Why People Believe the Earth Is Flat
The community
The flat earth movement is not new: the modern movement dates to Samuel Rowbotham's 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy, and the Flat Earth Society was founded in England in 1956. The contemporary version is different in scale and character, driven largely by YouTube videos and online communities that have connected isolated believers into a global network.
The movement holds, at a minimum, that the Earth is a flat disc rather than a sphere, and that governments, space agencies and much of the scientific establishment are engaged in a coordinated deception to conceal this.
The evidence typically cited includes the apparent flatness of water, the visibility of objects across distances that spherical geometry would seem to preclude, and the claim that NASA photographs of Earth are composites.
What the evidence shows
Every photograph of Earth from space, from multiple independent space agencies including those of countries that do not cooperate politically, shows a spherical planet. Ships disappear hull-first over the horizon, consistent with a curved surface. The different star constellations visible from the northern and southern hemispheres are explained by a spherical Earth and have no flat-earth explanation. Lunar eclipses show a circular shadow on the Moon, which a flat disc could not consistently produce.
Satellite navigation systems such as GPS, which underpin mobile phone networks and global shipping, are designed around a spherical Earth, and they work.
Why the belief persists
Research on conspiratorial thinking consistently finds that belief in specific conspiracy theories is associated with a broader disposition toward distrust of authority, not with the specific merits of each claim. People who believe the Earth is flat very often hold other conspiracy beliefs.
The psychological function of conspiracy belief is not primarily epistemic. It provides a narrative that makes the believer special, privy to information that most people cannot see, and part of a community of others who know the truth. These are genuine psychological needs that evidence alone rarely addresses.
Sources and further reading
Pages we consulted when writing and revising this article, last checked October 8, 2026. They open in a new tab, and we are not responsible for what other sites publish.
- Flat Earth — Wikipedia — history of the idea, the modern revival and the evidence for a spherical Earth.
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