He made waves in the national media and became known for cheerfully insisting the rest of the world was being duped by scientists, Douglas Martin wrote in Johnson’s obituary for the New York Times in 2001. Johnson’s good friend Samuel Shenton founded a small fringe group dubbed the Flat Earth Society in the 1950s. In 1972 Johnson became the president of the society after Shenton's death, transforming the group from a small collection of conspiracy theorists into an organization with thousands of members. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, a man named Charles Kenneth Johnson became a minor celebrity for his refusal to believe the Earth is round, Cheryl Eddy writes for iO9. But this wasn't the first resurgance of the idea. So many were surprised to hear the flat Earth concept still kicked around. People have known that the Earth is round since at least the sixth century B.C.E. Since then, the rapper has drawn the ire of all sorts of incredulous people, including astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. took to Twitter and proclaimed that the Earth is flat. It all supports the idea that this image was created to be a funny meme.This week, a particularly odd little bit of pseudoscience reared its head again when rapper B.o.B. This is a decent collection of circumstantial evidence. That was 6 days ago and they have not responded. I sent a message to The Flat Earth facebook page asking if it was real, on 12/30/17. This guy tweeted out the joke in May 2016. This shirt was originally sold in February 2017. This same joke was made prior to May 2017 without attribution to an actual Flat Earth source. The original post was not an image, and therefore would not be found by tineye. It is possible that the post was real and the Facebook post was deleted after it became a widely ridiculed meme. It is very possible that Tineye's first record of it is actually a reposting of an earlier unrecorded image. Unfortunately I do not know how thorough their records are. Their image recognition algorithms allow you to reverse search an image and find out when it first appeared in Tineye's records. When I go to The Flat Earth Society's Facebook page, this post does not appear in the first half of 2017. Tineye's first record of this image appeared on May 9, 2017. I find no evidence of this being real, but I cannot prove a negative.
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