This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Before Bobby Henderson became the reluctant head of a movement with adherents in dozens of countries, he was an Oregon State University physics graduate in his mid twenties, born in 1980 in Roseburg, Oregon. That physics training sits behind the argument his open letter actually made in January 2005, an argument article one summarizes only by its outcome rather than its content.
Henderson wrote directly to the Kansas State Board of Education after it voted to allow intelligent design to be taught alongside evolution in public science classes. His letter's claim was not simply satirical noise: if intelligent design merited classroom time as a scientific alternative to evolution, he argued, so did his own competing account that an invisible, undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe, and that every geological and biological finding otherwise read as evidence for evolution could equally be explained as His Noodly Appendage manipulating the data to disguise the world's true age.
The board never replied. Henderson published the letter on his own website in May 2005, months after sending it, and it spread from there entirely on its own, with no publicity effort attributed to him beyond making the text public. That gap between a private letter to a state board and a worldwide movement began with nothing more than a physics graduate posting his own unanswered mail online.