Sailing Off The Edge Of The Earth, Sailing Off The Edge Of Sanity.

The Earth is round!

To some, that's a controversial view but to most of us, it's been accepted and proven beyond reasonable, or even unreasonable, doubt for about two thousand years now. What the Earth is not is a flat disc. Neither is it surrounded by an ice wall. Nor is it enclosed in a dome (along with the Sun and the Moon in an ensemble that Flat Earther's like to call 'the firmament' - and nothing, absolutely nothing, exists outside of the firmament).

Back in the summer of 2019, I attended a London Skeptics in the Pub talk, Circular Reasoning:The Rise of Flat Earth Belief, at the Monarch at Camden and it began with the host, Carmen, saying that we "didn't think we'd need to have a talk on" such a subject in 2019. Nearly three years have passed and that rings as true as ever.

This time, now under the aegis of Skeptics in the Pub - Online - I watched at home behind my computer, the host of 2019's talk, Michael Marshall, was in host/compere mode and the guest speaker was Kelly Weill, a journalist at the Daily Beast, where she covers extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, as well as an author whose most recent book Off The Edge:Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture , & Why People Will Believe Anything shares its title, and themes, with last night's lecture.

It was a good one too. Weill returned to the firmament and the 'logic' of Flat Earthers. If both the Sun and the Moon are in the firmament then what of the other planets, the uncountable number of stars we see when we look up at the night sky? Most Flat Earthers don't really believe in other planets. Not in the way we'd understand them anyway. Neither do they believe in gravity. The idea is we stay on the ground, not because of gravity, but because of 'buoyancy' or, in some cases, because the Flat Earth is zooming upwards at such a speed it sticks us to it.

Neither theory seems to make much sense but nor does anything to do with Flat Earth belief. Which is one of the most easily disprovable conspiracy theories ever conceived and yet attracts a sizable number of believers. Why do people believe conspiracy theories in the first place?

Weill was insistent that it's not just those people in tinfoil hats but that we're all, to a degree, susceptible to the line of thinking that leads some to adopting conspiracy theory mindsets. Conspiracy theories help, or appear to help, us explain uncertainty (hence the rise of them at the start of the pandemic), they offer alternative explanations for uncomfortable truths (witness those Stop The Steal types who refuse to accept that Trump could have lost a free and fair election), and they help people feel better about personal and group identities.

The example given here was that of 'gang stalking'. A persecutory belief system in which people believe they are being followed, and targeted, by huge, and organised, numbers of people. Every misfortune, minor or major, from not being accepted for a promotion at work to somebody bumping their shopping trolley into yours, can be explained by 'gang stalking'. 

It's a good way of absolving yourself of personal responsibility for your life but it's not so different to the victim narrative that we all know some people choose to use when it suits them. I suppose the best way of disproving 'gang stalking' is to point out the absolute chaos of life at the moment and, from that, deduct that the odds of people being able to put this into action are incredibly remote.

Also - why would they? What would make you think you're so important that huge numbers of people have come together to destroy your life or, at least, make it more difficult? Flat Earth belief is even weirder because there seems to be absolutely nothing to gain from disproving the Earth is round. Or at least that was the case in the past but we'll come to that.

So, how does one disprove Flat Earth belief? The obvious answer is 'with great ease' but such are the times we live in, Weill gave us a list. When things disappear over the horizon, the lower parts go first (for example, the hull of a ship or, even more obviously, the sun going down), shadow lengths and angles prove we live on a globe as do lunar eclipses and the movements of stars, and, if that's still not enough, there are photos, and lots of them, taken from outer space that show the Earth is a globe.

But even before we went into space, we have known the Earth is round. Pythagoras proposed the idea in 500BCE and half a millennium later, around the time of Christ, it had become widely accepted. When Columbus set off on his first famous voyage in 1492 it is believed, wrongly, that many feared he would sail off the edge of the Earth but that simply isn't true.

Columbus had a lot of things to worry about, nautical exploration was very dangerous, but sailing off the edge of the world wasn't one of them. The theory, it seems, was invented by the author Washington Irving in his 1828 book A History on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

That book came out when Samuel Rowbotham was a boy and, who knows?, perhaps he read it because Rowbotham, an English inventor who lived from 1816 to 1884, is the founder of modern Flat Earth belief. Earlier in his life, Rowbotham had been part of pre-Marxist, socialist, Utopian movement and had formed a commune in Cambridgeshire where people were to live with these values and have a better standard of life and more happiness.

The commune failed miserably, primarily due to wanton, and seemingly permanent, drunkenness and, more oddly, a hermit who refused to leave the commune when asked. Undettered by this failure, Rowbotham pivoted to selling miracle cures (in the form of phosphoric acid) and, then, carrying out experiments to see if, as he suspected, the Earth was indeed flat.

He found it was - which means he was either lying or he made a horrendous mess of his measurements. This supposed discovery was enough for him to create a whole 'science', Zetetic Astronomy, around it and though very few thought he was anything other than a lunatic his work was covered, in 1867, by the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer as well as the Leeds Times.

Not sure why Yorkshire was so interested. These periodicals did not explicitly endorse his theories but, despite a lively debunking by a local reverend, some local Christians found what they were looking for in Rowbotham's theories and converted to Flat Earth belief.

Other Flat Earth notables appeared. People like Lady Elizabeth Anne Blount (a novelist and head of the Universal Zetetic Society who even wrote Flat Earth songs), Paul Kruger (president of South Africa between 1883 and 1902), and a fellow named Wilbur Glen Voliva. An evangelist who controlled, with an iron fist, the town of Zion, Illinois, near Chicago.

Voliva wrote hymns in praise of the Flat Earth, he mandated Flat Earth belief be taught at all schools in Zion, and he armed police with bibles instead of guns. When free elections were held Voliva developed conspiracy theories about voter fraud (remind you of anyone?) and, such was his hold on Zion, hung on to power.

While Voliva was, in all respects, a theocrat and, it seems, something of a monster it was not in America that the Flat Earth Society was born. But in England. Samuel Shenton, a poorly educated sign painter from Great Yarmouth, became disillusioned with the globe, and the belief in it, after his flying machine failed to actually fly.

This was probably due to Shenton's misunderstanding of science. His flying machine went up in to the air but, once there, it didn't move. Shenton believed that if the Earth was round it would simply rotate beneath him and his machine and when he landed he'd find himself in another place.

When this, unsurprisingly, didn't happen Shenton felt sure the world must be flat and, in 1956, he launched the Flat Earth Research Society after being goaded into doing so by a skeptical press.

The Flat Earth Research Society had almost no converts and was widely seen as a complete joke, even Shenton's wife didn't get on board with his theories. For some, the joke was too good not to share and, soon, Shenton found himself invited to lecture for what some would call, these days, shits and giggles.

In the new and exciting age of space exploration, Flat Earth belief just didn't cut it. Shenton made some innovative excuses which he thought disproved that Yuri Gagarin had orbited Earth from outer space and he was also one of the first people to proffer the theory that the moon landings were hoaxed. So if you're of the belief that man never walked on the moon, remember you're with the Flat Earthers.

Shenton said it would have been impossible for Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon because the moon, quite clearly, wasn't a solid body. He also threw in his belief that the moon was also transparent as he'd claimed to have seen stars shining through it. Even though, presumably, he didn't believe in stars either!

When Samuel Shenton died, the Flat Earth Society moved to California where it was run by the married couple, Charles and Marjorie Johnson. Marjorie had been born in Australia and wondered why, if the Earth was round, she had never hung from her feet in upside down land!

When they both died, Marjorie first and then Charles in 2001, it appeared the movement had ended with them. They'd run Flat Earth as a pen-and-paper organisation with no online, or even digital, presence. Much of the paperwork was destroyed in a house fire which you'd imagine gave conspiracy theorists plenty to work with.

But, just three years later - in 2004, Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel) revived it and put it online. In the age of the Internet people can connect with like minded folk quicker than ever - and did so - but it was the huge growth of social media, and its algorithms, that really turbocharged the spread in Flat Earth belief.

YouTube, where conspiracy theories - unlike this blog - overperform, proved particularly useful and, these days, most Flat Earthers freely admit it was YouTube that brought them into the fold. Since 2014, Flat Earthism has been booming with dedicated channels and Facebook groups that have over 100,000 members.

Or did, before many of them were banned and closed down recently. But why close down what, at heart, is surely a harmless, if foolish, belief? Here we enter the world of conspiracy crossover. Where once Flat Earth belief, and other conspiracy theories, were siloed, there has, of late, been a radical change and one that has been spearheaded by Donald Trump and a craven Republican party mainstreaming acceptance of conspiracy theory beliefs.

Covid, too, as an event that radicalised many into the world of conspiracy theories and many of these theories, especially in the way they interact with other theories, vilify minority groups. It's a technique that dates back to 1903 and a forgery, in Russia - very much the home of disinformation, of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated antisemitic text that, despite being widely debunked, is still quoted by neofascist groups and other fellow travellers.

Predictably enough, antisemitic belief has crept into Flat Earth belief and, for some, Flat Earth is a gateway conspiracy theory to other more harmful ideas. Which is bad for us but also bad for them. Often Flat Eathers become so fanatical in their beliefs that they lose their friends and they lose their family. In some cases they even lose their jobs.

This, of course, in many cases, pushes them ever deeper into their new 'family'. The conspiracy theory network. As the spiral develops, it becomes ever harder to stop it. Others in Flat Earth have found even bigger problems.

'Mad' Mike Hughes, a Flat Earther and amateur rocketeer from the US, built one of his rockets with the express motive of launching himself into the atmosphere so he could take a photo of the Earth below. One that would show no curvature whatsoever and put to an end, forever, the specious argument that the world was round.

It didn't go as planned. Hughes' rocket crashed to Earth (if only he'd believed in gravity) and he died on impact. An idiotic death for sure but also a tragic one and one made even more so by the fact he was trying to disprove something that had been settled in science for over two millennia.

Others look likely to follow Hughes to the grave in pursuit of their beliefs. Specifically those who plan to visit the non-existent ice walls in Antarctica without adequate training, planning, or equipment.

Getting people to leave Flat Earth belief isn't easy (Weill suggests our only tools for this are conversations with trusted friends, open mindedness, and supportive communities) but it's worth trying if more people are not to be delivered into nefarious conspiracy theorists that now monetise Flat Earth belief by selling books, clothes, and music and hosting conferences that cost between $150 and $300 a ticket.

Or, worse still, end up dying needless deaths like Hughes. An interesting Q&A took in Jair Bolsonaro, Alfred Russel Wallace, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, the New World Order, the Hollow Earthers - who despite disagreeing fundamentally with Flat Earthers are both united in their disdain for science, and people who believe a conspiracy yet to happen:- that of Jesus returning to Earth to be killed by people intentionally mistaking him for an alien.

If that sounds utterly bonkers - and it should - then just remember it's still not quite as bonkers as believing the Earth is flat. Thanks, as ever, to Skeptics in the Pub - Online for another enlightening evening and to Kelly Weill for being such a great speaker. Of course, I don't believe the Earth is flat but if it was it seems quite likely that it is also upside down.