There are many head-shaking moments in Behind the Curve—a 2018 documentary, now on Netflix, that follows luminaries of the Flat Earth movement, particularly YouTuber Mark Sargent. The most surprising may be the rigor with which believers in a Flat Earth disprove themselves. Twice in Behind the Curve, experiments show the opposite of what Flat Earth advocates hope to demonstrate, with one such experiment, involving a flashlight, serving as the documentary's ending.
"Science is having a problem combatting what we are doing," Mark Sargent says early in Behind the Curve, citing the fact that he can see Seattle skyscrapers from his mother's home on Whidbey Island, when he presumes they should be hidden behind the Earth's curvature. "Neil Degrasse Tyson—I hate saying his name, we call him He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named—says that, 'It's a growing anti-intellectual movement that borders on the end of civilization and democracy as we know it.'"
"The reason why we're winning against science is that science just throws math at us," Sargent says in Behind the Curve. Sargent and other proponents of a Flat Earth believe that our planet is covered by a gigantic dome, with the sun and moon rotating in circles above our heads. Antarctica isn't a unified continent, but a giant ice wall—just like in Game of Thrones, Sargent says—that surrounds the continents of Earth. Later, the documentary checks in on people with even more fantastical beliefs, including theorizing that additional, undiscovered continents are out there, beyond the wall.
"What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15-degree per hour drift," he said, per Newsweek. "Now, obviously we were taken aback by that – 'Wow, that’s kind of a problem.'
"We obviously were not willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth," he continued, talking to a fellow flat-Earther. "We don’t want to blow this, you know? When you’ve got $20,000 in this freaking gyro.
"If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad? It would be bad. What I just told you was confidential," he added.
Big yikes.
Maybe it's time to save your money and leave the space stuff to the real experts.
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