15 Flat Earthers Who Had Absolutely Wild Interactions With People
Recently, I asked members of the BuzzFeed Community about their experiences with (or even as) flat earthers.
Their responses were absolutely fascinating...and more than a little disturbing. Check them out:
Note: some responses came from this Reddit thread.
1."I lost a good friend to the 'theory.' It started with her listening to a bunch of podcasts and saying, 'It's not true, but what if?' like a funny joke. As she became more drawn into the Flat Earth world she started isolating herself from her friends, and in regular conversation, she'd have to say something about it every 5–10 minutes. You could just tell she was obsessively thinking about it."
"Eventually she sold her amazing house and property (that was totally paid off), and moved to some kind of Flat Earth commune where everyone else was on the same trip. It broke my heart at the time because we had been close friends for years, and it felt like witnessing a slow car crash.
This was almost a decade before COVID and vaccine paranoia, but she is obsessed with that now too, complete with 5G's, aliens, etc. I really miss my old friend, but she is not the same person that she once was."
2."I was debating a flat earther in Mexico, and I asked him about how GPS worked if there were no satellites. He said that they had devices in the ground to route you. I told him the Mexican government is barely able to put decent water pipes in the ground; did he really think they had the tech to put routing devices in the ground? He just chuckled with a thousand-mile gaze."
3."I spent a year infiltrating the flat Earth community on Instagram. I garnered a decent following with an account dedicated to flat earth travel photos (an intentionally absurd premise). I learned quite a bit about the community including how to discern the trolls from the real deal. The majority of legit flat Earthers are extremely distrustful of anything the government says or does. These same people are 9/11 truthers, Holocaust deniers, and anti-vaxxers and they connect these conspiracies together. Many of them have also attached flat Earth theory to religion, magic, or mysticism."
"Before my infiltration I’d always considered conspiracies fun. Like they were the fan fiction of real life. Now they mostly make me sad. For all the phony accounts like mine, there are still plenty of people out there willing to drop a couple of hundred dollars on a flat Earth convention."
4."There’s a discord server called the flat Earth society where they advertise it as a 'fun place to come and debate.' Newsflash: It’s not fun. If you’re anything but a flat earther and try to make a point, you’re instantly swarmed by all of them. They won’t give you a chance to speak and oftentimes refuse to answer questions. Instead, they just hurl insults. The worst part, the admins actively mute anybody who proves them wrong, and will actually kick you from the call and then tell everybody else you left, so it looks like they 'owned you.' It’s absolute cancer, they’re in absolute denial."
—r/deleted
5."My colleague is one and can’t think of a single explanation of why we’ve been told it’s a globe. Surely they must have their reasons for making us believe that. 'So what’s the cover up?' I ask. He has no reply. But, he claims, if you check out (insert random dude's YouTube pages) you’ll see the truth. No, what I see is someone making a living from clicks."
6."A lot of flat Earthers have made it such a large part of their personality that it's not as easy as just changing their opinion. They have to basically reconstruct themselves which they won't do."
7."I convinced a flat earther, temporarily, by asking him if it was possible for a sphere to be so large that you could not tell it was a sphere by simply being on the surface of it. I used an analogy of an extremely long line that was so slightly curved you couldn't tell by looking at a small section of it. It took him a while, but eventually, he said yes to the sphere and I told him that was how big the earth is. A few days later he reverted. Most of these people aren’t mentally stable, they believe in a lot of conspiracies."
—r/McClain3000
8."I once had a conversation with a UFC fighter and outspoken Flat Earther. I tried to explain how Archimedes was able to prove the Earth was round just by using his shadow. I mentioned air travel and how Hawaii and Japan are not 20+ hours of flying apart. But what got through to him the most were seasons. This particular guy was Brazilian. I explained that because the Earth is round, it’s possible to be winter in Brazil and summer in the USA and vice versa. He nodded and stared off into the distance silently. I don’t think I 'converted' him but it gave him significant pause at the very least."
9."The thing that made me stop believing in a flat earth was just the question 'Why would NASA lie to you?'"
"This is a solid point, there's no way 70,000 scientists could keep it a secret."
"That's the exact question I asked the few flat earthers I've met, but most of them dug in with this kind of answer: 'It proves God exists if the earth is flat, so of course they won't let us know.'"
10."I got a flat earther to question his beliefs by giving him the proof he asked for, to which he responded 'mainstream science and media are lies.' I asked him why he asked for proof if he could just disregard it as lies either way, then told him that since he required no proof (or evidence against) to believe something, it made him the easiest person to deceive and that it seemed pretty sheep-like to me. He deleted all of his flat earth comments and hasn't posted about it since."
11."My father-in-law is a flat earther. I asked him 'If the earth was flat and you were right, what then? How is your life any different?' His face was priceless because he didn’t have an answer. It was great."
12."One of my Geometry students believed the earth was flat, so I quietly spent the rest of the year trying to demonstrate how the earth was not, in fact, flat. (Among other things) we did a day on spherical Geometry and measuring angles on a sphere. We did projections from three to two dimensions and looked at different maps of the Earth. The students drew the continents on an orange and then peeled it in different ways to make it lay flat, and compared distortions between the different ways of opening. I got an airline pilot to come talk about using math, and he talked about how beautiful it was to see the earth curve away through the windscreen. We even watched videos of tall mast ships disappearing over the horizon."
"At the end of the year, I pulled her aside and asked if she believed the earth was flat. She said, 'Well, for airplanes and boats and stuff, and like Geometry, it's a sphere, but really it's flat.'
So, she knew it was round, but chose to believe it to be flat."
13."I talked to a flat-earther about my job working for a company that tracks ship locations, routes, and speeds by satellite. None of this would work at all if the earth was flat. I could only explain the most basic concepts, but it was enough for him to realize I was right and that he’d been convinced by someone who had no practical experience of the spherical nature of the Earth. I think that’s what really did it — my experience was really tangible."
This next person wasn't a flat earther, but was a 9/11 "truther," and discussed in fascinating detail how one can get lost in these conspiracy theories:
14."Not a flat earther. But I was a 9/11 'truther' I guess you could say — insofar as I thought it was an inside job. I was heavily influenced and believed in multiple conspiracies in the Zeitgeist film as well. There was a never-ending source of dark, shadowy 'they's and them's' controlling everything behind the scenes. I think there were a few factors that helped me escape that. They were..."
"1. Losing my father. It was such a life-changing event at that age that it made me reconsider everything in my life.
2. Some light training in evaluating information. I learned about how to vet sources, whether something was actually news or just an opinion/editorial, etc. Ironically, this education came before I was duped. After my dad died, suddenly this started to kick in more.
3. Lack of time/means to dig myself a deeper hole. I started college shortly after my father passed and that plus a full-time job took up all my time. I had none to buy further into the newest crazy bullshit. I had no Facebook/Twitter/IG/etc. No smartphone or texting.
So all in all, I think the time away gave me time to detox. If I had been on social media as I discovered those things, I can only imagine I may have become a Q believer as well. Looking back I see how gullible I was in that moment, fooled by the onslaught of half-truths and clever 'logic' of the various theories. I know better now (and I should have known better then), but I've been humbled to the fact that everyone is vulnerable to this sort of stuff. To think otherwise is deluding yourself."
Finally, here's perhaps the next thing we might have to write about...the Hollow Earth Theory:
15."The flat earth theory is totally illogical but the hollow Earth theory could be real. Do you expect me to believe that the ground we are standing on is only a few hundred miles above hot magma? What is under the magma? How can you prove what is at the center of the earth if it’s impossible to get there because of gravitational pressure? And before anyone can @ me, I am aware of the science but it is all theory and not actual fact."
Note: some entries have been edited for length and/or clarity.
