Man… Last night I was up during the wee hours, perusing my YT subs, when I figured I go and visit Rob Skiba’s “testingtheglobe.com” website to see if he had added any new content recently. What I found was all of the content removed, with only this note left as an explanation:
“Sorry, but this particular “quest for truth” has brought us nothing but pain and significant damage – emotionally, spiritually and especially financially – on top of a lot of other crap we’ve had to deal with at the same time. I now wish I had never gone down this “rabbit trail” as along the way, I have found that MOST people don’t care at all about truth (no matter what the topic is) and they have no desire to question what they’ve been taught about anything. So at this point, I’m done caring too. Believe whatever the hell you want. With any luck, it’ll all hit the fan next month (September) anyway. Hopefully, by then, whatever you read, heard or saw prior to me deleting everything will help you deal with whatever the future does or does not hold for us all.”
This really sucks. Breaks my heart almost. Within a week or so ago, he was still releasing videos on the Flat Earth topic, and somehow between then and now, he clearly has felt beaten down to the point of throwing in the towel altogether. From the note, it doesn’t sound to me like he became disillusioned with the question of the FE itself, but only incredibly disillusioned by the response. It’s hard for me to surmise just exactly how/why that is, or how he would’ve been taking a serious blow financially from this, but I can speculate to some degree. Maybe his “Seed the Series” project was suddenly having people pull out of wanting to be involved? I don’t know. It’s hard not to think that perhaps a large degree of the damaging backlash has come from the direction of his fellow Christian researchers, and if that’s true, then it really makes me sad. I just don’t get it, honestly… I mean, Skiba has always been someone who’s been willing to go further outside the box than most, and endure criticism, whether it be regarding things like the question of certain holidays being Pagan, or whatever. His stance on this Flat Earth issue was of exceptional integrity from my point of view. I mean, even if the whole thing turned out to be a complete dead-end, and the world turns out to be absolutely spherical after all, then, still, I had to commend him for being willing to at least seek it out, and dig into a topic that even most “fringe” researchers still seem scared to touch with a ten foot pole…
And that’s part of what is just so weird about this whole thing to me. I mean, I’ve been wandering the world of conspiratorial “fringyness” for maybe six years now.(?) (give or take), and in that span of time, I’ve certainly come across a LOT of people and ideas which were a LOT weirder, and had a LOT LESS compelling evidence behind them, yet somehow they’ve all come and gone, without the majority of those figures being taken to the proverbial town square and burned at the stake.
For crying out loud, there are authors and researchers out there, right now,
talking about the Hollow Earth, or the terra-forming of our planet to prepare it for extraterrestrial habitation, or “Planet X”, or the idea that Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden by having sex with Lucifer, or a secret Space Program where genetically-engineered soldiers use “jump rooms” to teleport to Mars, or the Queen being a shape-shifting reptilian, or Sasquatch being a lost race of hairy interdimensional beings, or, you name it, it’s out there! These sorts of topics abound, and oddly enough, for the most part seem to be quite embraced, even if only as more of a “speculative conspiratorial romp” instead of a serious inquiry. You can listen to some guy talk about secret underground bases housing armies of hybrid bodies waiting to be incarnated with alien/demonic intelligences, and hey, it was a fun little trip, but then you get to turn it off and go on your merry way, not having your entire worldview being challenged all that much, but merely getting to file it away as “something interesting I just listened to”. And I get it, because I do this too. Call it “conspira-porn”, or whatever. It’s everywhere, and and almost an accepted “sub-genre” of the “Truth Movement” as a whole.
So that’s why I think this whole Flat Earth issue, and now this specific example of what’s happened with Skiba, is really sort of telling, in a way. Telling of exactly what, I’m not entirely sure, but it is telling…
Why do people seem to react with such vitriol, such emotion, to THIS particular “conspiracy theory”, when there have already been countless others that have come along, which are just as “looney”, but didn’t seem to ruffle any feathers? Is it because the psychological conditioning regarding the matter of actually giving serious consideration to the notion of a Flat Earth has just been THAT deep, and THAT effective? Possibly. Is it really because people within the “Truth Movement” (arg, I really do hate that term…) are just concerned about “destroying the credibility of the movement”, and are afraid of crossing that final, tin-foil-hatted line of the Flat Earth, and being labeled as truly backwards, ignorant, and “unscientific”?
But speaking of “unscientific”, that is really a large part of what I find so absolutely ironic about all of this. The Flat Earth topic really does stand out from any other bizarre theory or notion I’ve ever encountered before, in that it actually IS involving a vast number of people who are getting up off their butts, going outside, and doing all kinds of experiments and investigations for themselves, to see if we can actually measure something like the Earth’s curvature, or send up balloons to see if the moon can be still be seen when it is supposedly on the other side of the globe, etc. That IS science! That really should be something that is celebrated and encouraged, no matter how dumb people might think the theory being tested is. It’s being tested. Is that not what science is supposed to champion? Or has science truly given way to scientism, whereby the academic institutions and ivory-towered intellectuals with Rockefeller funding are the only ones we need to bother asking about what is true??
This, in itself, really troubles me. So many of us are perfectly content to put stock into theories, or investigations, which more or less are based almost entirely upon scrutinizing photographs, watching amateur videos, or listening to the testimonies of “insiders” and “whisteblowers”, whose credibility can often times be hard to authenticate. How many zillions of hours have been spent by “conspiracy theorists” bantering away in forums, debating whether or not Bob Lazar was telling the truth, yet, no one’s made a huge fuss about those conversations “destroying the credibility of the Truth Movement”! There are scores of pet theories out there, which for the most part are based on little more than rampant speculation, or some tiny nugget of “evidence” which is then taken and run with to the Nth degree, (i.e. “the face on Mars”), while there is literally TONS of valid data points which really give a solid basis for at least investigating the true nature of the Earth further, but most people just shut down before even considering it all.
Is the difference perhaps, that as bizarre as so many of those theories might be, they don’t threaten the existence of what has become a very cherished notion, the concept of “Outer Space” itself? Or is it because most of those bizarre theories actually don’t pose much threat of ever actually being proven or disproven at the hands of ordinary people, since deep down we all know that most of us will never be able to go exploring Top Secret underground bases for ourselves, or sneaking into the Classified laboratories which may or may not house the hordes of alien embryos? Maybe both…?
I suppose this now why perhaps this Flat Earth issue intrigues me all the more, because if nothing else, it really does pose to us a very interesting case testing the nature of “conspiracy psychology” and internet-age epistemology. For whatever reason, it IS divisive, and for many people that is enough reason for them to want to just walk away and write it all off as a “distraction” or a “psy-op” or whatever. But, to my perhaps hopelessly curious mind, I can’t help but want to know, WHY is it so divisive? Why does this, amongst all that is out there on the interwebs, manage to raise the hackles of so many self-professed “free thinkers” out there…?
The Flat Earth issue stands apart, in that it is something which at least regarding it’s most fundamental question (flat vs. round) can be tested first-hand, by virtually anyone, and indeed is being tested in such a way. No other conspiracy theory I have yet encountered is able to subject itself to such a level of basic, empirical authentication.
If it is just a “psy-op”, then you still have to answer as to why it serves as such an effective one, when compared to so many others.
We see as through a glass darkly 