Original article (in Serbian) was published on 11/08/2020
After the pop artist Andreana Cekić stated on the Ami G show last week that the planet Earth is a flat plate and that gravity has not been proven, a series of negative comments followed, both in the media and on social networks. To justify her claims, the singer updated the three-year-old text of the website Sputnjik on her Twitter, stating that Nikola Tesla believed that the Earth was not a planet and that the stars were attached to the sky.
Readers of FN Tragac asked the editorial office to check the claims made by Andrea Cekić, that is, the text of the website Sputnjik. Readers’ demand turned out to be justified because, in the text, Sputnjik attributed the words of the lesser-known American YouTuber Darrell Fox, who is the man behind a YouTube channel called Electric Flat Earth Hypothesis, and who believes that the Earth is a flat plate.
How did the controversial quote originate
The author of the first three paragraphs of Sputnjik’s text is not Nikola Tesla but the previously mentioned YouTuber Darrell Fox. Fox’s words were published right before an authentic Tesla quote in a Facebook post from 2016. After that, this spread among the flat-Earthers as an authentic quote from Tesla.
Tesla’s original quote, which was added to the quote from the flat-Earther YouTuber Darrell Fox, read the following: “Although we are free to think and act, we stick together in inseparable ties like stars in the sky” and Tesla wrote it in the article titled “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” for Century magazine in 1900. However, after some time, this original part of the quote was changed and in some posts of flat-Earthers, it was simplified to the sentence “the stars are attached to the sky”, so it reached the Sputnjik portal in that form.
In the comments of the Facebook post from which it all started, the American flat-Earth theorist Darrell Fox mentioned that the first sentences of the post were actually his thought, but that did not stop the spread of this false quote that served many theorists of the flat-Earth movement to link one of humanity’s greatest scientists with their own understandings.
Tesla did not believe that the Earth was a flat plate
Sputnjik attributed this inauthentic quote to Tesla’s dynamic theory of gravity, although it is unfinished and the subject of many speculations. The former long-term director of the Nikola Tesla Museum, Dr. Branimir Jovanovic, who dedicated a large part of his academic work to Nikola Tesla, says to Tragac that the allegations from Sputnik’s text are speculative and completely incorrect.
“Tesla did announce that he was working on a dynamic theory of gravity, but he never published details, so any further story about that would be speculation and deception of the audience that wants sensation”, says Dr. Jovanovic.
Tesla’s authorial articles in which he often described the planet Earth with the English word globe, which according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary of English has the meaning of a spherical or rounded object, proves that his work and theories that speak of the planet Earth as a flat plate do not have much in common. In the same article in which Tesla’s later forged quote with the stars and the sky appears, this scientist used the word globe 12 times to describe the planet Earth.
Occult physics and flying saucers
The second part of the controversial text of the website Sputnjik relies on a book by a certain William R. Line “Occult Ether Physics”, and besides this book, the same author wrote works titled “Pentagon Aliens” and “Space Aliens from the Pentagon: Flying Saucers Are Man-Made Electrical Machines”. The works of this author mostly deal with the assumption that the American government confiscated Nikola Tesla’s writings on the dynamic theory of gravity before his death, in order to create flying saucers which they would later present as an alien creation.
According to the database of peer-reviewed scientific papers for citation Scopus, William R. Lane is an author who has never been cited. Three citations of this author appear on the site, which combines a large number of scientific papers and Google Scholar publications, although two of these are auto citations, and only one of Lin’s works is available – “Teslas dynamic theory of gravity” published by the author’s publishing house Creatopia Publications. William R. Line has no original scientific work, but that did not stop the website Sputnjik from choosing his book as a credible text for the interpretation of Tesla’s work.