Fake moon landings and a flat Earth: why do athletes love conspiracy theories?

With Christmas Day just gone, it seems fitting that Steph Curry already has something he’d probably like to take back. Two weeks ago, the Golden State Warriors star gave the 24-hour news cycle an incredible gift during an appearance on The Ringer’s Winging It podcast. The show, which features the Atlanta Hawks’ Vince Carter and Kent Bazemore as hosts, styles itself as more of a hang session than a proper interview; the point is to give listeners a sense of conversations that players actually have when scoop-hungry reporters aren’t parsing their every word.

For 70 minutes the Warriors sharpshooter played along as Carter recalled his experience playing with Curry’s father, Dell. Had you zoned out around the 45-minute mark, you may have missed the playful digression about dinosaurs sounds (“A bone don’t tell you what a sound is,” one player quips) that prompted Curry to suggest that the 1969 moon landing (and the five others that followed) never happened. Clearly, CNN’s forthcoming Apollo 11 documentary can’t get here fast enough for them.

The blowback to Curry’s throwaway thought was swift and strong. Nick Gurol, the Philadelphia science teacher who had pushed back against Kyrie Irving after the Boston Celtics standout claimed – while appearing on another NBA players’ podcast in early 2017, incidentally – that the world is flat, was crying foul all over again. Former Nasa spaceman José Hernández accused Curry of promoting “idiotic conspiracy theories.”

But not all the reactions to Curry’s astronomical gaffe were so harsh (at worst, maybe it disqualifies him from starring in the long-rumored sequel to Space Jam…). Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine mostly laughed off Curry’s remarks: “I can’t imagine he really believes that,” he told TMZ. Nasa invited Curry on a tour of its Houston lunar lab, while retired astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a record 520 days in space, visited with Curry and stressed the importance of scientific literacy.

Ultimately, Curry apologized for his comments – which, he strained to note, were “obviously” made in jest. But his contrition didn’t sit well with Irving, who had only just walked back his flat-Earth claims in October. “There’s world hunger going on, there are political things going on,” Irving told a gaggle of beat reporters. “There are so many higher things on the totem pole of society that matter to human beings. But, hey, Curry says he doesn’t believe in the moon [landings]? It’s on CNN. And they say we’re just jocks, we’re just athletes. But it’s on your channel. We’re [thinkers] but you don’t want us to be that.”

It used to be that conspiracy theorists hewed to a type. They wore tinfoil hats, babbled incoherently to themselves and, by and large, were little more than a nuisance to the onlookers with the curiosity or the compassion to engage them. But in the current post-truth era, where crowdsourced information has replaced peer-reviewed research and confirmation bias stands in for intellectual curiosity, the truthers congregate online to double down on old conspiracy theories (like the Earth being flat) and breathe life into new ones (like Hillary Clinton being a lizard person).

Science can’t hold a candle to celebrity, and sports personalities seem keener than ever to stir the pot. The past year alone has seen ex-NFL tailback Reggie Bush trade anti-vax views with his 2.88 million Twitter followers, retired All-Star pitcher Curt Schilling dismiss one of the victims of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as a crisis actor, and even the former England cricket all-rounder Freddie Flintoff joined the flat-Earth movement. And while Irving – whose comments some say are satire anyway –is right to point out that there are more pressing matters to consider than whatever far-out notions that he and his fellow sports celebrities kick around in their safe spaces, he and Curry should know better than anyone the weight that their endorsements carries. If sports heroes can sell sneakers and sugar water, odds are they can pretty much sell anything. When the Seattle Seahawks’ Pete Carroll was reported to have confronted a former US Army general with popular 9/11 conspiracy theories, those truthers cheered the Super Bowl-winning coach for boosting their credibility. It makes you wonder how big the John Birch Society might be today if their commie-fighting followers on the 1984 Padres pitching staff had come along 25 years later.

And if some of these ideas haven’t spoiled your family gatherings this holiday season, well, just give it time. Dr James Davis, an associate professor of psychology at Benedictine University, chalks up these flights of fancy to the human propensity to make meaning. “An evolutionary advantage to humans is that we are able to make causal links between events,” he tells the Guardian. “Our brains are so adept at this that oftentimes we will make causal links that don’t exist.” And when sports heroes do this, their young admirers are most likely to receive their conclusions as gospel. Gurol, the Philly science teacher, reckons “anywhere from half to 75%” of his class would believe “whatever [Curry] says.”

It’s not just kids. Sports fans are another captive audience with an overactive imagination. Under the right circumstances, they could believe anything: that the NFL triggered the power outage that delayed Super Bowl XVLII to inject life into a game that was quickly turning into a blowout (“Ahh, Roger Goodell,” Ravens linebacker Terrell Suggs told ESPN, “he always has something up his sleeve…); that a heavily favored New Zealand side was intentionally given food poisoning before the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, paving the way for South Africa’s breakthrough victory; that Sonny Liston took a dive against Muhammad Ali in 1965; that NBA commissioner David Stern rigged the 1985 draft for the struggling New York Knicks with a chilled envelope. Anytime things go against one rooting interest or the other, there must be an explanation. There must be a real story that just needs to be uncovered.

Doubtless for some, the fact that even two highly intelligent men like Curry and Irving could get swept up in the conspiracy theory craze might seem the most far-fetched idea of all. But it makes perfect sense to Davis. In August, the Benedictine psychologist was the lead author of a study in the European Journal of Social Psychology that found African Americans to be vastly more likely than whites to endorse conspiracy theories; that’s partly because of their diminished status in society, and partly because of the all-too-real conspiracies that have been perpetrated against them – like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the cellular plundering of Henrietta Lacks and the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Mich. “If you live in a world where it is very plausible that there are all these conspiracies against you and your group,” says Davis, “then it’s less of a jump to be like, ‘well, the moon landing was a conspiracy.’”

Flat Earths, faked moon landings, lizard people: there are objective facts to rebut these theories. And if athletes still aren’t buying it? That doesn’t make them nuttier than Christmas fruitcake. According to a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Political Science, “half of the American public consistently endorse at least one conspiracy theory.” If anything, it makes athletes just like the rest of us.