“I don’t want to be a flat Earther,” David Weiss says, his voice weary as he reflects on his personal awakening. “Would you wake up in the morning and want everyone to think you’re an idiot?”
But Weiss is a flat Earther. Ever since he tried and failed to find proof of the Earth’s curve four years ago, he’s believed with an evident passion that our planet is both flat and stationary – and it’s turned his world upside down.
“I absolutely freaked out,” Weiss tells CNN in a phone interview. “It literally whips the rug out from underneath you.”
Now, Weiss finds it tedious to associate with the majority of people – though he “unfortunately” still has some friends who believe in a round Earth. “I have no problem with anybody that wants to believe we live on a ball. That’s their choice,” he says. “It’s just not something I resonate with.”
Weiss’ preferred community is those who share his life-altering belief.
And that community is vast.
This week, the businessman attended the third annual Flat Earth International Conference, held at an Embassy Suites hotel in suburban Dallas, Texas. Organizers told CNN that about 600 others went too.
Previous conferences have taken place in Raleigh and Denver – while Brazil, Britain and Italy have also held flat-Earth conventions in recent years.
The event’s schedule resembled any corporate conference, with some fairly noticeable twists. Speakers gave presentations including “Space is Fake” and “Testing The Moon: A Globe Lie Perspective.” Awards for the year’s best flat Earth-related videos were handed out. And believers reveled in an opportunity to meet several of the movement’s most influential minds.
“We’ve all been communicating online (but) this brings us together so we can shake hands and give each other hugs,” says Weiss. “We can collaborate, we can make new friends. Because guess what, our old friends… we lost a lot of friends.”
On a clear day, the curvature of the Earth can be seen from an airplane window. But remarkably, the hundreds of flat Earthers at the Dallas gathering were just a small portion of the movement.
People in every pocket of this spherical planet are rejecting science and spreading the word that the Earth is flat.
There’s no clear study indicating how many people have been convinced – and flat Earthers like Weiss will tell you without evidence there are millions more in the closet anyway, including Hollywood A-listers and commercial airline pilots – but online communities have hundreds of thousands of followers and YouTube is inundated with flat-Earth content creators, whose productions reach millions.
A YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media.
The flat-Earth community has its own celebrities, music, merchandise – and a weighty catalog of pseudo-scientific theories. It’s been the subject of a Netflix documentary and has been endorsed by figures including the rapper B.o.B.
Each year, more flat-Earth events fill the calendar, organizers say.
“I’ve never seen anything grow this fast,” says Robbie Davidson, the founder of the Dallas conference. “I would say that within 10 years, the numbers are going to be astounding… next year, there’s going to be a conference in every major country in the world.”
But experts are wondering if the movement is really harmless – and whether we’re even approaching the edge of its influence.
Falling off the edge
When Davidson first heard that people really do believe in a flat Earth, “I just laughed and said, ‘they’ve got to be the stupidest people ever.’ Who in their right mind could believe something so dumb?”
A couple of years later, Davidson was setting up the first international flat Earth conference. Like most of the speakers at the event CNN spoke to, he was convinced after he decided he couldn’t prove the Earth’s roundness.
For Davidson, a born-again Christian, the most logical explanation for the conspiracy of the millennium goes like this: “Let’s just say there is an adversary, there is a devil, there is a Satan. His whole job would be to try to convince the world that God doesn’t exist. He’s done an incredible job convincing people with the idea that we’re just on a random speck in an infinite universe.”
The reality, says Davidson, is that the flat Earth, sun, moon and stars are contained in a “Truman Show”-like dome. From there, pitfalls can be easily dismissed – like photos of the Earth from space, which flat Earthers believe are photoshopped. “This all goes away if they put a 24/7 camera feed on the moon,” he adds.