Oklahoma City was home, but Hughes and his family spent so much time traveling from state to state, speedway to speedway, that life began to feel like a long racing circuit of its own. Born to a race-car hobbyist in 1956, Hughes spent much of his youth traveling the county-fair circuit, where his father competed in dirt-track races. Hughes had an advantage that most other would-be zetetic Flat Earthers lacked: he knew how to build a rocket and had no fear of dangerous stunts. 22, 2020, in a gray stretch of desert, Hughes joined the growing ranks of conspiracy-theory casualties, and I’ve had to live with that scrapped chapter title on my conscience ever since. I began to suspect he was searching for excuses, avoiding a dangerous stunt that would force him to confront the curved horizon. For the past year, he’d notified me of various complications: parachute malfunctions and unforeseen weather that delayed his project. Besides, I doubted he’d really attempt the launch. Hughes was 64 at the time and didn’t need my advice, I reasoned. I titled the chapter “Someone Is Going to Die for No Reason.” Then I dropped the matter and never raised it to him again. I thought it was such a terrible idea that I wrote a chapter about Hughes and the cadre of conspiracy theorists attempting dangerous stunts to prove their beliefs. I suggested, much too gently, that it was a terrible idea.
“This space launch is to prove or disprove the Flat Earth,” he told me in spring 2019. He was going to build a rocket ship, blast into Earth’s upper reaches, and see for his own eyes whether the horizon was flat or curved. He had earned his fame by taking the theory to its logical conclusion. Until that moment, Hughes had been one of the most famous living Flat Earthers. Hughes’s rocket crashed into the dust with absolute finality. But the parachutes that had bloomed above Mike Hughes on his previous death-defying rocket launches were nowhere to be seen. “Come on, parachute,” one watcher murmured anxiously. To onlookers on the ground, the ship and the man inside it were a blur of black. For a moment, the rocket seemed to hover, oblivious to gravity. A jagged trail of steam traced the ship’s path across the sky, up thousands of feet above the California desert. The rocket took off like a punctured balloon, wobbly and erratic.
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