Is the Earth flat? Meet the people questioning science

To the casual observer, there is nothing remarkable about the crowd gathered in a convention room at a central Birmingham hotel. Middle managers on a staff team-building exercise, perhaps. But their conversations give them away. The clique in the corner discussing the moon landings. The man at the bar chastising an acquaintance for holding on to the science he was taught at school. The woman who asks another, “If they’ve lied about this, what else are they lying about?” The various conversations peter out as the open-mic session gets under way. A 40-something woman approaches the stage. “My name’s Sarah,” she says. “And I’m a Flat Earther.” Other audience members offer similar anecdotes: epiphanies, followed by a complete rebuttal of their previous beliefs. Few are able to explain why a conspiracy might exist, why scientists might go to such great lengths to create false evidence.

I’m in central Birmingham, at the UK’s first Flat Earth convention, a weekend of lectures and workshops designed to provide believers with opportunities to engage with others who subscribe to the same hypothesis: that the Earth is not a globe, as most of us think, but some kind of plane, with edges. Around 200 people have paid to attend.

I’d arrived an hour earlier and found a chair six or seven rows back from the stage. Behind me, two men in their 20s are scrolling through images of the Earth taken from space. Every once in a while they land on a photograph that piques their interest, enter into a brief discussion, and move on. A middle-aged man a couple of seats away leans in to ask the pair what they are doing.

“Looking for the Photoshopped images,” they say.

Around the room, there is general consensus that Nasa is in the habit of doctoring its imagery, and the agency is considered untrustworthy. For long-standing Flat Earthers, the information is old-hat. They’ve used Nasa as the punchline of acerbic jokes for years and have rejected their discoveries as elitist artifice, part of a cover-up. But the young men have yet to fully commit to the community. They are sceptical, still, of its members’ hypotheses, though they’ve bought tickets to the convention and arrived with open minds. If a speaker can offer evidence that challenges conventional science, they say, they’d happily let go of their deep-seated beliefs. But that isn’t going to stop them from searching for proof of their own.

Soon, the three of them are deep in conversation. The older man introduces his take on the Nasa cover-up. That the colour of the ocean in one image is different to the colour of the ocean in another; that in two pictures the continents seem to be in the same position, but in a third they appear to have shifted. The images are riddled with discrepancies, he says. “They’re all different!”

I first discovered the Flat Earth community last year, when the cricketer Andrew Flintoff came out publicly in support of the movement’s theories. Flintoff’s announcement led me to a YouTube video, and then another, and another after that. In each, a presenter denounced conventional science as flawed, if not entirely fabricated, and offered alternative hypotheses. Many of the presenters are speakers at the convention: Dave Murphy (29,000 subscribers), Martin Liedtke (800+ videos), Nathan Oakley (1.5m views). Most of the convention’s guests have come to the Flat Earth movement in a similar way: through videos, first, and later comment threads and forum discussions. When the community was still very young, around 2013, theories spread quickly, though only between outlying networks of conspiracy theorists. Now hypotheses appear weekly, released across hundreds of online channels. Many come from the US, where the scene simmers not far below the mainstream. Conventions are popping up throughout North America. In August, believers will travel to Edmonton, Canada. In November they’ll meet in Denver, Colorado. Conference organisers are planning the world’s first Flat Earth cruise. It will set sail some time in 2019.

The American community is big and brash and filled with personalities vying for public influence. There, Flat Earthers have secured airtime on almost every major television network, sometimes primetime slots, and the movement has been lent credibility by celebrity support. (The rapper BoB is a believer.) But, because Flat Earth has been a YouTube phenomenon, the same hypotheses tend to appear everywhere: that the Earth is flat and round, like a pancake. That it is surrounded on all sides by the Antarctic, a huge impassable wall of ice, and protected by a dome. That it is not hurtling through space at great speed but rooted somehow, an immovable mass: still, calm, glorious, the epicentre of the universe.

This is contrary to thousands of years of science, of course. Aristotle claimed the world was a sphere some time around 350BC. Plato agreed. So did Pythagoras, Archimedes and later, in 240BC, the astronomer Eratosthenes, who was among the first to estimate the Earth’s circumference. It was confirmed in the 1500s when a Spanish expedition led by Magellan circumnavigated the globe. Most of us have believed ever since, though not all, apparently.

Those at the beginning of their Flat Earth journey typically encounter hundreds of ideas – some alike, some wildly contradictory – in a very short space of time. Nearly always the research period ends in what believers refer to as a kind of awakening, a moment when the information they’ve consumed coalesces, and they achieve insight the rest of us aren’t able to grasp. Sometimes that takes three months. For many it takes at least six. A woman at the convention tells me she has so far logged 8,000 hours of research, though others consider that extreme.

Often research is conducted alone, at a computer screen. The convention is meant to remedy this. “It’s really nice to be in a room with open-minded people,” one man tells me while we are queuing for coffee during a break in the lectures. The comment has multiple meanings. Many in the audience have only ever experienced the community online. (The speakers, who walk around the hotel with an air of minor celebrity, are regularly referred to by their YouTube handles.) Every now and then a group might meet informally in a pub, but often the turn-out is tiny. When, on the opening night, a speaker asks members of the audience to raise a hand if this is the first time they’ve met another Flat Earther, many do.

But the comment hides darker sentiment, too. Coming out in opposition to conventional science can be fraught. I hear stories of family bust-ups, of partners never speaking to each other again. “I don’t enjoy being a Flat Earther,” one speaker says. “People ridicule you.” Another woman tells me, “My friends, they thought I was crazy.” Believers hide their views from loved ones, fearful of potential repercussions: the blank stares, the angry retorts. It isn’t just “really nice” to be in a room with open-minded people, it is far less emotionally taxing.

During a break between lectures, I find Sarah, the woman from the open mic, and ask her how it felt to uncover the theories. “I was just like…” She throws her hands above her head in a mimicry of sudden shock. “Mind. Blown.” Later, she adds, “You kind of discover that everything you’ve ever known is incorrect.”

Most of the audience members watch the lectures enthralled. In one, Dave Marsh, who works for the NHS, posits that the moon is a projection. In another, Darren Nesbit, a part-time musician who drives a van for a living, suggests the Earth is diamond-shaped, not circular, and supported by colossal columns. (Walk off one edge, he says, and through a quirk of space and time you’ll appear on the other side.) Martin Liedtke presents theories with the frenzy of a child high on sugar. Watching him is fun and exciting – and utterly baffling. He offers several hypotheses – that the Earth is one of several ponds carved out of a huge crust of ice, for example – before walking off stage to almighty applause.

After Liedtke’s lecture, I find Nesbit outside, and ask him what he thought of the talk. “I was like that at first,” he says. “It’s such an amazing realisation that you want to tell the whole world. But what you don’t realise is the world isn’t ready to hear it.”

I’d spoken to Nesbit a few times previously, and I’d come to like him. While others railed headstrong against scientific convention, he advocated a measured approach to fact-finding. Search for the truth for yourself. Question things. Don’t believe everything you read. Who knows what you might find?

In an era of disinformation the message feels particularly pertinent. “Science isn’t perfect,” Chris French, a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, tells me when we speak on the phone after the conference. “And in one sense it’s good that people question authority. You need that in a healthy democracy. But you also have to have the critical thinking skills to be able to evaluate the evidence.”

At a buffet lunch on the Saturday, between instalments of a three-hour talk by a speaker who’d flown in from Argentina, I meet a 24-year-old computer science graduate called Kai. I’d noticed him the night before. He’d spoken at the open mic, but whereas many of the other guests had been upbeat, almost jubilant, his delivery had seemed laced with sadness. “I remember last year,” he said at one point. “I was so frustrated with life.”

At the buffet, I ask Kai why. “I think a big part of it is to do with lies we’re being told,” he says. “And not being in control of your own life.”

Others I speak to echo the sentiment: that the course of their lives had escaped their command, and they felt powerless to it. When I ask them to explain what their lives were like when they experienced their awakening, several describe a kind of personal crisis.

Dave Murphy, the closest thing the convention has to a superstar speaker, came to the movement after his marriage unravelled. Didi Vanh, one of the organisers, tells me she’d been “bored and frustrated with life”, and decided to research theories online. She’d been approaching 30, and thought: “What else is there?” (The Flat Earth, she says, had made her “a better person”.) Sarah had been through a hellish break-up. In those situations, she says: “I think you open up more, you crack open, and then other things present themselves.”

I bring this up with Chris French. He tells me it made sense “that some kind of psychological crisis had led these people to dramatic insight”. Conspiracy theorists are united in their rejection of conventional views and often the rejection is both a bid to reclaim personal agency and an attempt to experience community.

“It’s almost like a coping mechanism,” Rebecca Owens, lecturer in psychology at the University of Sunderland, tells me. “The belief that: ‘Actually, I have some control over this’. They’ve had this revelation and now something makes sense – while everything else in their world is chaotic.”

According to psychologists, conspiracy theorists often feel they’re somehow special: whereas the majority of the population has fallen for a false rhetoric, a conspiracy theorist has risen above it. “They have this special knowledge, this special insight,” French tells me. When the community comes together, views are mutually reinforced, and the world becomes explainable, if not entirely secure.

Isn’t that dangerous? “Believing in the Flat Earth theory isn’t really dangerous in itself,” says Mike Marshall of the Good Thinking Society, a pro-science organisation, after the convention. “But Flat Earthers tend to believe in other conspiracy theories, too.” He means the “anti-vaxxer” movement, particularly, whose subscribers reject conventional medicine as false or unnecessary, sometimes with disastrous consequences and most often to the detriment of children. This “special insight” that French talks about, is a denial of the expert view, of years of scientific progression: the world was created divinely, evolution is nonsense, vaccinations are harmful, news is fake.

“And the thing about conspiracy beliefs is that they’re kind of non-falsifiable. There’s no piece of evidence that could convince someone they’re wrong, because any evidence that does suggest they’re wrong has obviously been put there by the conspirators. In the case of the Flat Earth, that would be the scientific community.”

Towards the end of the day I walk past Kai in a corridor. Much of the audience has left, but Kai is still hunting truths. Earlier he’d told me he’d yet to fully commit to the Flat Earth movement. He’d been researching various conspiracies, and he’d yet to arrange the information he’d found into order. Now I ask if he’d been convinced.

He shakes his head and lets out big sigh. Then he says: “I’d prefer to keep my options open.”

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