled the Museum of the Flat Earth, which included some artefacts from the 1970 group. It was exhibited in 2016 at the Flat Earth Outpost Café in Shoal Bay, Newfoundland.

À l'ère d'Internet, la disponibilité d'outils technologiques et de réseaux sociaux tels que YouTube, Facebook et Twitter permet facilement à des indvidus, célèbres ou non, de répandre des fausses nouvelles et des idées erronées. L'idée de la Terre plate est un des sujets qui se sont épanouis dans cet environnement.

Les platistes modernes embrassent généralement une certaine forme de théorie du complot, dans la nécessité où ils sont d'expliquer pourquoi des institutions majeures telles que les gouvernements, les médias, les écoles, les scientifiques et les compagnies aériennes affirment toutes que le monde est une sphère. Ils ont tendance à ne pas faire confiance aux observations qu'ils n'ont pas faites eux-mêmes, et sont souvent méfiants ou en désaccord les uns avec les autres. Ils peuvent aussi être moins enclins aux interprétations inerrantistes de la Bible, et certains critiques de l'idée de la Terre plate, comme l'astronome Danny R. Faulkner, qui sont des créationnistes jeune-terre, tentent de justifier les passages de la Bible qui pourraient renforcer cette idée.

Les conférenciers de la Flat Earth UK Convention de 2018, bien que presque tous d'accord pour affirmer que la Terre était un disque plat et que l'espace extérieur . While most agree upon a disc-shaped Earth, some are convinced the Earth is diamond-shaped. Furthermore, while most believers do not believe in outer space and none believe humans have ever travelled there, they vary widely in their views of the universe.

The solar eclipse of 21 August 2017 gave rise to numerous YouTube videos purporting to show how the details of the eclipse prove the Earth is flat. Also in 2017, "the Tunisian and Arab scientific and educational world" had a scandal when a PhD student submitted a thesis "declaring Earth to be flat, unmoving, young (only 13,500 years of age), and the centre of the universe".

On 3 May 2018, Steven Novella analysed the modern belief in a flat Earth, and concluded that, despite what most people think about the subject, the believers are being sincere in their belief that the Earth is flat, and are not "just saying that to wind us up". He stated that:

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The British sceptical activist Michael Marshall attended the UK's annual Flat Earth UK Convention on 27–29 April 2018 and noted disagreement on several views of the believers in a flat Earth. To Marshall, one of the most telling moments at the convention was the "Flat Earth Addiction" test that was based on a checklist used to determine whether someone is in a cult, without the convention attendees realising the possibility of themselves being in a cult.

Organisations sceptical of fringe beliefs have occasionally performed tests to demonstrate the local curvature of the Earth. One of these, conducted by members of the Independent Investigations Group, at the Salton Sea on 10 June 2018 was attended also by supporters of a flat Earth, and the encounter between the two groups was recorded by the National Geographic Explorer. This experiment successfully demonstrated the curvature of the Earth via the disappearance over distance of boat-based and shore-based targets.

In 2018, the documentary Behind the Curve was released, which follows prominent modern flat-Earthers Mark Sargent and Patricia Steere, as well as astrophysicists and psychologists who attempt to explain the growing fad.

In March 2019, social media personality Logan Paul released a satirical documentary film about the flat Earth called FLAT EARTH: To The Edge And Back.

The Flat Earth Society has a Twitter account, @FlatEarthOrg. This account shares information about their group and promotes flat earth ideologies.

Mike Hughes

Mike Hughes, a daredevil and flat-Earth conspiracy theorist, used a homebuilt manned-rocket in an attempt to see for himself if the Earth is flat on 24 March 2018. His rocket made of scrap metal was estimated to cost $20,000, and using a mobile home as a custom launchpad managed to climb 1 875 pieds ( ) with Hughes inside and ended with a hard landing but with parachutes successfully deploying. The amateur rocketeer was not seriously injured and remained firm in his flat Earth beliefs. He claimed that real evidence will come with "larger rockets". Hughes was killed in an accident on 22 February 2020 while piloting a flight of his steam-powered rocket in a further attempt to prove the Earth was flat. The accident was caused by an early deployment and separation of the return parachute on the vehicle. The rocket impacted after falling from an altitude of several hundred feet. Hughes was killed instantly.

After Hughes' death, his public relations representative Darren Shuster stated that Hughes "didn't believe in flat Earth" and that it was "a PR stunt" to get publicity, while Michael Linn, who worked on the documentary Rocketman: Mad Mike's Mission to Prove the Flat-Earth said that Hughes' belief appeared genuine.

En Italie

In Italy there are no centralised societies on flat Earth. However, since the 2010s, small groups of conspiracy theorists, who carry out meetings, started to emerge and to spread flat Earth theories. Among these are Calogero Greco, Albino Galuppini and Agostino Favari, who organised in 2018–2019 several meetings in Palermo, Sicily, with an entry price of €20.

Among their claims, some include:

• NASA is similar to Disneyland and that astronauts are actors.
• The April 2019 supermassive black hole photo at the core of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 is a complete fake.
• The proof Earth is flat lies in a filled bottle where, if placed horizontally, water never curves.

In addition to these, it is their common belief that the United States has a plan to create in Europe a new America open to everyone, where the only value is consumerism and that George Soros commands a satanic globalist conspiracy. They reject the past existence of dinosaurs, the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the authority of the scientific community, claiming scientists are Freemasons.

Former leader of the Five Star Movement political party, Beppe Grillo, showed interest in the group, admitting to admiring their free speech spirit and to wanting to participate at the May 2019 conference. In the end, however, Grillo did not appear.

Dans la culture populaire

Modèle:In popular culture The flat Earth, or the Flat Earth model, is often used and characterized in a satirical or humorous sense, which is generally popularized by Internet memes on social media platforms. One image, which appeared in May 2017 according to TinEye which could possibly be a photoshop, displays a Facebook post by the Flat Earth Society stating the phrase "The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe" with another user replying, "Say that again, but slowly" after some time the image went viral.

The Flat Earth model is also used in fictional writing, along with books, video games and music.

Such as:

• The fictional character Evan Michael Tanner, an international adventurer created by American novelist Lawrence Block in the 1960s, is a member of the Flat Earth Society. Tanner is described as not taking the Flat Earth belief seriously, but rather belongs to the group to represent his suspicion of authority and devotion to fighting for lost causes.
• Richard A. Lupoff's novel Circumpolar! (1984) describes a flat Earth, with a hole at the centre instead of a North Pole, and the underside contains fictional lands such as Atlantis and Lemuria.
• California-based punk rock band Bad Religion include a song titled "Flat Earth Society", by Brett Gurewitz, on their album Against the Grain (1990). A prominent feature of the song is the refrain "lie, lie, lie," indicating a strong denunciation of the society and its theories.
• In 1984, English musician Thomas Dolby released an album called The Flat Earth. This became the name for his fan club and subsequent website forums. Daniel Shenton credited this album as his introduction to the theory, and offered the first membership of the reopened Society. Dolby, while not a believer, accepted.
• Terry Pratchett's commercially successful series of Discworld novels take place on a flat Earth balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle swimming through space. The thirteenth book in the series, Small Gods, features the "Quisition", a powerful censorial body within the Omnian church, whose members propagate the religious dogma that the world is in fact spherical, and persecute those who dare to say truly that "the Turtle moves", in allusion both to the historical controversy on heliocentrism and to the ahistorical belief that the notion of spherical Earth was condemned as heretical by the Church in the Middle Ages.
• In 2013, while discussing the importance of acting on climate change, President Barack Obama said there was no time for "a meeting of the Flat-Earth Society" in reference to climate change deniers.
• Rapper B.o.B composed a song titled "Flatline", in which he claims the Earth is flat and promotes other conspiracy theories. He was offered, and accepted, membership in the Flat Earth Society. In 2016, he posted a photo of himself on Twitter at a highly elevated location. He captioned the photo "The cities in the background are approximately 16 miles apart… where is the curve? Please explain this." He later added that "A lot of people are turned off by the phrase ‘flat earth’ ... but there’s no way u can see all the evidence and not know... grow up". Since these comments, he has additionally started a GoFundMe page to raise $1 million to launch a satellite into space to prove that the Earth is flat. (Valenzuela, 2019) but the page has been taken down.
• On Saturday, 17 February 2017 NBA point guard Kyrie Irving was interviewed on his previous comments in a podcast with fellow NBA players Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson regarding the Earth's curvature. In the podcast, he made claims about the ambiguity of the evidence that the Earth being round and his words garnered massive attention and sparked discussion on social media. 
• Shaquille O'Neal claimed that the Earth is flat during his podcast called The Big Podcast with Shaq. The podcast episode was titled "Shaquille O'Neal and Kevin Garnett Talk NBA and Area 21, Plus Shaq Sounds Off on the Boogie Cousins Trade and Wrestlemania". He said that he drove from Florida to California and it was flat to him.
• SpaceX ISS docking simulator has an option to display Earth flat.
• In late 2020 a group called "The Truthtellers" released a game titled Flat Earth Simulator on Steam.

Voir aussi

• Figure of the Earth
• Geodesy
• Hollow Earth
• Modèle:Section link (documenting why the flat Earth belief is mistaken)
• Wilbur Glenn Voliva

Notes et références

Références

• (en) Cet article est partiellement ou en totalité issu de l’article de Wikipédia en anglais intitulé « Modern flat Earth beliefs » (voir la liste des auteurs).
• (en) Christine Garwood, Flat Earth: the History of an infamous idea, Macmillan, 2007
• (en) Graham Ambrose, « These Coloradans say Earth is flat. And gravity's a hoax. Now they're being persecuted », ,‎ 7 juillet 2017 (lire en ligne)
• Valenzuela , S. (19 April 2019). History's most famous Flat Earth believers: Athletes, celebrities, and ancient Greeks. Retrieved 3 March 2020, from

Bibliographie

• 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)
• Christine Garwood (2007) Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Pan Books, (ISBN 1-4050-4702-X)

Liens externes

• The Flat Earth Society (2004/2009)
• The Flat Earth Society (2013)
• The International Flat Earth Research Society
• The Modern Day Flat Earth Community
• References to The Flat Earth Society by the Library of Congress
• Article on Daniel Shenton
• 3D Interactive Earth Globe

Modèle:Pseudoscience

Projections of the sphere like the azimuthal equidistant projection have been co-opted as images of the flat Earth model depicting Antarctica as an ice wall surrounding a disk-shaped Earth.

Twenty-two images of the Earth taken from space by the DSCOVR satellite. The observable, contemporary scientific view of the Earth as a rotating spherical globe, which flat Earth believers contest.

Pseudoscientific beliefs in a flat Earth are promoted by a number of organizations and individuals. The claims of modern flat Earth proponents are not based on scientific knowledge and are contrary to over two millennia of scientific consensus based on multiple confirming lines of evidence that Earth is roughly spherical. Flat Earth beliefs are classified by experts in philosophy and physics as a form of science denial.

Flat Earth groups of the modern era date from the middle of the 20th century; some adherents are serious and some are not. Those who are serious are often motivated by religion or conspiracy theories. Through the use of social media, flat Earth theories have been increasingly espoused and promoted by individuals unaffiliated with larger groups. Many believers make use of social media to spread their views.

Background

Many ancient cultures may have believed that the Earth, Sun, Moon, stars, and planets were flat as they can sometimes appear so on a local level. The Ancient Greeks deduced that they were instead a sphere, and that became the scientific consensus.

Contrary to the popular belief that the Earth was generally believed to be flat until a few hundred years ago, the spherical shape of the Earth has been widely accepted in the Western world (and universally by scholars) since at least the Hellenistic period (323 BCE–31 BCE). It was not until the 19th century that the Flat Earth concept had a resurgence, due to Samuel Rowbotham. Flat Earth beliefs have had a notable recent resurgence since 2015, due to the internet.

19th and early 20th centuries

Rowbotham's flat Earth map

Modern flat Earth belief originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). Based on conclusions derived from his 1838 Bedford Level experiment, Rowbotham published the 1849 pamphlet titled Zetetic Astronomy, writing under the pseudonym "Parallax". He later expanded this into the book Earth Not a Globe, proposing the Earth is a flat disc centred at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice, Antarctica. Rowbotham further held that the Sun and Moon were 3 000 milles ( ) above Earth and that the "cosmos" was 3 100 milles ( ) above the Earth. He also published a leaflet titled The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scriptures, which argued that the "Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the Earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture".

Rowbotham and followers like William Carpenter gained attention by successful use of pseudoscience in public debates with leading scientists such as Alfred Russel Wallace. Rowbotham created a Zetetic Society in England and New York, shipping over a thousand copies of Zetetic Astronomy to the New York branch. Wallace repeated the Bedford Level experiment in 1870, correcting for atmospheric refraction and showing a spherical Earth.

In 1877, John Hampden produced a book A New Manual of Biblical Cosmography. Rowbotham also produced studies that purported to show that the effects of ships disappearing below the horizon could be explained by the laws of perspective in relation to the human eye.

After Rowbotham's death, Lady Elizabeth Blount established the Universal Zetetic Society in 1893, whose objective was "the propagation of knowledge related to Natural Cosmogony in confirmation of the Holy Scriptures, based on practical scientific investigation". The society published a magazine, The Earth Not a Globe Review, which sold for twopence and remained active well into the early 20th century. A flat Earth journal, Earth: a Monthly Magazine of Sense and Science, was published between 1901 and 1904, edited by Lady Blount.

Other notable flat Earthers from this time period include:

• William Carpenter, a printer originally from Greenwich, was a supporter of Rowbotham. Carpenter published Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed – Proving the Earth not a Globe in eight parts from 1864 under the name Common Sense. He later emigrated to Baltimore, where he published One Hundred Proofs the Earth is Not a Globe in 1885. He wrote: "There are rivers that flow for hundreds of miles towards the level of the sea without falling more than a few feet – notably, the Nile, which, in a thousand miles, falls but a foot. A level expanse of this extent is quite incompatible with the idea of the Earth's convexity. It is, therefore, a reasonable proof that Earth is not a globe", as well as: "If the Earth were a globe, a small model globe would be the very best – because the truest – thing for the navigator to take to sea with him. But such a thing as that is not known: with such a toy as a guide, the mariner would wreck his ship, of a certainty! This is a proof that Earth is not a globe."
• John Jasper, an American slave turned prolific preacher, and friend of Carpenter's, echoed his friend's sentiments in his most famous sermon "The Sun do move", preached over 250 times, always by invitation. In a written account of his sermon, published in The Richmond Whig of March 19, 1878, Jasper says he would frequently cite the verse "I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth" and follow up by arguing: "So we are living on a four-cornered earth; then, my friends, will you tell me how in the name of God can an earth with four corners be round!" In the same article he argued: "if the earth is like others say, who hold a different theory, peopled on the other side, those people would be obliged to walk on the ground with their feet upward like flies on the ceiling of a room".
• In Brockport, New York, in 1887, M. C. Flanders argued the case of a flat Earth for three nights against two scientific gentlemen defending sphericity. Five townsmen chosen as judges voted unanimously for a flat Earth at the end. The case was reported in the Brockport Democrat.
• Joseph W. Holden of Maine, a former justice of the peace, gave numerous lectures in New England and lectured on flat-Earth theory at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His fame stretched to North Carolina, where the Statesville Semi-weekly Landmark recorded at his death in 1900: "We hold to the doctrine that the Earth is flat ourselves and we regret exceedingly to learn that one of our members is dead."
• In 1898, during his solo circumnavigation of the world, Joshua Slocum encountered a group of flat-Earthers in Durban, South Africa. Three Boers, one of them a clergyman, presented Slocum with a pamphlet in which they set out to prove that the world was flat. Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, advanced the same view: "You don't mean round the world, it is impossible! You mean in the world. Impossible!"
• From 1915 to 1942 Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who in 1906 took over the Christian Catholic Church, a Pentecostal sect that established a utopian community in Zion, Illinois, preached flat Earth doctrine. He used a photograph of a 12 milles ( ) stretch of the shoreline at Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin, taken 3 pieds (91,44 cm) above the waterline to prove his point. When the airship Italia disappeared on an expedition to the North Pole in 1928, he warned the world's press that it had sailed over the edge of the world. He offered a $5000 award ($98,590 in 2022 terms) for proving that the Earth is not flat, under his own conditions. Teaching a globular Earth was banned in the Zion schools, and the message was transmitted on his WCBD radio station.
• Along with those who followed him, Frank Cherry (died 1963), the founder of the Black Hebrew Israelite religion, taught the existence of a flat Earth "surrounded by three layers of heaven."

International Flat Earth Research Society

Logo of the Flat Earth Society

In 1956, Samuel Shenton created the International Flat Earth Research Society, better known as the "Flat Earth Society", as a successor to the Universal Zetetic Society, running it as "organising secretary" from his home in Dover, England. Given Shenton's interest in alternative science and technology, the emphasis on religious arguments was less than in the predecessor society. This was just before the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik; he responded: "Would sailing round the Isle of Wight prove that it were spherical? It is just the same for those satellites."Modèle:Better source needed

His primary aim was to reach children before they were convinced about a spherical Earth. Despite plenty of publicity, the space race eroded Shenton's support in Britain until 1967, when he started to gain attention during the Apollo program. When satellite images showed Earth as a sphere, Shenton remarked: "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye". Later asked about similar photographs taken by astronauts, he attributed curvature to the use of wide-angle lens, adding, "It's a deception of the public and it isn't right".

In 1969, Shenton persuaded Ellis Hillman, a Polytechnic of East London lecturer, to become president of the Flat Earth Society after attempts to convince Eden Thomas, a former chairman, to take on the role; but there is little evidence of any activity on his part until after Shenton's death, when he added most of Shenton's library to the archives of the Science Fiction Foundation he helped to establish.

Shenton died in 1971. Charles K. Johnson, a correspondent from California, inherited part of Shenton's library from Shenton's wife; he incorporated and became president of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and Covenant People's Church in California. Over the next three decades, under his leadership, the Flat Earth Society grew to a reported 3,500 members.

Johnson spent years examining the studies of flat- and round-Earth theories and proposed evidence of a conspiracy against flat Earth: "The idea of a spinning globe is only a conspiracy of error that Moses, Columbus, and FDR all fought..." His article was published in the magazine Science Digest in 1980. It goes on to state: "If it is a sphere, the surface of a large body of water must be curved. The Johnsons have checked the surfaces of Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea without detecting any curvature."

Johnson issued many publications and handled all membership applications. The most famous publication was Flat Earth News, a quarterly, four-page tabloid. Johnson paid for these publications through annual member dues costing US$6 to US$10 over the course of his leadership. Johnson cited the Bible for his beliefs, and he saw scientists as pulling a hoax which would replace religion with science.

The Flat Earth Society's most recent planet model is that humanity lives on a disc, with the North Pole at its centre and a 150 pieds ( m) wall of ice, Antarctica, 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 32 milles ( ) in diameter.

The Flat Earth Society recruited members by speaking against the US government and all its agencies, particularly NASA. Much of the society's literature in its early days focused on interpreting the Bible to mean that the Earth is flat, although they did try to offer scientific explanations and evidence.

Criticism

Eugenie Scott called the group an example of "extreme Biblical-literalist theology: The earth is flat because the Bible says it is flat, regardless of what science tells us".

According to some flat Earthers, the Flat Earth Society is a government-controlled organization whose true purpose is to make ridiculous claims about flat Earth and therefore discredit the flat Earth movement.

Decline and relaunch

According to Charles K. Johnson, the membership of the group rose to 3,500 under his leadership but began to decline after a fire at his house in 1997 which destroyed all of the records and contacts of the society's members. Johnson's wife, who helped manage the membership database, died shortly thereafter. Johnson himself died on 19 March 2001.

In 2004, Daniel Shenton (not related to Samuel) resurrected the Flat Earth Society, basing it around a web-based discussion forum. In the late 1990s, Thomas Dolby's 1984 album The Flat Earth inspired Shenton to look into the Flat Earth Society, and he came to believe in its ideas. He believes that no one has provided proof that the world is not flat. This eventually led to the official relaunch of the society in October 2009, and the creation of a new website, featuring a public collection of flat Earth literature and a wiki. Moreover, the society began accepting new members for the first time since 2001. Dolby accepted Shenton's offer of membership number 00001, although he does not believe the Earth is flat. Modèle:As of, over 500 people had become members.

In 2013, part of this society broke away to form a new web-based group also featuring a forum and wiki.

By country

Canada

Flat Earth Society of Canada was established on 8 November 1970 by philosopher Leo Ferrari, writer Raymond Fraser and poet Alden Nowlan; and was active until 1984. Its archives are held at the University of New Brunswick.

Calling themselves "planoterrestrialists", their aims were quite different from other flat Earth societies. They claimed a prevailing problem of the new technological age was the willingness of people to accept theories "on blind faith and to reject the evidence of their own senses." The parodic intention of the Society appeared in the writings of Ferrari, as he attributed everything from gender to racial inequality on the globularist and the spherical Earth model. Ferrari also claimed to have nearly fallen off "the Edge" of the Earth at Brimstone Head on Fogo Island.

Ferrari was interviewed as an "expert" in the 1990 flat Earth mockumentary In Search of the Edge by Pancake Productions (a reference to the expression "as flat as a pancake"). In the accompanying study guide, Ferrari is outed as a "globularist", a nonce word for someone who believes the Earth is spherical. The real intent of the film, which was part-funded by the Ontario Arts Council and National Film Board of Canada, was to promote schoolchildren's critical thinking and media literacy by "[attempting] to prove in convincing fashion, something everyone knew to be false."

Relaunch

Multi-media artist Kay Burns re-created the Flat Earth Society of Canada as an art project with her alter ego Iris Taylor as its president. Burns created an installation entitled the Museum of the Flat Earth, which included some artefacts from the 1970 group. It was exhibited in 2016 at the Flat Earth Outpost Café in Shoal Bay, Newfoundland.

Italy

In Italy, there are no centralised societies on flat Earth. However, since the 2010s, small groups of conspiracy theorists, who carry out meetings, started to emerge and to spread flat Earth theories. Among these are Calogero Greco, Albino Galuppini and Agostino Favari, who in 2018–2019 organised several meetings in Palermo, Sicily, with an entry price of €20.

Among their claims, some include:

• NASA is similar to Disneyland and that astronauts are actors.
• The April 2019 photo of the supermassive black hole at the core of the supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 is fake.
• The proof Earth is flat can be demonstrated with a filled bottle where, if placed horizontally, water never curves.

In addition to these, it is their common belief that the United States has a plan to create in Europe a new America open to everyone, where the only value is consumerism and that George Soros commands a satanic globalist conspiracy. They reject the past existence of dinosaurs, the Darwinian theory of evolution, and the authority of the scientific community, claiming scientists are Freemasons.

Former leader of the Five Star Movement political party Beppe Grillo showed interest in the group, admitting to admiring their free speech spirit and to wanting to participate at the May 2019 conference. However, Grillo did not appear.

Internet-era resurgence

In November 2017 "more than five hundred people ... paid as much as $249 each to attend "the first-ever Flat Earth Conference", in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. According to a 2018 YouGov opinion poll, "just 66% of millennials firmly believe" that the earth is round, with celebrities (rapper B.o.B., basketball players Kyrie Irving, Wilson Chandler, Draymond Green) advocating for flatness.

Sociological explanations for counterfactual beliefs

A popular 2020 YouTube debate about the Flat Earth concept, between science advocate and atheist activist Aron Ra and flat-earther Nathan Thompson

In the Information Age, the availability of communications technology and social media such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have made it easy for individuals, famous or not, to spread disinformation and attract others to erroneous ideas. One of the topics that has flourished in this environment is that of the flat Earth. These sites have made it easier for like-minded theorists to connect with one another and mutually reinforce their beliefs. Social media has had a "levelling effect", in that experts have less sway in the public mind than they used to.

YouTube had faced criticism for allowing the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories through its platform. In 2019, YouTube stated that it was making changes in its software to reduce the distribution of videos based on conspiracy theories including flat Earth.

In the documentary Behind the Curve (2018) (which follows prominent modern flat-Earthers including Mark Sargent and Patricia Steere, as well as astrophysicists and psychologists who attempt to explain the growing fad), professor of psychiatry Joe Pierre offers as explanations: the Dunning-Kruger effect (the phenomenon whereby ignorance in a given field makes people unable to recognize their own ignorance or lack of ability in that field); misunderstandings of simple observation; pseudoscientific practices which fail to separate reliable from unreliable conclusions; and a progressive divergence from reality that starts with a belief that conventional information sources and the government cannot be trusted.

Out of the necessity to explain photographs of the earth in space, the observations of astronauts, why all major institutions such as governments, media outlets, schools, scientists, and airlines assert that the world is a sphere, etc., modern flat-Earthers very commonly embrace some form of conspiracy theory. As Darryle Marble, a speaker at the Flat Earth Conference, told his audience, after watching hours of YouTube conspiracy videos on Sandy Hook, 9/11, false flags, the Bilderbergers, Rothschilds, Illuminati – "Each thing started to make that much more sense. I was already primed to receive the whole flat-Earth idea, because we had already come to the conclusion that we were being deceived about so many other things. So of course they would lie to us about this."

Conspiracy belief is often intertwined with conservative Christian belief. According to internet influencer Rob Skiba, "the ultimate motivation" of the (alleged) conspiracy of a round earth in space, "many of us have come to believe, is hiding God." Reading the Bible, "when you break down the text of what it represents, there's no way you can get a spinning heliocentric globe out of anything in the Bible." (According to author Alan Burdick, "in style and substance, the flat-Earth movement is a close cousin of creationism.")

They tend to not trust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust or disagree with each other. Patricia Steere admitted in Behind the Curve that she wouldn't believe an event like the Boston Marathon bombing was real unless she had gotten her own leg blown off. Flat Earth believers in the documentary also professed belief in conspiracy theories about vaccines, genetically modified organisms, chemtrails, 9/11, and transgender people; some said dinosaurs and evolution were also fake, and that heliocentrism is a form of Sun worship.

The scientific experts in Behind the Curve pointed to confirmation bias as a way to maintain a counterfactual belief, by cherry-picking only supporting evidence, and dismissing any disconfirming evidence as part of the purported global conspiracy.

Some flat Earth believers, such as authors Zen Garcia and Edward Hendrie, cite the Christian Bible as evidence. Some critics of the flat Earth idea, such as astronomer Danny R. Faulkner, are young Earth creationists and attempt to explain away the Bible's supposed flat Earth language.

On 3 May 2018, Steven Novella analysed the modern belief in a flat Earth, and concluded that, despite what most people think about the subject, the believers are being sincere in their belief that the Earth is flat, and are not "just saying that to wind us up". He stated that: Modèle:Blockquote

The British sceptical activist Michael Marshall attended the annual Flat Earth UK Convention on 27–29 April 2018 and noted disagreement on several views among believers in a flat Earth. To Marshall, one of the most telling moments at the convention was the "Flat Earth Addiction" test that was based on a checklist used to determine whether someone is in a cult, without the convention attendees realising the possibility of themselves being in a cult.

Beliefs

Based on the speakers at the 2018 UK's Flat Earth UK Convention, believers in a flat Earth vary widely in their views. While most agree upon a disc-shaped Earth, some are convinced the Earth is diamond-shaped. Furthermore, while most believers do not believe in outer space and none believe humans have ever travelled there, they vary widely in their views of the universe. (Flat Earth International Conferences, organized by Robbie Davidson, are unaffiliated with the Flat Earth Society. According to Davidson, the "Earth is ... a stationary plane, with the sun, moon, and stars inside a dome", while the Flat Earth Society promotes a model in which Earth is "a disk flying through space", and which Davidson finds "incredibly ridiculous".)

Filmmakers of Behind the Curve attended another flat Earth conference at which a substantial number of people believed the Earth was an infinite plane, potentially with more continents beyond the purported circular ice wall of Antarctica. Members of the Flat Earth Society and other flat-Earthers claim that NASA and other government agencies conspire to fabricate evidence that the Earth is spherical. According to the most widely spread version of current flat-Earth theory, NASA is guarding the Antarctic ice wall that surrounds Earth. Flat-Earthers argue that NASA manipulates and fabricates its satellite images, based on observations that the color of the oceans changes from image to image and that continents seem to be in different places. The publicly perpetuated image is kept up through a large-scale practice of "compartmentalization", according to which only a select number of individuals have knowledge about the truth.

Research by Carlos Diaz Ruiz and Tomas Nilsson on the arguments that flat Earthers wield, shows three factions, each one subscribing to its own set of beliefs.

The first faction subscribes to a faith-based conflict in which atheists use science to suppress the Christian faith. Their argument is that atheists use pseudo-science – evolution, Big Bang, and the round Earth – to make people believe that God is an abstract idea, not real. Instead, their arguments use the Scripture – word-by-word – to support an argument that enables God to really exist. This faction frames flat-Earth arguments as revelatory. (For example, a literal interpretation of Revelation 7 -- "I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth ..."—indicates the earth must have four corners.) This is in spite of the fact that a circular flat earth would also not have corners, contradicting the central model of flat earth. This contradiction seems to imply that god created a 2D quadrilateral or 3D tetrahedral earth.

The second faction believes in an overarching conspiracy for knowledge suppression. Building upon the premise that knowledge is power, the flat Earth conspiracy argues that a shadowy group of "elites" control knowledge to remain in power. In their view, lying about the fundamental nature of the Earth primes the population to believe a host of other conspiracies. This faction frames flat-Earth arguments as liberatory.

The third faction believes that knowledge is personal and experiential. They are dismissive of knowledge that comes from authoritative sources, especially book knowledge. This faction would like to find out themselves whether the Earth truly is round or flat. Because they distrust book knowledge and mathematical proof, this faction believes that the Earth is flat because their observations and lived experiences make it appear as if we live on a flat surface. This faction frames flat-Earth arguments as experimental.

Fellow flat earthers are not exempt from distrust and belief that they may be in cahoots with round earthers. In Behind the Curve, conference attendees were warned against attending by Math Powerland a.k.a. Matt Boylan, who posted videos alleging others were working for the CIA or Warner Brothers. At the 2017 Flat Earth conference: Modèle:Blockquote

Social and experimental activities of skeptics and believers

Organisations sceptical of fringe beliefs have occasionally performed tests to demonstrate the local curvature of the Earth. One of these, conducted by members of the Independent Investigations Group of the Center for Inquiry, at the Salton Sea on 10 June 2018 was attended also by supporters of a flat Earth, and the encounter between the two groups was recorded by the National Geographic Explorer. This experiment successfully demonstrated the curvature of the Earth via the disappearance over distance of boat-based and shore-based targets. IIG founder Jim Underdown reported that the flat Earth supporters in attendance immediately rejected the results, denying the validity of the demonstration after the fact, and the discussion degenerated into tangents about Moon landing conspiracy theories and alleged NASA cover-ups.

The 2018 documentary Behind the Curve followed two groups of American flat Earth believers who were attempting to gather first-hand empirical proof for that belief. One group from the YouTube show GlobeBusters used a ring laser gyroscope in an attempt to show the Earth was not rotating. Instead, they detected the actual 15-degree-per-hour rotation of the Earth, a measurement they dismissed as corrupted by the device somehow picking up the rotation of the "firmament". Another group used lasers in an attempt to show a several-mile stretch of water is perfectly flat by measuring the distance between the water level and the laser beam along three vertical posts. They were unable to align the beam as they expected to because the surface of the still water was in fact bent by several feet over the distance measured; the experiment was dismissed as inconclusive.^{[réf. nécessaire]}

Behind the Curve illustrated how flat Earth believers rely on poorly-verified claims. Mark Sargent claimed to have watched flightaware.com for a very long time to check if any flights traveled between continents in the Southern Hemisphere, which in his disc model would be much further apart than they are on the globe. He stated that he saw no such flights, and took this as evidence for the disc model. Caltech astrophysicist Hannalore Gerling-Dunsmore went to the site and immediately found flights that contradicted Sargent's claims.

The solar eclipse of 21 August 2017 gave rise to numerous YouTube videos purporting to show how the details of the eclipse prove the Earth is flat.

In 2017, "the Tunisian and Arab scientific and educational world" had a scandal when a Ph.D. student at the University of Sfax in Tunisia submitted a Ph.D. dissertation "declaring Earth to be flat, unmoving, young (only 13,500 years of age), and the centre of the universe". In 2018, astronomer Yaël Nazé analyzed the controversy over the dissertation. The dissertation, which had not been approved by the committee overseeing environmental studies theses, had been made public and denounced in 2017 by Hafedh Ateb, a founder of the Tunisian Astronomical Society, on his Facebook page.

In March 2019, social media personality Logan Paul released a satirical documentary film about the flat Earth called FLAT EARTH: To The Edge And Back.

The Flat Earth Society has a Twitter account, @FlatEarthOrg. This account shares information about their group and promotes flat Earth ideologies.

Mike Hughes

Mike Hughes, a daredevil/stuntman, planned to use a homebuilt crewed rocket to reach outer space. In a practice flight on 22 February 2020, the early deployment and separation of the return parachute allowed his rocket to fall unimpeded from an altitude of several hundred feet, killing him instantly.

After Hughes' death, his public relations representative Darren Shuster stated that Hughes "didn't believe in flat Earth" and that it was "a PR stunt" to get publicity, while Michael Linn, who worked on the documentary Rocketman: Mad Mike's Mission to Prove the Flat-Earth, said that Hughes' belief appeared genuine.

Social consequences and responses

Behind the Curve's filmmakers spoke with several people who said that as a result of their flat Earth beliefs they had lost romantic partners and no longer spoke to many friends and family. One said he was tired of being told he was an idiot. The Facebook group Flat Earth Match is a dating site used by some to find romantic partners who share these beliefs. Experts pointed out that after social ties to people outside the flat Earth community are lost, one consequence of abandoning the flat Earth belief would be loss of all remaining relationships.^{[réf. nécessaire]}

Caltech physicist Spiros Michaelakis stated that instead of denigrating flat Earthers, scientists should do a better job of teaching scientific facts. Various scientific and medical experts in the documentary supported improving scientific literacy and avoiding marginalization of flat Earthers. They pointed out that people who distrust all of science, including truths about vaccines, evolution, and climate change, would make poorly informed-decisions, and that people who do not exercise the skill of critical thinking can be easily manipulated. They also pointed out that some believers were motivated to spread false ideas, and that because they are unconstrained by facts they can mutate and become less harmless than a mere belief about the shape of the Earth.

Prevalence

In 2020, it was reported that based on polling by Datafolha, 7% of Brazilians believed in a flat Earth. A 2018 YouGov poll found that around 4% of the population of the United States believed in flat Earth, while the POLES 2021 Survey found around 10% of the United States population believed that the Earth is flat. A 2019 YouGov survey found that around 3% of British people supported flat Earth.

The term "Platiste"

The term flat-Earth-man, used in a derogatory sense to mean anyone who holds ridiculously antiquated or impossible views, predates the more compact flat-earther. It was recorded in 1908: "Fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the term flat-Earther was in 1934 in Punch magazine: "Without being a bigoted flat-earther, [Mercator] perceived the nuisance ... of fiddling about with globes ... in order to discover the South Seas."

See also

• Empirical evidence for the spherical shape of Earth
• Figure of the Earth
• Geodesy
• Hollow Earth
• Category:Flat Earth proponents

Notes and references

References

• (en) Christine Garwood, Flat Earth: the History of an infamous idea, Macmillan, 2007
• (en) Graham Ambrose, « These Coloradans say Earth is flat. And gravity's a hoax. Now they're being persecuted », ,‎ 7 juillet 2017 (lire en ligne)
• Valenzuela, S. (19 April 2019). History's most famous Flat Earth believers: Athletes, celebrities, and ancient Greeks. Retrieved 3 March 2020
• Lewis, D. (2016, January 28). The curious history of the International Flat Earth Society. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/curious-history-international-flat-earth-society-180957969/

Further reading

Scientific sources

• 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)
• Christine Garwood (2007) Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, Pan Books, (ISBN 1-4050-4702-X)

Flat Earth believers

• (en) Zen Garcia, Firmament: Vaulted Dome of the Earth, Lulu.com (self-publishing platform), 2016 (ISBN 9781365073847) Arguments based on Christian Bible and related writings.
• (en) Edward Hendrie, The Greatest Lie on Earth (Expanded Edition): Proof That Our World Is Not a Moving Globe, 10th Expanded, 2018 (ISBN 978-1943056057) Christian basis.

External links

• The Flat Earth Society (2004/2009)
• The Flat Earth Society (2013)
• The International Flat Earth Research Society
• The Modern Day Flat Earth Community
• References to The Flat Earth Society by the Library of Congress
• Article on Daniel Shenton
• 3D Interactive Earth Globe
• USA Today: Fact check roundup: Debunking the flawed science behind flat Earth claims

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