But some believers want nothing to do with the Flat Earth Society, according to a 2019 CNN article, with some attendees of the Flat Earth International Conference in Dallas that year telling the news agency that the organization is a government-sponsored front designed to make Flat Earthers look bad. Today, the society claims more than 500 members on its roster.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, membership in the Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, once reached 3,500 people. No one knows how many flat Earth believers are out there.

Opinions differ on exactly how the flat Earth works, with believers concocting elaborate versions of physics and creative interpretations of the solar system to make their theories work. These believers claim that the Earth is a flat disc, and that evidence that it is round - say, pictures taken from space - are an elaborate hoax involving multiple governments. But a fringe society founded in the 1950s, dedicated to insisting that the Earth is flat, has given rise to a modern ground of flat Earth adherents.

The flat earth theory