Homer. Democritus. Anaxagoras. Three brilliant thinkers and writers, men who contributed to the development of classical Greek thought, and most importantly, men who believed the earth was flat. To their ranks, we can now add California resident Mike “Mad Mike” Hughes.
Seeking to free himself from the fetters of earthbound gravity, just as he has already freed his mind from the ironclad scientific evidence the world is round, Hughes is planning to launch himself into space on Saturday via a homemade rocket, The Washington Post reports. Hoping to reach a height of 1,800 feet—also roughly the nearest distance Hughes’ enlightened mind has come to human logic during this project—his scrap-metal rocket ship will propel him at 500 miles per hour for a mile-long journey. No word yet on whether fellow flat-earth truther BoB will be there to support him.
And this is only the first phase of Hughes’ ambitious multi-tiered project to disprove what centuries of scientific thought and outer-space travel have confirmed, repeatedly and with increasingly little effort. The 61-year-old limousine driver plans to subsequently follow up his doubtless successful Saturday flight with a drive several miles up into space, in order to photograph the flat disc that actually comprises our planet. With that, Hughes hopes to “shut the door on this ball earth” nonsense believed by the many unthinking sheep who simply accept what sound mathematics, as well as countless pieces of photographic and video evidence, have told them.
Hughes is actually a fairly recent convert to the truth of a flat earth, as he tells a fellow flat-earther in a recent fundraising interview for the project. He says he came to the realization the earth is flat about a year ago, following several months of “research,” which presumably involved reading up heavily on a variety of earth-related informative critical and investigative journalism sites, like NBA player Kyrie Irving’s Instagram feed. Once he gets proof, it will put a stop to the steady stream of Illuminati Freemason astronauts—including John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, Hughes assures us—who have pulled the veil of deception over our collective eyes.
Completely coincidentally, this conversion to horizontal honesty came around early 2016. This just so happened to be about the time Hughes’ previous Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for an Evel Knievel-style rocket flight to space—in which he didn’t say a word about flat earth or conspiracies—raised exactly $310 of his $150,000 goal. His post-conversion GoFundMe campaign, freed from Kickstarter’s insidious allegiance to ball-shaped ideologies of evil, managed to wring about $8,000 out of fellow flat-earthers, more than enough to explain his adding a coat of Rust-Oleum and “Research Flat Earth” imprinted on his homemade rocket.
While some might see his recent enlightenment (or “unlearning”) as an opportunistic cash grab, Hughes appears serious in his desire to disprove the actual model of our planet, just as serious as he is about needing additional funds to take the next step, should he survive Saturday’s attempt. (A previous shorter rocket flight of Hughes’ ended with him being pulled moaning from the wreckage, as seen in this video.) We here at The A.V. Club are rooting for a successful mission this weekend, if only so that our weekend news editor doesn’t end up having to make an extremely depressing addendum to this currently very entertaining story.