A former Flat Earther has spoken out about his thought process after discovering our planet is spherical during a paid-for trip to Antarctica.
"Alright guys, sometimes you are wrong in life," is the now iconic phrase muttered by the then-popular platygaean, Jeran Campanella, as he looked up at the famed midnight sun on the polar ice cap in December.
Campanella, who runs the YouTube channel 'Jeranism', was flown out to Antartica for a staggering $35,000 after taking up a 'glober' - the term given by Flat Earthers to someone who understands that the Earth is round - on his offer to be proved wrong.
The theory involves taking a trip to Antarctica to prove that there is no midnight sun because on a flat Earth it would be impossible that the sun stays in the sky 24 hours a day... which we all know occurs during the summer.
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Anyway, the 'Center for Inquiry' invited the former Flat Earther onto its YouTube channel where he was interviewed about his previous beliefs and how he managed to ignore an insurmountable amount of evidence that proves the Earth is round.
Host Rob Palmer asked him whether he managed to see the Moon while he was in Antartica because it 'would be upside down' compared to how we view it in the Northern hemisphere.
Talking about his old mindset, Campanella explained: "The Flat Earth excuse that I would have given you if it was was three months ago and you asked me how does the Moon flip upside down I would have said well put a circle on your ceiling with an A and a B on it and then walk to the other side of the room and it will flip upside down.
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"But that's not at all what the Moon does, it's a it's an actual 3D object that you can see. So the other Flat Earthers and I were talking and we just kind of said well it could be some sort of reflection off of a dome or something.
"Of course that is the thing that we would do that I now realize once you have removed that block from your brain is that you're spending all your time trying to fit the evidence into your belief."
He continued: "I don't think I realized how easy that was to do - or at least get it to the point where you could pass it off to the people that watch you - so it's kind of easy to do.
"No matter what you threw at me I could come up with some [excuse] - and I thought that was actually research, I thought that was actually doing something right.
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"Now I realize, ''Oh man that's one of the most biased, basically confirmation biased positions that you can take' where you're just looking for the evidence that meets your belief and then you really disregard anything else - you really just throw it out, it's almost like you don't hear it."
While Campanella may no longer be adored by the Flat Earth community, he's well-respected by us globers these days.
Topics: Antarctica, Conspiracy Theories, Science, Travel
Joe Yates