“Those are my money minds,” he says, of students gawking, pointing, and some (yes, some) thinking. He defended himself unsuccessfully, paid a fine, and redecorated.īefore parking, Burke likes to drive by high schools, rolling past with his oracle.
His house is correspondingly adorned-the siding, glass, and lawn peppered with signs like “NASA = $54 Million Per Day Joke” or “Water’s Surface Does Not Curve!” Burke has been forced into court over property code violations. He has to trudge back to his rolling conspiracy theory billboard in the morning. All available surfaces are decorated with stickers that read something like, “Scientifically, the Earth is Flat.”Įvery day, Burke drives this barely legal heap around Denton, parks his car for extended visibility, and walks up to two miles home. The car’s innards are exposed where bumpers should be pink leis hang from side mirrors. An American flag whips from the hatchback. Burke wheels around a silver Scion wrinkled up like a discarded bag of potato chips. Dentonites may not know Burke’s name, but they know his car. When he began proselytizing a few years ago, Burke became one of the most notorious citizens in Denton, a college outpost roosting above Dallas/Fort Worth. At some point, the world meets sky, earth bleeds into atmosphere, and God lives at that nexus of matter waiting for us. The land reaches out, sprawling with undiscovered countries and unimaginable lifeforms. Earth does not spin like a Dervish rather, its plane reclines and stretches beyond the thousand-mile-thick ice wall encasing us.
Hiroshima was dynamited, the Titanic sunk for insurance, and New Orleans flooded by government agents.Įarth-our sapphire speck, our pale-blue lifeboat in an ocean of dark-does not, after all, perch on a Milky Way tentacle.
The Hubble Space Telescope never existed, nor did dinosaurs. In the cosmology of Patrick Burke, a flat-Earth believer, humans can spoon-eat uranium flakes like Cheerios. “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.” -Isaiah 40:22
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