An Experimental Inquiry into the True Figure of the Earth: Proving it a Plane, Without Axial or Orbital Motion; and the Only Material World in the Universe!_ (London: Simkin, Marshall, and Co., 1865). How sincere are flat earthers, really? When “Saddam Hussein” posted on the Flat Earth Society forum in November 2007, he addressed the peanut gallery.
A lie which has been forced so thoroughly into the masses [sic] subconcious [sic], that nobody dares to question it. This, the rotating Earth, is the centre of it! Not the Earth itself but the shape of it!. [sic] We do not live on a blue ball hurtling through the cosmos but upon the back of a great disk, thousands of miles wide.
This is what the Earth looks like!” The naysayers immediately rolled in. If I look out the window, I see flatness. I see no curvature.” In his profile picture, the former president of Iraq gazes skeptically leftward, a noose photoshopped over his left shoulder.
As of September 28, 2026, “Hussein” had posted on the forums of the Flat Earth Society 35,188 times, with variations of the same singular argument: NASA, through devious machinations, had convinced the people — through lies about the existence of penguins and the nonexistence of a vast ice wall at the end of the earth. He was and is, obviously, joking — though the skeptics who have come to the forum to argue with him over the past nineteen years are no less infuriated by his claims. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.
Broadside (detail) by Parallax (Samuel Birley Rowbotham) on Zetetic Astronomy, 1857 — Source. According to the historian of science Christine Garwood, he was — to his critics’ embarrassment — astoundingly successful. Furious amateur scientists would go to his lectures and fall one by one.
Invariably polite and unflappable (and willing to cut and run when necessary), the _Greenwich Free Press_ would report in May 1862 that “it seems impossible for any one to battle with him, so powerful are the weapons he uses. Mathematicians argue with him at the conclusion of his lectures, but it would seem as though they held their weapons by the blade and fought with the handle, for sure enough they put the handle straight into the lecturer’s hand, to their own utter discomfiture and chagrin.” (He would reproduce this report in the second, 1873 edition of _Zetetic Astronomy_, which did some clever editing of skeptical newspaper coverage.) Born in 1816 as Samuel Birley Rowbotham to a wealthy Stockport merchant family, Parallax had dabbled in utopian socialism and medical quackery before embarking on his quest to flatten the world. He was not the first Brit to attempt to disprove the concept of the round earth — a pamphlet titled _The Anti-Newtonian_ had made a minor splash in 1819 — but his public debates quickly made him the most famous and _Zetetic Astronomy_ the foundational text of all modern Flat Earth thought.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
