Circle Or Sphere? Inside The UK's First 'Flat Earth Conference'
On a Friday evening in late April, around 70 people gathered in a brightly lit conference room at the Jurys Inn Birmingham to hear news of an important discovery. The audience shifted in the tightly packed chairs and the room was filled with the buzz of conversation, which hushed as Anthony Riley began his presentation. The stocky 37-year-old law graduate from Manchester wore a blazer over his T-shirt, which lent him a professorial air of authority, and held a pint of Stella Artois in his left hand, which did not.
Riley told the audience that the footage they were about to see had not been easy to obtain. “I lay, on the beach, on my belly,” he said. “The water was there 20 minutes ago and I’m now lying on the wet sand, and I’m walking the dog at the same time. There’s people on the beach wondering, what the hell is he doing? I’m wondering, can I see it? Is it there?”
An enlarged version of his laptop screen was projected onto a big screen behind him and the audience watched intently as the cursor navigated to a file named “wow3.mpf”. Riley’s footage began to play. The camera panned from left to right, capturing a blurry image of the sea and an unidentifiable landmass on the horizon. This was the evidence for which everyone had been waiting. Riley explained the landmass was the Isle of Man, 34 miles away from the camera’s vantage point on the British mainland. The view was only possible, he said, if Earth is flat.
Riley cast doubt on the scientific explanation for this phenomenon: that atmospheric refraction allows light to travel further than the curve of Earth would otherwise allow. “I don’t accept logic and reason,” he said. “I accept the evidence. If we can see that land, is that better, or less than, logic and reason? It’s proof.” A picture of the globe popped up on the screen.
“That’s what they tell us is the evidence for what we should accept to be true,” he continued. “Does that look like it’s a ball? Yeah. Does it look real? No! Nobody in this room accepts that is real.”
Earlier that evening, I’d arrived for the UK’s first “Flat Earth Convention”; nearly three days of talks and workshops offering a wide range of metaphysical theories, all of them based on the assumption that the Earth is not a globe. Over the course of the weekend, more than 200 delegates, including property developers, NHS workers and retired teachers, listened attentively to speakers who variously suggested the Earth is a flat diamond supported by pillars; that gravity does not exist; and that the universe is contained within a giant cosmic egg. There were frequent references to the Illuminati and other conspiracy theories.
As I checked in, I accepted a complimentary tube of fluoride-free toothpaste at the door. At the front of the room I spotted Allegedly KA Dave, one of the weekend’s speakers, whom I’d recently seen on YouTube explaining how he’d cured chronic asthma by drinking nothing but his own urine. The merchandise stand was selling copies of Dave’s book, The Human Body Owners Workshop Manual, a guide to alternative healing. When he kicked off the evening’s open mic session, he appeared to be wheezing.
One by one, members of the audience stepped up to share their stories. They had come from all over the world: the UK, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand… The majority were white, male and over the age of 30, but roughly one-in-five was a woman and over the course of the weekend I met delegates of all ages and from a mix of racial and social backgrounds. The open mic session was due to conclude at 8.30pm, but it was gone midnight by the time everyone had been given a chance to have their say.
Sean Connors, a UKIP councillor from Daventry, speaking alongside another of the convention’s speakers, said: “I think anyone who is on the fence will know, if you just think about it for a moment, how your political system is failing you, how everything in your life is controlling you. You know there’s something more at play.”
David Mannall, a tanned South African, wore a white T-shirt bearing the slogan #FlatPower. For most of his life he’d been an atheist. “Three years ago I had an experience with DMT [the hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine] that slapped me awake so hard,” he said. “Then three weeks later I found out that the Earth is flat.”
For many, the conference was a rare opportunity to speak openly about Flat Earth. Anthony Riley admitted: “I’ll be honest. I don’t enjoy being a ‘Flat Earther’. You’re ridiculed by everybody.” Sean Connors described “how easily people attack you, how they get so frightened by the fact that you have a different viewpoint from them”. Martin Kenny, a former hotel manager in his mid-thirties and the convention’s Saturday night headliner, said: “I’m really overwhelmed to be here. It’s an honour and a pleasure to be among like-minded people, on the same wavelength, on the same journey. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same space as people who think... the same way that I do.”
The convention was organised by Gary John Heather and Didi Vanh, who had also paid a price for her beliefs. “Since I discovered Flat Earth, I’ve lost a lot of friends,” she said.
“You gained more, though, Didi!” shouted a man from the audience.
Halfway through the evening, Heather took to the microphone. “You guys are special,” he said. “Thank you very much for being here because this is just amazing.” He looked briefly as if he might be overcome with emotion. When I asked him about this later, he told me: “You know how sometimes you’re with your wife or girlfriend and you’re on a beach and the stars are out and you’re in a very special moment? I was in that special moment.”
The earliest world maps depict what ancient cultures knew to be true: the Earth was flat. Europeans envisioned a flat continent surrounded by ocean. In China, the world was thought to be flat and square. It was the Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras, who first began to question these notions around the sixth century BC. Some 300 years later, Eratosthenes used trigonometry to calculate the Earth’s circumference by measuring the sun’s elevation from two distant points. In 1972, more than 2,000 years after Eratosthenes’ discovery, Nasa published 'The Blue Marble', a photograph capturing the spherical Earth in its entirety.
Today’s Flat Earthers believe the idea of Eratosthenes conducting his experiment is laughable and that everything published by Nasa is a lie. Many are also deeply religious and believe in the theory of divine creation. In recent years, interest in the concept has surged. Google searches for 'Flat Earth' have been rising dramatically since the start of 2015. Interest spiked in January 2016, when the American rapper BoB announced he had seen the light, and again in February 2017, when NBA star Kyrie Irving said, “This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat.” In April this year, a YouGov poll found two per cent of Americans have always believed the Earth is flat. A further five per cent said they thought the Earth was round but had recently had doubts.
Karen Douglas is a social psychologist at the University of Kent and has been studying conspiracy belief for around a decade. Douglas told me she’d been surprised by the emerging popularity of Flat Earth theory in recent years, but that she saw similarities between the phenomenon and belief in other popular conspiracy theories.
“You see similar themes coming up in climate change conspiracies and anti-vaccine conspiracies,” she said. “Mistrust of scientists is something really quite strong in conspiracy belief at the moment.” Feelings of uncertainty are another common predictor of conspiracy belief, Douglas told me. Researchers believe that’s why conspiracy theories often emerge after troubling, hard-to-comprehend world events, such as terrorist attacks and plane crashes. Essentially, the universe is full of unresolved questions. “Conspiracy theories provide an answer,” she said.
A few weeks before the convention, I’d travelled to meet Heather at his home in the South Downs. It was a half-mile drive from the nearest train station and the bus twisted as it navigated the narrow country lanes. Daffodils had recently sprung up in the adjacent hedgerows. I stepped off the bus with the only other remaining passenger and shortly afterwards met Heather, who greeted me with a firm handshake. An imposing figure, over 6ft tall, 54 years old and bald, he dressed much younger in a hooded top and jeans, with a couple of days’ stubble outlined on his face. He invited me to his flat, a modest bedsit above a village pub, where he told me about his journey into Flat Earth.
In August 2015, Heather was browsing YouTube when he stumbled across Flat Earth Clues, a 12-part series which describes the Earth as a circular disc, enclosed by a giant dome and surrounded at the circumference by an ice wall. As the series unfolded, Heather learned that the stars, the sun and the moon do not exist and are actually projections upon the dome. The dome’s existence, and that of the ice wall, are believed to have been discovered in the late Fifties. A cover-up has been imposed ever since. “When I watched it I was blown away,” he told me. “My whole world, in an instant, changed. I was stunned. It felt right in my gut.”
Almost every Flat Earther I spoke to traced their conversion back to YouTube. Many others, like Heather, cited Flat Earth Clues as their introduction. Heather told me Flat Earth theory has moved on significantly since the series was published in 2015. “It’s almost like watching Blazing Saddles,” he said. “I used to love Blazing Saddles. Watch it now, it’s not only dated but it’s a shit comedy.” Other popular videos include Eric Dubay’s 200 Proofs Earth is Not a Spinning Ball. On Facebook, Dubay describes himself as “a 34-year-old American living in Thailand teaching yoga and wing chun part-time while fighting the New World Order full-time”. He was banned from YouTube in December 2017 after violating the platform’s policy on hate speech.
When I asked YouTube about efforts to tackle misinformation on its platform, the company emailed me a statement. “We’ve made YouTube an open platform, so people can easily share videos and find things they care about,” it said. “With this openness comes a responsibility to help people discover reliable information, especially when it comes to serious topics like news. We know there's more to do and we are always looking to improve."
Mark Sargent, the 49-year-old American behind Flat Earth Clues, has become a minor celebrity as interest in the topic has escalated. Formerly a professional video gamer and software consultant, Sargent now makes a full-time living from Flat Earth by earning money from his YouTube channel, a radio show and a book based on his video series. He is one of the stars of the documentary Behind the Curve, an investigation into the North American Flat Earth movement which recently premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto. When I called Sargent recently, he said that while he doesn’t claim to have invented modern Flat Earth theory, he does take some credit for its growing popularity. “It wasn’t easy to digest,” he said. “I made it palatable.”
Sargent is a self-described “conspiracy guy”. He said he was deeply sceptical about Flat Earth at first, but became a convert when he was unable to debunk the theory. Now he’s prepared to question anything. “I can’t even shoot down any conspiracies at first glance anymore,” he said. “If I start my day with Flat Earth, how can I? You could literally come to me and say, ‘I know a guy who swears that Elvis had Bigfoot’s baby.’ Now I’ll be like, ‘OK, I’ll give you a few minutes, what have you got, why not?’ I can’t in good conscience say it’s crazy out of the gate.”
It was Saturday night at the convention and there was a keen sense of anticipation in the conference hall. A mysterious structure was draped in tablecloths in the centre of the room and headliner Martin Kenny was almost ready to present his vision of the universe. For nearly 90 minutes, Kenny had been summarising ancient texts of the Native American, Chinese, Japanese, African, Norse and Assyrian people. Kenny described a recurring theme of the Earth being vast and there being many other worlds. He apologised to the 150 Flat Earthers in the audience for taking so long. “I really wanted to show you that I’m not just plucking this cosmic egg theory out of my head and making this up,” he said.
Then, the big reveal. “Without further ado, I present my geocentric model of the universe...” said Kenny, dramatically. The tablecloths fell to the floor and the audience took to its feet, craning heads for a closer look. Kenny later told me he’d spent three months working on the model that had been uncovered. It was undoubtedly an impressive creation. The Earth was depicted as a circular disc, comprised of four concentric rings, each divided by an ice wall painstakingly crafted from what looked like white duct tape. LEDs represented the stars, embedded in another disc, held above the Earth by four poles, which appeared to be table legs commandeered from office furniture. Between the two discs, glowing spheres were suspended from strips of clear plastic bent in arches over the Earth. At least, the spheres were meant to be glowing. “Sorry,” said Kenny. “Some of the suns and moons have gone out.”
Undeterred, he began to explain his model. “Now, I reiterate, I’m not preaching,” he said. “I’m not selling anything. This is an idea. This is a hypothesis.” But what came next felt a lot like a sermon. “At the centre…” Kenny removed the North Pole from the centre of his model, lifting the small white continent aloft as if it were the lid of a saucepan. “I think there is a realm, and that’s hidden, like a crater continent, underneath a cloud of some sort, a heaven of some sort. I’m guessing if you flew over you’d see a white swirling cloud. So I think that’s the heaven sitting above the central realm.”
Audience members approached the model for a closer look. A group formed around Kenny, peppering him with questions. At one point, he speculated that the North Pole may have given the Nazis access to Hollow Earth [the concept proposing a habitable world inside our planet]. It was difficult to see where the lecture could go from there, but when Kenny resumed, it became clear he was just warming up. “I’m going to ask you to put your seatbelts on,” he said, “because the things I’m going to say in my next presentation are pretty outlandish, to say the least.”
Later, I reviewed my frantically scribbled notes. Kenny described how the domes between the world’s concentric rings would soon open up, allowing humankind to see all the solar systems in our universe, “a galactic alignment,” he said. “I wonder if all these chemtrails they are spraying are to try and hide this event and create a fake one,” he added, although it wasn’t exactly clear who “they” might be. Kenny predicted that Nasa would finally leave Earth and colonise Mars. “And we might have a fake alien invasion,” he said, nonchalantly. “I don’t know. I’m hypothesising.” He felt more confident that the North Pole would open up and serve as a portal for a chosen few to move 3,000 years into the future. “So there’s going to be time travel,” said Kenny. “We’re living in amazing times.”
Kenny remembered an announcement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January 2018 that the Doomsday Clock, which provides a symbolic countdown to a man-made apocalypse, had been set at two minutes to midnight. That was a sign, Kenny said, that the events he had outlined would take place in two years’ time, on 21 December 2020, the winter solstice. It was a lot sooner than I’d been expecting. Nobody in the audience seemed particularly perturbed. “If it does happen when I think it’s going to happen, embrace it, comfort those around you,” suggested Kenny, before adding, almost as an afterthought: “If it doesn’t happen, fine, it doesn’t happen, whatever. Life goes on.”
In the weeks after discovering Flat Earth, Gary John Heather threw himself into research, watching hundreds of films on YouTube. Early on, he tried to discuss the subject with his nephew, who works at Heather’s fire-fighting systems firm, but his nephew reacted first with indifference and then with anger. “He’s never really spoken to me like that,” said Heather. Soon, though, Heather discovered a community of like-minded people online. He set up a separate Facebook account, where he could post about Flat Earth without judgement, and joined groups dedicated to discussion of his newfound theories.
At times, I found it hard not to get swept up in Heather’s enthusiasm. Ideas tumbled out of him like coins from a fruit machine paying out a jackpot, leaving sentences unfinished as he was struck by more important thoughts. I admired his willingness to question the most fundamental aspects of our existence. And, after all, isn’t belief in a Flat Earth harmless? But when I suggested this to Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor in the school of experimental psychology at Bristol University, he vehemently disagreed. “I personally don’t think it’s harmless at all,” he said. “I think this is something that should worry us tremendously.”
Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist. In recent years, he’s dedicated himself to researching the ways we deal with misinformation and the factors that affect our acceptance of scientific evidence. He told me there is evidence to suggest that people who are exposed to conspiracy theories, even if they don’t buy into them, are subsequently less likely to believe other official accounts of events.
Humans have always been susceptible to misinformation. For most of history, this has been tempered by our tendency to be swayed by majority opinion. “In history that was a very wise thing to do,” said Lewandowsky. “If everyone in the village believed a tree to be poisonous, that was a good thing to believe.” Nowadays, no matter how unpopular your beliefs, you will find a community online. “I don’t think there is a belief absurd enough that you can’t find 1,000 people sharing it on Facebook,” Lewandowsky said. “No one realised what was going to happen. It’s just a sort of tragic consequence that our cognitive vulnerabilities are amplified by social media.”
We are only just beginning to understand how our age of connectivity is affecting the way we think. But we are already grappling with its consequences as the concepts of objectivity and facts are increasingly called into question. In the run-up to the UK’s EU referendum, the Vote Leave campaign repeated the message that Britain’s departure from the union would secure an additional £350m of weekly funding for Britain’s NHS, a claim later described by Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, as “a clear misuse” of official figures. In July, Vote Leave was fined £61,000 for breaching electoral law. The Washington Post, through its Fact Checker database, claims that Donald Trump has lied over 3,200 times since taking office. Online, we can choose our own truth.
Once you start to question everything, anything seems possible. On the Saturday morning at the Flat Earth Convention, Heather asked the audience if they believed the 9/11 attacks were carried out by terrorists. I could see only one other hand in the air. The night before, Robbie Davidson, who organised the Flat Earth International Conference in North Carolina last year, spoke about introducing Flat Earth to non-believers. “If you can get them questioning the moon landing, this topic’s a lot easier to digest,” he said. “But if they’re not there on the moon landing, I always say, back off, you’ve got work to do. Start with 9/11, see where they’re at on that scale.”
In 2011, Lewandowsky co-authored The Debunking Handbook, a guide for anyone attempting the precarious task of tackling misinformation. The book explains that attempts to disprove myths can inadvertently reinforce those same beliefs. Unfortunately, attempts to engage with proponents of discredited theories can also backfire. “The moment you show up to the debate you’re already confirming there is a debate to be had,” said Lewandowsky. “I would never debate a Flat Earther. I would never debate climate deniers and evolutionary biologists would never debate creationists. There is no scientific debate.”
It was Sunday afternoon and the final session of the convention. Tom Williams, Luke Johnson and George Kyriacou, PhD candidates in physics and astronomy at Cardiff University and Imperial College London, who had not been privy to Lewandowsky’s advice, had agreed to appear alongside a panel of Flat Earthers for a “heliocentric versus geocentric debate”. The session started civilly enough; while the scientists’ arguments clearly weren’t resonating, they were nevertheless greeted with polite applause. Then came a question from the audience: “Why is Nasa faking it all?”
“How deep do you think this is?” said Williams, in the manner of a man who had clearly missed all the rest of the weekend’s presentations. “So, every space mission ever has actually never happened? We’ve never sent a telescope up into space?”
“We’ve never sent an astronaut into space, either,” replied Allegedly KA Dave.
For the first time, the scientists seemed to realise the full extent of the conspiracy they were attempting to debunk.
“So…” said Williams. “There’s all of these volumes of data that have come back from telescopes that are all faked?”
The audience erupted in a chorus of affirmation. “Have you looked?” shouted one woman.
“Yes,” cried Williams. “I work with that data every day!”
Members of the audience began shouting out their own questions, unable to believe this naivety, turning to each other incredulously and talking among themselves. They demanded the scientists address the flaws they had seen in videos of astronauts in space.
“Have you looked at that footage?” demanded the woman. “Do you not see them fiddling with the wires?”
The scientists seemed confused and bemused. “You really do need to look,” she went on. “I hope that if you don’t take anything else away from this, that your preconceived ideas before you arrived that we’re all nuts…”
“I don’t think you’re nuts,” said Johnson, not entirely convincingly.
“At least look at what we’ve looked at so you can see perhaps where we’re coming from, you only need to see them fiddling with the strings once,” she continued. “That is when Nasa became an unreliable source of information for me. I only had to catch my husband once sleeping with another woman and I presumed he was going to do it again.”
The audience broke into applause. The scientists moved uncomfortably in their seats, the prospect of changing anyone’s mind clearly a fading hope.
“I’ll take one more question,” announced Heather.
A man jumped out of his seat. “I was just going to ask these lads: do they seriously think in 1969 they had the technology to land on the moon and to fly through the Van Allen radiation belts? Is that seriously possible? And you have no doubt about that?”
“Yes,” said Williams, with the tone of a man who has had quite enough.
“Not only do we believe they did but I’m also quite proud of it,” said Kyriacou, firmly.
“Oh no,” moaned one woman, seemingly in deep distress. A man nearby was muttering to himself. “It’s too much,” he said, shaking his head.
In the corridor outside the convention hall, I caught up with the shell-shocked scientists before they could make their escape. They’d been caught off guard by the level of support for such unscientific ideas, but they attempted to understand the motivation. “There’s a huge appeal in believing something that only a small group of people do,” said Kyriacou. “We all work in science so we very much know the appeal of discovering something for the first time. So we completely understand where they’re coming from, it just feels like they’ve gone down the wrong path.”
None of the scientists were optimistic about tackling the spread of misinformation. “I think a lot of the people in there are of that generation that will not be able to learn and to deal with the fake news that’s out there,” said Kyriacou. “But for the next generation, we need to change how it is in schools so they have a much better idea of what’s reliable data and what isn’t. It’s going to take a lot of work. I don’t think for the next 20 or 30 years it’s going to be easy.”
A few days after the convention, I received a message from Heather. It was a link to a clip from This Morning, the ITV show presented by Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby. Heather had appeared on the programme earlier that day, alongside two other speakers (one being Martin Kenny) from the convention. In the 10-minute clip, Schofield becomes increasingly frustrated at the Flat Earthers’ arguments. At one point, the telegenic physicist Professor Brian Cox makes an appearance to describe their suggestions as “drivel”. Heather responds by inviting Cox to debate a team of Flat Earthers, but Schofield claims the last word: “You’re all bonkers.”
Despite having his sanity questioned by Schofield, Heather judged the appearance a great success. He speculated that it would prompt viewers to take Flat Earth theory more seriously next time they encountered it online. “Whereas before they would have dismissed it,” he said. “I guarantee a lot more people have heard of Flat Earth now. It’s sowed a seed.”
Just a few days later, an edited version of the clip had been posted to YouTube and been watched more than 2.5m times. Meanwhile, Heather and Vanh had announced plans to hold Flat Earth conventions in London and Amsterdam in 2019.
I told Heather that, while I’d enjoyed my time with the Flat Earth community, I hadn’t been convinced by any of its arguments. He asked me to imagine the start of the universe, when the Earth and the sun were nothing more than dust floating in space. How, he said, did that dust begin to arrange itself into the world now sold to us by science? I told him I couldn’t explain, but that I believed there are people who can. It’s a matter of trust, I said. “Fair enough,” he replied. “And that’s your choice.” He left me with a request. “I only ask you to tell the truth as you see it.”
The following day, I drove out of London to the south coast of England and stood on the beach, the pebbles shifting beneath my feet. Facing in the direction of France, the water lay before me like a vast satin sheet, the surface gently rippling, a distorted mirror image of the cloudless blue canvas above. Ferries departed from a nearby port and sailed slowly into the distance, becoming white pinpricks as they approached the dividing line between the sea and the sky. In the fading evening light, it was difficult to tell when they dipped over the horizon.
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