Mixed Results for The Final Experiment

The expedition confirmed what most people knew, but what effect is it having in the Flat Earth Community?

A month has passed since a group of globe-earthers and flat-earthers travelled to Antarctica as part of pastor Will Duffy’s “The Final Experiment.” The participants observed exactly what everyone should have expected if we do live on a globe: a 24-hour sun circling just above the horizon. This result would be impossible on a flat earth. Now that there’s been some time for the results to sink in, has this empirical test of the globe model had any effect on the flat-earth fallacy and its adherents? Has this indeed been The Final Experiment that finally stops the flat-earth movement in its tracks?

Hardly, though it has had some impact. According to Duffy, some number of flat-earthers have seen the light or, more likely, simply realized the hypocrisy and cynicism of the movement’s leaders. Here’s one of the videos he put out since the expedition’s return:

At around the 3:00 minute mark, he mentions one follower of flat-earther Eric Dubay who saw through his cult leader’s flip-flopping and publicly left the movement. Later in the video, Duffy mentions several flat-earthers who have reached out, saying his project convinced them they live on a globe.

So yes, The Final Experiment has had some effect. At the same time, the prominent flat-earth YouTubers claim their channels are doing fine, so I suspect this project has just raised their visibility, similar to what happened with the Netflix documentary Behind the Curve back in 2018.

Seeing is (maybe) believing

What about the flat-earthers who went on the trip? The results here are also mixed. Jeran Campanella (Jeranism) seems close to rejoining the rest of us here on a round planet, according to this post from Culture Catz, a full-time science teacher and part-time YouTuber who focuses on all types of unscientific nonsense. (And since I first drafted this post, Jeran has indeed left the flat-earth community.)

This video covers the pushback Jeran has received since admitting the existence of a 24-hour sun and hinting that he now thinks we live on a globe. (Sarge Marshall, one of the flat-earthers in my satirical novel, Ship of Fools, receives a similarly hateful response when he organizes a trip to Antarctica).

Faced with this criticism, Jeran has come to a startling revelation: flat-earthers are not nice people. Crucially for understanding conspiratorial movements, Culture Catz points out that this is the response Jeran himself trained his audience to have, through countless of his own hate-filled videos. Much of the rest of the video is a comparison of Jeran’s remarks about Antarctica from two years ago compared to his own followers’ statements today.

While Jeran may be moving toward a reality-based view, Austin Whitsitt, the other prominent flat-earther on the trip, is trying to incorporate this “new” information into a flat-earth model, with limited success. And while he claims to be loyal to the flat-earth movement, he’s still being treated with contempt by the rest of the community.

Here’s a video by my favorite Michigan-based globe-earther, Bob the Science Guy, covering Whitsitt’s response. The beginning features a supercut of flat-earthers’ past statements that a 24-hour sun in Antarctica would be impossible if the Earth were flat. After that, he goes into Whitsitt’s appearance on a channel run by Nathan Oakley, one of the most prominent and long-standing flat-earthers. Whitsitt tries to explain his ideas for a new model of the flat-earth, but appearing in such a hostile environment seems to have been a mistake:

Glitches in the system

I mentioned in a previous post that an incorrect setting in Will Duffy’s initial livestream introduced a glitch that led to the charge that he and other participants were streaming from a green-screen studio. This belief was so obviously false to anyone familiar with green-screen technology that even a prominent flat-earther debunked it. Yet this hasn’t kept the lie from spreading, with Eric Dubay claiming the whole project used not just a green screen, but a 360-degree LED studio like the ones employed by big-budget movies.

A lie travels around the world at the speed of light, while the truth arrives on the back of a snail, if at all. TFE and various participants have had to spend time debunking this claim rather than focusing on the results of the numerous experiments they conducted. I said in that previous post that this glitch was an unfortunate distraction, and it has been. But even without it, flat-earthers are picking apart other aspects of the experiment’s video footage that supposedly show it was faked, as just about everyone knew they would.

They particularly have a problem with shadows, drawing on some of the same misunderstandings of how light works used by moon-landing deniers (the overlap between these two conspiracy movements being large). Here’s another video from Culture Catz covering Eric Dubay’s claims about some of these other “anomalies” in the livestreamed footage, beginning at around the 3:45 mark. Wait for the funny bit about shrinking and expanding shadows.

Was this the final final experiment?

As much as Will Duffy wanted to settle the debate once and for all, that’s clearly not going to happen. The truth was revealed once again, yet some people will persist in seeing what they want to see, cherry-picking evidence, or making up wild claims from slim reeds (we couldn’t see condensation when they exhaled, so they must have been indoors!). In short, they’ll do whatever is necessary to stay comfortably inside their preferred world view (and, in the case of the flat-earth “content creators,” to keep raking in money from their followers)¹.

Only one thing is certain: the expedition created a lot of grist for videos from both sides, ensuring the livelihoods of this interdependent neighborhood of YouTubers for the foreseeable future. Oh, and it got some really spectacular shots from the glaciers and mountains of Antarctica.

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Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll give it a like or a share, or even subscribe or buy me a coffee.

If you’re intrigued by flat-earthers and other conspiracy theorists, I hope you’ll check out Ship of Fools, my science fiction satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more. It just wrapped up this past weekend.

And I hope you’ll come back on Friday, when I begin reposting the early chapters from my post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, Ada’s Children. Climate catastrophe, mass deportations of US citizens, AI taking over everyone’s jobs and finally stepping in to save humanity from itself, plus a pastoral hunter-gatherer far future. Glass Half Full had so few subscribers back when I serialized Ada that I thought my current readers might appreciate another chance to read it.

1. The unresolved nature of this debate is a mirror for the ambiguous, unresolved ending of my satirical novel, Ship of Fools, which just wrapped up on Sunday. Yes, the Truth is out there, but humans are often too blinded by their own emotional needs or ideological whims to recognize it. I’ll have more on why Ship of Fools ended the way it did, as requested by

Mark Hannam

, in next Tuesday’s post.