Papers of the Flat Earth Society
Covering the period of Samuel Shenton's involvement with the Society (1956-1971), material includes correspondence, promotional material, magazines, manuscripts, lecture material, photographs, press cuttings, notes and books.
The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society, as a successor to the 19th century Universal Zetetic Society. The Flat Earth Society devised detailed arguments, based on scientific observations and references to the Bible, to support their claim that the Earth is a motionless disc not an orbiting globe. The Flat Earth Society argued that the accepted scientific belief in the spherical Earth was a delusion, that the curvature of the Earth was attributable to atmospheric refraction and that the Moon landings were a hoax.
From his home in Dover, Samuel Shenton collated material, gave lectures, arranged meetings and generated widespread publicity in Britain and the USA, attracting dozens of enquiries each day and over one hundred members. Following Shenton's death in 1971, the Flat Earth Society was run by Charles K. Johnson in California with an expanding membership until Johnson's own death in 2001. From its establishment in 1956, the Flat Earth Society also operated under the name of the International Flat Earth Society and the International Flat Earth Research Society. A new and seemingly unrelated Flat Earth Society is now in existence.
The Flat Earth Society Archive covers the period of Samuel Shenton's involvement with the organization (1956-1971). It contains large amounts of correspondence, mainly incoming, which has been indexed and arranged alphabetically. The Archive also contains diagrams, notes, two manuscripts on the subject of Zetetic Astronomy, a collection of newspaper cuttings featuring the Society and a small collection of relevant books and periodicals.
Finding Aid
The archive is fully listed and an online Finding Aid including further biographical information is available for browsing or searching.
Access
All material in the Archive is available to scholars for consultation in the University Library's Special Collections and Archives Reading Room by prior arrangement. Please refer to Visiting & using SC&A.
Related material
The University Library's Special Collections Catalogue contains a small number of books relating to flat earth theories. More background information on the Flat Earth Society, Samuel Shenton and Charles K. Johnson can be found on Wikipedia. The online artice The Flat-out Truth, features Charles K. Johnson. Another, seemingly unrelated, Flat Earth Society also now appears on the Web.
