Flat Earth Society

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International Flat Earth Society
Flat Earth Society Logo.png
Chair: Daniel Shenton
Establishment date: 1956
Number of members: 3500
Seat : London
Website: tfes.org

The Flat Earth Society is an organization founded in 1956 which, despite scientific evidence to the contrary, takes the view that the earth is flat .

history

Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884) founded a movement to promote this view. He was guided by the conviction that certain passages in the Bible say that the earth is flat. In 1849 he published a 16-page book, which he later expanded into a book.

Rowbotham claimed the earth was a flat disk with the North Pole in the center and an ice wall on the edge. The sun is less than 4,000 miles from London .

Rowbotham and his followers became known for the heated debates they had with scientists of their time. Such a debate with Alfred Russel Wallace led to numerous lawsuits.

After Rowbotham's death, his followers formed the Universal Zetetic Society , which published The Earth Not a Globe Review magazine. After the First World War, the movement began to slowly decline.

In the United States , Rowbotham's ideas were adopted by the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church . The religious community founded by John Alexander Dowie in 1895 founded a theocratic community in Zion, Illinois , 70 km north of Chicago . In 1905 Wilbur Glenn Voliva took over the leadership of the religious community; this disintegrated after Voliva's death in 1942 in the course of various financial scandals.

The Universal Zetetic Society lived on in the International Flat Earth Society founded by Samuel Shenton in 1956 , albeit at first with practically no attention. The photos of the earth from space that appeared at this time were dismissed as a conspiracy . Shenton died in 1971, and Charles K. Johnson, a Texan born in 1924, became the new President of the Society. In the near future, newsletters and the like were published on a somewhat larger scale (at times up to 3000 readers). How far these readers seriously supported the theses is not known; nor whether the whole thing was meant seriously. Nevertheless, the theses received some media attention during this time.

present

After Johnson's death in March 2001, the Flat Earth Society fell asleep completely. She has since been reactivated as the new President by Daniel Shenton from London. Since October 2009 it has been recruiting members on its own website.

As of 2019, the Flat Earth Society has around 200,000 followers on Facebook, although many Flat Earth followers have little to do with the Flat Earth Society or they decidedly reject it. In 2019, at a conference of flat earth enthusiasts, it was stated that the Flat Earth Society was a “state-controlled organization” whose aim was to spread “disinformation” about the flat earth and make it sound like “far fetched”.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Douglas Martin: Charles Johnson, 76, Proponent of Flat Earth . In: New York Times , March 25, 2001. Retrieved December 27, 2013. 
  2. Christine Garwood: Flat Earth. The History of an Infamous Idea. London 2007
  3. archive.org: Digitized : Zetetic astronomy. Earth not a globe! an experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth , 1865.
  4. archive.org: Zetetic astronomy. Earth not a globe! an experimental inquiry into the true figure of the earth , 1865, pp. 72-74
  5. ^ Robert J. Schadewald: The Flat-out Truth: Earth Orbits? Moon Landings? A fraud! Says This Prophet In: Science Digest . July 1980
  6. ^ Robert PJ Day: Documenting the Existence of "The International Flat Earth Society" . 1993 (reproduced in the TalkOrigins Archive )
  7. ^ The flat-earth conspiracy is spreading around the globe. Does it hide a darker core? . In: CNN , November 17, 2019. Retrieved November 17, 2019.