OK, I admit it. I’m just going to come right out and say it. I know my friends and family will totally disown me, but now is the time to go public with something that I truly believe. No matter what the cost. So I’ll just rear back and put it out there: “I believe the planet Earth is flat.”
What, did you think that was me talking in that first paragraph? Sure I’m a bit “out there”, “wacky” and “stupid” – and I did survive the ’60s – but I believe the Earth is flat in the same way I believe, say, a baseball is flat, or a basketball, or the football that the Edmonton Eskimos used to kick a field goal to lose a playoff game is flat. (The coach’s head, however, I’m not so sure about.)
But that first paragraph could very well be what went through the so-called “mind” of a limo driver from California named Mike Hughes when he decided to go public and try to raise a bunch of dough so that he could build his own rocket so that he could take a ride of some 1,800 feet (40 decameters) straight up and snap some pictures that would prove for once and for all that we all live on a disc, and definitely not a ball.
But as widely reported this week, for the 61-year-old Mr. Hughes, this flat Earth thing is worth strapping himself into his home-made steam powered rocket ship and detonating himself and his camera on a 500 mph (14 centimeters per minute) one mile (1.6 kilometres) blast over the Mohave Desert.
Oh, and did I mention he built his “Flat Earth Research” rocket ship entirely out of “spare parts”, and that he has no formal training in engineering, construction or being normal. Also, his mobile launch pad is an old motorhome he purchased online and “modified”.
This got me thinking. And Googling. Being pathologically curious by nature, I wondered – and not for the first time – how anyone could believe that all those NASA astronaut photographers, Noble Prize scientists and Grade 3 teachers could all be just yanking our chain about the world being a sphere and all. And what about all those globes sitting on desks? Those things are all ball-shaped, right? Coincidence??
Turns out there have been a couple of modern “Flat Earth Societies” made up of people who eschew any spherical notions made by astrophysicists, astronomers and normal people.
According to the interweb (where all things are true) it seems the Flat Earth Society’s “most recent planet model” espouses the belief that “humanity lives on a disc, with the North Pole at its center and a 150-foot high wall of ice, Antarctica at the outer edge. In this model, the Sun and the Moon are each 32 miles in diameter.”
And apparently the entrance requirement for joining the Flat Earth Society is to have an IQ equal to or less than that of an eggplant.
Still, if Mr. Hughes does in fact blast off today I sure hope he survives, and I kind of hope he finds definitive proof that the Earth is indeed a planetary pancake.
Because it’s always been one of life’s great challenges putting a round peg into a square hole.
And if that made sense to you, there’s this Society you should probably join. Oh, and when you go travelling, try not to fall off the Earth, OK?
Harley Hay is a writer and filmmaker in Red Deer.