The Flat Earth theory, With Interviews from believers

What is the Flat Earth Society?

The Flat Earth Society is the meeting place for those who don’t accept the modern opinion that the Earth is spherical, The society was formed in 1956 by a man called Samuel Shenton.
Wikipedia

In 1956, Samuel Shenton, a signwriter by trade, created the International Flat Earth Society as a successor to the Universal Zetetic Society and ran it as "organizing secretary" from his home in Dover, in Britain.[11] Due to Shenton's interest in alternative science and technology, the emphasis on religious arguments was less than in the predecessor society.[14] This was just before the launch of the first artificial satellite and when satellite images taken from outer space showed the Earth as a sphere rather than flat, the society was undaunted; Shenton remarked: "It's easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye."[15] However it was not until the advent of manned spaceflight that Shenton managed to attract wide publicity, being featured in The New York Times in January and June 1964, when the epithet "flat-earther" was also slung across the floor of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in both directions. The society also took the position that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax, staged by Hollywood and based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke, a position also held by others not connected to the Flat Earth Society. On hearing this, Clarke sent a facetious letter to NASA's chief administrator:

If you are unfamiliar with the Flat Earth theory, here is a video from How Stuff Works



I spoke to a few members on their website and found them to be very polite (despite a few trolls breaking up the conversation!) and I was lucky enough to get a few Interviews!
I will post them below,

Enjoy

Interview 1
Strange_Wayz/Tom Bishop
I created a general thread asking members for an interview, a member of the forum told me this of Tom Bishop

Your best bet for an interview IMHO is Tom Bishop. He knows everything there is to know about flat earth theory and he is an interesting character at the very least - if you are lucky he may oblige. The Round Earthers here hate him, but that should give you some idea of how formidable he can be in debate. He also rarely does interviews so yours wouldn't be like all the Shenton/Davis interviews that you can google.

Do you believe the earth to be completely flat or more of a bowl shape?

The earth is flat.

When did you first start believing the earth was flat?

I first heard about the Flat Earth Society on CNN about 11 years ago. Former FES president Charles K. Johnson appeared on television to give an interview on national television describing his beliefs about the earth. The concept of a group of intellectuals who believed that the earth was flat intrigued me, prompting me to look further. After some months playing with the idea I finally ordered a copy of Earth Not a Globe, the premiere manual on Flat Earth Theory.

Earth Not a Globe was written in the mid 1800‘s by a medical doctor named Samuel Birley Rowbotham. Dr. Rowbotham starts his work as an honest inquiry into the shape of the Earth, starting afresh without interpreting the results of experiments to any one particular predisposition. He calls his method of inquiry Zeteticiscm, where tests are tried and facts are collected without building upon any particular hypothesis or theory.

Zeteticism is is in direct contradiction to the Scientific Method, where one begins with a hypothesis and builds his work off of that. Purveyors of the Scientific Method seek to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, building one hypothesis upon the next in mumbling pretension until we have house of cards model of the universe consisting nothing but undiscovered phenomena like graviton particles and dark matter to glue the entire horrid mess together.

Rowbotham made me disgusted with the Newtonian and every other theory. His work compelled me to realize that astronomers are not scientists like other scientists. They cannot put the universe under controlled conditions to come to the truth of the matter, as a chemist can with his subject matter. An astronomer can only observe and interpret. Stephan Hawking never performed any experiments on the universe before publishing his works, for example. Nor did Newton or Copernicus. Even in the 1800‘s, Rowbotham saw that the bulk of astronomy was based on hypothesis and conjecture.

As a form of empiricism, Zeteticsm is the more honest approach to science. Direct evidence is demanded in all things. A Zetetic is a free-thinker; one whose views are based on logic and reason independent of authority.

Is it possible for one to reach the edge? If so what would they see?

It is not possible for one to reach the edge. The earth is an infinite plane.

Do you think the round earth is a huge government lie? If so, why would they spend all those resources and time to keep the public in the dark

This is a common assumption people have when visiting our website -- that there is some elaborate conspiracy hiding the shape of the earth or otherwise tricking the public into believing that it is round. But the government is not hiding the shape of the earth. They are simply mistaken.

There is a conspiracy, but it has nothing to do with hiding the shape of the earth. The purpose of NASA is to fake the concept of space travel to further America's militaristic dominance of space. That was the purpose of NASA's creation from the very start: To put ICBMs and other weapons into space (or at least appear to). The sentiment of a desire to explore space was nothing more than a front.

See this quote from president Lyndon Johnson:
Quote
"Control of space means control of the world. From space, the masters of infinity
would have the power to control the earth's weather, to cause drought and flood,
to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and
change temperate climates to frigid. There is something more important than the
ultimate weapon. And that's the ultimate position. The position of total control
over the Earth that lies somewhere in outer space."

-President Lyndon Johnson, Statement on Status of Nation's Defense and Race for
Space, January 7, 1958

One month later, Lyndon Johnson and the Senate Special Committee on Space and Astronautics drafted a resolution to change the name of the US Army's Ballistic Missile Arsenal to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NASA's early rocket research is well documented to have been a complete failure, plagued by one disaster after another. At some point, perhaps after the Apollo 1 disaster, it was decided to fake the space program outright and use rockets which only needed to fly into the air until they disappeared from sight. NASA went from nearly every launch being a failure to a near flawless track record, able to land man on the moon multiple times without error, and with only two public spectacles of failure in 45 years.

The earth is portrayed as round in NASA media because NASA thinks it's round. They are not in the business of running a real space program, so they wouldn't know what shape the earth truly takes. At the time of NASA's creation the general population already believed that the earth was round, based on the handed down teachings of the Ancient Greeks, which is why it was depicted in that manner. As with everyone else in the country, the people at NASA were brainwashed with the fiction of a globe earth from the cradle, so there was no doubt in their mind as how to display it.

What are your beliefs on the Moon Landings and the recent curiosity rover on mars?

Fake.

What about amateur pictures from weather balloons where you can supposedly see the curvature of the planet?

Real. At the edge of space you are looking down on a circle of light, and will therefore see some slight curvature to the horizon.

Do you believe in aliens, and what do you make of their supposed link to ancient civilizations?

I don’t believe in aliens and I am not religious.

Interview 2
Strange_Wayz/Ski
Ski is a “Planar Moderator” on the Flat Earth Forums, With a total of 5417 posts so I was delighted to be given this opportunity, Here it is

Do you believe the earth to be completely flat or more of a bowl shape?

It is obviously not "completely" flat. I do not believe it to be concave, however. As an interesting aside, nearly every ancient cosmology places a ring of mountains at the rim of the disc producing a rough bowl shape, I suppose.

When did you first start believing the earth was flat?

When I was in school studying philosophy, I began looking at generational "common knowledge" "truths" versus empirical truths (Hume, Kant, Hobbes, etc). I began to question many of my beliefs and attempted to reconstruct them empirically. I questioned the shape of the earth only as a nod to this exercise. To my surprise globularism fared rather poorly. The more I questioned the accepted model, the more I found the answers uncompelling.

Is it possible for one to reach the edge? If so what would they see?

I think the edge is sufficiently remote in the depths of the rim-country, that the inhospitable weather conditions make travel there unlikely. It is perhaps possible by way of flight. Navigation into terra incognita, where magnetic field lines are near vertical seems daunting. I imagine one would peer into the depths of space beyond the rim.

Do you think the round earth is a huge government lie? If so, why would they spend all those resources and time to keep the public in the dark? What are your beliefs on the Moon Landings and the recent curiosity rover on mars?

I don't think the government proper has any indication the earth is anything but a globe. There exists an influential group of Illuminists within governments promoting the idea for their own gain. The moon and martian landings are contested by millions of people with no interest in promoting a flat earth agenda. It is hardly novel that we reject those claims based on available evidence.

What about amateur pictures from weather balloons where you can supposedly see the curvature of the planet?

Most of these endeavours use a fish-eye or other wide-angle lens. This provides a spectacular field of view, but also introduces barrel-distortion in the image.




Look at 1:33-1:36 in the video.
Look at 2:47-53 in the video
It's pretty clear that the horizon is flat when he opens the door to the capsule, and that it looks curved when seen from the wide angle view outside of the capsule. The horizon looks curved even at ground level from the outside cameras.
Some curvature should be evident from height above the portion of the earth lit by the sun. This is the boundary of the area illuminated, and not (necessarily) the bounds of the earth.

Do you believe in aliens, and what do you make of their supposed link to ancient civilizations?

I believe the alien/UFO phenomenon do exist, but do not believe them to be extra-terrestrial.

Wow flat earth

Amazing that people can believe in it even with today's technology

Huh.. I thought this was debunked in the 17th century..

reply to post by BrianG


ha no # who are they trying to kid there are pleanty of experaments you can do at home to prouve that the world is in fact round

i've been in a commercial airliner, my eyes were open, and i looked out the window...the earth is round, not flat...geez...people will believe anything, except science.

Thanks for the read OP. I needed a laugh today.

reply to post by StrangeWayz
thanks for your endevour's and the interesting thread.
i won't add what i think of 'flat earthers' as i'd just get one of those t&c violation stickers.

Didn't ptolomy prove the earth was round a thousand years ago with a very simple test. He measured the size of a shadow in comparison to the size of a shadow further down the road. They wee different sizes because the angle of light changed with the earths curvature.

Wow. these people are more ignorant than peoples living in alexandria thousands of years ago.

I don't know why I clicked on this thread.

I also don't know why I'm replying to it.

I guess I can waste your time as much as this thread did. Thanks for reading.

Ok so if I took a flight from NYC to London, then London to Moscow, then Moscow to Tokyo, Tokyo to Hawaii and finally Hawaii back to NYC, would I have just flown around a round world? Or somehow managed to fly to the flip side of a flat earth then back again?

I hope these people make a bunch of money off of this because if they are just in it because they believe, well damn. I thought public schools in this country were bad.

reply to post by StrangeWayz


A classic ATS conspiracy of the first kind....IMHO. A flag for you my friend.

Although I consider it very hard to belief that the Earth is flat the whole theory behind fits right in the 'conspiracy' belief system of today: how much do you trust your government?

If I read some of the replies in this thread I must say that the brainwash/ mindcontrol of tptb is very succesful....if the earth is really flat of course. People consider it impossible and a joke.....

"The Earth is an infinite plane"
do you ever read something that just makes you fall out of your chair laughing?

Hey OP, there's a joke forum ya know right?

So how do they explain going from tokyo ( on the other sids of the. Flat earth) to california in like 14 hours? Or do they think commercial air liners travel in eccess of 2000 MPH?

I also have been at 40,000 feet in a commercial air liner and the earth. Is indeed round.

reply to post by StrangeWayz




Here is a picture from an AGM of flat earth society members.

If the universe is flat, technically aren't we all?

reply to post by StrangeWayz


Op. SnF. I needed a good laugh today, thanks a lot, this makes my day. I didn't even know people still believed this stuff.

And they think us ATSers are a crazy bunch! ROFL!

reply to post by StrangeWayz


this is great:

"Zeteticism is is in direct contradiction to the Scientific Method, where one begins with a hypothesis and builds his work off of that. Purveyors of the Scientific Method seek to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, building one hypothesis upon the next in mumbling pretension until we have house of cards model of the universe consisting nothing but undiscovered phenomena like graviton particles and dark matter to glue the entire horrid mess together. "

Thanks for this.