Then God Has Not Abandoned Us

by Colin Dickey, from Earth Not A Globe.

Sometimes, you have to see a thing with your own eyes. I’d known well enough that there was a community of people who believed the Earth was flat, but even having devoted much of my career to investigating fringe beliefs, this seemed beyond the pale. I wasn’t sure I thought it fully legitimate; perhaps this community was nothing other than Internet trolls, trying to get a rise out of people. I had to go see them, and talk to them, myself.

Smoke blanketed the skies over Edmonton, Canada, turning the sky a dirty mustard yellow. It was 2018, and late summer wildfires had been burning across the western half of North America for weeks, part of what had become an almost omnipresent feature of the August landscape. Even early in the morning, it felt like late afternoon. Flying up from California, I’d followed the blanket of smoke between me and the Earth below, distant as a dream or a myth. Now on the ground, temperatures were hot and everything outside was haze.

But inside the West Edmonton Mall, everything felt different. The second largest mall in North America: a playground of simulacra, commerce, and lunacy that stretches almost half a million square meters. Here, you could forget the climate apocalypse outside, and lose yourself in the 800 stores catering to your any whim. But I was here for a conference in the convention center of the attached Fantasyland Hotel: the Flat Earth International Conference.

In the hallway leading to the lobby there are murals depicting the kinds of rooms you can rent: Polynesian theme, Roman themed, Outer Space themed. The Luxury Space room features a king bed plus two bunk beds built to look like capsules on some spaceship somewhere, plus a jacuzzi that looks out onto distant planets, the whole room done in black lacquer and lit with a purple glow. But the lobby itself was relatively staid, and I headed up the escalator to the mezzanine,  to the conference among muted yellows and browns. Along with my conference badge I was handed my complimentary t-shirt— a boring white tee with an encircled Canadian flag. The slogan for the conference was a lazy joke about Canada: “It’s flat, eh.”

The conference itself was well attended; held in a large ballroom, the kind made for corporate retreats and motivational speakers, there must have been somewhere around 250 attendees. The stage was a professional setup; it could have been any corporate retreat or motivational seminar. Certainly, there was an excitement in the air when the first speaker came onstage. This was Mark Sargent, as close as the Flat Earth community had to a rock star.

Sargent had created the popular YouTube video, Under the Dome, which had logged millions of hits, and in which he argues that the belief in a spherical Earth is, in fact, a recent delusion. Whatever else one may say about him, Sargent is unfailingly pleasant, with an unflappable yet gentle demeanor. He is extremely giving of his time, always willing to talk to anyone, skeptic or believer. He is the best possible public face a fringe movement could want: articulate even in his incoherence, and polite even at his most pugnacious. If so many people at this conference seemed eager to shake his hand, it was no doubt because he’d made the movement welcoming, and he’d helped these people to feel seen.

The popularity of Sargent’s YouTube channel helped propel him to the unofficial spokesperson for the movement. He got by far the most media attention by the dozen or so journalists and news crews that were there to document the proceedings. Under the Dome began as a series of discrete chapters, each ten or so minutes long, before Sargent finally pieced it together into a two-hour movie laying out his conception of history. “For the first four thousand years of our civilization, we believed that the Earth was a flattish disc,” he narrates, “surrounded by a solid dome barrier called the Firmament. All of the five major religions had their own version of this, and the churches enforced the belief. Then around 1514, a man named Copernicus created a new model of the world…. [The] new world view was promoted and took hold; the religions adapted to handle the new reality, and life moved on. More importantly, the globe model was quickly introduced into the education systems. Over the next 500 years, the challenges to this model faded, to the point where the globe was accepted as universally as physical laws such as gravity.”

It’s important to state definitively that none of this is true. Humans have always understood that the planet they lived on was spherical. The idea that we once believed that the world was flat until Columbus decided to prove everyone wrong is a nineteenth century fiction—one that was promoted, ironically, by scientists.

The most commonly cited examples of Christian Flat Earth belief were two early writers, Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes. Lactantius was a third century pagan convert to Christianity who was eventually deemed heretical after his death; Cosmas Indicopleustes was a sixth century mariner and topographer, best known for his atlas, Christian Topography. But to say “best known” is a bit of a stretch, since only three manuscripts of Cosmas’s work survived past his death, and the first translation from Greek into Latin wasn’t until 1706—hardly indicative of a landmark work being widely read and disseminated throughout the Christian world.

You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of Lactantius or Cosmas, even though you probably have heard of Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Euclid, as well as Saint Ambrose, the Venerable Bede, and Thomas Aquinas. All of these more well-known figures—and many, many more—knew the Earth to be round. The main question for much of the Greek and Medieval periods in Europe was not the shape of the Earth, but its diameter, and whether or not anyone lived on the other side of the globe.

Like many other philosophers of his time, Lactantius ridiculed the idea of “antipodes,” that is, people who lived on the other side of the Earth. This itself wasn’t controversial; most philosophers and theologians generally assumed merely that the other side of the earth was nothing but water. But Lactantius took it a step further, claiming that this discussion was born of a more general error of assuming the world was round. Cosmas argued even more strenuously that the Earth was flat, bounded by a dome-like firmament. Neither was ever taken all that seriously.

These writers were both freaks in their own times, and would have stayed that way, barely more than curiosities in the pantheon of fringe belief, had they not been resurrected in the nineteenth century. In 1828, Washington Irving published his hagiographic and heavily fictionalized, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.  In it, for the sake of dramatic tension, he invented a scene where Columbus faces off against clergy at the “Council of Salamanca”: arguing for his voyage, Columbus must respond to a group of superstitious priests who list Lactantius, “a redoubted champion of the faith,” alongside Gregory, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome. In Irving’s fictional story, Columbus emerges as a man of science warding off backwards Christian thought: “To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of scripture.”

This story gradually became used as evidence among those eager to reveal the ignorance of believers—taken up most dramatically by a man named Andrew Dickson White. Born in 1832, White was a historian who became the founder and first president of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. White envisioned Cornell as “an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.” He despised Christianity and what he perceived to be the backwardness of religion, and wanted an institution of higher learning that would push back against superstition in favor of enlightened, rational thought.

In 1869, White delivered a speech that would eventually be published under the name “The Warfare of Science,” arguing vociferously that science and religion were irreconcilable. Ignoring the centuries of Western thought that had seen these two pursuits as basically aligned, he refashioned history as a zero-sum war between opposing forces. In his polemic, White chronicled a number of ways in which Christianity had actively opposed scientific discovery, though many of his examples were fabricated or distorted. But perhaps none was as egregious as his assertion that Christians had, for centuries, believed the earth to be flat. White maintained that while the Greeks had begun to understand the Earth’s sphericity, Christians recoiled from this concept.

White thoroughly laundered Irving’s story, turning it from invented drama to established fact. And in doing so, he turned Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes—two minor cranks no one had ever heard of—into the preeminent scholars of the Middle Ages, their crackpot theory somehow becoming the standard accepted knowledge. It became the story schoolchildren were taught, and passed into fact because it presented a satisfying clash between reason and superstition. The idea that humans believed for thousands of years that the Earth was flat, in other words, was a modern invention promoted by scientists to prove how far we had come from an age of superstition and ignorance. And here in the Fantasyland Hotel convention center, that false narrative was being promoted to attack scientists, as though we had come full circle.

Cosmas’s image of the world looks like a transparent treasure chest; in the middle is a giant mountain that the sun and moon revolve around (the reason the sun isn’t visible at night is because it’s behind this mountain); above the mountain, sun and moon is an image of Jesus Christ. The modern Flat Earth movement, however, tends to agree on a depiction of the world that looks like the flag of the United Nations: a disc where the North Pole is at the center, and where the continents of the Northern hemisphere are mostly recognizable. As one moves out past the equator, though, not only are South America, Africa, and Australia visibly distorted, but the distance between them is massive, the southern oceans seeming more than twice as big as their northern counterparts. In the UN flag, there is no Antarctica. Flat Earthers assure this is no coincidence: those who control the levers of power all know the truth, and the UN’s flag is proof—it’s a taunt, letting everyone know what the truth is even as they won’t admit it.

It was still early. I’d had coffee but wasn’t sufficiently awake or alert enough to make small talk with my fellow attendees, so I picked a table near the back of the room as Sargent began the opening presentation. As a figurehead for the movement, his arrival at Flat Earth belief was a curious one. Months before the convention, I’d spent over an hour talking to Sargent about his beliefs and the Flat Earth movement. Sargent told me his interest stemmed instead from Admiral Robert Byrd’s exploration work in Antarctica. After Byrd hinted that there was a goldmine of natural resources waiting to be plundered in Antarctica, he returned to command the US Navy expedition Operation Deep Freeze in 1955. “He goes down there in ‘55 and ‘56,” Sargent told me, “and everything changed after that. The world literally changed. Every move that the governments made at the highest echelons of power were deliberate, they were strange, and they were very calculated.”

For Sargent, the idea of an international cooperative to set aside resource-rich Antarctica as a scientific preserve belied all common sense and understanding of how governments and corporations work. It is as though cynicism towards corporations and government has assumed a religious level of certainty. His argument relied on the fact that no government or energy company had ever seriously challenged the Antarctic Treaty System, suggesting that these governments and the corporations bound up in them all knew something the rest of us didn’t. That knowledge is not only that the Earth is flat, but also, as he explains in his two-hour video, that the government is hiding the existence of God. “If the Firmament was indeed discovered in 1956,” he says, “and it was deliberately hidden, then the ruling authority not only hid the structure, but evidence of the builders, and by builders I mean creators, and by that I mean what people define as God.”

Repeatedly singling out NASA as being behind a massive cover-up, in our conversation Sargent referenced Enron’s collapse, JFK’s assassination, and other threads that pointed to government corruption and conspiracy. He told me at one point: “When you get to a certain level of power, you tend to bend the rules in your favor because it benefits you, and because you can get away with it.” This, it seemed, was for Sargent a more ironclad rule of the laws of physics and history than any purported evidence for a spherical planet.

Sargent was here to build a community, affirming that the people gathered here were a select coterie of enlightened elites. These Flat Earthers certainly saw themselves as a cut above. The mantra of the modern Flat Earth movement, like so many conspiracy theory groups, is “do your own research.” Repeated by numerous speakers, affirmed to me by several conference attendees, and printed on coffee mugs you can buy in the vendors fair, doing your own research meant not accepting the scientific status quo, not accepting whatever your teacher told you in school, not accepting something just because everybody else believes it. This was a room full of people who saw themselves as the elite, those who’d refused to be suckers and struck out on their own.

It turns out, though, doing your own research doesn’t mean having all the answers. A couple of times Mark Sargent was pressed on various aspects of his theories—as often from believers who are hoping to bolster their own understanding as from milquetoast skeptics. There was, frankly, a fair amount he can’t explain.

When he ran into trouble, he defaulted to a series of relatively predictable moves. He often replied to a difficult question by asserting that science couldn’t answer the same question either. (In his 2015 book Flat Earth Clues, Sargent includes a list of frequently asked questions; to the question, “If you flip the earth over, what do you see?,” he responds, “No one currently knows what is underneath the enclosed world model, but then again we don’t currently know what is below the globe model either. Remember that the deepest hole ever drilled by our civilization is only 8 miles/12 kilometers, and yet, mainstream science shows up detailed diagrams going all the way down to the center of the earth at 4000 miles. I believe that below 8 miles is the real machinery that runs this wonderful system we live in.” He also summarily blamed NASA or the American government (here in Canada, that played pretty well). Lastly, if something seemed grossly inconsistent, he would suggest that perhaps something was gradually being revealed, that all would become clear once the veil was fully pulled back.

At one point Sargent was asked about the Southern Hemisphere, which, according to the Flat Earth map, is considerably larger than the Northern, meaning that the distances between South America and Africa would be vast, too vast to be crossed by commercial airliner. In his YouTube videos, Sargent has suggested that this is why there are no direct flights in the Southern hemisphere; flights from Johannesburg to, say, Sydney, will often route through the Middle East or Europe. This triangulation allows the airlines and governments to cover up the fact of these vast dimensions in the Southern oceans.

This explanation works okay, I suppose, except for the existence of Qantas flights 27 and 28, which fly direct between Sydney and Santiago, Chile, and, by their very existence, more or less destroy the Flat Earth model. No one likes to talk about Qantas 27 and 28. At the conference, Sargent didn’t bring up the triangulation hypothesis, and instead talked about how difficult it was to think in three-dimensions, and then stated that there are no accurate maps of what the Flat Earth actually looks like. This is how it goes: each Flat Earth proof or illustration is good only until it’s not.

🌐

2018 was the Year of the Flat Earth. The movement, perhaps the fringiest of all fringe movements, had achieved a shocking level of visibility and press. There were documentaries, articles and interviews with the major players at a variety of journalistic outlets. It’s hard to overstate how radical this group is: in 2018, only 2% of Americans believed the Earth was flat, which is tiny, compared to the number of Americans, for example, who believe in the existence of Bigfoot (21%), that aliens have visited Earth (35%), or that ghosts are real (51%).

Nonetheless, by the end of the 2010s, modern Flat Earthers managed to gain traction on social media, co-opting memes and relying on algorithms to drive viewers to their extreme and controversial behavior. They coined insults for people who think the Earth is round, calling them “globeheads” and “spherecucks.” And they leaned heavily into “Debate me, bro,” energy. Earlier in the year, a YouTube personality known as Flat Out Hero offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who could prove definitively that the Earth was a sphere. When another YouTube user, Wolfie2060, accepted and proved the Earth round according to Flat Out Hero’s rules, he rejected Wolfie2060’s proof, changed the terms and moved the goalposts, before finally announcing no such proof would be acceptable, because the Earth was flat.

Despite the reliance on social media and YouTube, this is nothing new: The Flat Earth movement has always relied on these tactics, from its very beginnings. In the mid-nineteenth century, a man who went by the name “Parallax” began delivering lectures throughout England and Scotland declaring that the Earth was flat, challenging anyone who disagreed to prove him wrong.

Parallax’s real name was Samuel Birley Rowbotham, a former nostrum dealer and socialist commune manager who’d reinvented himself as the modern world’s first proselytizer of the Flat Earth Theory. Rowbotham claimed that while lying on the ice of the Bedford Canals in East Anglia, looking through a telescope, he could see ice skaters six miles away. This would have been impossible if the world was curved, and so Rowbotham deduced that the Earth must be flat.

From 1849 onward, Rowbotham began lecturing at various meeting halls and public gathering places, arguing in favor of his Flat Earth theory. He would lecture in places like the Mechanics’ Institute in Plymouth, one of many organizations set up to provide free or low cost instruction to working class communities. Crucially, Rowbotham fed off of anti-elitist sentiment directed towards the sciences, calling his theory “Zetetic Astronomy” (he coined the word “zetetic,” from the Greek zeteo, which he claimed meant “to search or examine—to proceed only by inquiry.”) and arguing mainstream science operated only on received, dogmatic and unchallenged catechisms.

When challenged in a local paper, he offered to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was not a globe, and at noon on Monday, October 24, 1864, he met a group of men on the beach at Plymouth Hoe on the southwest coast of England, to settle the question once and for all. Fourteen miles out to sea was the Eddystone Lighthouse; if Rowbotham was correct, a telescope set up on the water line would capture the whole lighthouse, whereas, if the Earth was round, his detractors calculated, only the lighthouse’s lantern would be visible.

They were, as it happened, both wrong. When they set up the telescope on the water’s edge and looked through it, they saw something else instead: only the top-most part of it was visible—less than even Rowbotham’s detractors had anticipated.

What had happened? Richard Proctor, one of those gathered on the beach who would go on to become an astronomer in his own right, later explained that the difference was likely the result of light refraction, which created an optical illusion and made less of the lighthouse visible than one might otherwise see. Light refraction had been known since the beginning of the seventeenth century, but apparently no one on the beach that day thought to bring it up. Even still, one would assume that Rowbotham’s claims had been debunked. After all, the base of the lighthouse was not visible.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Rowbotham quickly seized the upper-hand, and proclaimed victory.

How? As Proctor would recall, Rowbotham seized on the fact that his opponents’ prediction had been wrong to cast doubt on their entire understanding of science. He had been wrong, of course, but so had they, and they were the ones who had claimed such absolute certainty. “It is manifest,” Rowbotham proclaimed, “that there is something wrong about the accepted theory; for it tells us that so much less of the lighthouse should be seen from the beach than from the [cliff], whereas less still was seen.” It was, Proctor conceded, a masterstroke by Rowbotham, as it helped convince many of those assembled that “some of the most important conclusions of modern astronomy had been seriously invalidated.” And while he lamented that, had anyone there brought up the problem of light refracting, “this mischief would have been avoided,” it was in many ways too late.

Rowbotham had seized on the question of doubt, and in doing so highlighted another fracture between religion and science. For many, doubt is a thing to be feared, and dispelled at all costs; we look for certainty, turning to authority. This is, after all, one of religion’s chief appeals.

Scientific exploration, on the other hand, thrives on doubt—it celebrates doubt, and uses it as a driver of future discoveries. The Eddystone Lighthouse is a perfect case in point: the unexpected outcome is not proof that the Earth is flat, but rather a spur to future understanding—in this case the effects of light refraction. A basic tenet of the scientific method is to learn from mistakes and refine theories, not to simply abandon them entirely the first time they don’t work out.

Science, when it works, embraces the principle of doubt and mysteries still left to discover. Rowbotham, on the other hand, had a much simpler task. He didn’t have to be right; he only had to suggest that science might be wrong. He’d created a straw man argument in claiming that the scientific establishment only tolerated rigid certainty, and then he’d proceeded to torch it. Having proclaimed victory, Parallax slunk away from Plymouth, gradually refusing to answer any further questions or respond to future queries. In the local press he was denounced as a “shallow conjuror,” but he kept up his lecture circuit, still goading audiences with his blend of showmanship and provocation, and the next year he published his opus, Zetetic Astronomy: Earth not a Globe! He was still going only by the name Parallax—at one point a crowd demanded his real name, and he responded he would reveal it only if they could prove that the Earth
was round to his satisfaction.

Needless to say, they could not.

🌐

During the conference’s first break, I wandered outside for a breath of fresh air and to clear my head, but this was a mistake: the smoke from the forest fires was so dense there was no fresh air to be had. The sky was a milky orange and within minutes my nose and fingertips were tingling slightly due to the diminished oxygen in the air. So I retreated back inside to the mall, which stretches on for what seems like forever. Near the hotel is a large lagoon with pirate ship, and I watched as an opera singer stood on the deck and sang an aria to throngs of apathetic shoppers, her voice bouncing off the glass and concrete. Then I went back to the convention.

The Globebusters presentation was by Bob Knodel and Jeran Campanella, who hosted another popular YouTube channel and were there to bring a scientific perspective to the conference. If there was a recurring theme, it was that nearly all of the presenters have built their platform via YouTube. In 2018, as with today, it was pipeline of junk science, its algorithms designed to keep viewers watching, keep them engaged, even if that meant moving them deeper and deeper into the fringe network. Flat Earth is the end of this rainbow—it is past the edges of the known universe, the furthest rejection of reality there is.

If the Globebusters took the stage with the goal of actually offering some Flat Earth 101, their explanations were painfully inadequate. According to mainstream science, they claimed, the Southern Hemisphere is closer to the sun than the Northern Hemisphere, yet Antarctica isn’t necessarily warmer than the Arctic—but no mainstream scientist believes the Southern Hemisphere is closer to the sun. Refusing any kind of complexity in the Earth’s ecosystem—ocean currents, climate patterns, and so forth—their arguments rested on debunking whatever basic understanding of earth science one receives in grade school. They spent a mystifying amount of time debating why planes that fly with the Earth’s rotation don’t reach their destinations faster than those that fly against it. (It’s because of the jet stream.)

What the Globebusters did provide, like Sargent’s videos, was a great deal of cutting edge technology. They referenced GPS, satellite imagery, flight tracking websites and radar, and displayed table after table of precise measurements of water levels. This is part of how Flat Earthers build their audience, by presenting themselves as digital natives savvy enough to parse the latest technology.

But there seems to be a willful disregard in learning how these technologies actually work. When Sargent explained to me that distances between the continents in the Southern hemisphere were much farther apart than a globe would suggest, he directed me to flight tracking websites, which give you the real-time flight pattern of airplanes in minute detail. Over the Northern hemisphere, he pointed out, the flights appear as detailed, squiggly lines, as the flight tracker records their accurate positions. But over the Southern hemisphere, once a flight gets out over water, the line becomes a smooth parabola. It’s an obvious hoax, he told me, proof that the flight is actually somewhere else—flying over the northern hemisphere in what would be the most direct route. 

Neither a scientist nor an air traffic controller, I listened to this argument without saying anything. Only when I looked this up online afterwards and did some rudimentary researching did I understand what was happening. How radar works is simple: an array sends out a signal and records what bounces off of it. Which means that when a plane is over water, there’s no ground-based radar to track it, so of course there is no real time accuracy. If you look at a transatlantic flight on a flight tracking website, the line will be accurate when the flight is over North America, Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, and Europe, but there will still be smaller parabolas of the kind Sargent talked about when it’s over water; they’re just not as noticeable as when a plane is flying over a vast ocean.

This all seems pedantic, but it shows the way in which Flat Earthers embody a certain kind of symptomatic response to the Internet and its attendant technology. The Information Age of the past four decades has brought us heaps of information that was previously restricted to specialists who needed such information—and while this is certainly a net positive, it also means that a lot of people who access those technologies will not bring a basic sense of literacy to them (sometimes perhaps in active bad faith, but just as often not), misunderstanding the complexity of the world in favor of simplistic critiques. One of the hallmarks of the current Flat Earth movement is its misunderstanding (either unintentional or deliberate) of technologies made available by the Internet.

This mixture of distrust and misunderstanding of what you see on the Internet has, in its most extreme forms, filtered into how people see reality itself. One thing the Globebusters agreed on is that no one who has ever been to Antarctica in summer has ever seen 24-hour sun. And here is where the do your own research mantra all begins to fade away. Campanella told the audience that people have even offered to fly him to Antarctica to see for himself the 24 hour sun, but that even if he saw it for himself, he wouldn’t believe it. As he explained that day, he’d assume it was a concocted hoax for his own benefit. Do your own research, it seemed, was just code for believe what you want to believe.

🌐

At the end of the first day I slunk away back to my own hotel, far from Fantasyland, with its un-themed room, trying to ground myself from a strange vertigo that had set in. There was something about sitting through an entire day of misinformation hurled at you at rapid speed, via a series of official-sounding proofs and experiments. Like a fraternity hazing or a cult induction, this incantation of ersatz science can almost become hypnotic, dulling your senses and your ability to make sense of what you’re hearing.

That was part of the program. Knodel at one point had cautioned against the idea of a “smoking gun,” preferring instead the idea of a “preponderance of evidence.” Arguing the Earth is flat involved heaping a bunch of quibbles, cavils and caveats, hoping that taken altogether they’ll sway the uninitiated. There can be no smoking gun, of course, because the Earth isn’t flat. But in lieu of this, you get hit with a sensory overload of bad-faith arguments, and after several hours in a climate-controlled room, these can take their toll.

The do your own research mantra also means that there’s not a lot of agreement among Flat Earthers. “We’re divided on a number of issues,” Sargent said at one point. “We all agree it’s not a globe, but beyond that we all have our own thing.” One speaker referred to the “Flat Earth model” before correcting himself: “We’re not saying there is a model,” he added, trailing off.

If you ask Flat Earthers about the Moon, for example, competing theories abound. Some people told me it was a sphere that’s floating in the sky, revolving just like the Sun. Others thought it was a flat disk. Some believed it reflected the Sun’s light, others that it emitted its own. No one wanted to seriously delve into these disagreements, because to do so might risk admitting that the whole idea was nonsense. With such a small group, no one could afford to create factions. The only thing you had to agree on to be part of this community was right there in the name: the Earth is flat. Flat Earthers define themselves in opposition to the mainstream; they are against rather than for. But without any stable, agreed-upon doctrine, it can be difficult to debate them or debunk any of their ideas.

This is hard, because the temptation to try to push back on what you’ve heard, to stand up as a cool voice of reason and dispute the flimsiness of the evidence, is extremely strong. You want to debate these jokers. It’s a basic human impulse. But this is a quagmire that will suck you down. Just ask Alfred Russel Wallace.

In 1861, a man named William Carpenter had attended a lecture by Samuel Rowbotham in Greenwich and had been converted to the Flat Earth gospel. Carpenter, a spiritualist and mesmerist, was interested in overturning scientific orthodoxy, and he saw in the Flat Earth gospel a means of showing up the scientific establishment. Just before Rowbotham’s own book came out, Carpenter published a series of pamphlets under the name “Common Sense,” which had argued for the flatness of the Earth, entitled Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed—Proving the Earth not a Globe. As with Rowbotham’s work, Carpenter’s writing was met with a mixture of curiosity, contempt, and befuddlement by most—until, in 1869, Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed fell into the hands of an independently wealthy Christian polemicist named John Hampden.

Hampden’s championing of the Flat Earth would differ markedly in style from his predecessors. Rowbotham, even at his most controversial, had counted on a gentlemanly demeanor to defuse his critics, and it had served him well through the years. Hampden opted for confrontation and pugnacity, arrogance and derision. But he did borrow one idea from Rowbotham’s playbook, and in 1870, he announced that he was ready to bet that the Earth was flat.

In a notice in the journal Scientific Opinion, on January 12, 1870, Hampden proclaimed: “What is to be said of the pretended philosophy of the 19th century, when not one educated man in ten thousand knows the shape of the earth on which he dwells? Why, it must be a huge sham! The undersigned is willing to deposit from £50 to £500, on reciprocal terms, and defies all the philosophers, divines and scientific professors in the United Kingdom to prove the rotundity and revolution of the world from Scripture, from reason or from fact.” Perhaps Hampden meant it as a hollow boast, but a perhaps unlikely source took him up on the wager: Alfred Russel Wallace.

Wallace at the time was working on his collection of essays, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection; this was years after he had independently hit on the theory of natural selection, a discovery that he entirely ceded to Charles Darwin. But Wallace was not independently wealthy, like many gentleman naturalists, and while he hoped his forthcoming book would provide him with some kind of income, Hampden’s £500 seemed like easy money.

Furthermore, Wallace seemed to genuinely believe he could help end once and for all this bizarre delusion; “a practical demonstration,” he wrote to his friend Charles Lyell, “would be more convincing than the ridicule with which such views are usually met.” So he deposited his own £500 into escrow to match Hampden’s sum, and the wager was on.

The terms were simple: at one end of the Great Bedford Level, a flat, unobstructed canal, they hung a large calico sheet from a bridge, with a thick black horizontal band painted on it. A surveyor’s telescope was set up six miles away at another bridge, trained on the painted black band. Exactly halfway between these two points, a pole with a marker disc was set up in the middle of the canal. The marker disc, black band, and telescope were all set exactly thirteen feet, three inches above the water. If Hampden was right, when the telescope was trained on the black band six miles away, the marker disc would appear dead center in the horizontal band. If Wallace was right, the marker disc would appear at least five feet above the line of sight, reflecting the curvature of the Earth.

Hampden himself did not show; he made excuses at the last minute and entrusted the measuring to Carpenter, the author of Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed. A group of locals, having heard of this bizarre bet, were also on hand to witness the proceedings. They watched as Wallace lined up the telescope and found, as he had correctly predicted, that the marker was above the line of sight between the telescope and horizontal band, proving the Earth was spherical.

Then Carpenter stepped forward, and within a few minutes had realigned the telescope. And then he, too, proclaimed victory. Carpenter had re-aligned the telescope so that the crosshairs, marker, and black band were all equidistant from one another. He proclaimed that, because they all appeared equidistant from each other through the telescope, all three taken together made a straight line. Ergo, the Earth was flat.

Wallace was outraged, objecting that the position of the crosshairs bore no relation whatsoever to the actual relationship between the telescope and the other markers. (Wallace, of course, was absolutely right.) More fundamentally, he seemed genuinely mystified that Hampden and Carpenter were not acting in good faith. He had committed a fundamental error in trying to convert a conspiracy theorist: a belief that patient appeals to logic and facts would be persuasive. As one critic had already complained of Rowbotham, he “always discovered the strongest confirmation of his doctrines even in their most complete refutation,” which turned out to be a great description not only of Rowbotham, but also of Hampden and Carpenter, as well as most conspiracy theorists and Creationists.

But unlike the skeptics who’d challenged Rowbotham on the beach at Plymouth, Wallace did have something extra going for him: £1,000 held in escrow. Because there was actual money at stake, Wallace was able to force a definitive verdict on the question. As evidence mounted against Hampden, he tried to withdraw his £500, but to no avail; as the judges appointed to deal with the matter became more aware of Hampden and Carpenter’s behavior, to say nothing of the paucity of their science, it seemed indisputable that the £1,000 held in escrow was due to Wallace.

But if Wallace had hoped this would settle the matter, unsurprisingly it did not. Carpenter spun the events by publishing a pamphlet with the libel-courting title, Water Not Convex, The Earth Not a Globe! Demonstrated by Alfred Russel Wallace on the 5th March, 1870, and began heaping an increasing torrent of abuse at Wallace and the scientific community. Wallace initially tried to put the wager behind him, despite Hampden’s repeated verbal and written abuse, telling friends that Hampden was “half mad and I don’t want to indict him criminally and imprison him, and so I suppose he will continue to write endless torrents of abuse as long as he lives.” But after his wife received a death threat, Wallace had no choice but to sue, winning a £600 verdict against Hampden for libel and defamation of character. The legal battles between Hampden and Wallace would continue for years, and while Wallace was inevitably victorious, and the verdicts, subsequent imprisonments, and legal fees ruined Hampden, they also destroyed Wallace’s own finances and severely damaged his reputation amongst the scientific community.

Wallace’s ordeal suggests that the impulse to debate is folly. The premise of the debate is that each side has an equal footing, and offering Flat Earthers such legitimacy gives them a platform to muddy the waters and sow doubt. Wallace did prove that wagers are smarter than debates, since at least there was money at stake, and something akin to a definitive ruling in his favor. But even having lost his £500, Hampden’s mind was not changed, and the more one involves institutions such as the judiciary, the more one plays to the persecution complexes and anti-elitist sentiments that motivate men like Hampden, Carpenter, and Rowbotham in the first place.

That being said, you still have to have the facts on hand. As Sargent’s flight tracking example suggests, knowing the truth is invaluable to shutting down specious reasoning. But it’s never sufficient to simply state the truth and assume it will carry the day. Like the suffocating haze outside my hotel windows, the disputation of facts is always just a smokescreen. The real event is elsewhere.

I returned on the second day of the conference fortified with more caffeine and chose a table much closer to the front, one that filled up by the time the first sessions began. The tone on Day Two was a significant change from the day before, as more and more of the stranger conspiracies came out. There was an argument that Gus Grissom, who died with two others on the launchpad in Apollo 1, was in fact assassinated by the Illuminati, and that his death was a secret blood sacrifice after he threatened to reveal the space program to be a hoax. There was a great deal of discussion about the secret magnetic mountain at the North Pole, surrounded by a 500-mile wide whirlpool. Hillary Clinton’s constant references during the 2016 election to “hitting the glass ceiling” was proof, we were told, that she knew about the “Firmament dome” over the flat earth. And as news broke of Donald Trump’s creation of a new branch of the military, the Space Force, someone suggested the United States government was planning to start a war with God.

Additionally, the welcoming demeanor of the first day’s presenters, like Mark Sargent, had been swapped out for people like Rob Skiba, who consistently berated scientists and those who believed in astronomy and evolution. At one point he bellowed, “I’m not gonna let people who think they came from monkeys ridicule me!” He attacked Neil deGrasse Tyson at length, which was the only moment I felt any kind of kinship towards him. But strangely, he went on to reject Creationists as well, deeming them insufficiently literalist in their Biblical interpretations. The Bible, he told the room, was not reconcilable with a spherical understanding of the Earth, and any attempts to reconcile Christianity with scientific principles were only attempts to make God into a liar.

It was beginning to dawn on me that the sober, rational perspective offered by Mark Sargent and the Globebusters would not be an accurate depiction of what motivated these believers. In between sessions, I tried to get a better sense, chatting with the people at my table. One attendee, a man named Chris, told me he was a practicing doctor who specialized in family medicine. Chris got into Flat Earth about three years earlier, he told me—his son was diagnosed with autism, which he soon attributed to vaccines. Once an anti-vaxxer, he began to question everything. The first scientific idea he discarded was evolution, and once he threw out evolution, he was left with the Bible; from there he soon saw that the Bible was incompatible with a spherical Earth. He didn’t go to church; he studied the Bible by himself, and told me the Spherical Earth Conspiracy is maintained by thirteen powerful families (including the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers) who received their directives from Satan. Gravity, he maintained, is a lie, and Newton was a Freemason, he said at last, as though this last revelation tied everything together.

When I asked Chris about his medical work, he admitted under questioning, that he didn’t always “do his own research.” When presented with a patient whose symptoms you didn’t recognize, I asked him, wouldn’t you consult the literature and see how other doctors have treated the patient? In the time it takes to do your own research, you might lose the patient, and you might not have that luxury. Yes, he admitted at last, in his job he rarely did his own research.

It’s perhaps a minor point, but Chris used scientific knowledge like anti-vaxxers used herd immunity: he employed it when it suited him, reaping the benefits, all while still poisoning the well.

“I believe aliens are coming from below,” another attendee named Birdie told me; “I think they’re demons.” Her father would not tolerate her Flat Earth obsession, but her mother had agreed to accompany her, and her face was plastered with a look of detached amusement. Family tensions, I learned, were common here: people talked about being disowned by their parents. One speaker, Matt Long, compared telling his family that he believed in a Flat Earth to coming out of the closet.

Sargent and his smooth demeanor, I realized on that second day, was just the carnival barker to get you inside, where the real show begins. Now in the thick of it, all the scientific veneer was stripped away, and Biblical literalism was all that was left. One attendee told me her belief that Flat Earth will come to be seen as the test: do you believe in God, or do you believe in man? Even the less religiously-motivated among the speakers predicted, one way or another, a Christian apocalypse. Mark Sargent didn’t come out and say this right away, but on a panel on Day Two, he eventually got to the point—the real point—behind it all. If the Earth is flat, he said, then evolution would be revealed to be a sham, and world markets would be up-ended. The revelation of the Flat Earth would itself be out of the Book of Revelation: such a stunning and cosmic reversal of everything we know and believe would completely bring about the end of the status quo. The Flat Earth, for Sargent, was really about the end of this world and the beginning of a new one.

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Sometime in the afternoon of the second day, about two hours before the end of the conference, the shopping mall’s fire alarms went off. No one knew what to do: do we evacuate, or was it a false alarm? But no one came rushing in waving their arms telling us to flee, so after a few nervous moments of looking around, the speakers continued. The fire alarms continued for several minutes before we were given the all clear. A few minutes later, they started up again. They continued, on and off, for the rest of the conference.

The noise made it harder to focus, but over the repetitive din of the fire alarm I began to understand that the Flat Earth movement had very little to do with the shape of the Earth. The idea of the Flat Earth was, as Sargent said, merely the tip of the spear, the secret that was so big that it allowed for literally anything else. What had brought these people together was not really the shape of the planet but a belief that there was something big they’re not telling us, a giant truth that was hiding just out of view.

Once you accepted that, you could believe anything you wanted. You could believe any manner of Biblical Revelation based on your personal understanding of the Bible’s inerrant word. You could believe that anything the government tells you was a lie. You could believe we were on the cusp of a complete up-ending of the world and a coming utopia.

Meanwhile, eventually word got around about the fire alarms. What had happened, it seemed, was that several guests staying in the hotel had left their windows open, and the smoke from the forest fires was so thick that it had filtered in and set off multiple fire alarms throughout the hotel. A voice over the intercom told guests to return and ensure their windows were closed. And so here we were, choking on the evidence of a literal climate apocalypse, while the believers in this room had set their sights on a distant, imaginary apocalypse, one just around the corner, that will soon change everything and make everything right. Rather than get to work dealing with the apocalypse drifting through the building, they were content to sit and do nothing, waiting for the “real” one.

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The last panel of the conference was devoted to religion. Speaker Matt Long talked about how embracing Flat Earth allowed him to read the opening verses of Genesis literally, which in turn allowed him to get closer to God. As he explained, “If I can take Genesis literally, I can be more in the world.” Another speaker talked about astronomy’s conception of the universe—ever expanding to accommodate a multiverse—and suggested that such an idea only pushes God further away, as though Heaven was a literal place reachable by spacecraft.

Behind Mark Sargent’s pleasant rationalism, Matt Long’s revivalist preaching, the Globebusters’ hackneyed science, and Rob Skiba’s angry denunciations—behind it all was fear. A fear of being lost, fear of being alone, fear of not knowing one’s place in the world. During the final session, panelist Emmanuel Lokonga stated it bluntly: “If the Earth is a flat plane,” he said, “then what that means is we have a God who has not abandoned us.”

If there was a fundamental anxiety that drove—and continues to drive—the creationist and intelligent design movement, it is the bedrock fear of a world in which humanity was not at the center of all things. It is a fear that Homo sapiens were just a happy accident, through the endless trial and error of natural selection, slowly evolved from other animals. It is a fear of this seeming randomness, more than anything, that animates the ferocity of the resistance to evolution.

The Flat Earthers in the convention center in Edmonton shared this rejection of evolution and its anxiety. But they took it farther. They were reacting to a new story that had emerged in the past few decades, one popularized by astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who’ve helped us to understand that not only is Earth a tiny, mostly unremarkable speck in the cosmos, but that there are likely other universes, dark matter and dark force, and a whole host of unexplained phenomena, that lie out there in the great beyond.

No one here wanted to accept that. They rejected it all.

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Over time, this denial tends to take on a life of its own, and can consume you entirely, until you end up denying your own life. Rob Skiba built a career out of rejecting everything around him—not just a spherical Earth but also vaccines, arguing that inoculation was the “Mark of the Beast.” And then in August of 2021, Skiba contracted COVID-19 at a Biblical convention, and died of complications from the disease that October.

But not everyone is beyond saving. Among the presenters at that 2018 conference, few were as vociferous as Jeran Campanella, who said that even if someone flew him to the South Pole to witness the 24 hour sun in summer, he simply wouldn’t believe it. In December of 2024, he finally got the chance to test this belief, joining in an expedition funded by Colorado pastor Will Duffy to Antarctica. Duffy, in an attempt to prove the Flat Earthers wrong once and for all, organized an expedition for a handful of influencers—including Campanella—to witness the midnight sun with their own eyes.

In the reality of Antarctica, Campanella found, contrary to his earlier boasting, that he simply could not deny the truth before him. Campanella found his beliefs shattered while he was down there. The Earth, he saw, was round. His beliefs were a lie. “Even if I don’t feel like I’m on a sphere, even if I don’t feel like I’m upside down, even if I don’t feel like I’m flying through space, the flat Earth doesn’t work for me,” he told reporters upon his return. He left the Flat Earth community altogether, saying “I couldn’t go on once I knew it was not the case. There’s not a part of me that could go on and do another show.”

Beyond Campanella, Duffy’s subsequent documentary, “The Final Experiment,” did little to sway the larger Flat Earth community, who accused him of staging the event or manipulating the footage. These believers found safety and comfort, and a shield against fear and insignificance, in nonsense. And their numbers have continued to grow. Thanks to the rot of social media algorithms, Flat Earth belief is up closer to 10% now.

Listening to Matt Long explain how his belief in the Flat Earth allowed him to be more in the world, I had a moment of something like jealousy. I too, would often like to be more present in the world. But not at the cost of giving up on it in the process. Being in the world means being present with its flaws, its contradictions, its failures and confusions, its chaos and randomness. And that’s what terrifies those who seek solace in the Flat Earth.

There was a t-shirt popular when I was a kid that had a picture of the universe and a white arrow pointing to a tiny dot reading “You Are Here” like a legend in a shopping mall. It was precisely this idea that these folks were pushing back against. Instead of facing the possibility of our own cosmic insignificance, where the measure of our lives might simply be how we treat and care for others, they’ve re-imagined a world where all the stars in the sky are projections for our benefit and wonderment, where a dome encircles us and the world is rimmed with the glaciers of Antarctica. A place where God—somewhere close by but just out of reach—has not yet abandoned us.

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