The Invisible College of Experimental Flatology was founded in 2020, back before everything turned out OK, at a time when the forces of buffoonery and biology threatened to unravel the fabric of human civilization. The history of this period hardly needs rehashing. Suffice it to say that people were looking for a distraction.
The founding members of the College were a small community of scholars who held regular meetings to discuss shared scientific interests. A belief common to all members was that empirical observation was the driver of scientific progress, but the reason for the focus on flatology is unclear. Careful analysis of the audio recordings suggests that members of the College might have found the topic amusing, consistent with the hypothesis that the entire project was a distraction during an otherwise bleak period in human history. However, it is equally clear from their writings that members of the College invested considerable effort in the subsequent data analyses, flawed as they obviously were. Whether the project ultimately improved our understanding of human biology or simply added to the total of human buffoonery remains to be seen.