Illustration: Artur Balytskyi
The first Flat Earth International Conference was held on 9 and 10 November 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Reports put the crowd at roughly 400 people, and later accounts at more than 500 paying attendees, some of whom flew in from abroad. Tickets cost between $109 and $249. Speakers argued that NASA and mainstream science are hiding the "real" shape of the world, the YouTuber Mark Sargent was the best-known name on the bill, and footage from the weekend later appeared in the Netflix documentary Behind the Curve.
The Earth, of course, is round, and people have known it for well over two thousand years. The more interesting question is why a belief like this was drawing paying crowds in the 2010s. This article looks at what happened in Raleigh, who the movement's figures are, and what the evidence and research say.
What happened at the Raleigh conference
The two-day event was organised by Robbie Davidson, whose conferences promote a model of a flat, stationary Earth covered by a dome rather than the disc-with-an-ice-wall favoured by the older Flat Earth Society. Talks carried titles such as "NASA and other Space Lies" and "Waking Up to Mainstream Science Lies", and the programme mixed Bible-based arguments, distrust of government agencies and home-made "experiments".
For many people there, the attraction was not only the ideas but the company. In a short BBC report filmed at the event, an attendee explained that he simply wanted to meet others who thought as he did. That desire to belong comes up again and again when researchers talk to flat-Earthers.
Organisers presented the event as a sign that the movement was growing, and the conference did return the following year.
Mark Sargent and the Q&A that went viral
Mark Sargent became one of the movement's best-known voices through his YouTube video series Flat Earth Clues. His question-and-answer session in Raleigh circulated widely after the blog Friendly Atheist at Patheos highlighted it.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
About twelve minutes in, someone asked how flat-Earth ideas could reach schools. Sargent predicted that the movement was nearing a tipping point and that "Science is gonna have to address this, plain and simple."
The most quoted moment came around the half-hour mark. An audience member wanted to know whether a SpaceX rocket would explode on hitting the dome above the Earth or slide along its edge. Sargent dismissed Elon Musk entirely, telling the room that "anything that man says is an outright lie", to applause, and followed it with a cruder insult.
The exchange shows how the belief works: any evidence from space agencies or private rocket companies is ruled out in advance as part of the deception, so nothing they show can count.
How we know the Earth is round
None of this rests on trusting NASA. Much of the evidence is older than spaceflight, and some of it you can check yourself.
- Ancient Greek reasoning: by the 5th century BC, Greek thinkers were describing a spherical Earth, and by the 3rd century BC Hellenistic astronomers treated it as settled and estimated its size. Eratosthenes famously compared the Sun's angle at two Egyptian cities and came remarkably close to the true circumference.
- Lunar eclipses: the Earth's shadow on the Moon is always curved, from every angle, which only a sphere produces.
- Ships and horizons: distant ships disappear hull first, and you can see farther from a hill or a tall building.
- Different stars: travellers going north or south see new constellations rise and familiar ones vanish.
- Time zones and flights: the Sun rises in Sydney while it sets in London, and long-haul routes in the southern hemisphere only make sense on a globe.
- Circumnavigation: Magellan and Elcano's expedition sailed around the world between 1519 and 1522, long before satellites.
Later measurements refined the picture: the Earth bulges slightly at the equator, as Isaac Newton predicted, but it is very close to a sphere.
Why the flat-Earth idea made a comeback
Modern flat-Earth belief traces back to Samuel Rowbotham's 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy. Samuel Shenton founded the Flat Earth Society in England in 1956, and Charles K. Johnson kept it going in California until his death in 2001. For decades it was a small fringe.
That changed after about 2015, largely through YouTube and social media. Celebrities added fuel: the rapper B.o.B argued the point on Twitter, and basketball players Kyrie Irving and Wilson Chandler voiced doubts about the globe. In 2019 YouTube said it would recommend fewer conspiracy videos.
Researchers have tried to understand who is persuaded. Work by the psychologist Asheley Landrum and colleagues found that people with lower science knowledge and a stronger general tendency to believe conspiracies were more susceptible to flat-Earth videos. In Behind the Curve, the psychiatrist Joe Pierre points to overconfidence, misreading of everyday observations and deep distrust of official sources. Polls suggest committed believers remain a small minority: a 2018 YouGov survey put the share of Americans who believed in a flat Earth at around 4 percent.
Seen this way, the conference makes more sense. It offered community, a sense of seeing through a grand deception, and a stage where doubt about the globe was the norm rather than a joke.
Behind the Curve: the conference on film
Clips from Raleigh appear in Behind the Curve, Daniel J. Clark's documentary about the movement, with Mark Sargent as its main subject. It premiered at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto on 30 April 2018 and reached Netflix in February 2019. The film also follows Patricia Steere and the GlobeBusters YouTubers Jeran Campanella and Bob Knodel, and includes interviews with scientists and astronaut Scott Kelly.
Its most memorable scenes are the believers' own tests. Knodel describes an expensive laser gyroscope that registered a steady drift of about 15 degrees per hour, which is exactly what the Earth's rotation should cause. In the closing scene, Campanella shines a light through holes cut in panels set at equal heights over a distance; the light reaches the camera only when it is raised, as the Earth's curve predicts. In both cases the results were not accepted as proof.
Talking with someone who doubts the globe
Mockery rarely changes minds, and the documentary suggests it can push people further into the community that welcomes them. If a friend or relative has started watching flat-Earth videos, a few approaches tend to work better:
- Ask what first made them doubt, and listen; the reason is often distrust rather than astronomy.
- Suggest observations they can make themselves, such as watching a ship sail away with binoculars or comparing sunset times with a friend in another time zone.
- Keep the relationship warm. People leave fringe beliefs more easily when they have somewhere else to belong.
Sources: Wikipedia: Modern flat Earth beliefs; Wikipedia: Behind the Curve; Newsweek, 25 February 2019: Behind the Curve ending explained; Wikipedia: Spherical Earth; Friendly Atheist (Patheos), 13 November 2017; IFLScience; conference site fe2017.com; video report by BBC News.
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