Unless you are familiar with his work, such as breaking the Guinness world record for the longest limousine jump in 2002, you may not have heard of “Mad” Mike Hughes.
But that all changed at the weekend when the 64-year-old daredevil made news across – and this bit is important – the globe.
As part of an ongoing attempt to prove that the Earth is flat, he shot off into the sky on a steam-powered homemade rocket aiming to reach 5,000ft, the very edge of space, before returning to the Earth with some kind of evidence that had apparently eluded scientists thus far.
Unfortunately, just 20 seconds after launch and a distance short of his target, Mr Morris did in fact return to Earth but, as his parachute had failed to deploy correctly, he was killed.
This was subsequently confirmed by a San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner public information officer.
Beyond proving that the Earth is anything other than very hard indeed, particularly when impacted at a speed in excess of 350mph, Mr Morris’s endeavours have brought little to the debate raging across the internet.
There, a coalition of the gullible, dumb and millennial – in other words one in six Americans – have taken it upon themselves to refute the idea that the Earth is essentially spherical.
Presumably some of these people have jobs but, more incredibly, they managed to form a society in 1956 – the straight-talking Flat Earth Society.
It is, or so it says, “Dedicated to unravelling the true mysteries of the universe and demonstrating that the Earth is flat and that Round Earth doctrine is little more than an elaborate hoax”.
Elaborate would certainly seem to cover it. The earliest documented mention of the Earth being spherical rather than flat came around the 5th century BC, and was gradually adopted throughout the Middle Ages before attaining a degree of certainty following the Magellan-Elcano and then Sir Francis Drake circumnavigation expeditions in 1522 and 1580 respectively.
Not so, says the society.
“The Earth is in the form of a disk with the North Pole in the center and Antarctica as a wall surrounding the known continents… circumnavigation is performed by moving in a great circle around the North Pole.” That’s right, a huge wall of ice stops the water falling off the sides.
But surely, people have been into space… Whoa! Hold on there. The Society has this one covered.
“The most commonly accepted explanation of this is that the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration,” explains their website. Didn’t happen, you see?
“We are not suggesting that space agencies are aware that the Earth is flat and actively covering the fact up,” they offer in the spirit of scientific even-handedness.
“They depict the Earth as being round simply because that is what they expect it to be.” Well, that will be almost 60 years of manned spaceflight for you.
And the pictures we have all seen of the earth hanging around in space looking like it is basically round? Easy. “In general, we at the Flat Earth Society do not lend much credibility to photographic evidence.”
Which all rather begs the question of what Mr Hughes was hoping to bring back from his ill-fated jaunt in California?
“The Flat Earth thing is like everything else to me,” he had told CBS News, seven months after another failed attempt in March 2018.
“I just want people to question everything. Question what your congressman is doing, your city council. Question what really happened during the Civil War. What happened during 9/11.”
He was momentarily the, ahem, shooting star of the Flat Earth movement but others who have come into its non-existent orbit (in case you were wondering, the Earth is not travelling at 1,000mph right now, it’s stationary) include musicians such as rapper B.O.B and former England cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff.
“Evidence suggests the world isn’t round”, pointed out the Top Gear presenter in 2017.
“Why would water stay still if we’re hurtling through space? Why is it not wobbling?”
Obviously we know now that the big ice wall is keeping it in place, but this predilection for the famous and not-so-famous to ally themselves with the kind of pseudoscience that used to be the preserve of the malevolent and/or stupid is a concern.
The Flat Earth Society can boast 88,700 followers on Twitter , last year there was Flat Earth Convention in Birmingham and the organisers appeared on ITV’s This Morning.
Before the rise of the internet, the membership of the Society was dwindling, but now, as with anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers, there is suddenly an increasing number of people attempting to find some kind of mainstream acceptance for ideas that have already been tossed into the dustbin of history.
A 2018 Netflix documentary, the aptly-titled Behind The Curve, was commissioned to look at the rise of this phenomenon, and although it showed Flat Earthers accidentally confirming that the Earth is round with two experiments designed to show the contrary, the number of believers is definitely on the rise.
Perhaps Michael Gove was right when he said in 2016 that “People [in this country] have had enough of experts” or, more likely, the gullible are just more easily motivated and persuaded by the world wide web.
After the accident in the desert, “Mad” Mike Hughes’ spokesman, Darren Schuster, told BuzzFeed News: “We used flat Earth as a PR stunt. Period.
“He was a true daredevil decades before the latest round of rocket missions.
“Flat Earth allowed us to get so much publicity that we kept going! I know he didn’t believe in flat Earth and it was a schtick.”
