There was a smattering of interest in the 1950s with the creation of the International Flat Earth Society, but today's resurgence of the theory seems to derive from social media, said Viren Swami, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. And, psychologists say, flat-Earth conspiracy theorists may be chasing many of the same needs as believers in other conspiracies: social belonging, the need for meaning and control, and feelings of safety in an uncertain world.įlat-Earth theories aren't new in the modern era, they date back to an English writer named Samuel Rowbotham, who came up with a variety of creative interpretations of cosmology in the mid-1800s. So what is the appeal? For many believers, it's a matter of distrust of the scientific elite and the desire to see the evidence with their own eyes. [ 8 Times Flat-Earthers Tried to Challenge Science in 2017)Īs conspiracy theories go, it's a pretty all-encompassing one.
Exactly what this looks like varies by who is theorizing, but many flat-Earth believers say that walls of ice surround the edge of the disk, and that the planets, moons and stars hover in a sort of dome-shaped firmament above Earth, much closer to Earth than they really are. Instead, flat-earthers argue, the planet is a disk.
That subculture is flat-earthers, people who argue that centuries of observations that the Earth is round (including astronaut photographs from space and the fact that round-the-world travel itineraries work) are either mistaken or part of a vast cover-up.
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