History

We’ve all been taught the basics of ‘how they discovered the globe’ centuries ago – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. I am not going to repeat the sanitized script sanctioned and taught in public schools; rather I’ll highlight opposing views, much like one would allow in a court of law – no judge worth his title would accept a gagged defense. … Following this courtroom analogy, it might be wise to consider who the plaintiffs were and their vested interests in the heliocentric model. My opinion, there was no need to attack the flat, enclosed model; if it was erroneous, simply prove the errors and let it collapse under its own weight.

Instead, there appears to be a concerted effort to ridicule and quash ‘any such notion as flat’ rather than presenting provable solid evidence to the contrary. ‘Ships sailing over the horizon’ was touted as factual proof of the globe model, but when ‘zoom’ technology revealed ships much further away, the globe defenders doubled-down on light refracting, bendable radar, mirages and other marvels of ‘science!’ The original ‘ships over the horizon’ isn’t extinguished as evidence, but rather… sugar-coated.

Call me a skeptic, but I raised kids and when they were caught in a falsehood they’d build tales and twist it around. Seems human behavior is a good indicator of shenanigans; cover-ups and justifications are common whenever there is a strong enough motive. So when there is a dazzling display of experts trotted out as ‘too smart for you to understand’, I begin to suspect there may be something rotten underneath. It’s like the reports of shifty shopkeepers concealed rotting meat by burying it in tasty pizza toppings and gullible buyers lining up for dinner, ‘piling on toppings to distract from the meat of it’. I’d rather not think it of scientific study or shopkeepers, but…

My position is ‘forget the pizza toppings’. I don’t need a discussion on quarks, neutrinos, black holes and light-years in space. All flat earth researchers (and by default, globe skeptics) would disappear if the curvature that MUST exist to have a globe could be measured and verified; to date, it hasn’t. And all images provided by NASA or other agencies depict a perfectly round sphere; none are like a half-deflated basketball with one side squashed in (for those who think a small curve here or there is sufficient to prove the whole). Long-distance ‘flat’ measurements are dismissed as illusions and delusions, rather than open for serious consideration.

I found that there has always been critics of the globe theory; they’re usually ignored, scoffed at or ridiculed. Yet as Carl Sagan stated, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – the spinning globe models qualifies. One contemporary critic, Walter van der Kamp (1913-1998) worded it this way:

Now I “knew” of course, that Copernicus and Galileo had “proved” that the Earth goes round the sun, but slowly an almost unbelievable and horrifying possibility began to haunt me.What if the whole kit and caboodle of post-Copernican astronomy were not founded on fact at all but just on theory with zero probability. I decided to investigate the matter in depth and worked my way through stacks of highly touted books on the philosophy and history of science, on astronomy, on astrophysics. The results were staggering. Suffice it to say: I found that no one has ever directly proved the Earth to be in motion. Quite the opposite: a relativity theory more incredible than any Bible story had to be called upon for the purpose of saving the appearances.” – Walter van der Kamp in Tychonian Bulletin May 1980, p. 6

“Theologians, without exception, long ago dropped any claim for an actual and factual meaning of the first half of Genesis 1. Having come this far in reading about the matter, I found myself in a quandary. All books and everyone consulted warned me that it would be worse than preposterous to contradict and dismiss the results of three centuries of observations.

“I quested far and wide, and everywhere I came face to face with a dishonesty, a misleading practice, I never had thought possible. None, but none among the fanciful assertions of the believers in Galileo’s sun-centered astronomical gospel has ever been proven. It is after Eve’s seduction in the Garden of Eden the most monstrous deception ever foisted on mankind. The procedure for bringing it about has been an old, but effective one…proclaim a lie again, and again, and then in due course all people will believe you.”
— Walter van der Kamp, The Whys and Wherefores of Geocentrism, Bulletin of the Tychonian Society, No. 49, p. 18 (captured from Flat Earth and the Bible)

These are a few pdf links others might want to explore.
GALILEO versus THE GEOCENTRIC THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE by N. Martin Gwynne
Recanting Galileo by Solange Hertz
What’s Up? by Solange Hertz
SIR ISAAC NEWTON AND MODERN ASTRONOMY by N. Martin Gwynne
EINSTEIN AND MODERN PHYSICS by N. Martin Gwynne
Evolution and Cosmogony: The Achilles’ Heel of the Creationists’ Positionand Einstein, a Solipsist? by Walter van der Kamp (1996)

For those who prefer a video summary, this one ‘drops a lot of names’ of historical consequence. It combines history and religious considerations: Medici Occult Schools influenced Roman Catholics who were losing power over the population as the Christian faith split … Those preaching or possessing the King James Version of the bible were tortured or burned at the stake; several hundred over a few years – a power struggle to maintain control and profit… When Jesuits came forward with a heliocentric earth model, the ruling Catholics ‘adopted’ their teachings; it undermined ‘the Bible’ and returned religious power to ‘the learned select few of the Papacy’. This included controlling education and developing ‘learning against learning’ by replacing Scripture with the new god of Science, as taught by the ruling hierarchy. “Giants of Science” emerged, such as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein…

And this piece of text was too fascinating, considering the dates, players and the author’s conclusions. If you watched Heliosorcery, you understand the connection. As an observer and data collector, I find the information interesting and part of a larger picture, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. (Bold added for emphasis):

When John Paul II did in fact rehabilitate Galileo in the course of his address before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Halloween 1992, the American media were unanimous in handing down their own infallible judgments. While on the west coast the Los Angeles Times headlined, “Earth Moves for Vatican in Galileo Case – Vatican Admits Error in 17th Century Case,” on the east coast the same article by William Montalbano was carried by the Washington Post under the caption “Vatican Says Galileo Right after All – 3 Centuries Later, Pope Admits Error.”

The journalist declared triumphantly, “The Roman Catholic Church has admitted to erring these past 359 years in formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining scientific truths it long denounced as against-the-Scriptures heresy.” He informed the public that the Papal Commission had finally concluded …that Galileo’s clerical judges acted in good faith but rejected his theories because they were `incapable of dissociating faith from an age-old cosmology – the biblical vision of the earth as the center of the universe… Unable to comprehend a non-literal reading of Scripture, according to the commission, the judges feared that if Galileo’s ideas were taught, they would undermine Catholic tradition at a time when it was under attack by Protestant reformers…

With the hindsight we now enjoy, we can see that this is exactly what happened, for with the Galileo affair, the Great Apostasy prophesied in Scripture began in earnest, and by now it’s in full swing.
– The Scientific Illusion, Solange Strong Hertz, pg. 8

And we have Samuel Rowbotham, quoted below and taken from Flat Earth and the Bible listed above. These are just a few ‘snips’ of Rowbotham’s writings:

“During Captain James Clark Ross’s voyages around the Antarctic circumference, he often wrote in his journal perplexed at how they routinely found themselves out of accordance with their charts, stating that they found themselves an average of 12-16 miles outside their reckoning every day, some days as much as 29 miles. Lieutenant Charles Wilkes commanded a United States Navy exploration expedition to the Antarctic from August 18th, 1838 to June 10th, 1842, almost four years spent “exploring and surveying the Southern ocean.” In his journals Lieutenant Wilkes also mentioned being consistently east of his reckoning, sometimes over 20 miles in less than 18 hours.

“The commanders of these various expeditions were, of course, with their education and belief in the earth’s rotundity, unable to conceive of any other cause for the differences between log and chronometer results than the existence of currents. But one simple fact is entirely fatal to such an explanation, viz., that when the route taken is east or west the same results are experienced. The water of the southern region cannot be running in two opposite directions at the same time; and hence, although various local and variable currents have been noticed, they cannot be shown to be the cause of the discrepancies so generally observed in high southern latitudes between time and log results. The conclusion is one of necessity, forced upon us by the sum of the evidence collected that the degrees of longitude in any given southern latitude are larger than the degrees in any latitude nearer to the northern center; thus proving the already more than sufficiently demonstrated fact that the earth is a plane, having a northern center, in relation to which degrees of latitude are concentric, and from which degrees of longitude are diverging lines, continually increasing in their distance from each other as they are prolonged towards the great glacial southern circumference.” – Dr. Samuel Rowbotham, “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe!”

“On a globe 25,000 miles in equatorial circumference, however, degrees of longitude at 34 degrees latitude would be only 58 miles, a full 12 miles per degree less than reality. This perfectly explains why Ross and other navigators in the deep South experienced 12+ mile daily discrepancies between their reckoning and reality, the farther South travelled the farther the divide. “From near Cape Horn, Chile to Port Philip in Melbourne, Australia the distance is 9,000 miles. These two places are 143 degrees of longitude from each other. Therefore the whole extent of the Earth‟s circumference is a mere arithmetical question. If 143 degrees make 9,000 miles, what will be the distance made by the whole 360 degrees into which the surface is divided? The answer is, 22,657 miles; or, 8357 miles more than the theory of rotundity would permit. It must be borne in mind, however, that the above distances are nautical measure, which, reduced to statute miles, gives the actual distance round the Southern region at a given latitude as 26,433 statute miles; or nearly 1,500 miles more than the largest circumference ever assigned to the Earth at the equator.” -Dr. Samuel Rowbotham, “Earth Not a Globe, 2nd Edition”

“Another thing is certain, that from within the equator the north pole star, and the constellations Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and many others, can be seen from every meridian simultaneously; whereas in the south, from the equator, neither the so-called south pole star, nor the remarkable constellation of the Southern Cross, can be seen simultaneously from every meridian, showing that all the constellations of the south – pole star included – sweep over a great southern arc and across the meridian, from their rise in the evening to their setting in the morning. But if the earth is a globe, Sigma Octantis, a south pole star, and the Southern Cross, a southern circumpolar constellation, they would all be visible at the same time from every longitude on the same latitude, as is the case with the northern pole star and the northern circumpolar constellations. Such, however, is not the case.” -Dr. Samuel Rowbotham, Zetetic Astronomy, Earth Not a Globe!

We could rely on ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ … who said, “One thing I really want your generation to embrace is that the earth is a closed system. We cannot leave earth.” Now why would he say that?? Maybe he was in agreement with Dr. John Mack, Dept. of Defense, who said, “Nothing has or ever will penetrate the glass dome!” – NASA, Operation Fishbowl (God knows, they tried.)