The launch by SpaceX of the massive Falcon Heavy rocket has one Flat Earther claiming that it is all an elaborate hoax.
You would think that Justin Harvey would be a believer in space travel and a round Earth by now, considering he lives in Orlando and was able to see SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket from his home recently. But he totally rejects all of it and has bought into an insane conspiracy theory where SpaceX is specifically recruited by the government to fool the world.
Harvey, 30, believes that the Earth is flat and therefore Falcon Heavy is a giant hoax. He thinks they are designed to distract people from the strange lands that exist outside of the ring of ice that he think surrounds the flat disk that is the Earth, and people like SpaceX founder Elon Musk are willfully complicit.
“I thought, there’s another typical rocket launch, I’ve seen plenty of them. I didn’t think too much of it,” he told Metro US.
“Was he picked up as his PayPal thing, and then groomed into being the so-called first civilian space agency to try and take some pressure of of nasa and make it seem like we are progressing with civilian space travel?” he continued, according to Metro US. “I think that may be the case.”
So what happened to the rocket? Harvey thinks that it simply curved over the Atlantic Ocean and then was dumped into the water. He also believes that the government recruited Musk from PayPal, his former company, to run SpaceX and fool the world.
The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia on flat Earth beliefs.
The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of Earth’s shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat Earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period (early centuries AD), and China until the 17th century. That paradigm was also typically held in the aboriginal cultures of the Americas, and the notion of a flat Earth domed by the firmament in the shape of an inverted bowl was common in pre-scientific societies.[1]
The idea of a spherical Earth appeared in Greek philosophy with Pythagoras (6th century BC), although most pre-Socratics (6th – 5th century BC) retained the flat Earth model. Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. Knowledge of the spherical Earth gradually began to spread beyond the Hellenistic world from then on.
In the modern era, pseudoscientific flat Earth theories have been espoused by modern flat Earth societies and, increasingly, by unaffiliated individuals using social media.
In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth has been expressed by a variety of individuals and groups:
English writer Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1885), writing under the pseudonym “Parallax”, produced a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy in 1849 arguing for a flat Earth and published results of many experiments that tested the curvatures of water over a long drainage ditch, followed by another called The inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scripture. One of his supporters, John Hampden, lost a bet to Alfred Russel Wallace in the famous Bedford Level Experiment, which attempted to prove it. In 1877 Hampden produced a book called “A New Manual of Biblical Cosmography”.[134] Rowbotham also produced studies that purported to show that the effects of ships disappearing below the horizon could be explained by the laws of perspective in relation to the human eye.[135] In 1883 he founded Zetetic Societies in England and New York, to which he shipped a thousand copies of Zetetic Astronomy.
William Carpenter, a printer originally from Greenwich, England (home of the Royal Observatory and central to the study of astronomy), was a supporter of Rowbotham. Carpenter published Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed – Proving the Earth not a Globe in eight parts from 1864 under the name Common Sense.[136] He later emigrated to Baltimore, where he published A hundred proofs the Earth is not a Globe in 1885.[137] He said “There are rivers that flow for hundreds of miles towards the level of the sea without falling more than a few feet – notably, the Nile, which, in a thousand miles, falls but a foot. A level expanse of this extent is quite incompatible with the idea of the Earth’s convexity. It is, therefore, a reasonable proof that Earth is not a globe”, as well as “If the Earth were a globe, a small model globe would be the very best – because the truest – thing for the navigator to take to sea with him. But such a thing as that is not known: with such a toy as a guide, the mariner would wreck his ship, of a certainty!, This is a proof that Earth is not a globe.”
John Jasper, an American slave turned prolific preacher, echoed his friend Carpenter’s sentiments in his most famous sermon “Der Sun do move”, preached over 250 times, always by invitation.[138]
In Brockport, New York, in 1887, M.C. Flanders argued the case of a flat Earth for three nights against two scientific gentlemen defending sphericity. Five townsmen chosen as judges voted unanimously for a flat Earth at the end. The case was reported in the Brockport Democrat.[139]
Professor Joseph W. Holden of Maine, a former justice of the peace, gave numerous lectures in New England and lectured on flat Earth theory at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. His fame stretched to North Carolina where the Statesville Semi-weekly Landmark recorded at his death in 1900: “We hold to the doctrine that the earth is flat ourselves and we regret exceedingly to learn that one of our members is dead.”
