Hughes said he was postponing the flight, scheduled for Saturday, after he failed to get permission from the Bureau of Land Management to conduct it on public land.
The ultimate goal the 61-year-old limousine driver has set himself is to fly in a balloon miles above Earth to take photographs which he hopes will prove that the planet we live on is actually a disk.
“It’ll shut the door on this ball Earth,” Hughes said in a flight fundraising interview with members of the flat-Earth community during which he claimed that NASA is controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and that Elon Musk is building fake rockets from blimps.
He promised to expose this conspiracy with the help of his steam-powered rocket that he plans to launch from the back of a converted mobile home.
However, Mike Hughes won’t be able to prove his bizarre theory unless he actually flies at 500 mph above Mojave Desert in a homemade scrap-metal rocket he spent $20,000 to build in his spare time, the newspaper wrote.
He has promised his supporters that if everything goes well, he will float in a balloon miles above the ground before rocket-packing himself into space as part of the second phase of his “Earth is a disk” program.
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Not entirely a rookie in rocket technology, Hughes, who only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, built his first manned rocket in 2014, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Arizona before suffering a crash, which put him in a walker for weeks.
The Flat Earth theory has been increasingly popular in recent years fueled by online message boards and high-profile endorsements from celebrities.
Founded in 1956, the Flat Earth Society now boasts over 500 members.
