He restated his position though and said that the photographs could easily fool the untrained eye and that they had been faked.

When Samuel Shenton was presented with the pictures taken by probes from space showing a spherical Earth, he wavered at first.

The new president of the organization also thought that the Sun and Moon were flat discs about 4,800 kilometers from Earth and that the stars were only approximately 6,400 kilometers from our planet. Johnson claimed that there was a conspiracy against the theory of a flat earth. Johnson inherited much of Shenton’s large library containing flat earth literature when he took over the organization. When Shenton died in 1971, the organization was taken over by Charles Johnson and the society’s headquarters were moved from England to California. He believed that his theory was based on common sense and scientific evidence and did not believe that scientists had enough proof to ascribe to the view of a spherical Earth. Instead, it was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton who was a Fellow of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society. Although it would seem that this organization was founded before the fourth century B.C., when Greek philosophers and scientists advanced the idea of a spherical planet, it was not. I won’t ruin the ending for you here, but it’s safe to say very few people will have been converted to the cause after watching it (I hope).The Flat Earth Society is an organization whose members adhere to the belief that the Earth is flat rather than a sphere. Ultimately it was not exactly positive attention, even if it attempted to be balanced and let flat-Earthers speak for themselves. Many of those featured are the same, although there is also a fair share of more aggressive and arrogant believers.Įssentially it humanizes flat-Earthers, transforming them from deluded conspiracy theorists spending all their time in dark basements, to more of a well-meaning fan club just trying to figure out the world around them.īehind the Curve was released on Netflix at the end of Feb 2019, and caused a spike in Flat Earth conversation that lasted well into March.

He comes across as a genuinely friendly guy that just happens to have an odd obsession. One of the main flat-Earthers featured is Mark Sargent. It also includes a bunch of scientists talking about how ridiculous the Flat Earth theory is. Behind the Curve is a documentary about flat-Earthers, their lives, and their quest to prove planetary flatness with scientific experiments.

How did the flat earth theory start