Citizens Of The World's Edge

Not everyone believes our planet is a sphere. Welcome to flat Earth.

- Mara Hvistendahl

The mood of the crowd gathered alongside a highway just outside Denver is euphoric. Around 75 people stand in the brush beneath a roadside billboard with their phones out, filming one another and tossing around a beach ball that looks like a globe.

Several of them are livestreaming the event, part of the kickoff for the Flat Earth International Conference, the largest ever summit of its kind. A drone buzzes overhead, collecting footage. Every few minutes, a passing car slows down to honk, and the crowd erupts into cheers. The billboard reads: “google flat earth clues.”

This stretch of road has few landmarks beyond a Best Buy distribution center, so to direct attendees here, conference organizers gave them the coordinates on Google Earth. People seem unbothered by the apparent contradiction. They owe the rapid spread of their belief that Earth is flat to the technologies of the so-called globular world. Some speak of YouTube, a Google property, with something close to reverence.

A man named Robert Foertsch approaches me. He wears a black T-shirt and carries a large reflective sign, both urging people to “youtube truth.” “Should I warm you up?” he asks. It’s a brisk afternoon, and he helpfully tilts the panel so the sun’s rays hit me. “I used to drink vodka for breakfast and smoke cigarettes in the shower,” the homeschooling dad from South Carolina tells me. First he found Jesus. Then, four years ago, came the conversion he believes was more consequential: He realized he was living on a flat disc.