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i was a teenage flat earth scientist
May. 8th, 2026 02:27 pmWith this entry, I’m going to reveal one of the internet’s biggest, most well-guarded secrets, one that may even get me killed or, if I’m being serious, forever banned from the community to which this secret belongs.
But first, some background.
It all started around ‘06 or ‘07. I know this because every night my bedroom wall was a kaleidoscopic mishmash of color from Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, alternating between anime and adult-oriented cartoons. It was the era of Futurama, Cowboy Bebop, The Boondocks, FLCL, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. “Number one in the hood, G.” I must have been a freshman in high school. The curriculum was English Lit, Algebra, Social Studies, Spanish, and Science, or something along those lines. I remember the science teacher was a big Christian who refused to teach evolution, and of course, I was the smartass kid always asking her stuff like, “Do you think God could create a rock so heavy that he can’t lift it?” in a faux-genuine tone, as if I truly wanted to know the answer when really I was just fucking with her. Back then, I thought I knew everything, so of course I watched a lot of Amazing Atheist and Thunderf00t on the nascent YouTube. I regurgitated their talking points like they were my own. I filtered the world through an anti-spiritual, pure-science lens, which appealed to my latent nihilism. Nothing was known unless it could be observed, validated, and tested, and even those things were meaningless to me because there was nothing beyond the known universe, only entropy and suffering. Obviously, I was a very chipper kid.
I remember the Spanish teacher was into The Smiths. She had a printout of Morrissey and Marr on the wall behind her desk. What The Smiths had to do with Spanish, I had no idea, but The Smiths were one of my favorite bands, so this teacher and I bonded over this picture a little bit. But she was also the flirtatious type who would look me up and down in this “What are you doing tonight?” sort of way. Somehow, even at my young age, I knew she was dangerous. And my suspicions were confirmed when, one day, she got fired for marrying one of the students. She tried to keep it on the down-low, but everyone found out. The rumor was that it was a green card marriage. All the other teachers pretended as if they had no idea what was going on. And the day it was found out, the administration held a big emergency meeting in the gym. “We’ve gathered here today to discuss Ms. Baez’s departure. There have been many rumors floating around, so we would like to set the record straight. First, she was not fired, she has voluntarily left of her own accord.” And so on. Damage control. The idea that a teacher at a private Catholic school could do such a thing was so blasphemous, so scandalous, that it had to be covered up. But we all knew what happened.
All the students were there in the gym. I was sitting next to this kid named Aaron, who was my only friend that year. Somehow we got along, even though he was opposite from me in many ways. He was big into sci-fi television and would often read books on quantum mechanics at lunch. He wore a pocket protector and big rounded spectacles and was quite chubby and had a round face colored by rosacea. Pretty much all the stereotypical things you would expect from a classic nerd in a television show, he had them. But he and I bonded over SimCity one day, so we clicked. And I guess I was one of the only kids who would even talk to him. Maybe we gravitated toward each other because we were both sort of outsiders, on the fringes of the soccer-obsessed, church-going student body. He too believed there was nothing beyond the realm of science, only entropy and suffering. Most of the time, Aaron was no-nonsense, very serious about his schoolwork, but when Computer Lab came around on Wednesdays, he seemed to change, show more of his true personality. Instead of doing the assignments, he'd browse Star Trek message boards and get into furious post wars with other users about the show’s physics or which alien race was the most advanced or whether Kirk was a better captain than Picard or whatever. I always told him Sisko was the better captain. This both annoyed and intrigued him because, “Wait, you watch Star Trek? Really?” I guess that was another reason we got along so well.
And yeah, I watched Star Trek, mostly because my grandma was into it, also MacGyver and Stargate SG-1. However, back then, my multimedia diet primarily consisted of computer games, ’80s music, and Adult Swim.
Adult Swim used to do these things called “bumps,” where before returning from commercial break they’d display a black screen with a humorous joke, saying, or anecdote in small white font, usually accompanied by a jazzy, urban beat. The bumps were typically ironic, poking fun at current events or certain fringe groups and ideologies. And one night, when I was watching Cowboy Bebop, right after the commercial break, I remember seeing this one bump where they quoted someone from theflatearthsociety.com. (Trying to find the bump now, in 2026, seems impossible, but I swear it existed.) It was some quote from a user saying something about how, under the Flat Earth model, moonlight is caused not by the sun’s light reflecting off the surface of the moon but by bioluminescent creatures called “moon shrimp.” The bump presented the quote with no additional comment. No snarky remark, no accompanying image, nothing. I guess the Adult Swim staff figured the absurdity of the quote was hilarious enough on its own.
Needless to say, this bump immediately grabbed my attention. The next day at school, I told Aaron all about it and, when Computer Lab came around, we both navigated to theflatearthsociety.com, created accounts, and basically started textually attacking everyone on the forum, making numerous posts about how stupid they were and whatnot. We started with low-hanging fruit, like, “Don’t you guys know that we’ve been to space and also have satellite images of Earth clearly showing it’s round?” to which we were met with conspiratorial counterarguments like, “All those pictures are computer-generated. We’ve never been to space. Here’s a link detailing the moon landing hoax.” When we tried to counter those conspiracies, we were called sheeple and laughed at by the majority of the userbase. So we switched to more advanced arguments, like, “If the Earth is flat, how do you account for gravity?” and Aaron was really good at coming up with scientific examples and math formulas to quote-unquote “prove” gravity did indeed actually exist. He was way smarter than I was.
But the Flat Earthers had a counter for this stuff, too. Aaron and I quickly found out that they had created their own incredibly detailed cosmological model, called the “Neo-Classical Model,” with its own governing principles, its own underlying assumptions, and even its own mathematical framework to support each and every little nuance. The roots of this “Neo-Classical” Flat Earth model date back to the mid-1800s, where it was outlined in a book titled Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe, written by Samuel Rowbotham, who was basically a kook writer-slash-inventor with no credible educational background whatsoever. Despite that, to the modern-day Flat Earther, Rowbotham's model fully explains the phenomenon we call gravity and literally any other potential hole in Flat Earth theory. In this model, the Earth is a disc that moves upward at 9.80665 m/s2, which they call “Universal Acceleration,” the same measurement used for gravitational acceleration. The sun and moon are also discs, hovering 3,000 miles above the Earth, both rotating clockwise in a circular path opposite each other, which accounts for night and day. The North Pole is the center of the Earth, while the South Pole is the circumference around it, which Flat Earthers have lovingly taken to calling “the ice wall" (some even joke that it's guarded by armed penguins). Considering all this, one might assume that if the Earth is indeed moving upward at a constant rate, then it would accelerate past the speed of light and kill us all, but Flat Earthers have a counter for this too, outlined in excruciating detail on their wiki, using Einstein’s theory of special relativity to demonstrate that it’s actually impossible for an object to accelerate past the speed of light.
What I’m trying to illustrate here is that Flat Earthers created their own scientific worldview, backed it with already established science and advanced mathematics that went way over the head of the average layperson, especially teenage me, and have been using this model to bludgeon people they call “Round Earthers” (or RE’ers) over the head with ever since.
As far as I can tell, the origins of the original “Flat Earth Society” date back to the mid-1950s, when a guy named Samuel Shenton founded it. This original society existed with a small membership until Shenton died, at which point Charles K. Johnson created the International Flat Earth Society of America after inheriting part of Shenton's library, and he was able to convince about 3,000 people to join. They created newsletters and flyers and seemed like a relatively serious group of true-blue “Flat Earth Scientists,” but their numbers eventually dwindled to nothing. Then the society was later revived by one Daniel Shenton when, in 2004, he registered the domain name theflatearthsociety.com and launched the forums and, later on, the wiki. As far as I can tell, “Daniel Shenton” was not related to Samuel Shenton in any way, and it likely wasn’t even his real name, as there’s no record of him ever having been alive, so, to this day, Daniel Shenton remains just another anonymous person on the internet, which should give you some idea of what we’re dealing with, some hint about the secret soon to be revealed here.
Anyway, like I was saying, Aaron and I joined up around 2006 or so, after seeing an Adult Swim bump. We spent many days in the computer lab arguing with Flat Earthers, and even took the hobby home, browsing the forums deep into the night. I didn’t have the patience or mental capacity to properly argue the Round Earth perspective, often defaulting to name-calling and cat memes, which, early on, got my account banned, so I would make a new one, only to get banned again, only to make yet another account, only to get banned again, and so on, until eventually I started being a little nicer and started making friends within the moderator team. But Aaron, on the other hand, had the patience of a Zen monk and the mental capacity of an adolescent Einstein, and he was dead serious about proving Flat Earthers wrong. He would write essay-length posts outlining all his arguments, packed with scientific jargon and math formulas, and while most users responded with ridicule like, “Have you been to space yourself?” or “Are you just parroting mainstream science like a good little sheep?”, there was one user who always engaged him seriously, a guy named Tom Bishop. Tom would take each and every point in Aaron’s posts and dismantle them one by one using hardcore science and advanced mathematics and detailed diagrams, which fueled months-long debate wars between the two of them. This eventually became so frustrating for Aaron that, one day, he just stopped logging into the site altogether. He was done.
Being far more cynical by nature than Aaron, I started to suspect something was up with the Flat Earth forums pretty early on, way before he even quit. It really hit me when, one time, Aaron was arguing back and forth with some established Flat Earther, and I noticed that, when Aaron employed the argument that lunar eclipses disprove the Neo-Classical model (because how could an eclipse happen if the sun and moon discs are rotating opposite each other at all times?), the Flat Earther made up some ridiculous counterargument on the spot. That counterargument was basically, “Well, there’s actually a third celestial disc that’s invisible to the naked eye called the ‘shadow object’ that hovers just below the sun and moon discs and sometimes intersects with them, which explains why eclipses happen,” and then, as if suddenly realizing someone had exposed a vulnerability in their model, the moderation team added a wiki article covering this mysterious “shadow object” (sometimes referred to as “the antimoon”) on the same exact day Aaron made the original argument. This struck me as very strange because most scientifically minded people don’t operate this way. In fact, most people don’t operate this way. People don’t usually just make things up on the fly and then immediately argue as if they those things are true. The scientific method, which most Flat Earthers claim to respect and practice, usually calls for a hypothesis (e.g. “the shadow object”) to be tested through experimentation and then refined based on the results, not, “Oh, let me just make up some bullshit real quick to explain this obvious problem in my model and then pretend as if it’s 100% factual.” This practice of making things up on the fly became so commonplace among Flat Earthers that, by around 2007, a year after I had joined, I was convinced the whole website was some sort of elaborate hoax, an “epic troll,” as we used to say back then.
I became so convinced of this that I flipped sides and started arguing for the Flat Earth model myself. That’s right, I was a Teenage Flat Earth Scientist. I wanted in on the fun, to be part of the joke, to participate in “the lulz,” as we would call it back then. This transformative process is what I’ll now dub the “Round Earth to Flat Earth Pipeline,” and I suspect it’s how a lot of quote-unquote “Flat Earth Scientists” got started.
I made a brand-new account that was dedicated solely to slinging Flat Earth propaganda. I employed many methods, like liberally quoting the Flat Earth Wiki and making things up on the fly, but my main method was simple, I would sow the seeds of doubt in modern science. I would argue that, instead of blindly following the mainstream scientific narrative, you should instead do the research yourself and experience the science firsthand, only then could you know the true shape of the Earth. I would argue that you can’t trust the government, so you can’t trust pictures of Earth from space. And I would also argue that there was a huge conspiracy to hide the shape of the Earth, backing it up with ridiculous theories like “it’s all big oil, the oil companies are making a killing off the airline industry under the Round Earth model, because they can artificially extend flight times and therefore sell more oil.” But my main go-to doubt-sower was “dark matter.” I would say, “The entire Round Earth model of physics is dependent on this made-up substance called ‘dark matter,’ which supposedly makes up 27% of the universe but has never actually been observed or tested, and despite this, you’re expecting me to believe the Earth is round? Are you fucking kidding me right now?” And I would stick to this argument like glue, because it was grounded in a real scientific problem that cosmologists still haven’t been able to fully resolve. What the fuck is dark matter? Where does it come from? Why hasn’t it been observed? Why can’t it be tested? To me, that signaled serious problems with our understanding of the universe, and if there were serious problems with our understanding of the universe then why the hell should I believe any of it?
This line of argumentation was a hit, and one that many Round Earthers couldn’t contend with. It was a great sower of doubt. They would say, “Well, we know dark matter exists because otherwise galaxies wouldn’t behave the way they do, their rotation curves wouldn’t match the observed gravitational effects, so something invisible has to be there even if we haven’t directly detected it yet.” And I would say, “OK, but how the fuck is that any different than me saying the shadow object causes lunar eclipses?” At which point they would either error out and start repeating themselves or simply concede, saying something like, “OK, maybe we don’t fully understand how our universe works yet, maybe our model is incomplete, but I think our model makes more sense than yours.” And that was exactly where I wanted them, because it was the perfect position, it placed Round Earthers and Flat Earthers almost on the same playing field of uncertainty. It promoted “critical thinking.”
As I was doing all this, I would tell myself that I was trying to save these poor lost souls, encourage them to do their own research, help them actually use their brains, use some critical thinking for a change, but really I was just laughing my ass off the whole time. Sometimes I would even log in to my old account, the one I had used to argue for Round Earth, and post intentionally bad Round Earth arguments directed at my new account, essentially arguing with myself in order to build up my persona’s credibility as a legitimate “Flat Earth Scientist.” And considering the admins could see the IP addresses of every account, and considering the IP addresses across my two accounts matched, the admin team surely knew I was doing this, but they never said a word about it, which is just yet another hint about the secret soon to be revealed here.
It was around 2008 when theflatearthsociety.com had a little civil war. I’m not sure exactly what caused it, but at some point Tom Bishop, who was still just as active as ever, suggested that the forums were going off the rails, that “it was becoming too much of a joke,” and that a new forum should be created with real “Flat Earth Scientists” as the moderation team. Tom Bishop, however, refused to be part of this new moderation team, for some reason. But this idea took off and so a splinter group was formed. Shortly after, a new website popped up, theflatearthsociety.org, which was hosted by a whole new person and run by a whole new moderation team. I was quite active as a Flat Earther when this was going on, and while I was never made part of this new moderation team, I was respected as a “true” Flat Earther and accepted into the inner circle. From that point onward, I was actively posting on both versions of The Flat Earth Society, using the same persona on each forum, until a few years later when .com shut down, leaving .org as the only official Flat Earth Society online community. During all this time, I became such close friends with the webmaster that I was added to his personal IRC chatroom, where I would spend many nights just shooting the shit with the moderation team, who were pretty much just like me. We would stay up late talking about music and video games and Adult Swim, sometimes we'd even play Team Fortress 2 together. 2fort, one of the best first-person-shooter maps ever made. Notice, however, how I didn’t say we would talk about Flat Earth Theory, because in group chats none of us talked about Flat Earth Theory. And that’s because, well, none of us really believed in Flat Earth Theory. I mean, c’mon, there's so much evidence that the Earth is round, you would pretty much have to be an idiot to believe otherwise. Ships disappear hull-first over the horizon. Different stars are visible depending on your hemisphere. The higher you climb, the farther the horizon extends. Time zones exist because different parts of Earth receive sunlight at different times. Shadow angles change depending on latitude. You can easily calculate the Earth’s circumference in your backyard using sticks and sunlight. Circumnavigation. Satellites and astronauts and even private citizens have photographed the Earth from space thousands of times. Gravity pulls matter into spherical shapes, and this can be reproduced in lab environments. Constellations rotate differently in the northern and southern hemispheres. Airplane routes only make sense on a globe. People at higher elevations can see sunsets longer. Weather balloons capture the curvature of the horizon. GPS systems function using a mathematically modeled spherical Earth, so if the Earth were not actually round, GPS would be all fucked up. This is all well-known stuff. The entire Flat Earth moderation team was aware of this stuff. We may have made counters up on the fly to explain away these obvious scientific truths, but we did so knowing exactly what we were doing. It was all a big joke, and we were all in on the joke. In fact, we were so in on the joke that, in group chats like the IRC channel I had been added to, we wouldn’t even suggest it was a joke, because doing so would have broken the unspoken code.
But in private chats, one on one, the code simply didn’t apply. The admin, the moderators, even some of the most serious-seeming Flat Earthers on the site were all in on it. We’d send each other links to certain posts, laughing at how gullible the RE’ers were, celebrating how deftly we had tricked them. We’d strategize ways to shore up the Flat Earth model, how to make it ironclad against Round Earth science so that we would continue to be taken seriously by newcomers. We didn’t want to be seen as some huge joke because, of course, that would undermine the effectiveness of the joke. We’d talk about this stuff all the time. For those in the know, this was an open secret.
So, that’s the reveal. The Flat Earth Society, in its current incarnation as theflatearthsociety.org, is an elaborate hoax, an epic troll, satire basically. The hundreds of wiki articles, the detailed diagrams, the complicated mathematical frameworks explaining Universal Acceleration, it’s all one big joke. The whole society is just a small group of people with multiple sock accounts pretending to be idiots for lulz.
But who’s really the idiot here?
Now, don’t get me wrong, we all had our reasons, many of which we pretended were noble and justified. We’d tell ourselves that we were encouraging people to challenge their own deeply held beliefs, that we were promoting a certain level of critical thinking that we felt was lacking in the modern collective psyche. But the real reason we did it was because it was just funny as hell. We did it for the lulz. It provided an endless stream of entertainment. “Come look at the dumb Flat Earther, doesn’t he know that ships disappear behind the horizon? What an idiot!” But in our minds, we weren’t the idiots, the people arguing for Round Earth were, because they didn’t realize it was all a big joke. They were gullible conformists who couldn’t think for themselves. There was also an element of contrarianism at play here. The only reason I got along so well with all the so-called “Flat Earth Scientists” was because we were all so similar in a contrarian, outsider sort of way. We all ranged from about 16 to 25 years old, we were all deeply cynical and distrustful of authority, we all had nihilistic outlooks on life, we all had barely any real-world friends, we all spent way too much time playing retro computer games and arguing on the internet, and we all listened to music made long before we were even born. One guy around my age was obsessed with Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa and had thousands of dollars’ worth of rare recordings. You could say, perhaps, that we were born in the wrong era, but really we just had massive chips on our shoulders and wanted to be different from everyone else. We saw everyone who wasn’t in on the joke as conformists, and we desperately didn’t want to be like them. The Flat Earth Society epitomized this dynamic, because what’s more non-conformist than claiming you believe the Earth is flat? Nothing. In the twenty-first century, that's probably the most contrary claim one can make. So, of course, The Flat Earth Society attracted people who were, at their core, contrarians.
There was one anomaly, however, one person we couldn’t quite figure out. This person wasn’t in the IRC channel. He didn’t speak privately to any members of the moderation team. He refused to be part of the inner circle. He seemed to operate totally independently. This person was Tom Bishop.
Tom Bishop is what I would call an elder Flat Earther. As far as I can tell, he has been around since the forum’s creation in 2004. He seems to know the Flat Earth Wiki by heart and can instantly regurgitate its talking points from memory. When waves of newbies would show up repeating the same Round Earth arguments, he would often just reply, “Read the wiki,” followed by a link to whichever article supposedly debunked the claim. His avatar was a picture of a nondescript, well-shaven, elderly Caucasian man with neatly combed silver hair, and, considering these were the days before generative AI, and considering I reverse-searched the image and found nothing, the photo seemed unique and genuine, as if it could actually be a real photo of him. More importantly, Tom himself seemed entirely genuine in his interactions. Sometimes he was a little caustic, but unlike everyone else on the forum, he never once hinted that he was joking, trolling, or playing a character. In fact, out of everyone I interacted with on the forums, Tom Bishop is the only one I would comfortably say might have been the real deal, especially considering that, here in the year 2026, he’s still posting, still arguing for Flat Earth with the same unwavering seriousness. As of right now, his profile has 18,032 posts to its name, and his latest post, on April 27th, 2026, reads, “There are far more interesting and pertinent phenomena to discuss, much of it right around you. Round Earthers who have looked into this should know that there are FE explanations for the Midnight Sun. You have been tricked and hoodwinked into focusing your attention on Round Earth gaslighting, which is obvious by the phrasing of the ‘Final Experiment.’ In contrast, Round Earthers won't even acknowledge the wild astronomical phenomena that is being pointed out, and opt to pretend that everything is perfectly normal.” Tom Bishop is a legend, and he has been doing this for a very long time without ever once breaking character, which tells me either A) he is neurotically dedicated to trolling people on a relatively obscure internet forum, or B) he is not playing a character at all, meaning he genuinely believes the claims he’s making.
I point this out to highlight the fact that, while the majority of theflatearthsociety.org is satirical, there may, in fact, be a few people who actually believe the crazy shit they are espousing. But herein lies the problem. Because of the satirical nature of the site, it’s almost impossible to know who’s genuine and who’s faking it. Who’s an idiot, and who’s pretending to be an idiot? (I’m using the term “idiot” here flippantly, but you know what I mean.) The waters here have been so muddied that, who could possible know?
There’s this famous internet quote, often used on message boards, that goes something like,
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe they're in good company.”
I would take this a step further and ask, if you spend all your time pretending to be an idiot, are you not just a full-blown idiot yourself at that point? What’s the difference? Does it even matter if you’re pretending? To put it more succinctly, if the satire is indistinguishable from the thing it's satirizing, is it still satire, or is it just the thing itself at that point?
So now I’m starting to think that maybe I was the idiot all along.
