Looking down a two-lane highway in the middle of a barren desert brings about an immense feeling of flatness. Heat rises from the asphalt in mirage waves imitating the possibility of water and the only movement becomes aimless tumbleweeds. Here, the earth feels flat with slim chance of a curvature for hundreds of miles – or, as some believe, the earth feels flat because it is flat.
Modern day flat-earthers believe with conviction that our planet Earth has always and will always be flat. The planet lies flat like a disc with Antarctica being a giant ice-wall that prohibits us from falling off any edge. Any photographs from NASA exhibiting a spherical earth are fabricated. The sun, moon, and stars all exist above the earth’s atmosphere. All evidence that flat earthers need to reassure themselves can be found on the Flat Earth Wiki (FEW), created by members of the official Flat Earth Society.
“The Flat Earth Society has dedicated itself to starting science afresh from the ground up, to begin to see the world without bias and assumption,” states the Flat Earth Wiki’s homepage. “Experiment and experience has shown that the earth is decidedly flat. Time and time again through test, trial, and experiment, it has been shown that the earth is not a whirling globe of popular credulity, but an extended plane of times immaterial.”
Such experiment and experience that flat earthers claim to be evidence includes the inability to see a curve of the earth on a horizon – even on airplanes, water surfaces always appear to be level, and there’s no video proof from space of the earth rotating. In their eyes, there’s more evidence proving the earth is flat than there is proving a sphere.
When it comes to how everything would work on a flat world, the Flat Earth Society provides simple answers to everything, as if it is common sense whereas any explanations pointing toward a sphere are the crazy ones. Here are a few examples from their FAQ page:
“What about Astronauts? Most Flat Earthers think Astronauts have been bribed or coerced into their testimonies. Some believe they have been fooled or mistaken.”
“What is Gravity? Gravity as a theory is false. Objects simply fall.”
“What does the map of the Earth look like then? As evidence by the logo of the United Nations the Earth is a round disk of indefinite dimensions. The geographic North Pole is located in the center of the disk, and the Antarctic lies around the outer edges.”
“What about Day/Night and Sunrise/Sunset? The sun simply illuminates only a portion of the earth at a time. This also explains timezones as we can then see a path of the sun, a circle above a flat earth.”
Last but not least, “Are you serious? Yes.”
And they are indeed, very serious. Founded in eighteen eighty-four, the Flat Earth Society has garnered a whopping one hundred sixty-two thousand, four hundred and eighty followers on Facebook. The Facebook page has become a hub for flat earthers to connect with each other, share conspiracies, and largely get into heated internet arguments with round earthers who still live in a so-called ignorance to the truth.
“Freedom of speech and freedom of imagination!” comments Ferno Madmud under a post about how more Americans are believing the Earth is flat. “However, it just doesn’t make sense to live on a ball! There’s no logic to it!” His one comment received one hundred and thirty-two replies. Here are just a few:
The weather patterns on our planet wouldn’t be possible on a flat earth…Where the fuck do you think wind comes from??? The giant turtle we’re floating on??? Go get an education. -Nicholas Hinckley
Wow, special kind of dumb right here. -Anthony Anderson
Flat earthers have flat brains. -Leo Cal
But flat earthers pay no mind to what their doubters may say – they defend their stance with their evidence and strong confidence. And the post Ferno posted his comment on holds truth, more Americans are starting to hop on board the flat earth theory train. A report released by the Economist in November of two thousand and seventeen found that Google searches for “flat earth” have more than tripled since two thousand and fifteen – just two years.
Along with this surge in interest, a number of celebrities have come forward to say they themselves are flat earthers, including NBA player Kyrie Irving and rapper B.o.B.
But one flat earther in particular stands out among the rest. Limousine driver and daredevil, “Mad” Mike Hughes is a self-taught rocket scientist who has made two trips into the sky in his own homemade rocket ships with the goal of proving that the earth is flat.
This past March, “Mad” Mike blasted off from the Mojave Desert and shot one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five feet toward space inside his own rocket with “FLAT EARTH” painted on the side. This was short of the fifty-two miles high he hopes to reach by the end of the year, which to him will prove the earth’s certain flatness. He landed with two parachutes, unharmed but expecting to not feel his best in the days to come, according to the Associated Press.
“Am I glad I did it? Yeah. I guess,” the daredevil Californian told the Associated Press after his landing. “I’ll feel it in the morning. I won’t be able to get out of bed. At least I can go home and have dinner and see my cats tonight.”
After proving the flat earth theory through the use of one of his homemade rockets, he plans to run for Governor of California. The Flat Earth Society, of course proud of such a dedicated flat earther, posted to their Facebook page that they, “can’t wait to hear more about his flight!”
Until the day comes when Mike officially names the earth flat from fifty-two miles in the air, flat earthers are kept busy through online forums, local meet-ups, and even Flat Earth Conventions. The first official convention was held back in November in Raleigh, North Carolina where tickets sold for as high as two hundred and fifty dollars. The second one will be held in Denver, Colorado this coming November. Flat earthers can also set sail themselves all together on a Flat Earth Cruise, scheduled to depart in September of two thousand nineteen. Day by day, the flat earthers are creating a stronger community.
Isabella Sheen, a twenty-year-old student at San Francisco State University sits with her friend, Max Ferryera, also a SF State University student, and scrolls through her laptop sitting in front of her. Her fingers navigate through conspiracy YouTube videos, the Flat Earth Society Facebook page, and the tagged #flatearth on Twitter.
“I think I first heard of flat earthers on Twitter, probably as a joke,” the brunette begins with a laugh as she explains how she came to be a flat earther. “But then, I don’t know, the more I read and watched about it the more it made sense to me. I became obsessed a little…”
“Oh not a little,” interjects Max, rolling his eyes. “She wouldn’t shut up about it. She’d tell it to people in class, at parties, at parties! Like people are just enjoying themselves getting stupid drunk and then in comes Isabella trying to get everyone to believe the earth is flat. Buzzkill.”
Isabella has been trying to convince Max of the theory ever since she became convinced herself, but he’s never had the patience to hear her out. Today, he’s finally agreed to fifteen minutes of convincing. Isabella settles on a YouTube video titled “The Flat Earth Theory Explained” by the channel BuzzfeedBlue. The video has seven hundred fifty-three thousand two hundred and sixty-six views and counting.
The man behind the camera explains that the flat earth theory began with a man named Samuel Rowbotham who was an English inventor of the nineteenth century and wrote “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe” (a flat earther bible). Rowbotham conducted the Bedford Level Experiment where he stood at the end of a river with a telescope and had his friend ride a boat down a few miles.
“So this is what he was suggesting,” the video explains. “Because of the curve of the globe, he shouldn’t be able to see his friend after about six miles. The top of his sail should have been about eleven miles under his view but instead, he saw his friend go like, more than six miles…That led him to thinking earth is not a globe.”
Max still doesn’t buy it.
“I just…the logic isn’t there,” he tells Isabella, who is already trying to find another video to make him watch. “Why the hell would we lie about the shape of the earth? Like what is the benefit of that? Haven’t you seen the hundreds of photos of earth from space?”
“Well, yeah, I have, of course I have. But those could be fake because we didn’t land on the moon so-”
“Wait, wait, wait, okay no that’s enough, that’s too far. I can’t listen to this anymore,” Max interrupts before Isabella can delve into her belief that NASA in fact, did not make one giant leap for mankind on the moon in nineteen sixty-nine. This is also a conspiracy that many flat earthers share. Max shuts Isabella’s laptop.
As explained on the Flat Earth Society website, we didn’t actually land on the moon, that was just propaganda due to the Cold War and Space Race with the Soviet Union. The idea that the earth was a sphere had to have been continued if people were to still believe Neil Armstrong jumped on the surface of the moon.
“They lie because they have to or else they’ll look like fools! Which just makes them look like even bigger fools!” Isabella berates to Max as he continuously shakes his head, waving his arms as is he’s shooing away what she’s telling him. “When Christopher Columbus discovered the earth was round he actually just crossed a flat ocean to reach another flat continent!”
However, here’s where both flat and round earthers alike are wrong. Columbus never set out to prove the earth was a sphere. In fact, at the time of his journey west, most of the world already knew about the globe’s shape.
It is a common misconception that Columbus was the one who set sail with a compass pinned west in hopes of determining the planet’s shape, but according to Lesley B. Cormack in his journal article, “Flat Earth or round sphere: misconceptions of the shape of the Earth and the fifteenth-century transformation of the world”, a spherical model of our planet dates as far back to the fifth century BC.
“Every major Greek thinker, including Aristotle (384-322 BC), Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), and Ptolemy (AD 127-160), based their geographical and astronomical work on the theory that the Earth was a sphere,” Cormack states, debunking misconceptions that the world was believed flat before the Renaissance period. Even later on, closer to the Renaissance, Cormack claims that, “from the seventh to the fourteenth century, every important Medieval thinker concerned about the natural world stated more or less explicitly that the world was a round globe.”
The truth of the matter is, Columbus said nothing of the shape of the earth in his proposal to sail west. He was more concerned with the size of such sphere, according to Cormack.
Columbus proposed that, “the distance from Spain to China was not prohibitively great,” so it would be quicker to sail westward than south around Africa. Columbus’ own diary speaks nothing of possibly finding the edge of the world, nor did his published work, “Letter” mention anything about the shape of the planet.
Instead, he discovered the “New World” – and began a mass gentrification to all those who inhabited it, but more on that a different day. And thus, somehow, hundreds of years later he is still accredited for curving the sphere of the earth himself, taking any edge and pushing them together to show the world itself what it was, as though it and everyone inhabiting it didn’t already know.
This miscredidation is likely due to an over-idealization of the man Columbus was, misinterpretation of Medieval maps, and Catholicism agenda, says Cormack. He explains that the nineteenth-century writer, “[Washington] Irving began the legend (based on no contemporary evidence) that the council at Salamanca [the council that approved of Columbus’ voyage] rejected the Earth’s sphericity.” History was then, deliberately and literally, rewritten.
And so if flat earthers have been proven wrong long before Columbus came around, why is it they still insist today, in two thousand and eighteen, that the earth indeed does have an edge?
Despite any amount of time scholars have believed the earth a sphere or any plethora of evidence, flat earthers continue steadfast in the stubbornness to persuade the universe itself of it’s own shape.
“The soldiers of truth and reason of the Flat Earth Society have drawn the sword,” preaches the FEW. “And ere another generation has been educated and grown to maturity, will have forced the usurpers to abdicate.”
But it does not hurt to wonder whether or not there is harm in letting these free thinkers think. How does it impact a man’s life to let the person sitting next to him continue to believe the earth sits flat without argument? Is this where freedom of thought is actually harmful to the human race?
“But this whole thing, it’s just a symptom of a larger problem,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks on The Nightly Show about flat earth theories. “There’s a growing anti-intellectual strain in this country that may be the beginning of the end of our informed democracy.”
DeGrasse Tyson acknowledges that everyone has the right to think what they may think, but when someone’s thoughts begin to have substantial influence over other people, then it can become harmful to, “the security of our citizenry,” as we know it. The astrophysicist says it best in his famous quote he posted on Twitter back in two thousand and thirteen; “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
And yet, amidst any conspiracy or proof, the sun continues to rise in the east and set in the west each day as the world keeps turning whichever which way.