Brazil's flat Earthers to get their day in the sun
Siddhartha Chaibub’s suspicions that the Earth wasn’t really round were first aroused when he stumbled across a YouTube video while living in Brazil’s capital, Brasília.
“I was always very sceptical about things,” said the 35-year-old freelance designer, who soon dived deep into the flat Earth universe: reading, watching videos and joining a dedicated WhatsApp group.
By the end of 2015, he was convinced. “The model that is imposed on us – that the Earth is spherical – is full of contradictions,” he said.
Today, his YouTube channel Professor Terra Plana (Flat Earth Professor) – featuring videos such as “25 examples that prove Nasa is a fraud” and “gravity doesn’t exist” – has nearly 29,000 subscribers.
Like Britain and the United States, Brazil is seeing a revival of flat Earth theory: 7% of the population – 11 million Brazilians – believe that the Earth is flat, according to the polling firm Datafolha. The poll noted believers were more likely to be religious or poorly educated.
Last week, Chaibub and three of his flat Earth fellows got their biggest break yet when they appeared on the country’s most-watched talkshow, The Night, to promote Brazil’s first ever flat Earth convention this Saturday in São Paulo.
The location of the event will only be disclosed on the day, organizers say, for security reasons. “There is a lot of prejudice,” said Chaibub
Critics attribute Brazil’s most recent flat Earth craze to poor public education, copycatting from abroad and to the increase in social media use.
“The internet gives a voice to these idiots,” said Fernando Lang da Silveira, a professor of physics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil.
He said that like climate change denial and creationism, flat Earth theory had a base of Christian fundamentalism.
In Brazil, the power and influence of the evangelical Christian church has grown significantly in recent decades: around a quarter of the population identifies as evangelical and these voters played a large part in bringing the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro to power.Chaibub, who says he is a Catholic, admits that part of flat Earth culture is influenced by Bible verses, but denied that the movement is religious
– or political.Accusations of links to the flat Earth movement have dogged Bolsonaro’s government.
In January, the science minister, Marcos Pontes – South America’s first astronaut – said that he felt a “knot in the stomach” when he heard suggestions that the Earth is flat.
But just a few months later, Olavo de Carvalho – a former astrologer who is considered the intellectual guru of Bolsonaro and his inner circle – prompted outrage and ridicule when he tweeted: “I didn’t study the subject of the flat
Earth. I just watched a few videos of experiments that show that aquatic surfaces are flat – and so far I haven’t found anything to refute them.”
Carvalho – who has also claimed Pepsi was sweetened with aborted foetuses and that oral sex can cause cancer – dined with Bolsonaro and Steve Bannon in Washington during the Brazilian president’s state visit to the US in March.
When questioned about flat Earthism, the foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo – an Olavo disciple who believes climate change is a Marxist plot – also seemed sympathetic to the movement, saying: “For me, the Earth is round. But it’s important to have this spirit of questioning,”
Brazil abounds in folk legends, and has long been home to a thriving subculture of new-age truth-seekers and UFO-spotters.
One of the country’s most popular authors, Paulo Coelho, claims to have had “experiences” with aliens “more than once” – although he recently clarified to the BBC that he knew the Earth wasn’t flat.
Marcelo Gleiser, a Brazilian professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College in the United States and winner of this year’s Templeton Prize, described the resurgence of the theory as “very sad”.
“We’re living in very strange times. The idea of being popular for being outrageous is coming from the leadership,” he said.