There’s a growing number of people who seem to think the world is, in fact, flat. But it gets better. They also insist that Australia is actually just one big hoax. According to a viral Facebook rant, the entire country (and presumably the 24 million people that live there) is completely FAKE.

The idea resurfaced at a some recent gathering of the so-called “Flat Earthers” (Flat Earth Believers) in the Birmingham recently where over 200 people came together to confirm to each other that the Earth is nothing more than a giant pancake.

The origin of the “fake Australia” post started on Reddit back in 2017 and was written by a Shelley Floryd. But it appears to be back in the minds of the spherically-challenged at the moment.

“Australia is not real,” the rant begins. “It’s a hoax, made for us to believe that Britain moved over their criminals to someplace. In reality, all these criminals were loaded off the ships into the waters, drowning before they could see land ever again. It’s a coverup [sic] for one of the greatest mass murders in history.”

Moreover, the post reckons that all Australians are nothing more than computer generated personas and if you’ve ever been Down Under yourself: “you’re terribly wrong”.

Hilariously, the pilots are apparently all in on it – and have just been flying you to parts of South America all these years. Flat Earth theories have been shot down by just about everyone capable of rational thought, but the theory is still enjoying a current resurgence. Over 200 conspiracy theorists gathered at a hotel in Birmingham for the UK’s first Flat Earth Convention. The convention, which took place over three days, saw nine speakers take to the stage to explain their theory as to why the Earth is flat.

According to The Telegraph , Dave Marsh, an NHS worker who spoke at the conference, said: “My research destroys big bang cosmology.

🤔What If the Earth Was Actually Flat? (Duration 3:31)

“It supports the idea that gravity doesn’t exist and the only true force in nature is electromagnetism.”

While NASA has proved that the Earth is round using GPS, satellites, and images from space, Flat Earth believers claim that they have evidence that the space agency is lying. So what do you think about this? Let us know in the comments!

💣Flat Earth Australia Globe Earth Flight Routes Dest-ro-yed? (Duration 21:37)

🎓More And More Americans Are Starting To Believe Earth Is Flat

A lot of people believe in Flat Earth Theory. Some may be surprised to learn that people still hold such views. After all, the Earth has been photographed from space. But such photos could have been faked by the evil forces who secretly control the world, right? And all those centuries of scientific evidence suggesting that the Earth is spherical could be wrong, right?

In America interest in the flat-Earth movement appears to be growing. In September Bobby Ray Simmons Jr., a rapper also known as B.o.B, launched a crowd-funding campaign to send satellites into orbit to determine the Earth’s shape. On November 9th, 500 “flat-Earthers” assembled in North Carolina for the first annual Flat Earth International Conference. Data from Google Trends show that in the past two years, searches for “flat earth” have more than tripled (see chart below).

Skepticism about climate change has infiltrated schools. A recent survey found that a third of American science teachers tell their students that climate change is driven in part by natural causes. One in ten say humans play no role in it.

Conspiracy theories are appealing because they offer simple explanations for complex phenomena, or because they let people believe they are in possession of secret knowledge that the powerful wish to suppress. They tend to be most popular among less-educated people who do not trust public institutions. They are extremely common in dictatorships, where people assume, often correctly, that the authorities are lying.

Simply rebutting conspiracy theories may make adherents even more entrenched in their views. (If “they” are so keen to deny it, it must be true!) Absence of evidence is taken as evidence of a fiendishly effective cover-up. Some conspiracy theories are irrefutable—the American government cannot prove, for example, that it is not storing dead aliens in a secret underground laboratory. If schools were better at teaching analytical thinking, that might reduce the appeal of conspiracy theories.

And it would not hurt if governments were more open and trustworthy. Meanwhile, the best response is often to ignore the tinfoil-hat brigade. After the rapper B.o.B sparked an argument on Twitter about the shape of the Earth in 2016, one of the groups supposedly responsible for misleading the public on this point, NASA, chose not to weigh in. A spokeswoman told the Washington Post: “we don’t think there’s a debate to be had.”