Apple Valley, We have A Problem

IF ANY OF YOU KNOW A GUY NAMED MIKE HUGHES please do your best to convince him to either see a Doctor or buy a lot of insurance. If you don’t know a guy named Mike Hughes just consider yourself lucky.

A limousine driver by day the Mike Hughes I’m talking about lives in the idyllic sounding town of Apple Valley, California, but he has his head in the clouds – rather low clouds. If he is not really lucky he might be leaving it there even if his feet are on the solid ground.

You see… I don’t know quite how to phrase this without sounding like I’m… like I’m Mike Hughes. Mike has a plan to launch himself in a steam powered “rocket” up into the sky in order to prove, once and for all, that the Earth is flat. I think you can see now why I am skeptical about standing too close to Mr. Hughes.

If all goes well Mike plans to attain an altitude of 1800 feet into the sky. (Yes, 1800 not 18,000.) At that height, 1800 ft, our “Flatstronaut” thinks he will be able to take some snapshots that might prove that the Earth is flat.

“It’ll shut the door on this ball earth.”

While this may seem far-fetched it is not Mike’s first rodeo. He has experience. In 2002 he set an official Guinness Book record and all for the longest jump by a limousine. Pretty heady stuff, No? My guess is that he never chauffeured a limo full of Heavy Metal Rock and Rollers.

This is not Mike’s first rocket either. In 2014 he lit the fuse, as it were, and flew a quarter of a mile before ending up in the Emergency Room. You can watch that one on You Tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jU_forLM_s

It isn’t pretty, but he recovered.

While you might think that Mike has put his efforts into an ancient and failed idea. Maybe so, but he is using some very modern means to pull this off. To raise money to build and launch his rocket Mike has used “Kickstarter” to elicit donations. So far he has gotten $310. His goal was $150,000. In another effort to improve his financial picture Mike went right to the Well – he made a pitch in front of a meeting of The Flat Earth Society. I didn’t know they had meetings. That got him set up with a “GoFundMe” account that reaped another $8000!

The most widely held Flat Earth theory extant has the world as a flat disk, much like a tortilla. There is the land, surrounded by the oceans, and at the outer edge, a rim of ice that keeps the water from… from… from going somewhere else.

I can’t see any way that this project is going to do more than blow both steam and Mike – up. At least Mike has a truly adventuresome outlook about it all.

“It’s scary as hell. But none of us are getting out of this world alive.”

Mike’s set to blast off tomorrow. We wish him a Bon Voyage and a soft landing.

 

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