The Anomalous Archive

Key Facts

• Location: Naples and Estero, Florida, United States.
• Principal experiment: the Koreshan geodetic survey, 1897.
• Principal figures: Cyrus Reed Teed, known as Koresh, and Ulysses G. Morrow.
• The proposition: humanity inhabits the inside of a sphere containing the heavens.
• Principal document: The Cellular Cosmogony; this investigation uses the supplied 1905 edition.

On the beach at Naples, a line of timber stood between the land and the Gulf of Mexico. Its cross-arms, brass faces and tension rods belonged to an instrument with an imposing name: the Rectilineator.

During the spring of 1897, a surveying party moved its sections along the shore. Each new placement was meant to continue a perfectly straight line. Against that line they measured the water, looking for the curve that would decide which way the world was built.

The men behind the experiment believed the maps had been facing the wrong way. The Earth enclosed the heavens. People walked on its inner surface, with the Sun and stars contained in the space above their heads.

For their founder, Cyrus Reed Teed, this was part of a revelation that reached into almost every corner of life. Astronomy, the nature of God, relations between men and women, the organisation of society and the prospect of escaping death belonged to one system. Establish its foundation, and the rest might follow.

The expedition would announce success. Its photographs, diagrams and published measurements survived. They leave an intriguing question: how did a carefully described experiment appear to confirm a world that its participants had already been promised?