The other truth

Rosie Gutierrez is 33, looks 23, and is not easily dissuaded.

She’s a trainee nurse, wife, mother, works in a restaurant to pay the bills, and, oh, by the way, believes that the earth is flat.

“How did I become a Flat Earth believer?” she says. “Just step outside. You can feel it. No motion! My heart, my eyes, everything tells me that the earth is stationary, fixed, not moving. It’s why water always finds its level. Water does not curve.”

So if earth is not a spinning ball, what is it?

“It’s like a flat disk, with a firmament on the top. The firmament is like a glass dome. It stretches over the heavens, and you can only go a certain distance up. Auguste Piccard was a Swiss scientist. He was the first man to go in a balloon into the stratosphere. He went up over ten miles, and he described the earth as: a flat disc with upturned edge [as quoted in Popular Science, August 1931]. A circle with an upturned edge!”

What upturned edge? She quotes explorer Admiral Richard Byrd. “In 1952, Byrd said there was a land mass in Antarctica the size of the United States that had not been explored yet. I believe Antarctica encircles the earth. Maybe its 360-degree ice walls keep all the waters of the earth in. Older [maps] of the earth show you can circumnavigate the earth on a flat surface. Also, what got me were [today’s] flight patterns. If the earth were spinning at 1000mph as they say, wouldn’t it take twice as long going from country X to Y in one direction as the other? But it doesn’t. You have to conclude: We’re not spinning.”

She’s visited the NASA website. “If you go to aerodynamicstudents.com, it tells you to assume that the earth is not moving, it is fixed. They teach you this in pilots’ school. Also the Army research laboratory tells you the coordinate system is fixed to the earth with a flat earth assumption.”

In the Bible, she says, there are many verses that talk about a flat stationary earth. “I don’t believe we landed on the moon. Also I believe the moon and the sun are the same size. And the sun is close, because if it was 93 million miles away, the rays would disperse differently.”

She brings out a dizzying array of arguments, from Lake Pontchartrain’s causeway, to China’s Jiazhon Bay Bridge, the Fibonacci Sequence, the minimal gene concept. And of course, ancient cultures.

“The Egyptians, Aztecs, Maya, all believed that the earth was flat and stationary. It was a geo-centric model — everything revolved around the earth. Then Copernicus came out with a helio-centric model, that everything revolved around the sun. I was a helio-centric Glober my whole life till five years ago. But since I’ve realized that the earth is closer to the Creator, I’ve known immense peace. I feel my soul has come back to me. To my son, I say, ‘Do what teachers tell you, but here is the other truth. The water always finds its level. The horizon is always flat.’”