Flat Earther Fails To Launch His Homemade Rocket -- Yet Again (facebook.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Flat earther "Mad" Mike Hughes, who also bills himself as "the last great daredevil," promised Super Bowl-sized ratings for an event Saturday where he'd blast himself nearly half a mile into the sky on a homemade rocket. "We had 20 cameras on site today, ready for a full segment," explained the video-on-demand site Noize TV on their Facebook page. One newspaper described it as also being "an event which he hopes will get people to investigate the ideology which holds the earth is flat." But judging from online reactions, the event was just another disappointment.

Noize TV's Facebook post titled "The Launch!!! Finally" shows a picture of Mike standing beside his rocket -- but it's followed by a commenters saying things like "There was no launch. I doubt there will be," and the official Noize TV account saying "We thought he would press that button... He did not. And won't be doing so we are pretty certain." And this morning Noize TV posted that "we will no longer cover non launches, only launches... It turns out non launches are not as funny as we anticipated."

One woman even posted that "I was there for awhile...police were there. Ambulance was there. 100 people that weren't supposed to be there was there..." And while there's rumors Mike might still try again another day, her ultimate verdict about the limo-driver-turned-daredevil was cynical. "He's all about getting seen rather than getting launched... My husband gave him $100 cash the last time he was going to launch...live and learn."

Comments

Re:Too bad

[Tablizer]

Too bad. I love that guy. America needs more full-on nuts who do crazy things with rockets and other such toys

Having leaders of nations like that is NOT enough for you?

Re:Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Current evidence suggests this guy isn't a nut, just a liar that conned a bunch of actual nuts out of some money.

Re:Not likely

[Lord Bitman]

His launch is not likely to influence his beliefs. Not due to the strength of his convictions, but because he only planned to go up about 600 meters.

Note that the bare-minimum for being able to detect the curvature of the earth with the naked eye, in ideal / cloudless conditions, is over 10,000 meters. The most-common views that one typically sees of the "curved earth" / thinks of when considering the curvature of the earth, are from the the international space station (or other orbits of roughly that area), which averages 400,000 meters from the earth's surface.

600 meters much less than he'd get from riding in an airplane. If he didn't trust the windows on those things, and wanted a definite unobstructed view, he could just get into a normal hot air balloon - those tend to go up a little more than 600 meters, on average.

Can we please just stop

[LeftCoastThinker]

Can we please stop posting stories about this guy, he is either mentally unstable (in which case he needs help, not an audience, and Slashdot is contributing to the problem) or he is a con man (who should also not be encouraged or given a platform as well...)

Anyone who is a "flat earther" can easily test their hypothesis by spending around $10k. Fly from SFO to Hawii, take longitude and latitude measurements at each destination and track the flight time, use a compass to confirm you are always traveling West. Hell use GPS to track your flight path. Then fly to Tokyo, London and back to the US. Proof positive that the earth is round, and around $10k in plane tickets.

This is generally why there are very few flat earthers, because plane and business travel is common enough that most people know someone who has actually flown around the planet...