Flat Earth
The Flat Earth conspiracy theory is fundamentally a simple idea: the Earth is flat, and this fact has been covered up by a powerful elite who are pretending that it is a globe. There are some variants, but the most common theory is that the Earth is a flat disk with the North Pole in the center. Instead of Antarctica being a large continent at the South Pole, it is proposed to be an “ice wall” that encircles the edge of the disk.
This theory is firmly at the extreme end of the conspiracy spectrum. It’s an extreme conspiracy theory because the belief requires that you accept that the entire space program is a fake, designed to cover up hundreds of years of an even deeper scientific conspiracy to hoodwink people into thinking the Earth is round. You must also accept that GPS does not work by satellites but from radio towers, flights between Australia and South America are fake, the Sun sets via a bizarre interpretation of “perspective,” astronauts are all liars, and every image of the Earth from space is doctored.
To the person first looking into this theory it can be difficult to believe that the proponents actually take themselves seriously. Many of them do not. Many Flat Earth popularizers are simply doing it for fun, or to make a philosophical point about people’s over-reliance on the authority of science. But there are also people who do take it very seriously. Many do so for religious reasons, feeling that a literal reading of the Bible (or sometimes the Koran, or other religious texts) indicates the Earth is flat. Increasingly though there are people, usually young or otherwise easily convinced, who believe that the Earth is flat because they have seen what they think is compelling evidence in YouTube videos.
The religious Flat Earth beliefs are largely faith-based, and so not susceptible to reason. If your friend believes that the Earth is flat only because he thinks the Bible tells him so, then unfortunately you are unlikely to make much progress. But even the more religious Flat Earthers attempt to provide scientific proofs of their theory. Some very religious people even claim not to be religiously motivated in this topic, and to be approaching it from a purely scientific viewpoint. You can usually make some progress by looking at the science.
While the number of true believers in this theory is quite small, it’s still well worth looking into. People who are interested in less extreme theories (like 9/11 controlled demolition) will be upset that I included it in the book. My intent is not to equate the two in terms of being equally extreme, because they generally are not. But the way you’d approach debunking Flat Earth is similar to the way you’d approach debunking other false theories. I would hope that if there are 9/11 Truthers or Chemtrail believers reading this to help debunk a friend’s Flat Earth theory, then they might at least consider for a moment that similar scrutiny be given to some of the claims that are just on their side of the line.
To understand a conspiracy theory, it’s very useful to understand its history. To that end I highly recommend the book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, by Christine Garwood.
The book first details the history of ideas about the shape of the Earth, going back to ancient times. But the focus is on the Flat Earth movement that sprang up in the late 1800s, a surprisingly similar movement to our current YouTube-driven one. An integral part of the story is the role of skeptics and debunkers who attempted to address the issues back then. There were many points in the book at which I literally laughed out loud with recognition. Not only at situations repeated recently in Flat Earth debunking, but more generally at how the events surrounding the Flat Earth debate mirrored the debates over more modern conspiracy theories like “Chemtrails.”
The book opens with a prologue: “The Columbus Blunder,” describing the origin of the misconception that Columbus proved the Earth was round. Even in 1492 the rotundity of the Earth had been known for thousands of years, and very few educated people doubted it. The modern misconception came about from a colorful account of Columbus’ life written in 1828 by Washington Irving (author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow).
The story of Columbus creates the backdrop for the first chapter: “Surveying the Earth,” where Garwood details the evolution of ideas about the shape of the Earth. The shift in thinking from flat to round is identified as being about 2,500 years ago, in the time of Pythagoras, then Plato and Aristotle. A key thing to explain to your friend is that the shape of the Earth was discovered (and proven) thousands of years ago.
Subsequent chapters are character portraits, mini-biographies of the key figures in the Flat Earth movements. Garwood details the efforts of professed believers—some genuine, some joking, some possibly charlatans. Interwoven are the stories of those opposed to the spread of the false idea, the incredulous and amused public, the debunkers, the people trying to explain things to their friends, back in the 1880s.
The real story begins with Samuel Rowbotham, the socialist manager of a commune in Cambridgeshire, England. Seemingly always an independent and contrary thinker, Rowbotham took advantage of the length and straightness of a local canal to try to determine the curvature of the Earth. By his own account he was unable to detect any, and he quickly became convinced the Earth was actually flat. Simultaneously with this discovery he became convinced that this was also exactly what the Bible described.
Rowbotham discovered he had a talent for persuading people. He began to make a living by selling pamphlets and books with his ideas about the Flat Earth, and by performing lectures which people would pay to attend. He developed the idea of “zetetic” thinking, a concept that is key to understanding the mindset of the Flat Earth believer, both old and new. Pure zeteticism is essentially a form a scientific skepticism where ideas are believed only if you can personally verify them. It is perhaps the ultimate form of “do your own research,” where not only do you have to research the evidence for an idea, but you also have to research the very foundation of science itself.
Very little has changed in the Flat Earth arena since the time of Rowbotham. His most popular book, Zetetic Astronomy, contains many of the exact same claims of evidence and “proofs” of Flat Earth that are seen today in other Flat Earth books published by supposedly more modern proponents like Eric Dubay. The lectures carried out in church halls are the direct equivalent of YouTube videos about Flat Earth that are still being produced at this very moment.
Even in 1864, an analog version of the internet existed with ink and paper. Communication was much slower. Email was real mail, and discussion forums and comments sections were the letter pages of newspapers. The exploits of “Parallax” (as Rowbotham was known) were often covered by local newspapers, and the letters that followed a Parallax lecture bear a striking similarity to comment threads that might follow a Dubay video. Garwood describes these letters:
In 1864 the paper’s correspondence pages were crammed with letters from irate citizens of Plymouth, many of whom were disgusted by zetetic exploits in their town. Among those most appalled were amateur astronomers and local seamen, who wrote in droves complaining about Parallax’s “foolish assertions” and his attempts to mislead the public about the most fundamental scientific facts. Keen to make amends, they offered a series of proofs for rotundity, from circumnavigation to the curved shadow of the earth during an eclipse of the moon. One sailor, from a naval and nautical school, even felt it necessary to add that during twenty years of voyaging he had never seen the ice barrier that was supposed to surround the disc-shaped earth, and Parallax’s claims to have observed boats at great distances on rivers and seas were impossible unless his eye had been elevated far above water level. Amateur astronomer James Willis agreed, declaring that as Parallax had posted himself as a teacher, he should be willing to replicate his experiments openly for all to see. This drew a response from Parallax who declared, on 6 October, that he was ready, willing and able to, “do battle, inch by inch” with his Newtonian opponents “and upon their own ground.”
Rowbotham continued in this vein for a number of years, others came after him doing the same thing. The reactions were the same—incredulity and derision from the popular press, but inevitably enough people thought he had a point (or they were just entertained enough) that a movement was formed.
Garwood describes a variety of nineteenth and twentieth century followers. There’s John Hampton, who infamously refused to accept the result of a wager made with famous scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, and harassed him for years in an 1880s form of cyberstalking conduced largely via letters. Then there’s Lady Blount, an energetic lady of leisure who took up the mantel of “Parallax” (d. 1894) by forming the “Universal Zetetic Society” in 1893. The book ends with Charles Kenneth Johnson—the founder of the International Flat Earth Research Society of America. Significantly hampered by the space program, with photos of the Earth from space and live TV shots from the Moon, as well as other problems caused by international air travel, and a general public understanding of time zones, the Flat Earth movement had necessarily moved to an even deeper rejection of reality, now claiming that the entire space program was fake.
“It’s nothing more than a piece of clever stage-managed science-fiction trickery.” NASA and world leaders knew that the earth was flat, but they had launched the $24-billion-dollar space hoax as a “scientific plot to hoodwink the public.” From Johnson’s perspective, there was no alternative explanation: it was impossible to orbit a Flat Earth, rockets could not penetrate the firmament of heaven, and such feats were unnecessary because information about the universe and its creation was laid out in the Book of Genesis.1
Garwood’s history goes up to 2001, with the death of Johnson presented as the tail end of the decline of the Flat Earth movement, finally fading away under the weight of science and reality. But Johnson died four years before the advent of the greatest vehicle for spreading Flat Earth and other nonsense theories in history: YouTube.
Modern Flat Earth
While YouTube began in 2005, it did not immediately become an amplifier for the Flat Earth belief. If you look at the Google Trends line going back to 2004, interest in the Flat Earth idea was in a slow decline, halving in popularity from 2004 to 2014.
After the death of Johnson, Flat Earth existed on the internet at a slow burn. His organization found new life in the form of The Flat Earth Society, run by Daniel Shenton. There was a website and a reasonably popular forum,2 but it remained largely unknown to the general public. When people stumbled across it they generally assumed it was just a big joke.
Then in 2015, its popularity began to rise. It’s not clear exactly why, but there seemed to be a critical mass of YouTube videos. Several people were making reasonably high-quality videos repeating the exact same claims made in the 1800s. Now perhaps there was enough of them, allowing people to get sucked into this particular rabbit hole more easily.
The growth in Flat Earth interest has been meteoric over the last three years, eclipsing “Chemtrails” in popularity. Much of this is obviously a fad on the part of non-believers—just fascination with the “crazy Flat Earthers.” But there are also many people who seem genuinely convinced that the Earth is actually flat and most of them got sucked in via YouTube.
It really hit the mainstream in January of 2016. Like any sufficiently interesting rabbit hole it had attracted its share of celebrities, like rapper B.o.B and reality TV star Tila Tequila, who both spoke out about their suspicions about the shape of the Earth. This was picked up by the entertainment media, and this then prompted responses from Neil deGrasse Tyson and others who explained that the Earth was in fact round. These celebrity rebuttals simply increased interest in the topics, and now here we are.
The Flat Earth community exists largely on YouTube and there’s several YouTube personalities who make it their focus. It’s not always clear if they actually believe their theories, but they certainly spend a lot of time promoting them. Here’s the top five ranked by subscribers (as of March 2018):
128K Rob Skiba
94K Jeranism
66K Celebrate Truth
52K Mark Sargent
42K Mr Thrive and Survive
These numbers are really not very large in terms of actual YouTube celebrities who count their subscribers in the millions, but they are on the same level as the main Chemtrail channels like Geoengineering Watch’s Dane Wigington (64K subscribers) or the biggest 9/11 conspiracy channel, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (43K subscribers). The Flat Earthers have the others beat on views though, Rob Skiba has 16 million views since 2013, Jeranism also has 15 million since 2015, but AE911Truth only comes in at 7 million since 2008. Dane Wigington does better at 7.5 million since 2014.
These numbers are important because they help bring perspective to people down the rabbit hole. Your friend might think that the Flat Earth conspiracy theory is very important, probably the biggest issue of the day, something that lots of people are interested in.
But it’s not. There’s literally tens of thousands of YouTube channels that get more views and more subscribers. There’s channels that are devoted to odd things like dropping a red hot ball onto different things (carsandwater 835K subs) or crushing things with a hydraulic press (Hydraulic Press Channel 1.8 Million subs) or playing with magnets (Magnetic Games 288K subs). One single video of a red hot ball dropped onto floral foam has had more views than Skiba’s entire channel over its entire lifetime.
The modern Flat Earth movement’s videos generally comprise of two things, either a long list of “proofs” that the Earth is flat, or a more detailed discussion of one individual claim. From a debunker’s perspective it’s very tempting to leap right in and start explaining whatever you first happen to come across. Flat Earth debunking is a rabbit hole in itself. There’s hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of “proof” that supposedly show the Earth is flat. They are all based on fairly simple misunderstandings of geometry and optics, so are relatively straightforward to refute by correcting the mistakes. It’s also fun, in a nerdy kind of way. The geometry and optics are relatively simple, and there are interesting problems to work through like “how far away is the horizon …?” The problem is that most people don’t understand geometry and optics, and even if you can explain one item to them, there’s still hundreds more.