Modern Flat Earthism In fact, flat-earth beliefs were a rare fringe idea with few followers until relatively recently. In the 1800s, the most famous flat earther was Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). In the 1860s, he pioneered the modern flat-earther notion that the earth was a disk centered over the North Pole (Fig. 2.2), bounded on its outer edge by a wall of ice (instead of Antarctica over the South Pole, which cannot exist in their version of geography). The skies above were a dome of fixed stars only 5000 km above the earth''s surface, consistent with the old medieval notion of the heavens before the birth of modern astronomy. His ideas were first published in a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy , followed by a book called Earth is Not a Globe , and another pamphlet The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scriptures , which revealed the Biblical literalist roots of most flat-earth thinking. According to Rowbotham, 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".

He is correct in saying this, because there are at least 16 places where the Bible says the earth is flat or talks about the "four corners of the earth" or talks about the "ends of the earth" or the "circle of the earth" or suggests that you can see the entire earth from a high place. Rowbotham and later followers like William Carpenter and Lady Elizabeth Blount kept promoting the idea and founded the Universal Zetetic Society, even after the death of the Rowbotham in 1884. This incarnation of flat earth thinking died out some time after 1904. After about 50 years of virtually no organized activity, the rebirth of flat earth thinking occurred in 1956 with the founding of Samuel Shenton''s International Flat Earth Research Society, based in his home in Dover, England. It was always a tiny group, with a very limited membership corresponding with a primitive homemade mailed newsletter, yet every once in a while they managed to get a short burst of publicity in the newspapers. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Gemini and Apollo astronauts first began to produce images of the earth from space, Shenton dismissed the images as hoaxes (the common belief among flat earthers ever since), saying, "It''s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye". Later, he attributed the curvature of the earth seen in NASA photographs as a trick of the curvature of wide-angle lenses. "It''s a deception of the public and it isn''t right".

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. They reached a membership as large as 3500, scattered around the world, paying annual dues of $6 to $10. 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 the records and contact information of the membership. Johnson''s wife died shortly afterwards, 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. The Flat Earth Society was resurrected in 2004 by Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel) as a web-based discussion forum, then eventually relaunched as an official society, with a large web presence and their own wiki. As of July 2017, they claim a membership of 500. Based the publicity from all the celebrity entertainers and musicians discussed at the beginning of this chapter, however, it appears that flat earth ideas are much more common (see Chapter 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 Nov. 9 and 10, 2017, with about 500 attendees. 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.

Even more alarming, about a third of millennials are not convinced that the earth is round (discussed in Chapter 18). 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!.