In what may be one of the most satisfying TV moments we can recall, a group of conspiracy theorists accidentally spent thousands of dollars to prove that, yes, the Earth is round.
The scene is from a new Netflix documentary called Behind
the Curve, which follows a group of Flat Earthers, a “small but growing
contingent of people who firmly believe in a conspiracy to suppress the truth
that the Earth is flat.”
One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a
YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team
relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn’t actually
rotate.
Except… It does.
“What we found is, when we turned on that gyroscope, we
found that we were picking up a drift,” Knodel explains. “A 15-degree per hour
drift.
“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 easy to disprove it was actually registering the motion of
the Earth.”
You know what they say: If your experiment proves you wrong,
just disregard the results!
“We don’t want to blow this, you know?” Knodel then says to
another Flat Earther. “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.”
If you’re keen to see this scene – and so much more – Behind
the Curve is available on Netflix now.