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.

Shenton soon constructed a cosmology, based partly on his interpretation of Genesis, that 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. 'What the authorities were concealing, was the 'fact' that the earth was flat'. When he discovered Parallax's Zetetic Astronomy he was an instant convert. Shenton could not understand why someone had not previously thought of this idea until he discovered, in the reading room of the British Museum 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. He was the 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. Samuel Shenton was a sign writer, who lived with his wife Lillian in a ginger-brick terrace in suburban Dover.

Flat earth society founding