An Open Apology From Team Flat Earth: We Were Just Kidding

A sincere letter from top Flat Earth presenters asking your forgiveness for taking the joke a little too far. "It was a mean thing to do, and we are truly sorry."

Flat Earth Action News is the official literary publication of the contemporary Flat Earth movement. We are based in Orlando, Fl.

Image provided by NASA.

Dear World:

And by “world,” we mean the globe, the planet, the sphere, the spinning ball.

We are what is often known as Team Flat Earth. We’re writing to offer our sincere apologies for our years-long prank campaign to convince people the Earth, our beautiful planet, our Goddess mother Gaia, is “flat.”

It is possible to take a joke too far. That is what we’ve done — and what we regret.

We also regret that we have damaged our scientific credibility by abusing the trust that people have in us as legitimate reporters on important health issues. We claim to be experts in science, and demonstrate that in some significant ways.

Then we have been pretending the Earth is “flat” and starting controversies when the world and so many people are struggling and in pain at such a difficult and critical time in history. We have used science against people when we knew better.

That is some real gaslighting.

Perhaps you’ll be interested in the backstory. It will not excuse our behavior, but it will maybe reveal the human side of who we are. And by the way, the reason we are doing this now is because we’re expecting a feature article demolishing us coming soon in The New York Times.

There is nothing ‘flat’ about our beautiful world.

It All Started as a Bet

It started as a bet at a party: who could get a million clicks on a YouTube video claiming that the Earth is not a sphere? Well, it was not just any party — it was a rather fancy one in Austin, Texas. Attended by a lot of people whose names you know, who claim to be health freedom advocates, including several medical doctors — and tequila was involved. Not just any tequila: Cierto Extra Anejo.

And, that one night, we came up with the whole strategy — and successfully built a major international brand, capitalizing on public confusion and mistrust of science that we helped create in the first place.

Our answer to any intelligent question regarding the shape of the planet would always be some form of “you’re wrong, or you’re stupid.” That is mean, especially when sincere, naive people join us and also declare you wrong or stupid.

Our ultimate triumph was being able to claim that we are smarter than you are because we “know” the world is flat.

We can’t tell you who was at this party.

An All-Night Brainstorming Session

We are all experts in various branches of science. Most of us have MD or Ph.D. degrees. We know what the scientific method is, and our goal with this joke was to violate it as many times as possible.

We wrote bad answers to many predictable questions in advance, which we knew would come up, such as, “Mommy, why is it dark at night?” and “Why is it cold in winter?” The brainstorming went on and on, and it really was the greatest party ever.

And we came up with questions to confuse you. How come there are no satellite photos of upside-down people in Australia? Why don’t airplanes fly with their nosees pointed upward to '“follow the curve”? Why don’t submarines at the bottom of the sea adjust for the curve? How do satellites work? And so on.

Our official note-taker, only half-drunk, caught most of it. (You would recognize her name immediately.) Note, none of this was a psyop. We came up with it ourselves.

She Called her Mom and Got an Apology

We never went to sleep that night; at breakfast, someone, I cannot say who, called her mother and said she was upset she had told her the world was a sphere when really, it was not. She said she had discovered “the proof” — and started crying, for effect — and her mom apologized for misleading her. On speakerphone no less — we all heard it.

That was the first taste of the narcotic that this became.

We knew we had a winner.

We kept working into the afternoon and came up with our best meme-ready phrases, including “Show me the curve, bro!” (and created the “Showmebrobot,” an app which posts the phrase, “Show me the curve, bro” from hundreds of fake accounts on YouTube, BitChute, Facebook, and many other platforms, including Substack).

Then we came up with “Isaac Newton was an idiot,” “space is a hoax,” and “gravity is a fraud” — they became surprise hits as well.

We vowed to repeat the words “Michelson-Morley experiment” as many times as possible, even though none of us have ever read the paper. We said “the ether” so often, everyone would laugh themselves silly every time it was uttered, usually with “bro” tacked on.

Earth seen from the International Space Station. There’s the curve, bro!

And it Went On and On

Obviously, it didn’t stop there. Three of the people who were in on the bet got more than 500,000 clicks on videos they made that weekend, and then the response videos from dweeby physicists and wedding photographers started coming out — and the more response videos there were, the more people looked us up and…it went on.

Then came the debates. The endless YouTube debates, lasting hours on end, where we gave less information than Fauci during the “pandemic.”

Then we put out the unexpected best-selling book 200 Proofs Earth is Not a Spinning Ball, and each time there was a new response video, it sold another thousand copies — but the book didn’t prove anything, except that if you…sell a thousand copies enough times, you can buy a ranch. Actually, three ranches.

The Sun as seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

The Sun is Not 3,000 Miles Away

Those lovely estates (which we will now donate to charity) sit comfortably on a spherical planet. Of that we assure you, though you have little reason to believe us after we already convinced you otherwise.

The Sun is in fact 93 million miles away — not 3,000 miles (that was a typo — it was supposed to be “30,000 miles” but 3,000 caught on, so we left it). Yes, we convinced hundreds of thousands of people that the Sun is only slightly further from the Earth than New York is from Los Angeles.

This was so much fun, I’m sure you understand, we just could not stop. We discovered that most people are so out of it, they will accept nearly anything. We were propelled by the simple fact that if you believe this crap, you’re a moron.

Anyway, we are terribly sorry for all the confusion.

We are sorry for torturing people who still have a shred of logic or who passed elementary school science. We have wasted a lot of your time. We messed with the heads of many kids. We have been exploiting people who are confused and looking for answers. We have stoked additional mistrust in government and science when suspicions are already at their very peak.

We apologize to the Freemasons, who have never said anything about the shape of the planet — but we blamed them.

We promise never to do any of this again, and we hope you will keep reading our accurate coverage of medical issues.

Most kids already think “NASA lies,” therefore “the Earth is flat.” Boy, they know how to put on a frightening protest these days — chalk on the sidewalk!

The Spinning Ballers are Right, Of Course

The problem with claiming the planet is flat is that it’s not 1492 anymore, when people didn’t have a clue, nobody had a private yacht or airplane, and you couldn’t text someone in the Philippines to find out if it was light out.

The shape of the planet is not some abstract thing unconnected to everything else, like it was 500 years ago, before Isaac Newton was born. The planet and its properties are connected to nearly all technology, including the functioning of the internet.

Many things depend on the shape of the planet, from “Find my iPhone” to the “find the airport” function on a Boeing 777 to the ability to accurately predict the time and direction of sunrise anywhere in the world. You can find a rural address in the back hills of Arkansas thanks to those 31 GPS satellites dependably, predictably orbiting the planet. The “G” does not stand for “guessing.”

For a navigation satellite to work, you have to know exactly where it is at all times. That’s based on the same principle as it knowing where you are.

A GPS navigation satellite. Look, Ma, no balloons!

The Helium Satellite Joke Must Remain Anonymous

We can’t tell you who came up with the idea that “NASA buys 95% of the helium produced in the world, therefore ‘satellites’ float around on balloons,” but we all thought it was a scream.

The concept is ridiculous. But NASA does not launch many satellites anyway; there are more than 100 private companies around the world that do — operating in 80 countries. The tactic of “blame NASA” works great. But they are good, hardworking people, and deserve better.

We’re sorry that we pushed this joke so endlessly long, and that so many of you fell for it, or at least doubted yourself. Which is still ridiculous, because this whole thing is so hideously stupid there is no way to even describe it.

We can only fool you if you come along for the ride.

Now, why would anyone do that?

Very truly yours,

— Team Flat Earth: Del, Derrick, James C., Ivor, Bobby Jr., Robert M., Peter M., Joseph M., Meryl, Gary, Poornima and Whitney. And a few other people we cannot mention.

Yes, the Moon landing happened. Duhh.

PS — It is our duty to warn you that The Beatles and Rolling Stones never wrote a single song, there are no nuclear bombs and never were, Einstein could not do math, viruses don’t exist, vaccines are bad for you, flying saucers are a hoax, your dog doesn’t really love you, your cat is spying on you, your garden is terrible for the environment, and soon you’ll be eating worms and crickets for dinner. Those things are all true. We have done the research.