Flat Earth / Spherical Earth in mainstream media

In the year 1543, the Pope teamed up with Copernicus, the Church of England, and possibly Aristotle (who, inconveniently, had died in 322 B.C.) to convince unsuspecting Europeans that, despite the Earth’s obvious flatness, it’s actually a sphere, and that the sun is the center of the universe. In the years since, the usual bad guys—Catholics, Jews, and bankers—have jealously guarded the secret of the flat Earth. And with the birth of the space age, NASA (basically a joint project between the Freemasons and the Nazis) got involved. That, at least, is the story according to the Flat Earth Truthers, a small but vocal group who believe that the world is flat, and that this knowledge is the key to understanding who really runs the world...

My book, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, is out now! You can buy it now from all the usual places, in hardback and for Kindle and other e-readers. (Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk / Barnes & Noble / Waterstones)

Suspicious Minds cover

Here’s what the book is all about…


Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. The plots of countless Hollywood blockbusters, bestselling books, and beloved TV shows revolve around conspiratorial shenanigans, and surprising numbers of people believe that the kinds of vast, insidious conspiracies that Mulder and Scully routinely unearthed on The X-Files are happening right now in the real world. Yet conspiracy theories are not a recent invention, and they are not always a harmless curiosity.

In SUSPICIOUS MINDS: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (Bloomsbury / November 17, 2015 / $27, hardcover), Rob Brotherton, a research psychologist and leading expert on the psychology of conspiracy theory, explores the history and consequences of conspiracism, and offers insights into why so many of us are drawn to implausible, unproven and unprovable conspiracy theories. They resonate with some of our brain’s built-in quirks and foibles, and tap into some of our deepest desires, fears, and assumptions about the world. But conspiracy theories are not unique in eliciting our brain’s biases. From our love of heroic underdogs to our tendency to see hidden hands behind ambiguous events, the same mental quirks that make conspiracy theories appealing are constantly shaping how we think about the world. Most of the time our biases simply slip by unnoticed.

The fascinating psychology of conspiracy theories tells us a lot about how our minds are wired and, indeed, why we believe anything at all. Conspiracy theories are not some psychological aberration—they’re a predictable product of how brains work. And, of course, just because your brain’s biased doesn’t always mean you’re wrong. Sometimes conspiracies are real. Sometimes, paranoia is prudent.

Conspiracy theorists aren’t just a few kooks lurking on the paranoid fringes of society with bizarre ideas about shape-shifting reptiles secretly running society. According to Brotherton, we’re all conspiracy theorists—some of us just hide it better than others.

Flat-Earthers are back: 'It’s almost like the beginning of a new religion'

YouTube videos and spiffy websites espouse the conspiracy theory – but is the movement doomed to once again fall flat over countless schisms?

YouTube user TigerDan925 shocked his 26,000 followers recently by conceding a shocking point: Antarctica is a continent. It’s not, as he previously thought, an ice wall that encircles the flat disc of land and water we call earth.

For most of us, that’s not news. But TigerDan925’s followers, like Galileo’s 17th century critics, are outraged by his heresy. Welcome to the contentious universe of flat-Earthers – people who believe the notion of a globe-shaped world orbiting the sun is a myth.

Through popular YouTube videos and spiffy sites, they show how easy it is to get attention by questioning scientific consensus. Unfortunately, we don’t really know how many people believe in the movement because so many people in it accuse each other of being as fake as Santa Claus (or perhaps the moon landing).


That being said, TigerDan925’s admission was not a concession that the world is shaped like the globe. He merely said flat-Earthers need a new map. But for his community, he might as well have abandoned them altogether:

“Next he says the Antarctica is not governed and protected by the Illuminati, that somehow any group deciding to buy and invest in equipment is free to roam anywhere by plane or on land,” writes a user by the name Chris Madsen. “This is absolute rubbish ... 2016 is the year it becomes common knowledge the earth is flat, just like 9/11 became common knowledge, no stopping the truth now. ”

Such schisms are commonplace in flat-Earthdom, where at least three websites are vying to be the official meeting ground for the movement to save us all from the delusion that our world is a globe. Their differences range from petty (who came up with which idea first) to shocking and offensive (whether Jewish people are to blame for suppressing flat-Earth thought). And they regard each other with deep suspicion – almost as if they can’t believe that anyone else would believe what they do.

“[The multiple sites are] just the tip of the iceberg,” said flat-Earth convert Mark Sargent, who used his two decades of work in the tech and video game industries to create the site enclosedworld.com and a YouTube series called Flat Earth Clues. “There’s dissension in the ranks all over the place.”

Sargent compares the frenzy to the Monty Python film Life of Brian, in which Brian gains a following that immediately splits over whether to gather shoes, wear one shoe, or possibly follow a gourd.

“It’s almost like the beginning of a new religion. Everyone’s trying to define it. And they’re turning on each other because there’s no unified theory.” And so, like the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front, they often spend far less time discussing what they believe than they spend attacking each other.

The Flat Earth Society revived in 2004 under the leadership of one Daniel Shenton and was opened to new members in 2009. A dissatisfied group split away in 2013 and launched its own site. A reunification proposal in 2014 has withered, and Shenton’s Twitter feed went cold after he posted a cryptic photo of the Terminator in September.

The curvature of the Earth: an optical illusion, perhaps?
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The curvature of the Earth: an optical illusion, perhaps? Photograph: Alamy
A more fiery split took place when yoga teacher and conspiracy theorist Eric Dubay launched the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS) and claimed that the other flat-Earth groups were “controlled opposition”: a propaganda tool in which the ideological enemy pretends to be a friend to make the movement look stupid.

Dubay has since posted a lengthy Nixon-style enemies list, labeling Sargent and many other flat-Earthers “shills” who deliberately poison the movement with flawed arguments. Sargent says he was once on good terms with Dubay and doesn’t want to speak ill of him. That said, some flat-Earthers are ill at ease with Dubay because of his other work, including a documentary that claims Adolf Hitler was a decent, peace-loving fellow who has been smeared by the Zionist media. Around the turn of the year, Dubay’s discussion board has been shut down by a hosting company claiming a terms-of-service violation. He has since started fresh elsewhere, but yet another group popped up with a new site also claiming the IFERS name.

Beyond Dubay’s vitriol and a few political squabbles lies a fundamental question for flat-Earth factions: sure, the videos draw hundreds of thousands of page views, but who are the true believers?

A New York magazine piece on flat-Earthdom is skeptical of some who claim the mantle: “The line between actually believing the theory and enthusiastically entertaining is unclear. Being a Flat Earther exists in the same online space as chemtrails and the notion that 9/11 was an inside job: there are some who believe it sincerely, and magnitudes more who entertain the notion ironically.”

Some conspiracy theorists take it farther. What if all the flat-Earth talk is a big psychological experiment to see what we humans will believe in an era in which sizable groups already go against scientific consensus on vaccines, evolution and climate change?

“Maybe they wan’t to create the perfect concoction of pseudo-science bullshit and fabricated statistics to see who will blindly follow,” reads the opening comment of a thread in Reddit’s conspiracy theory subreddit. “They can then set up or use the same tactics to further lead the conspiracy community astray. Who else thinks this is a psy-op?”

Just in time for the X-Files revival: trust no one.

Flat-Earthers aren’t the only ones getting things wrong

Any mention of flat-Earthers brings out the insults – and historical blunders

An article on this site yesterday on modern “flat-Earthers” gained plenty of interest. Most of the comments joined in with general hilarity about the gob-smacking stupidity of other people. The existence of (several) flat-Earth societies is certainly fascinating, but I was also slightly gobsmacked by the comparison drawn between those who today believe the Earth is flat and “Galileo’s 17th century critics”.

I mean, really? Are there really people out there who believe that Galileo showed that the Earth was round and that his critics denounced this view, “outraged by his heresy”? Especially people who like to laugh at others for getting their facts wrong. Are they stupid or something?

In such debates Galileo and history are much used and abused. Admittedly most commenters realise that in Galileo’s time it was known that the Earth was spherical, although their tendency to see debates over heliocentrism as a parallel example of a clash between the forces of reason and darkness is not much more historically sophisticated.

Intriguingly, some flat-Earthers like to draw the comparison the other way: they are like Galileo, not his critics. They are the ones daring to champion views that go against the consensus. They may be wrong, but they’re not all stupid, charlatans or simply “anti-science”.

Needless to say, there is plenty of confusion from both sides about what Galileo did, the nature of his heresy and the (rather good) reasons why astronomers rejected heliocentrism. But it is nonetheless interesting that both claim to make scientific statements and make use of the name of a hero of science.

Perhaps a more common, though equally wrong, historical myth is that almost everyone believed that the Earth was flat until the 15th century and that Christopher Columbus (or Copernicus) thought and proved otherwise. Follow the links above to the blog of historian of science Darin Hayton and you’ll see just how few genuine examples of flat-Earth thinking there were during the middle ages, and how and why the myth has nevertheless become so prevalent.

Comparisons made between the stupidity or credulous superstition of medieval people (or Columbus’s doubters and Galileo’s critics) and today’s flat-Earthers fail, then, in several ways. It also seems very likely that the sweeping worldview underpinning such statements and comparisons is part of the problem rather than any kind of solution.

As Christine Garwood has put it in her book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, the belief that it was Columbus or Galileo who challenged a consensus regarding the shape of the Earth is “part of a much deeper set of assumptions about the progress of knowledge and the passage of time.” This myth, along with that of the so-called “Dark Ages” and the idea of a constant battle between reason and credulousness, or science and religion, is a story that developed in the 19th century, flattering the present by simplifying and denigrating the past.

Garwood’s book shows the relatively modern origins of the story. She also shows that it was at just about the same time that “real” flat-Earthism developed. It was, indeed, a response to, rather than a state existing before, the rise of science as an increasingly authoritative element within society.

As the story that sparked this post admits, people are drawn to flat-Earthism for all sorts of reasons. The author quotes a New York magazine article that notes: “The line between actually believing the theory and enthusiastically entertaining is unclear”, many doing so “ironically”. Getting a rise out of the crowd that is so ready to call “stupid” and “anti-science” is likely a motivation for many.

It is, though, seriously counterproductive that such discussions create and align a series of binaries – science/anti-science, intelligence/stupidity, reason/credulity, us/them, science/religion, evolution/creationism, vaxxer/anti-vaxxer. They obscure the many shades of grey and mixed views that real people entertain, shutting down more useful and important conversations.

As Garwood says, ultimately we all “choose our own truth”. You probably haven’t determined first hand that the Earth is a sphere and that it orbits the Sun. You (rightly) trust the people, books, photographs and whole fields of endeavour that indicate that these things are so. It is one hell of a conspiracy if they are not. Yet, it is right to admit that you do take certain people’s expertise on trust, and to think harder about why others might place their trust elsewhere. It is not, I promise you, just because they are stupid.