Samuel Shenton

Samuel Shenton (March 1903 – 2 March 1971) was the founder in 1956 of the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), based in Dover, England. He lectured tirelessly on this to youth clubs, political and student groups and during the Space Race in the 1960s he was frequently seen on television and in newspapers promoting his views.

Samuel Shenton was a signwriter, who lived with his wife Lillian in a ginger-brick terrace in suburban Dover. He was son of an army sergeant major, born in Great Yarmouth, and by the 1920s claimed to have invented an airship that would rise into the atmosphere and remain stationary until the earth spun westwards at 1,000 km/h (620 mph) to the desired destination at the same latitude. Shenton could not understand why someone had not previously thought of this idea until he discovered, in the reading room of the British Library at Bloomsbury that Archbishop Stevens, a friend of Lady Blount, the founder of the Universal Zetetic Society, had suggested an aircraft design similar to his own. When he discovered Parallax's Zetetic Astronomy he was an instant convert. "What the authorities were concealing, Shenton decided, was the 'fact' that the earth was flat".

Shenton soon constructed a cosmology, based partly on his interpretation of Genesis, that the earth was a flat disk centred on the North Pole with the zetetic notion of the South Pole being an impenetrable wall of ice, that marked the edge of the pit that is the earth in the endless flat plane forming the universe. The sun cast a narrow beam like a flashlight moving over a table as it traced flat circles that varied over the 365-day cycles. The sun was 32 miles (51 km) in diameter 3,000 miles (4,800 km) above the earth and the moon also 32 miles in diameter but only 2,550 miles (4,100 km) above the earth.

In 1956 he founded the International Flat Earth Research Society as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society but with a less religious emphasis, found a president in William Mills, a relative of one of Lady Blount's followers and held its inaugural meeting in November at Mills' home in London, with Shenton as secretary. One of the attendees, attending out of curiosity, was the Sky at Night astronomer Patrick Moore who recounted his experience in his book Can you speak Venusian?.

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