What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 2018 PDF

1 What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention It is unbelievable but true that Flat Earth theory is making a comeback. Although the basic science to demonstrate the curvature of the Earth is over two thousand years old—­and available to any high school physics student—­one now finds numerous Flat E...

1 What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention It is unbelievable but true that Flat Earth theory is making a comeback. Although the basic science to demonstrate the curvature of the Earth is over two thousand years old—­and available to any high school physics student—­one now finds numerous Flat Earth meetup groups in various cit- ies, hears their views spouted by celebrities like rapper B.o.B.1 or NBA play- ers Kyrie Irving2 and Wilson Chandler, and can even attend a Flat Earth convention like the one I did—­Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC 2018)—­in Denver. First, the threshold question. Are these people serious? Yes, completely so. To believe in Flat Earth is not something one would come to lightly, for Flat Earthers are routinely persecuted for their views. Many report losing jobs, being kicked out of their churches, and being ostracized from their fam- ilies. Is it any wonder that many would choose to keep their beliefs private? Given this, it is nearly impossible to tell how many Flat Earthers there actu- ally are.3 Perhaps this accounted for the celebratory atmosphere I witnessed at FEIC 2018, where complete strangers greeted one another as old friends. In one of the first presentations at the opening of the conference, one speaker memorably took up the mantra “I am not ashamed,” for which he was greeted with wild applause. Some in the audience had tears in their eyes as they repeated the phrase to themselves: apparently they were not ashamed either. To be insulted, ridiculed, and dismissed for your views can- not be a fun experience. I think of this every time I hear someone dismiss Flat Earthers as trolls or jokesters who must be in it for the fun. Who would endure this for fun? Perhaps I am simply credulous, but in all of my time at FEIC 2018, I did not meet one person who seemed anything other than deeply committed to their beliefs. Indeed, that is probably part of what 2 Chapter 1 made the meeting so meaningful to its participants. Other than me and a few journalists who were there to cover the event, FEIC seemed like a revival meeting for misfits who had finally found their kin. As I looked around the ballroom, what struck me most was that if you didn’t already know what the event was about, you wouldn’t be able to tell. Everyone looked so “normal.” Not a tinfoil hat anywhere. Men and women, young and old, multiracial, from all walks of life.4 I did see a lot of black T-­shirts (some with funny logos), but nothing else to indicate that this was a fringe crowd. If you looked away from the three huge multimedia screens at the front of the ballroom, you might think that you were waiting for the opening act at a Metallica concert. In my casual shirt and jeans, I fit right in. I sat toward the front, next to a couple about my age who said they were from Paradise, California. This was just a few months after the deadly wildfires there, so I asked if they were OK. The man spoke up. “Well, our house got burned up. We can’t go home. And we still haven’t heard from my wife’s mother. She was old and had dementia. So she might be lost.” This floored me. I looked discreetly at his wife, but she gave no reaction. In the middle of that situation, they had loaded up the truck and driven out to Denver for a Flat Earth convention? I expressed my sympathies, and we continued to talk about the wildfires, during which the man offered that he thought the government had been putting accelerant on the fires; he’d seen chemtrails overhead beforehand. The woman offered, “I just think there’s something fishy about the fires, how they had been isolated, then closed in.” Behind us sat a mother and her six-­or seven-­year-­old son, with a spiral notebook that said “Bible Research.” Then the show started. After a rousing musical act, the opening speech was given by Robbie Davidson, the event’s organizer, who talked about how he used to be a “globalist,” but then got converted to Flat Earth in the process of trying to refute it. He wasn’t against science, he explained, only “scientism.” But “the truth shall set you free!” At that point the couple from Paradise leapt to their feet and yelled, “Praise Jesus,” as the rest of the crowd erupted in applause. I just sat there, taking notes. As they sat down, the couple looked over at me. Robbie continued by pointing out—­I thought largely for the media’s sake—­that this meeting did not have any affiliation with the Flat Earth Society. He went on to ridicule that group for believing that the Earth was a “flying disk” in space.5 He implored any skeptics in the crowd that What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 3 if they were going to ridicule his group, to do so with an understanding of what they actually believed. Stay for the whole conference. Do your own research. Science has had a stranglehold on our cosmological beliefs for centuries, he said, “but the foundation is crumbling!” And the crowd went crazy again. Not all of the events were talks. In addition to the rapper who had warmed up the crowd, there was a video from Flat Earth Man, a rock star wannabe whom everyone in the crowd already seemed to know. His video “Space Is Fake” was well received (and well done), and featured all sorts of goofy Photoshopped images that were apparently shown to reinforce the message that if he could fake pictures, so could the government. NASA was the butt of most of the jokes. Here I learned that virtually all Flat Earthers believe that all of the pictures of Earth from space are fake, that we never landed on the Moon, and that all of the employees at NASA—­along with millions of others—­are “in on the conspiracy” to cover up God’s truth that the Earth is flat. Those who were not already Flat Earthers were either part of the cover-­up or they were sheep. To drive the point home, the video indicated that if you count up the place of the letters in the alphabet for “National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” it comes to 666. After the video I asked the man from Paradise to explain who is behind all this. He knew that I was a newbie, so maybe my cover wasn’t completely blown yet.6 He said, “The adversary.” I pressed him: “The devil.” He went on to explain that the devil helps those who are in power, and that includes all world leaders: every head of state, astronauts, scientists, teachers, airline pilots, and many others who are rewarded by the devil for keeping the secret of Flat Earth.7 He then explained, “This all goes back to the Bible.” There couldn’t have been a flood in the time of Noah if the Earth was round, he opined.8 Over the next forty-­eight hours I heard similar things from many other people, which were largely a combination of nonsensical physics mixed with Christian fundamentalism.9 What impressed me, though, was that even though most of the participants seemed to have deeply held religious views, they did not base their belief in Flat Earth on faith. Instead, they maintained that their beliefs were based on evidence, both in favor of Flat Earth and against the “globalist” hypothesis. They encouraged participants to do their own experiments.10 Indeed, the whole point of the conference, Robbie had said, was to present material for “educational” purposes. “Don’t 4 Chapter 1 believe things based solely on authority” was a common refrain. In fact, several speakers encouraged the crowd not to believe what they were saying just because they had said it, but to use it as a jumping-­off point to do their own research. This apparently is how many Flat Earthers become converted. More than once, I heard someone say that they used to believe in the global Earth—­for which the unkind word (that we were encouraged not to use) was “globetard”—­ and had tried to refute Flat Earth but could not, and so concluded that it must be true. “Be careful, we used to be like you,” one speaker warned. In the process of trying to prove that Flat Earth was a fraud—­ usually after watching a series of YouTube videos—­ many had instead convinced themselves that it must be true. Indeed, insofar as the Flat Earthers had a method, this seemed to be it: if you can’t prove that the Earth is round, then you should believe it is flat.11 And it didn’t seem to bother them one bit that most of their “research” came from watching online videos. Indeed, according to Asheley Landrum, a psychologist at Texas Tech who has studied Flat Earthers, YouTube is the gateway for virtu- ally all new recruits of Flat Earth.12 To a person, Flat Earthers have a profound distrust in authority—­and great belief in first-­person sensory experience. And their standard of belief is proof. In their epistemology, to question a belief is sufficient for conclud- ing that it must be false. But what about their own beliefs? In a group as skeptical as Flat Earthers, it is curious that they do not apply any real scru- tiny to the basis for their own beliefs. If one asks them for proof that the Earth is flat, they normally turn the burden of proof back on the globalist. The choice is binary. If you can’t prove that Earth is round—­subject to their paranoid suspicions of bias or fraud about any evidence you offer—­then it must be flat. It is also curious that for a belief system which purports to be based on evidence and experiment, most Flat Earthers describe their conversion as one of revelation. One day they woke up and realized that there was a worldwide conspiracy of people who had been lying to them. Once they were willing to question the depth of the cover-­up, Flat Earth was at the bottom of the rabbit hole. “Trust your eyes” became their mantra. “Water is level.” “Space is fake.” “A government that could lie to you about 9/11 and the Moon landing is one that would lie to you about Flat Earth.” The Flat Earthers all describe their conversion as a quasi-­mystical experience, where What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 5 one day they “took the red pill” (and, yes, they adore the movie The Matrix) and realized a truth that the rest of us have been blind to for our entire lives, as a result of our miseducation and indoctrination: the Earth is flat. What does this mean? What do they actually believe? Not only that the Earth is flat, but that the continent of Antarctica is not really a continent at all but an ice wall spread out along the perimeter of the Earth (which is what keeps the water from falling off) and that the whole thing is covered by a transparent dome, outside of which the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars (which are very close) shine through. Of course, this means that all space travel is faked (for how could they get through the dome?). And it means that the Earth does not revolve or rotate (for if it did, wouldn’t you feel it?). To state this immediately raises a series of questions: What does this mean for gravity, the constellations, time zones, eclipses? And just what the heck is under the Flat Earth, anyway? Flat Earthers love these sorts of questions and have an answer for every one of them—­ though they sometimes vary from person to person, which is what the conference was all about.13 Who could keep such a secret? The government, NASA, airline pilots, and others. Who put them up to that? “The adversary” (the devil), who rewards them mightily for covering up God’s truth. Why don’t others realize the truth? Because they have been fooled. What is the benefit of believing in Flat Earth? Because it’s the truth! And it’s consistent with the Bible. What about the scientific proofs of a round Earth? They are all flawed, which is what the rest of the conference was about. To spend two days attending seminars with titles such as “Globebusters,” “Flat Earth with the Scientific Method,” “Flat Earth Activism,” “NASA and Other Space Lies,” “14+ Ways the Bible Says Flat Earth,” and “Talking to Your Family and Friends about Flat Earth” is in some ways to spend two days in an asylum. The arguments were absurd yet intricate and not easily run to ground, especially if one buys into the Flat Earther’s insistence on immediate first-­person sensory proof. And the social reinforcement that participants seemed to feel in finally being with their own was palpable. Psychologists have long known that there is a social aspect to belief; FEIC 2018 was a lab experiment in tribal reasoning. 6 Chapter 1 The next presentation was by one of the Flat Earth superstars—­ Rob Skiba—­whose talk had been billed as one of the main “scientific” presen- tations. I could hardly wait. At the beginning, Skiba pointed out that he had no academic credentials... ​but he did have a white lab coat, which gave him all the credibility he said he needed. He then began a lecture that included a ten-­point slideshow on the “evidence” for Flat Earth (which consisted mostly of “evidence” against the global Earth). Foucault’s pendu- lum? A fake! If it’s real, then why do they need a drive motor to keep the pendulum moving? (Physics says friction.) Photos from space? He said that they were all illustrated or painted by NASA (in the era before Photoshop). During the talk I also learned that Skiba had an alternative theory of grav- ity (which I couldn’t reproduce here if I tried), thought that Flat Earth was supported by pillars that had been put there by God (resting on what, he didn’t say), and he didn’t understand how water could adhere to “a spin- ning ball.” Just try spinning a beach ball and throw a cup of water at it, and see what happens! Oh boy. What he did believe in was a video he showed of an elderly woman pushing a nine-­ton boulder with one hand. If that was possible, he said, they must have already figured out anti-­gravity. And if that was true, they could fake a Moon landing in a warehouse. By this point my head was spinning; none of it made any sense. But then he switched to something I vaguely remembered from physics: the Coriolis effect. Skiba wanted to know why it was that if you shot a bullet east to west you had to make an adjustment, but not when you shot it north to south. Wouldn’t the alleged “sideways” motion of the Earth come into play? And if it didn’t, did that mean the Earth wasn’t spinning? None of this comported with anything I remembered about the Coriolis effect (and I confess I didn’t remember the technical details well enough to know where his description of the phenomena was at odds with reality), but what I did notice was that Skiba really didn’t seem to understand inertial frames of reference. He apparently thought that if you tossed a baseball in the air on a train going at constant speed it would land behind you rather than in your mitt. Was this what he was saying about the bullet? I was still pondering this conundrum (and wishing I remembered more physics) when the talk moved on to something I recalled very clearly from college astronomy. Skiba displayed a photograph of the skyline of the city of Chicago taken from sixty miles out in Lake Michigan.14 This caught my attention because I remembered a lecture that had talked about the What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 7 phenomenon called hull down, which is where a ship disappears on the horizon hull first, due to the curvature of the Earth. It had been a long time since freshman year, but I checked the calculation provided on screen and it was right: at sixty miles the top of the Sears Tower should have already dipped below the horizon. Indeed, you didn’t have to go out that far... ​ you only had to go out forty-­five miles! But here was a picture of the full, shimmering Chicago skyline from sixty miles out. Proof? Well, in a group of skeptics, did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps the picture might be faked? We had just heard that virtually every single picture from NASA was fake, so why not this one? Later, after the presentation, I caught up with Skiba by one of the booths at the swag fair of Flat Earth merchandise for sale in the adjacent ballroom.15 There were Flat Earth maps and T-­shirts, hats and jewelry. I bought a CD of Flat Earth music—­which was surprisingly catchy and well done—­and some stickers and a necklace for my wife. At first, Skiba must have thought I was a fan when I approached him and said that I’d just seen his presentation and had a few questions. As it turned out, the photo was not a fake. It was a real image that demanded an explanation. During his presentation, Skiba had dismissed the correct scientific explanation for the photograph, which is due to some- thing called the superior mirage effect. This occurs when there is a blanket of cold air (for instance, on the surface of the water) just underneath a blan- ket of hotter air above it. As the light travels through these layers, it is bent, as though by a lens, and an observer might see an image hovering in the air where it should not be.16 There is nothing mysterious about this. Those who have driven on hot pavement and seen “puddles” on the surface of the road (which vanish as one approaches) have seen the inferior mirage effect, which occurs when the surface of the road is hotter than the air above it. In that case, the image is below where one would expect it; with the superior mirage effect, the image appears above its actual position. It is an illusion, but it is not “fake.” It is a real image that one can photograph. In just the right conditions, one can even take a video of the blinking lights of a city over the curvature of the Earth’s horizon. It is a cool effect. When I asked Skiba about the superior mirage effect, he dismissed it. “I dealt with that in my talk,” he said. “It’s made up.” “You didn’t deal with it in your talk,” I said. “You just said you didn’t believe it.” 8 Chapter 1 “Well, I don’t,” he said. We talked a bit more about the photo, and he explained that he wasn’t just taking this on authority. He himself had gone out on Lake Michigan and recreated the effect from forty-­six miles away. He said he’d seen it with his own eyes. By this time, a crowd of admirers had gathered to ask Skiba their own questions, and the “scientist” was getting antsy. He’d probably figured out by then that I wasn’t a Flat Earther, but he couldn’t very well break away now without looking small in front of his fans. But I had another question. “So why didn’t you go out one hundred miles?” I asked. “What?” “A hundred miles. If you’d gone out that far, not only the city would’ve disappeared but also the superior mirage too. If it didn’t, you’d have your proof.” He shook his head. “We couldn’t get the captain of the boat to go out that far.” Now it was my turn to scoff. “What? You’ve devoted your entire life to this work and you didn’t go? You had the definitive experiment within reach and you couldn’t go out an extra fifty-­five miles?” He turned his head and began to talk to someone else. Looking back, maybe I don’t blame him. I was too hot. Too confronta- tional. It’s hard to stay cool when your beliefs are being challenged. Maybe I was proof of that myself. Over the next forty-­eight hours, I had numerous other less heated conversa- tions about the Flat Earther’s “evidence.” Given their belief that the Earth is flat, that the continent of Antarctica as we know it does not exist, that there is a giant dome over the top of the Earth, and that the Earth does not move, there should have been ample opportunity to test the accuracy of the Flat Earthers’ hypothesis. Yet in two days of talking about Foucault’s pendulum, shadows during an eclipse, the International Space Station, the fact that water is subject to gravitational pull, and other matters from col- lege astronomy, not once did I seem to disturb any of the Flat Earthers’ beliefs that they were right. The temptation to come up with some definitive experiment or scien- tific finding that blows Flat Earth right of the water is overwhelming at an What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 9 event like this. I wanted to debunk them so badly I could taste it. But if the goal is to get a Flat Earther to admit that they are wrong, it probably can- not be done, at least not in this way. The evidence for a global Earth has been around since Pythagoras (who argued that if the Moon was round, the Earth must be also). Since Aristotle (who said that if we walked north to south we would see different stars). And since Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth by measuring the Sun’s shadow on two sticks placed very far apart).17 This evidence had been around for 2,300 years and the Flat Earthers already knew it, but they remained unconvinced. They had an excuse for everything.18 So if they weren’t already convinced by two millennia of physics, why would they be convinced by me? I needed to reset. I wasn’t a physicist, and I hadn’t come to FEIC 2018 to talk to them about the scientific evidence for or against Flat Earth anyway. I was a phi- losopher, and I had come to talk about how they were reasoning. The frus- trating thing with Flat Earthers is that even if you find a flaw in one of their arguments or experiments, they will just look at you and say, “Yes, but what about...” and move on to the next thing. They have hundreds of “points” and unless you are willing to play whack-­a-­mole and knock down every single one of them, they will not admit defeat. For them, there is no such thing as a “definitive experiment.” If they tell you that they know Flat Earth is true because of X, and you then show them that X is not true, they will just move on to the next thing. This is decidedly not what scientists do. In my earlier book, The Scientific Attitude, I had argued that the primary thing that separates science from nonscience is that scientists embrace an attitude of willingness to change their hypothesis if it does not fit with the evidence.19 This is reinforced not just through the commitment of individual scientists, but in the commu- nity standards of science as a whole, where they test one another’s work and hold it up to the highest level of scrutiny. Is that even close to what the Flat Earthers were doing? To be fair, some Flat Earthers had thrown down the gauntlet and said that they were willing to change their minds if presented with the right evidence. At FEIC 2018, I had the pleasure of meeting “Mad” Mike Hughes, who was famous for going up in a homemade rocket to try to see the curva- ture of the Earth. He didn’t get very far. In his first attempt, he went up only 1,875 feet, which is shorter than the 2,717-­foot-­tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper 10 Chapter 1 in Dubai. Rather than building a rocket, he could have taken an elevator. And, without a 60-­degree or wider field of vision, the curvature of the Earth is not visible until one gets above 40,000 feet. No amount of observation below that height would suffice for settling the question of the curvature of the Earth. Even if Hughes went up as high as 30,000 feet, he’d have to settle for the view he could get on most commercial aircraft.20 When I met Hughes, standing next to his rocket at FEIC 2018, I admired his experimental mindset. His understanding was warped, but he was brave in the face of its challenge. About a year after the conference, in December 2019, Hughes announced that he was going to make another launch up to the Kármán line, sixty-­two miles (328,000 feet!) into the atmosphere. From there one would be able to see curvature, and I was excited to hear about the experiment. Just before his prior launch (in 2018), Hughes had said, “I expect to see a flat disk up there... ​I don’t have an agenda. If it’s a round Earth or a ball, I’m going to come down and say, ‘Hey guys, I’m bad. It’s a ball, OK?’”21 Unfortunately, he never got the chance. On February 22, 2020, Hughes’s rocket malfunctioned just after takeoff and he fell back to Earth and died. Say what you will about Hughes, but I will not criticize him. He embraced an adventurous spirit and core commitment to put his beliefs to the test, and promised to give them up if they did not pass, which is the foundation of the scientific attitude. But can the same be said of his Earth-­ bound fellow Flat Earthers? In a delightful documentary called Behind the Curve, a film crew follows a group of Flat Earthers (most of whom seemed to be affiliated with FEIC) as they pontificate their views and occasionally try to test them. At first, the film might seem a celebration of Flat Eartherism, but once the characters are established, the fun begins. In one scene, a couple of Flat Earthers have spent $20,000 on a laser gyroscope to try to prove one of their core beliefs: that the Earth does not move. Except that when they turned on their equip- ment, they found a 15-­degree-­per-­hour drift. Said one researcher, “Wow, that’s kind of a problem. We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.” They couldn’t. Then—­at the very conference I was attending in Denver—­they were caught on film saying, “We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro. If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad. It would be bad. What What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 11 I just told you was confidential.”22 Can one imagine an actual scientist say- ing this?23 As bad as this is, at the end of the film there is another experiment that is arguably worse. A group of Flat Earthers go out and try to measure whether a light beam lands at the same height on three equal poles that are spaced very far apart. Based on their theory, if the light beam hit the same height on each of the poles, this would prove that there was no curvature to the Earth. Actually, this is not a bad experiment, in that it is consonant with the famous Bedford Level experiment from the nineteenth century, which Alfred Russel Wallace (of evolution fame) set up to collect prize money to “prove” the curvature of the Earth.24 So what did the Flat Earthers find? In the movie’s final frame, we see them flummoxed because they can’t get the light beam to go through the “right” hole on their apparatus. So they raise the pole. And the light goes through. Roll credits. What was the result of all this experimental failure? FEIC 2019 went on as scheduled. As I said, for a Flat Earther there is no such thing as a defini- tive experiment. For all of their bluster about how much they care about evi- dence and paint themselves as more scientific than the scientists, the truth is that they don’t really understand the basis of scientific reasoning. Their ignorance is not just about scientific facts, but about how scientists think. So how do Flat Earthers think? What is the basis (and weakness) of their reasoning strategy? For one thing, their insistence on proof is based on a complete mis- understanding of how science works. With any empirical hypothesis, it is always possible that some future piece of evidence might come along to refute it. This is why scientific pronouncements customarily come with errors bars; there is always some uncertainty to scientific reasoning. This does not, however, mean that scientific theories are weak—­or that until all of the data are in, any alternative hypothesis is just as good as a scientific one. In science, all of the data are never in! But this does not mean that a well-­corroborated scientific theory or hypothesis is unworthy of belief. With science, it is ridiculous to ask for proof as a necessary standard.25 What scientists do often engage in, however, is disproof. If your hypothe- sis says that X must be true, and X is not true, then that means your hypoth- esis is wrong!26 For instance—­as in the example from Behind the Curve—­if a Flat Earther predicts no drift, and they actually found some, this means that 12 Chapter 1 their hypothesis is disproven. Now, of course, even scientists are allowed to go back and make sure that their equipment wasn’t malfunctioning or that there isn’t some other overlooked reason for the phenomenon they found upon experiment. But beyond a certain point, it seems ludicrous to keep making excuses. Given Flat Earthers’ commitment to the power of proof, I am surprised by their cavalier attitude toward those experiments that have disproven their hypothesis. Another weakness in Flat Earth reasoning has to do with their misunder- standing of how evidence gives warrant to a hypothesis. When a belief is warranted it means that it is justified on the basis of its evidence. The more evidence, the more credible the hypothesis. Of course, this falls short of proof. But does this mean that no amount of evidence can build up credibil- ity for any belief, until the day comes when it is absolutely proven? If so, we would be justified in believing only the truths of math and deductive logic; both physics and Flat Earth would be thrown out the window. Yet to talk to a Flat Earther is to watch them shout “aha” with bright eyes any time they feel your failure to offer proof somehow makes their own hypothesis more credible. But this is just not how science works. To say that my hypothesis is unproven does not make yours more likely—­else what about the triangular Earth, the trapezoidal Earth, or the donut-­shaped Earth?27 And of course the backtracking and revision, based on ad hoc rejection and groundless suspi- cions, just to keep their own hypothesis from being outright refuted, only undermines their credibility. This is not how scientists reason. One cannot keep modifying what one is willing to accept as evidence just to protect a favored hypothesis. Yet Flat Earthers routinely employ a double standard of evidence. Virtually anything a Flat Earther wants to believe is allowed to pass muster with hardly any scrutiny, whereas anything they do not want to believe is demanded to be proven?28 But why? I cannot emphasize enough how deeply Flat Earth is rooted in conspir- acy theory reasoning. Indeed, some have described Flat Earth as the biggest conspiracy of all.29 Time and again at FEIC 2018, I heard people talk about other conspiracy theories they believed: chemtrails, government control of the weather, fluoridated water as a means of mind control, the idea that the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings were a hoax, that 9/11 was an inside job, and the list goes on.30 One speaker actually said, “Everyone here can prob- ably give you their top-­twenty list of conspiracy theories.” And indeed some confessed that because they were prone to conspiracy theories, this is probably What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 13 what drew them to research Flat Earth in the first place. But the amazing thing is that they did not seem at all ashamed of this. One fellow explained this by saying, “Flat Earthers are more ‘sensitive’ to conspiracy theories than other people.” But to believe that all world leaders are in on a secret that the world is flat? Does anyone think that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could keep a secret like that? Apparently so. Time and again, Flat Earthers would come right out and tell me that belief in conspiracy theories was at the foundation of their reasoning.31 (Indeed, in one of the seminars on how to recruit new believers into Flat Earth, one of the speakers said, “If you run into someone who says they don’t believe in conspiracy theories, walk away.”) The specific role that conspiracy theories play in denialist reasoning will be covered in detail in chapter 2. For now, let me simply say that conspiracy-­ based reasoning is—­or should be—­anathema to scientific practice. Why? Because it allows you to accept both confirmation and failure as warrant for your theory. If your theory is borne out by the evidence, then fine. But if it is not, then it must be due to some malicious person who is hiding the truth. And the fact that there is no evidence that this is happening is simply testa- ment to how good the conspirators are, which also confirms your hypothesis. An equally large role in Flat Earth thinking is played by confirmation bias. Flat Earth is the ultimate example of motivated reasoning. They will cherry-­pick or misinterpret any piece of evidence that will support their beliefs and reject with extreme bias any evidence that does not. As one of the five tropes common to all science denial reasoning, the problem of cherry-­picking evidence too will be dealt with in chapter 2. Let me here simply point out that the mindset of virtually every Flat Earther I met at FEIC 2018 was to actively pursue anything that might tend to make their views seem more credible and ignore or dismiss anything that did not. Remember the reaction to the falsifying experiments in Behind the Curve? The idea of setting up a definitive experiment, and then living by the result, was anathema to them. They weren’t even close to being scientists. They were true believers—­evangelists for Flat Earth. Naturally, I already had my suspicions about how Flat Earthers (and all science deniers) reason, but I still did not know why. If I hoped to be able to break through with Flat Earthers, and make them see that it was not just their facts but their reasoning strategy that was wrong, I needed to think a bit more about what might have led them to have this particular set of beliefs. Again, I felt out of my depth. Just as I am not a physicist, I am not 14 Chapter 1 a psychologist either. Yet based on my conversations so far, I did see a pat- tern in their stories that could perhaps shed some light on their motivation and mindset. In addition to buttonholing speakers and some of the other superstars of Flat Earth, I also had a number of conversations with my fellow conference- goers. I found that if I got to an event early, when there were still lots of empty chairs, it was easy to strike up a conversation. One of the most inter- esting I had was with an older woman from Europe, who said that she was a documentary filmmaker. At first I was disappointed, as I suspected that perhaps she was not a believer in Flat Earth and just one of the folks like me who was here to observe the event. So I let my guard down. “So you don’t really believe all this stuff, then?” “I don’t believe it, I know it,” she said. Uh-­oh, I had misjudged. Then, in the most pleasant way possible, she began to tell me her life story. She said that she used to be a scientist and had studied physics, chemistry, and psychology. But then she’d had a crisis in her life (which she did not specify, but I got the impression it was health related), after which her husband divorced her. She said this put her into a tailspin where she’d begun to question everything. What did her life mean? Who could she trust anymore? At this point she began to watch some Flat Earth videos and tried to debunk them but instead they had convinced her! She was embarrassed that she’d never questioned her “globalism” before, but said she’d had quite a regimented education. At this point I said, “So could anything change your mind back?” After all, she’d changed her mind once, so I was curious what it might take to change it again. She said that nothing could. I probed a bit as to why this was the case and got a whiff that it might somehow be related to her reli- gious beliefs. So I finally worked up the nerve to ask her another question. “So, are you one of those folks who believe that God created the Flat Earth?” “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that.” I thought that perhaps I’d run into my first nonreligious Flat Earther. “So your belief in Flat Earth is secular?” “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that either. Because I am the creator.” If she hadn’t been so soft-­spoken and pleasant, I might have thought she was joking. But it took me only a few seconds to realize that she was dead What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 15 serious. She smiled and continued. She said that if God was separate from her, then she would be a victim. But that couldn’t be, because she wasn’t a victim anymore. So she must be God. She said that she had created the uni- verse, and along with it the Flat Earth. She didn’t buy into all of the other Flat Earthers who were talking about Christianity and Jesus. It was her! With that she turned to an account of her present life and said that she’d moved back in with her husband—­in America now—­and that she was making films. She asked about me, and I told her I was a skeptic. That I didn’t believe in Flat Earth. She said she was OK with this. I said that I had come to the con- vention to see what other people believed, and she liked this very much. She said to be careful, though. That she had studied indoctrination and felt that all globalists had been brainwashed! Rather than being mad or feeling insulted by my questions, she instead looked like she felt sorry for me. All during the presentation that followed—­when we were sitting in nearby seats—­she kept looking over at me and smiling when the speaker made a good point. It was hard to keep my mind focused as I tried to process what I’d just heard. It would have been easy to dismiss this woman as crazy, but the weird part was that several of the things she’d said had resonated with things I’d heard from others. I am not saying that all Flat Earthers are delusional, but there was a common thread here that demanded follow-­up. This woman had spoken of trauma in her life. And I now realized that several of the oth- ers I’d heard that day had spoken of a traumatic experience in their own lives as well, which coincided with the time they had started to believe in Flat Earth. For many it was 9/11. For others it was a personal tragedy. Some terrible event had occurred, which had caused them to do precisely what this woman had done: question everything. The conclusion she had come to—­that she was God—­had to be an outlier. But the idea that Flat Earthers were somehow drawn to the ultimate conspiracy theory at just about the time they were trying to heal from some important psychic wound was one that I just could not stop thinking about. I had already noted that a number of Flat Earthers seemed alienated or marginalized from society. But that was easy to attribute to their belief in Flat Earth itself. As I said, Flat Earthers are often persecuted for their views and pay a heavy price with family, friends, community, and work. But now it occurred to me: What if they were alienated and marginalized to begin with? Maybe that is what led them to Flat Earth. Again, I am no psycholo- gist, but something fell into place. If you were someone who felt that you 16 Chapter 1 were always on the outs in life, never quite fit in or had a chance, maybe never had the career or personal life you wanted, and felt that at least in part this was because other people had been against you and lying to you and undermining you right from the start, might it not seem attractive to explain all this through some giant conspiracy? Instead of being marginalized, sud- denly you were part of an elite. You were one of the saviors of humanity, who actually knew a truth that billions of people had missed. And the fact that your cohort was so small only indicated the depth of the conspiracy against you. The Matrix indeed. As I sat there, I concluded that perhaps Flat Earth wasn’t so much a belief that someone would accept or reject on the basis of experimental evidence, but instead an identity.32 It could give purpose to your life. It created instant community, bound together by common persecution. And perhaps it could explain some of the trauma and other difficulties you might have experi- enced in life, as the elites in power were all corrupt and plotting against you. I will leave it to others to do the careful scientific work to measure the worth of these speculations.33 But as a working hypothesis for myself, in that room at that time, it changed how I approached the rest of the conference. If I was correct, then Flat Earth wasn’t really about evidence at all. The “evi- dence” was just a huge rationalization for one’s social identity. This explained why Flat Earthers took it so personally when I challenged their beliefs. This wasn’t just a belief that they happened to have; this was who they were. But this meant that I couldn’t get them to change their beliefs without asking them to change their identity. And that sounded like a recipe for failure. How could I get anyone to begin to understand that their belief system was wrong without making it seem like I was attacking them as a person? Perhaps I could proceed by taking them seriously as human beings, even while refusing to play their game of “proof.” I could stop trying to offer my own evidence for the global Earth, but also refrain from asking for (or criticiz- ing) their own. Instead I could engage them in conversation... ​about them- selves. In this way, I thought that perhaps I could get Flat Earthers to do my work for me. For one thing, it would be disarming. But I also knew that my approach had to involve their reasons for believing in Flat Earth. Their beliefs were my entrée, but my goal was to get them to talk about why they had them. Maybe I could ask them a question they’d never heard before. One that a scientist wouldn’t have any trouble answering. And then—­rather than What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 17 trying to change their mind directly—­I could just sit back and watch while cognitive dissonance overtook them, as they grew increasingly uncomfort- able when they couldn’t give me an answer.34 In his 1959 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper offers his theory of “falsification,” which says that a scientist always sets out to try to falsify their theory, not confirm it.35 In my book The Scientific Attitude, I developed a key insight from this, which is that—­in order to be a scientist—­ you have to be willing to change your mind on the basis of new evidence. So how about this for a question: “What evidence, if it existed, would it take to convince you that you were wrong?” I liked this question because it was both philosophically respectable and also personal. It was not just about their beliefs but about them. So far, I had approached everyone at the conference with respect, and I planned to continue to do so. But now I would need to make a slight adjustment to my strategy. Instead of challenging them on the basis of their evidence, I would instead talk about the way that they were forming their beliefs on the basis of this evidence. The next session was on “Flat Earth Activism” (in which they talked about how to recruit new members through street clinics to “wake people up”) and was run by one of the biggest celebrities in Flat Earth. He was young and lean and had a look about him that was both intense and vulnerable. He was soft-­spoken and patient, and obviously quite intelligent. Not only did he seem to be a true believer, but I gathered that a number of people at the conference believed in him. He was a natural leader, and that was a good thing, for he had one of the hardest jobs in Flat Earth, which was to convince people (sometimes face-­to-­face) to give up globalism.36 Immediately I was riveted. In a curious way, this man was setting out to do precisely what I was trying to do. I had come to the session to learn more about how Flat Earthers set about proselytizing new members. Per- haps I could learn some practical skills. He started off by showing a video of one of his street clinics, to demonstrate some of the techniques he used in trying to recruit people. His main piece of advice was that activists had to remain calm. Control their emotions. He said it helped not to assume that the people who believed in globalism were idiots or mentally ill. Give them your respect. Be upfront with them about your belief in Flat Earth, 18 Chapter 1 but also recognize that some people “aren’t ready yet.” There are so many lost people out there, he said. Don’t expect to win every time. “You will face people who are in total denial of reality.” (Yes, he actually said that.) I had to smile. The tactics he was describing for recruiting someone into Flat Earth were not a bad script for how I hoped to bring them back out. If you just substituted “Flat Earther” for “globalist,” he was describing almost every anecdotal account I had read of how people changed their minds and came to give up their resistance to vaccines or climate change. From here, the speaker went on to share some standard fare about Flat Earth: water seeks its own level, the people at NASA have to sign nondisclo- sure agreements, all of the faked photos from NASA are taken underwater. Ho-­hum. But then I saw a flash of anger as he began to describe the “purple pillars,” which were people who believed in most other conspiracy theories but called Flat Earth people crazy. Were they heretics? That’s what I think upset him. He was one of the folks who recognized—­and did not apologize for—­the role that conspiracy theories played in Flat Earth reasoning, and apparently felt that if someone was willing to believe that 9/11 was an inside job, or that the Parkland shooting was a hoax, they ought to be willing to come the whole way to Flat Earth. But he then recommended, for the sake of your own mental health, not to bring yourself to the point where every- thing in life is a conspiracy against you. He went on to make some personal remarks about his life and some ongoing medical issues—­which I am not going to share here. After the presentation was over, I felt reborn. This was the reason I had come to Flat Earth. Later that evening there was a scheduled Flat Earth “debate” between Rob Skiba and an alleged skeptic. Forget that. I wanted to have my own Flat Earth debate right now! I needed to talk to this fellow. I waited patiently out in the hallway while things finished up, but when the speaker appeared—­alone—­I called him over and asked if I could take him out to dinner (my treat), on the condition that we spend the whole time debating Flat Earth. How could he refuse? Actually, many people would have, but I’d just witnessed quite an impressive performance and I had my hopes up that if I approached him in just the right way, he’d accept. I was honest and told him I was a skeptic. That I was a philosopher and scholar of science denial, and even that I was writing a book about this, but I would love to talk to him. To my delight, he accepted on one condition: that while I was trying to recruit him, he would try to recruit me! What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 19 We didn’t have far to walk, since we decided to eat at the hotel restaurant. Just the two of us sitting across from one another at a small table. I asked him if I could take notes, and he said yes, and even offered that we could record the session if I cared to. I declined, feeling that this might interfere with our conversation. I didn’t want either of us to have to “perform” for anyone but just have an honest, face-­to-­face encounter. He thought that was OK. We ordered our food, and then jumped right in. I started by asking him to say a bit more about his life. It had been hard. He had a life-­threatening medical condition and lived in a trailer, but was evicted from the property it had been on, and moved it to his mother’s driveway. Her landlord had also made him move, and he ended up having to sell the trailer, which was painful because the Flat Earth community had taken up a collection to buy it for him. It wasn’t clear where he lived now, and I didn’t ask. Now it was his turn. He seemed intrigued that someone like me would choose to come to a Flat Earth conference. He was wary (of course) but also disarmingly open and straightforward, and said that he wanted to ask me a question. “As an outsider who has now learned a bit about us: do you think that Flat Earth is ahead of its time?” I was worried that if I gave a straight answer, it would immediately put us at odds, so I said, “Let’s come back to that at the end... ​I’m here to learn from you.” We never did get back to the question, which is probably good because my answer would have been, “No, you’re about five hundred years too late.” Then we got down to business. I knew I’d probably never get another chance like this. Here I was talking to a Flat Earther who was intelligent, genuine, and a very skilled debater. I even liked him. I didn’t want to squan- der any goodwill and trust we’d built so far, but neither did I want to gam- ble that it would still be there later in our conversation, so I decided to start off with my most important question: “I understand that your view is compatible with belief in a creator, yet it doesn’t seem to be faith-­based. You guys are looking for evidence, which means that evidence must matter for your beliefs. So what specific evidence would it take to prove to you that your belief in Flat Earth was wrong?” He gave me a pained expression. I don’t think he’d ever heard that question before. But while his face furrowed, I saw his mind engage as he considered the question carefully. “Well, first, I’d have to be part of any experiment. Otherwise I wouldn’t trust it.” I said OK. He went on to 20 Chapter 1 speculate that perhaps a fully funded rocket that would allow him to go up sixty-­two miles (to the imaginary point where space begins) would allow him to see for himself. I explained that bomber planes had gone up as high as 80,000 feet and could see the curvature of the Earth from there, but he said perhaps the window was curved, so how could he be sure? We both sat for a minute with the idea of what it would mean to go to the edge of space and look out the window. He said that people in the Flat Earth movement loved him and that if he came back from a rocket trip and said that he no longer believed in it, they would be devastated. A lot of people would lose their belief. And, of course, it was also unrealistic to think that he would ever be able to go.37 I then proposed the earlier experiment I’d heard about in Skiba’s semi- nar, where we might take a boat ride way out in Lake Michigan, beyond where it would be possible to see the superior mirage effect, and then look back at the shoreline.38 Perhaps a hundred miles. If we still saw the Chi- cago skyline, then Flat Earth was right; if not, then it was wrong. It would be a definitive experiment. He didn’t agree with this. He said there were too many variables based on weather and water vapor in the air. I said we could wait for whatever he might define as “perfect conditions,” but he said no... ​too many variables. I could see the struggle on his face. Just as much as I wanted to debunk Flat Earth, he wanted to be able to tell me what would count as definitive proof for him. He was smart enough to see the box my question had put him in: if he refused all evidence, it meant that maybe his beliefs were based on faith after all. For a while he said nothing. Then I proposed that together we take a flight over Antarctica. I had heard several of the other speakers that day say that Antarctica was not a continent and that evidence of the conspiracy to cover this up was shown by the fact that there were no direct flights over Antarctica. At this point he said, “But there aren’t any flights over Antarc- tica.” I said, “Oh, no?” and reached into my back pocket, where I had come prepared with the itinerary for a direct flight from Santiago, Chile, to Auck- land, New Zealand. If Flat Earth was right, such a flight shouldn’t exist.39 “Did you ever take that flight?” he said. “No, but here it is.”40 He said he’d have to take the flight himself to believe it. If he could bring his own equipment and do any experiments he liked while onboard, then he would believe in a global Earth. What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 21 Wow! I was impressed. For the first time at this conference, I had gotten an answer to my hardest question. In a way, Mike Hughes had answered it by saying that if he went up to the Kármán line and saw a round Earth, he would give up his views. But the chance of that actually happening, on a homemade rocket no less, seemed wildly impractical. But here I was sitting across from a Flat Earther who was willing to come with me on a commer- cial flight that actually existed, and we could take it together. The flight cost $800 per person. He said he didn’t have the money. But how hard would it be for me to go home and set up a Facebook or GoFundMe fundraiser for all of my philosophical and scientific buddies to fund a trip like this? Wouldn’t you chip in fifty bucks to watch a Flat Earther take a flight that he said didn’t exist, then have to reckon with the consequences when that flight flew over Antarctica? I told him that I could fund this myself, probably by the time I got back to Boston. Now my dinner companion was starting to look quite uncomfortable—­ and to tell you the truth, I was a bit worried too. Things were getting seri- ous. If we were actually going to do this, I’d need to have some sort of reassurance that when it was all over he wouldn’t say, “Well, the windows were curved,” or something like that. And what were these experiments he wanted to perform? I didn’t want to raise and spend $1600 of other people’s money, only to have him back out at the end. We needed a criterion. I gently offered that if we were serious about this, it was probably best to agree beforehand on what would count as a “successful” confirma- tion or refutation of Flat Earth. I proposed that a good measure might be whether we had to stop for fuel. If I was right, and Antarctica was a conti- nent that was only about a thousand miles across, then we should be able to make the trip without stopping to refuel. In fact, if you think about it, the minute you stepped on the plane, it would be an enormous leap of faith, for if you did not believe we could make it, where could you stop in Antarctica for fuel? If, on the other hand, he was right that Antarctica was a mountain range—­about 24,000 miles long—­then we would never be able to make it on one tank. Even the longest nonstop flights can go only about 10,000 miles without stopping to refuel.41 There are no around-­the-­ world flights (even flying east to west) that can make it without stopping. So was that OK? To my delight and amazement, he agreed. And we shook hands! I was brimming with excitement, for I knew quite clearly at this point that I had 22 Chapter 1 him. Maybe at some level he realized this too, for he slowly started to shake his head. “No, I can’t,” he said. “I take it back.” “Why?” I asked. He said that perhaps fuel stops were an illusion. That maybe we were conditioned to think that planes needed to stop to refuel on all of these other flights, so that when the day came that we wanted to take one over Antarctica, we’d say that the Flat Earther had to stop for fuel. But what if we didn’t? What if you could make it completely around the world on a single tank of jet fuel, and all of those other flights were just a shill to throw us off the scent? I couldn’t believe it. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that you believe the entire history of jet travel, both in this country and around the world, has been a hoax since before you and I were born, to guard against the day when we would be sitting here tonight trying to come up with some crite- rion to measure whether the Earth was flat?” He said yes. At that point—­for all intents and purposes—­our dinner was effectively over.42 His position had been demolished, and we hadn’t even finished our entrées. Rather than getting up and leaving, however, I instead took a page from his seminar and kept my cool. If I’d left, it would have been rude. Plus I’d forfeit any chance to advance the dialogue. You don’t change some- one’s mind by going back to your room and “being right.” But I also felt the weight of Thomas Henry Huxley’s admonition that “life is too short to occupy oneself with slaying the slain more than once.” What should I do?43 I could see that he was a bit upset, so I moved things onto familiar turf and just let him talk for a bit. He asked if I was spiritual; I said no. He then went on to explain the relationship between God and the Devil and give me a mini-­seminar on Flat Earth 101. At that point I was fine with that. I probed a bit, asking, “But if the devil is competent enough to hide such a big truth, why does he leave so many clues that you seem to have picked up on?” He explained that the truth is often hidden in plain sight. That people in con- trol can control the narrative too. Just like what happened at the Parkland shooting. My blood pressure jumped. My wife and I have a very good friend whose sister lost a child in the massacre at Sandy Hook. If I got angry, this dinner really would be over. But how could I let him get away with this hogwash? He began to talk about how the Parkland kids were “crisis actors.” That the What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 23 mom of one of the “victims” said, “I don’t want thoughts and prayers, I want gun control,” which made him a little suspicious. He said, “Isn’t that exactly what the anti-­gun lobby wanted her to say?” At that point our conversation devolved into a long back-­and-­forth over conspiracy theories and burden of proof, Occam’s Razor, and why I had such a big problem with the idea that you could count speculations and suspicions as evidence. I made a calculated decision not to share that I knew a family who had been traumatized by this kind of nonsense. Later I regretted that. Maybe I should have blasted him. He wasn’t the only victim in the world. Maybe he needed to hear that the kind of logic he was using had real consequences for real people. By the time our plates were cleared—­now past the second hour—­we had returned to the topic of science denial. He said he didn’t like how climate-­ change deniers and anti-­vaxxers looked down on Flat Earthers. He was also upset about the “moral superiority” of scientists and made a case that if they were really scientists they should want to investigate Flat Earth. I told him that in science you had to earn your place at the table; that scientists didn’t just go around looking into every conspiracy. “Well, I don’t distrust science,” he said. “I distrust pseudoscience.” “Me too,” I said. So we ended on a point of agreement. As we got up to leave, I paid the check and he put a little Flat Earth bro- chure on the table for the waitress. We shook hands and parted on the best terms we could. He was a skilled, relentless debater who never gave an inch. It was jarring to me that he had so many unsubstantiated beliefs, and I won- dered how any intelligent person could do that. People sometimes dismiss Flat Earthers as crazy or stupid, but I don’t think that explains what’s going on. Yes, there is deep ignorance of basic physics, and a heaping dose of willful ignorance and resistance at a level that may seem pathological, but the mindset was about something else. Here was a guy who knew enough rhetoric that he could counter (to his own satisfaction at least) anything I said. Of course he was wrong. But did he know that? And if he did, would he ever admit it? Probably not, but that didn’t necessarily make him crazy either. For there were too many others out there just like him. The argument he’d made over dinner had the same form as virtually every other denialist belief. Even if climate-­change deniers and anti-­vaxxers seem less extreme than Flat Earthers, they are using the same playbook. Even its own adherents would admit that Flat Earth is extreme. Some even wear that as a badge of honor. But I left thinking that it wasn’t the specific 24 Chapter 1 content of Flat Earth beliefs that made it ridiculous. It was how they rea- soned. And that wasn’t unique to Flat Earth itself. The actual debate on the main stage at the conference that evening was a bust. They had brought in a shill, and I left after ten minutes. He started by saying that he was a Catholic and that he’d been interpreting the Bible for forty-­five years and accepted it as an authority “as far as it could go.” Perhaps the Bible had no business making pronouncements about physics, he said, but he wouldn’t know. I left at the point where he said, “Each of us have to be humbled before the word of God.” It was the end of the first day. The following morning I had a brief conversation with Robbie Davidson, the conference organizer, when I passed him in the hallway. He didn’t know that I wasn’t a Flat Earther, so I asked, “I’ve heard a lot of researchers here say they don’t have enough money for their experiments. You must be making a lot of money on this conference. Do you make any donations to them?” He replied, “I don’t make a lot of money on these. These cost a lot to put up. My wife and I lost money on the first one.” I pointed out that he had future conferences coming up, so perhaps he could do a fundraiser to get donations for some of the researchers. He said he’d take that into consideration. Given the day I’d had yesterday, most of the sessions seemed like review. One after the other they all covered the same material. The only one that I was really looking forward to was called “Talking to Your Family and Friends about Flat Earth.” Once again, I got there early. The session was run by two Flat Earth “researchers,” both of whom seemed quite smug but promised to have different points of view: one was drawn to Flat Earth by Christianity and the other said he was secular.44 The secular one said that he lived near the World Trade Center on 9/11 and had a view of it out his window. What he saw happening in real life wasn’t what was being reported on the news. It made him start to doubt things. His belief in Flat Earth apparently fol- lowed soon after this, as he started to watch some online videos and tried to debunk them, but couldn’t (and apparently assumed that if a person as intelligent as himself couldn’t do it, they must be true). He said that his perspective was not Bible-­based. It was based on “evidence.” (I noted the familiar logic: the only criterion is proof. So if you can’t prove that the Earth is round then it must be flat. QED.) What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 25 The next speaker said that his views were Bible-­based and that he was drawn to Flat Earth because it aligned so well with his beliefs about the Bible. He’d never questioned 9/11 before he started to question the shape of the Earth. As with so many others at the conference, I surmised, Flat Earth was a gateway to other conspiracies. He went on to say that questioning global Earth led him to question NASA. “We’re not taught how to think, we’re taught what to think.” He felt that we had been brainwashed, and that fluoride in the water only made it tougher to learn how to think. Here both speakers spoke favorably of the “red pill” scene in The Matrix, which brought a murmur of approval from the crowd. Everyone seemed to love that film. They were the people who knew the truth, and they were there to “wake the others,” which is what today’s session was all about. They began with an interesting philosophical point: that there was a dif- ference between causation and correlation. Having evidence that appeared to support something didn’t amount to proof! The evidence in favor of global Earth doesn’t prove it. It just correlates with it. But it also correlates (they said) with Flat Earth. So your job in talking to people about this is to get them to take that first step and begin questioning things. In fact, one of the most effective tactics is to let the person you’re trying to convince ask you a question. After some ridiculous “evidence” for Flat Earth having to do with an alleged collusion between Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun (who designed a rocket that was a precursor to the Apollo space mission), I was treated to the insight that if you looked closely at Walt Disney’s signature, you could see that the loops hid three sixes in it! Of course, this didn’t “prove” anything, I imagine, but there it was: evidence. So it had to be explained. And so on... When the presentation finally returned to how to convince others to believe in Flat Earth, they said that not everyone could be converted. The speaker at yesterday’s “debate,” for instance, was a lost cause. “He’s got too much to lose,” one of the speakers said. “We’ll never get him.” Simi- larly, they offered that teachers and scientists were the hardest to convince because they were the most indoctrinated! A bit of practical advice was to walk away from anyone who said that they didn’t believe in conspiracy theories. It wasn’t worth your time. What was essential, though, was to know the details of the globalist system. Know how fast the Earth is (alleg- edly) spinning or rotating. They said that most globalists didn’t even know 26 Chapter 1 their own system (which is probably true), so it was helpful to get them into areas where you “knew the facts.” This was especially helpful in talking to strangers, because you were probably never going to see them again. But talking to friends and family could be the hardest thing of all. The goal for a Flat Earth activist is to “plant the seed” of doubt, they said. Don’t try to bulldoze people, especially family and friends. With strangers, make them commit to a length of time to discuss it. No hit and runs. Estab- lish some ground rules, like “you can ask me a question, but then you’ve got to wait for me to finish.” Burden of proof was essentially not an issue here. Their strategy was to get someone to question their own beliefs—­or admit that they didn’t know something—­then see where that led. The “secular” Flat Earther said, “If someone believes 9/11 as reported in the news, you’ve got a hard job ahead of you.” What might work, though, is to recognize that even if you don’t convince someone on the spot, you can plant a seed of doubt that comes to fruition later. Maybe ask people to research Flat Earth in private for two weeks, without telling anyone else what they’re doing. After that, if they’re convinced, they can share it with others.45 Then I heard one of the most stunning pieces of advice I’d heard in the whole conference: that it was easier to have a relationship with someone you’d met through the Flat Earth community. “Look around at everyone in this community!” That got a big round of applause from the ballroom audience. It was as if they were trying to isolate themselves from others who might cause them to question their own beliefs. Now it was time for the Q and A. The first question was how to advocate for Flat Earth through your church. One fellow was getting hostility from his preacher. He was afraid of getting kicked out. The speakers’ advice was to pursue others in the congre- gation. Perhaps put Flat Earth literature in the Bibles in the pews. Second question: “What should I do if I am a Christian above all else, and I wonder whether my focus on Flat Earth is conflicting with my idea of teaching the Gospel? We are heading toward the end times. I need to be out there saving people.” Answer: Try to infiltrate your congregation. Third question: “What should I do if I’m out there as a Flat Earth activist and I’m in a group that is hostile to what I’m saying?” Answer: Lay down the rules. They can ask you one question at a time and then you get to answer. You don’t want to be peppered with questions and then have some- one get frustrated and say, “What does it matter?” and walk away. What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 27 At this point, one of the speakers shared that one of the most frustrating conversations he’d ever had was with a very polite man who just kept say- ing, “Yes, the Earth is flat, but why is it a perfect circle?” He’d explain, and then the guy would say again, “Yes, but why is it a perfect circle?” At this point I almost burst out laughing. If I ever encounter a Flat Earther in Har- vard Square, now I know exactly what to say to them. The speaker shook his head and said, “Some people just don’t want to learn.” Now it was time for the question that nearly broke me. Seriously. So far, for the most part, I’d been able to keep my cool—­even at dinner the night before—­but now I started to wonder if I was going to lose it. The question was asked by a man standing next to a little girl, about five or six years old. He said: “What can I do to keep my kid from getting bullied in school? We’re grown-­ups and we can take it, but she’s being persecuted for her parents’ beliefs.” At this point my heart broke. Although I’d seen a couple of kids at the conference, I now felt the weight of the problem. Virtually all of the adults—­by their own admission—­used to be globalists and were converted through YouTube videos. And if they’d been converted once, perhaps they could be converted back. But what chance did you have if you were raised in a cult? If you grew up in a family where all you heard day after day was conspiracy and not to trust science?46 That little girl never stood a chance. My hands started to shake as I waited for the answer. First the audience applauded the little girl for standing up for her beliefs. Then the speaker got a wicked smile on his face. “Kids are the best ones to go after,” he said. Since the teacher was admonishing the child for bringing up Flat Earth in class, he advised her to go out and talk to the kids on the play- ground, where the teacher wasn’t listening. “Some kids are willing to learn.” I looked around the room. The odds were a hundred to one against me. What would happen if I raised my voice and yelled, “Bullshit!”? Instead, I got up and left the conference. That night I didn’t eat dinner with any of the Flat Earthers, and vowed to get out of the hotel. It was the last night of the conference anyway, and I didn’t want to hang around for the awards banquet. So I just left and ate at a local restaurant. While I did, my thoughts came to me thick and fast. For everyone who thinks that Flat Earthers are harmless—­and that the best way to deal with them is to just ignore them or laugh—­I wondered if they knew what was coming. Based on what I’d seen, the Flat Earthers 28 Chapter 1 weren’t just wrong, they were dangerous. They were organized and they were committed. And they were adding new members every day. The very fact that they’d had two sessions on recruiting new members—­not to men- tion the convention itself—­meant that they were expanding. They were taking up collections to buy billboards. They were courting celebrities. They were running street clinics to “wake people up.” As such, they were at least a menace to science and education. But they were also contributing to a culture of denial that has gripped this country over the last few years, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to refuse to vaccinate their kids, politicians to refuse to take action on climate change, and gun-­toting pro- testors to parade during a pandemic. Not only that, I think that Flat Earthers are dangerous in their own right. Right now, most people laugh at them. But I defy you to go to one of their conferences and keep on laughing. We used to laugh at anti-­evolutionists too. How many years before Flat Earthers are running for a seat on your local school board, with an agenda to “teach the controversy” in the phys- ics classroom? If you think that can’t happen—­that it couldn’t possibly get that bad—­consider this: eleven million people in Brazil believe in Flat Earth; that is 7 percent of their population.47 I took two things from my time at FEIC 2018. First, I was right that the underlying reasoning of Flat Earthers was the same as that of climate-­ change deniers, anti-­evolutionists, anti-­vaxxers, and others. It wasn’t just the content of their beliefs, but the reasoning process that had gotten them there that was corrupt. Ironically, I also learned a bit from the Flat Earthers themselves about what might be best to push back against them. Remain calm. Be respectful. Engage them in conversation. Try to build some trust. Say what you will about their beliefs and reasoning, they had the conver- sion tactics just right. In order to change someone’s beliefs, you have to change their identity. As I got ready to fly home the next day, I had more time to reflect. Yes, I’d learned something about how to talk to a science denier, but had I made a real dent in even one of the Flat Earthers’ beliefs? Well, how would I know? No, I didn’t convert anyone. No one tore off their lanyard and followed me out to the parking lot. But was that the criterion? And was that the point? I went to FEIC 2018 not to change minds but to understand better how their minds worked. I would dearly love to have had more influence, but there are no magic words you can say to convert someone on the spot, especially What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 29 in a crowd of their peers, when they have come to a conference expressly for the purpose of reinforcing their identity. And hadn’t I at least planted the seed of doubt a few times? When I buttonholed Skiba coming off the stage, we drew quite a little audience. When I had dinner with the other speaker, I’d given him plenty of reason to doubt, even if he didn’t listen. Bringing someone back from a belief like this is probably a long game. It takes a while to build up trust. I couldn’t just go once, tell them the truth, and expect a miracle. But at least I had shown up. That had to count for something. And what if, in future years, more people did what I tried to do, once they were aware of the problem? Sitting in the departure lounge at the Denver airport, I spied a pilot for a major commercial airline walk past. Suddenly I was in The Matrix. Did he know? Was he in on the conspiracy? It was weird. I’d spent the last forty-­ eight hours surrounded by people who believed in an incredible conspiracy that the Earth was flat. And here I was surrounded by people who almost certainly did not believe that. But who could tell? Curiously, even though I was back in civilization again, I still felt isolated. I felt infected. Perhaps there was another Matrix... I hustled a bit and caught up with the pilot, who was leaning against a pillar, texting on his cell phone. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said. He nodded, but surely had no idea what was coming. “I just got back from two days at a Flat Earth convention. Now, don’t worry, I’m not one of them. I’m a scholar who was there to study how they end up believing such a crazy thing. But a couple of the speakers said things about air travel and the curvature of the Earth that I know are wrong, so can I ask you a question?” I’m not sure he completely believed me. Even if I was telling the truth, it was a lot to take in at once. But he nodded and said, “Sure.” We both had a little while before our flights. He said they were right that the compass does funny things over the South Pole. There was some literature on this that he said he’d send me (which he did). But they were wrong about flights over Antarctica. There was one that he knew of, but there weren’t a lot. The problem was that under aviation regulations you could only fly a route like that in a 777 or above, because you had to be within a few hours of a “ditch” site, where you could land in an emergency. This meant that even if the fastest route between South America and Australia was over Antarctica, for commercial travel they probably weren’t going to take that route.48 30 Chapter 1 When I asked about seeing the Earth’s curvature in flight, he smiled. “Not at thirty thousand feet. I’ve heard that some of the bombers go up to sixty thousand feet. At that point you can see curvature. But I’ve never seen it myself.” “So you’re not in on the conspiracy, then?” “No,” he said with a smile. “I guess not.” We traded business cards and later exchanged a few emails. I apologized for the weird questions, and hurried away to catch my flight. But I suspect I made his day. Now he had a story to tell. By the time I landed in Boston, I felt much better. I was home. The last two days had felt like a month, but I was out from under now. It was worth going, but also strangely stressful. I’d had a few moments of unreality along the way where I’d ask, “Is it me or is it them?” I headed for the men’s room before going to get my luggage. As I locked the stall behind me, I looked over at the wall and saw this piece of graffiti (I kid you not): “The Earth is Flat.” It would have been smart to end the chapter here, but that’s not where the story ends. When I got back home, I found that I was a minor celeb- rity, with all of my stories and observations. People at parties would crowd around and make me tell it again about my time at Flat Earth. I already knew that I was going to write about this in a book, but there was so much immediate interest that I decided I couldn’t wait. Seven months later I had the cover story of Newsweek—­June 14, 2019—­with the astonishing title “The Earth Is Round.”49 After that, I did a few radio shows and some other publicity, which led to lunch with a local physicist who’d heard me on NPR. He invited me to do an opinion piece called “Calling All Physicists” for the American Journal of Phys- ics.50 In it I told my story (again) but also put out a plea for more scientists to take Flat Earth seriously. I’d spent two days talking about reasoning strategy, but asked for someone with some physics training to please come help me crash the next Flat Earth conference and do some “content rebuttal.” Amazingly, I got an offer. Bruce Sherwood is a retired physicist who lives in Texas. He and his wife, Ruth Chabay, are the authors of one of the lead- ing textbooks on how to teach physics using computational modeling. Bruce was patient, focused, and completely fascinated with the stories I told him. Better than that, he took them seriously enough that at several points he said, “That’s interesting,” and promised to go off and do some research. What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention 31 After several rounds of questions—­involving me and one of his collabora- tors, Derek Roff—­one day he announced that he had built a 3-­D computer model of Flat Earth! I couldn’t believe it. As I examined the model, he explained that it would allow Flat Earthers to explore their own system, and see if what they were predicting was consistent with their own theory. Of course it wasn’t. For instance, if they were right that Antarctica was a mountain range at the perimeter of the Earth, what did that mean for their view of different stars? “Walk inside the model and look up,” Bruce said. “If you’re standing at the North Pole, then Polaris should be directly overhead. Fair enough. But if you’re standing at the ‘edge of the Earth’—­and Polaris is only a few thousand miles overhead—­shouldn’t you at best see it at an angle? But if you’re actu- ally in Antarctica, you won’t be able to see it at all. Their model is inconsis- tent with physical observation. And they can see that for themselves.” Here is a link to the model.51 Try it for yourself. What genius to design something that takes Flat Earth seriously and conforms to their demand for firsthand observational evidence. The model may not prove global Earth, but it does disprove Flat Earth, or at least the model that those at FEIC were advocating. How do they explain its incon- sistencies? Now the burden of proof is back where it belongs. And here is the best part. At the next available opportunity, Bruce and I are going to go to a future FEIC convention, rent a booth at the swag fair, and invite people to try out his model.52 We’ll both be there—­a physicist and a philosopher side-­by-­side—­to engage in both content rebuttal and technique rebuttal. As the Flat Earth activists said themselves, it’s not just about one conversation. It’s about staying calm and building trust. And for that you need to keep showing up. Who knows if we’ll actually end up convincing anyone. But wouldn’t it be a kick if my dinner companion showed up again?