Confessed flat earther at a bar last night showed me before and after maps from 2015 to 2020

I ran into this guy at a dive bar in Portland who used to believe the earth was flat. He showed me side by side maps from his old group and the same satellite views from 2020. The difference in Antarctica alone was wild, like someone erased whole chunks of ice. He said the shift happened when a bunch of members started using GPS apps for fishing trips. Claimed the data from those apps broke the whole theory for him. Has anyone else seen real people flip on this stuff or is he an outlier?

2 comments

2 Comments

tessa36824d ago

My cousin actually went through something really similar last year. He was deep into one of those online flat earth groups for like two years, watched all the videos, the whole thing. What got him was downloading a hiking app with GPS tracking on his phone, he went out to prove the app was wrong and it just... didn't. The elevation files and paths matched perfectly with what satellites would show. Said it felt like the floor fell out from under him, but in a good way. Still talks about it sometimes, how weird it is to realize you were defending something that's so easy to check now with just a phone.

shane_wilson23d ago

Is it really that big of a deal though? @tessa368 I mean, sure your cousin got out of it but it sounds like he was just bored and into a weird hobby for a while, not like he was brainwashed or anything. People get into all sorts of dumb internet stuff, it doesn't always mean they're seriously lost. At most he wasted some time watching YouTube videos, it's not like he sold his house or stopped paying rent over it. Honestly the hiking app thing just sounds like a normal person realizing they were wrong about a silly thing, not some huge life changing event.