his discovery may solve the mystery of lost golf balls.” It wasn’t all fun and games: Voliva put forward a plan to require Zion schoolchildren to take an oath of loyalty to him and his theory. The Moline Dispatch got in a jab typical of the amused response from local papers, saying, “If Voliva finds the earth is flat. One of the most successful flat earth entrepreneurs was Wilbur Glenn Voliva, who, through a combination of fierce commitment to flat earth theory and blatant election intimidation and fraud, managed to gain control of Zion, Illinois, where he ruled as a local dictator for 20 years.
There’s plenty more where that comes from. And if he does, he will never come from Dayton.”įederal prosecutors have added new charges against Trump in the classified documents case, including his… The editor of the Wright brothers’ hometown paper, for instance, was deeply skeptical of reports of their achievement, allegedly saying, “Man will never fly. Why not? It used to be natural and salutary to disbelieve in such outlandish things as human flight. The book’s lively tone, by turns flummoxed, frustrated, and amused, comes through in Weill’s account of the “ The Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society.” Founded in 1969 by a group of engineers with the motto, “ Birds Fly, Men Drink,” this association of the incredulously outraged gathered for weekend reunions where they “got drunk and pretended to believe air travel was impossible,” exchanging mock arguments that mirror those of flat earth theory. It also provides plenty of prime comedic material.
Off the Edge gives the reader a fine, detailed overview of one of humanity’s oldest and most venerable delusions in a little under 250 pages. In places, its attentive and deeply amusing observations of human folly evoke the work of the master himself, P.G. Her book is insightful and sympathetic, meeting conspiratorial doctrine with sympathy and without condescension. In Off the Edge, out this week in paperback, Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill offers a very capable survey of the resurgent flat earth movement.
Those who hold this view believe that we’re all living in The Truman Show, the subjects of a massive, all-encompassing conspiracy to deprive all eight billion of us of the most basic truth about physical reality. In case you weren’t aware, America is in the midst of a dramatic, internet-driven resurgence of the fanatical belief that our beautiful, oblate spheroid is in reality a flat plane whose edges are rounded up by an ice barrier hundreds of feet high, topped by a dome.
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