Who is he? The unlikeliest of pop-culture icons is Flat Stanley, a paper cutout inspired by a 1964 children’s book of the same name about a boy squished flat by a falling bulletin board who makes the most of his potentially distressing situation by folding himself up inside in an envelope and mailing himself to far-away friends.

In recent years, a swarm of homemade mailborne Flat Stanleys have been going places in imitation of the hero of Jeff Brown’s book. Since 1995, when Dale Hubert, a grade-school teacher in London, Ontario, launched the Flat Stanley Project, Flat Stanley has been showing up in the oddest places, from network TV to Tibet to low-earth orbit. Hubert’s idea was for his third graders to create their own Flat Stanleys out of paper and send them off to other schools for a few weeks as an “exchange student.” Flat Stanley would arrive with a journal in which his hosts could record all of his adventures and activities. The goal was to inspire kids to read and write letters and e-mails to other kids. Hubert says his students found it far more stimulating than the rote pen-pal routine of “How are you? I am fine.” Since then, other teachers have come up with ways to incorporate Flat Stanley into lessons on English, math and social studies.

It being the ’90s, Hubert also created a Flat Stanley Project Web site (http://www.flatstanley.com) run by the Education Network of Ontario that gained a following among other teachers and students, which in turn generated even more Flat Stanley exchanges. By September, Hubert says, 2,000 classrooms around the world will be registered with the program. And Hubert isn’t stopping there: his future plans include getting sick kids involved in hospital-to-hospital Flat Stanley exchanges.