The world’s a big place, but to some it’s a few dimensions smaller. Flat Earth Theory is the rather self-explanatory belief that we live on a disk, and by association that the sky is either a projection, painting or a solid dome, and the sun and moon are spinning on some great mechanical axis around and above us – or that the earth is just an immovable flat plane around which the cosmos spins. To you or me from the outset this ancient belief might seem to hold about as much water as a sieve, but there are forums, groups and societies full of believers who would gladly argue each and every point you could possibly bring up against them to challenge that which they believe. It used to be bound only to religious extremist groups in more recent history, but now is seeing a resurgence on the fringes of modern western society.
The International Flat Earth Society saw its birth in Dover, England in 1956, itself dubbed a successor of the Universal Zetetic Society by its leader Samuel Shenton, a society which had existed for around a hundred years’ prior, and shifted thousands of copies of its manifesto worldwide. The modern iteration has risen and fallen in membership since the 50s, seeing a supposedly meteoric rise under the leadership of Shenton’s successor, Charles K. Johnson of Southern California from 1974. Johnson claimed that he had raised its membership up to 3,500 registered believers – and even had the documentation to prove it in the Societies’ database, which he and his wife had managed – that is before the database and all its records were destroyed in a fire in 1997, and he and his wife passed away shortly thereafter. So in regards to those statistics, we can only hope that he was as honest as he was zealous in his beliefs.
Say what you will of the logic behind it all (being predominantly based upon extremely literal interpretations of the bible and other religious texts), you cannot deny the durability and adaption of the societies which this theory has spawned. They exist today possibly in a volume several times greater than they did in Johnson and Shenton’s time (at least beyond 20,000, though exact figures are difficult to come by), in the communities of believers that inhabit their forums and subscribe to their ideals on a global scale. Nowadays however, more are drawn to the prospective religion by the celebrities who follow it openly, or as a selling point for the “art” they peddle for a living. It is perhaps true that these people are who I conceived this article to write about. In my defence, they’re a truly fascinating group of individuals. We have one Thomas Dolby – the now 59-year-old mastermind behind the Howard the Duck theme tune and several songs written for, but not actually performed by Michael Jackson; an actual recording artist signed under Warner Bros. Records, with tracks in his repertoire featuring Timothy Spall OBE (yes, the actor), and that had ranked as high as number seventeen on the UK charts back in 1984. And how can we forget B.o.B – oh B.o.B is a special one. Born Bobby Ray Simmons Jr. in 1988, B.o.B has been a member of the International Flat Earth Society for just about a year now, but he is by far its most famous believer. The man has an album which went two-times platinum in 2010 under his belt, with features from Eminem, J. Cole, Tech N9ne, Meek Mill, Bruno Mars, T.I., ke$ha, Taylor Swift and Lil Wayne across his discography, garnering him a majority of his fairly large following, and has feuded across several forms of media (through diss tracks and callouts on twitter) with Harvard graduate Neil deGrasse Tyson and his son regarding the earth’s shape. As of September 2017, B.o.B has started a fundraiser with a goal of one million dollars to launch satellites, weather balloons and drones of his own up into the atmosphere and stratosphere, to provide tangible evidence to support his fervent beliefs regarding the planet's shape. As of now, this fundraiser isn’t going anywhere, being about nine thousand dollars into that million, but the fact that it and Bobby Ray himself even exist in the first place is a testament to the belief. A belief that has stood the test of time for near as long as civilisation has existed, seemingly defying all odds and all logic. That has outlasted entire civilisations, a belief that no doubt will last for the next hundred years or so, perhaps more.
By Thomas Tsoukaris
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