From NPR news ....
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"It appears we will need to wait a while longer to find out whether more than two millennia of thinkers and explorers — from Aristotle and Ferdinand Magellan, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and John Glenn — have been wrong about the shape of the Earth.

"Mad" Mike Hughes, limousine driver and self-proclaimed flat-Earther, announced that he had to delay his plan to launch himself 1,800 feet high in a rocket of his own making. The launch, which he has billed as a crucial first step toward ultimately photographing our disc-world from space, had been scheduled for Saturday — before the Bureau of Land Management got wind of the plan and barred him from using public land in Amboy, Calif.

Also, the rocket launcher he had built out of a used motor home "broke down in the driveway" on Wednesday, according to Hughes. He said in a YouTube announcement that they'd eventually gotten the launcher fixed — but the small matter of federal permission proved a more serious stumbling block (for now).

The BLM "informed me that they were not going to allow me to do the event there — at least at that location," Hughes said.

Hughes asserted that the BLM last year had tacitly left the matter of permissions to the Federal Aviation Administration, and "of course, they can't honestly approve it," he added. The FAA "just said, 'Well, we know that you're going to do it there.' "

It turns out the BLM wasn't satisfied with that explanation — particularly after The Associated Press first reported on the launch for a national audience.

"Someone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [about the launch], because that was news to them," a spokeswoman for the agency told The Washington Post, adding that Hughes had not applied to the local BLM field office for the necessary permit.

"So, it turned out to be not a good thing," Hughes said.

Still, Hughes has not relented in his quest to launch himself roughly 500 mph on a mile-long flight across the sky above the Mojave Desert. He said he has found private property near his original launch site, where he anticipates finally taking off as early as this coming week.

For Hughes, this launch would not be his first in a homemade rocket. In 2014, the 61-year-old sent himself flying a quarter-mile across the Arizona desert before pulling out several parachutes of questionable quality on his fall to Earth. He was "in a walker for a couple weeks" after that launch, he told a flat-Earth community Web show.

He also hopes it will not be his last such attempt. Since converting to the flat-Earth belief after "research[ing] it for several months in between doing everything else," Hughes has seen a marked uptick in fundraising contributions to his rocket projects. And he has big plans, hoping eventually to launch himself into space, where he believes he can overturn a scientific understanding that predates NASA by at least 2,300 years.

"I don't believe in science," Hughes told the AP earlier this month. "I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that's not science, that's just a formula. There's no difference between science and science fiction."

For now, his mission will have to wait.

"It's been very disappointing and, I guess, enlightening — this whole week. It really has been," he said. "But it's not easy because it's not supposed to be."


https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/26/566583007/flat-earther-postpones-launch-in-his-homemade-rocket-saying-it-s-not-easy

This is so funny. I wonder how many others have left Mormonism only to start doubting everything they have ever been told.

I work with an exmo who believes in the FE. If I say anything he does not want to hear, he starts to filibuster. So I leave it alone. His default is always, “They lie about everything.”

Hardly an argument that will convince me.

Any other FEers here?

Well, he certainly is a character. To me, the curvature of the Earth is easy enough to see as long as you have enough horizon to look at.

summer Wrote:
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> Well, he certainly is a character. To me, the
> curvature of the Earth is easy enough to see as
> long as you have enough horizon to look at.

And even if it's not, you can prove the earth is "curved" with two sticks and a ruler, and about an hour of time.

I read some stuff online from some flat-earth nutters who are claiming the refusal to give him permission to launch on public land was part of the government cover-up of the "truth" of a flat earth. They can't let him launch and prove it's flat, of course. Sigh.

What an insane undertaking. So Mike Hughes is an ex-Mormon?

He needs to be put on psych hold at the local ER before his delusion kills him or someone else.

Doesn't believe in science, huh? Okay. I volunteer to light the fuse.

Who thought he could safely hover in a lawn chair lifted aloft by weather balloons. A 16,000 foot ascent proved otherwise.

http://www.darwinawards.com/stupid/stupid1998-11.html

For those of you not acquainted, the Darwin Awards are given (always posthumously) to people who remove themselves from the human gene pool because of their idiocy or stupid bravado. The site is an extremely entertaining way to waste internet time."Darwin" does an excellent job of checking out the "nominations" and ascertaining their veracity, or lack of.

We heard about this while visiting family in 29 Palms over the holiday. We were on our way home to Utah (taking the Amboy route) and saw Mike parked by the side of Route 66.

We stopped and talked to him for awhile. The rocket is a contraption of "very questionable quality". But he seemed very committed to the whole enterprise. (And his video will be available a PPV channel on YouTube.)

Is he Mormon? He seemed like an ordinary crazy not a Mormon crazy.