When the Earth was Flat and Surrounded by Walls of Ice

Decades into the twenty-first century there are still flat-earthers roaming the allegedly flat planet. As bizarre and anti-science as they are, they’re hardly new. In 1921, an Illinois school principal named Wilbur Glenn Voliva preached his flat earth theory to a thousand grade school and high school students.

Volivar contended that the flat earth has a north pole in the exact center (and no south pole) and is surrounded by a Game of Thrones-like wall of ice, which prevents sailors from falling off the rim. (Where would they land?) Students also learned that our flat world remains stationary in space and that the sun is a mere thirty-two miles in diameter and only three thousand miles away.

“The sun circles above the earth spirally, making one circuit of 360 degrees each twenty-four hours, always at the same height,” Voliva said. “The rising and setting of the sun are optical illusions; the sun is just as high at midnight as it is at midday, but is on the opposite side of the North Pole at midnight and because of its limited size and influence it cannot be seen.”

Heaven is above earth and Hell is below. Voliva maintained that nothing in the Bible supports globular-earth theory. Though the Bible also lacks other scientific details about our world, which doesn’t negate their existence.

According to one of the school’s educators, the students grasp the flat earth concept easily because their “minds are not full of globular earth teachings such as older folks have had drilled into them.” So they fully accepted the theory. “I don’t believe there is one student in the grades who has questioned it. The flat earth seems more reasonable to them. The globular, unreal.”

Did they ever unlearn these lessons? Or did they raise today’s generation of believers?