apeirron — Reality

Biggest Questions Humanity Asks

Ismael Shakverdiev and Sandro Abashidze

2026-04-27

© apeirron

Reality

CERN & The Large Hadron Collider

In the autumn of 2016, a video began circulating on the internet that was, by any reasonable standard of conspiracy content, perfect. The video had been recorded at night, on the grounds of the European Organization for Nuclear Research — CERN — outside Geneva, Switzerland. The camera was positioned at a distance and at an angle suggesting it had been operated by an observer who was not supposed to be there. In the foreground stood the two-meter bronze statue of Shiva Nataraja that has occupied the small plaza outside CERN’s main administrative building since 2004. In the background, around the statue, a small group of figures in dark robes was conducting what appeared to be a ritual. The figures were chanting, walking in slow circles, and at one point one of the figures appeared to plunge a knife into another figure who was lying on the ground. The video was approximately five minutes long, was unaccompanied by any explanatory text, and had been uploaded anonymously to a video-sharing service that had no obvious connection to either CERN or to any organized conspiracy-research network.

The video went viral within hours. By the next morning, it had been viewed several million times across multiple platforms. By the end of the week, it had become one of the most discussed pieces of conspiracy content in the recent history of the genre. The reason for the explosive spread was not only the visual content of the video — which was striking but, on careful examination, ambiguous — but the intersection of the content with a much larger framework of suspicion that had been accumulating around CERN for at least a decade. CERN was the site where humanity was conducting its highest-energy experiments on the fundamental structure of physical reality. CERN had a giant statue of the Hindu god of destruction at its main entrance. CERN’s leadership had been quoted, in interviews and conference presentations, talking about the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider could open portals to other dimensions or destabilize the vacuum state of space-time. CERN was located in the Pays de Gex, the small region of France that borders Geneva, in an area whose ancient name was “Apolliacum” — a name that some etymological researchers had connected to the Greek god Apollyon (Apollo), who appears in the Book of Revelation as the angel of the abyss. And now, in October 2016, a video had appeared showing what looked like a human sacrifice being conducted in front of the Shiva statue at the very institution that conspiracy researchers had been describing as the most likely physical site at which the structure of reality might actually be torn open.

CERN’s official response to the video, issued on October 19, 2016, was that the incident had been a prank conducted by employees on the CERN site without the knowledge or approval of the institution. CERN’s spokesperson described the event as “a clear violation of CERN’s professional guidelines” and announced that an internal investigation would be conducted to identify the participants. The participants were never publicly identified. The internal investigation was never publicly reported. The video was never officially confirmed as either staged by CERN employees or authentic in the conspiratorial sense, and it has continued to circulate as one of the most-viewed pieces of CERN-related content on the internet for nearly a decade.

The interesting question is not whether the 2016 Shiva video was a real ritual or an elaborate prank. The interesting question is why a major international scientific institution has a two-meter bronze statue of the destroyer god outside its main entrance in the first place, why senior CERN scientists have repeatedly used the language of dimensional portals and timeline destabilization in their public communications, why the institution sits in a location whose ancient toponymy connects to apocalyptic religious symbolism, why the symbolism it has adopted in its public iconography is so consistently chosen from the deepest layers of esoteric tradition, and why — at the same time — the people who notice these patterns are systematically classified as conspiracy theorists rather than as observers of an obvious set of facts. CERN is not hiding any of this. CERN does not hide the Shiva statue. CERN does not hide the language its scientists use. CERN’s public communications are full of the visual and verbal motifs that conspiracy researchers have been pointing to for years. The question is not what CERN is hiding. The question is what CERN means by what it has chosen to display, and why the meaning is treated as either nonexistent or unspeakable by the institutions that are charged with interpreting science to the public.

This node is the attempt to set out the documented facts about CERN — the institution, the experiments, the symbolism, the public statements of its scientists, and the conspiracy literature that has accumulated around it — with sufficient clarity that the reader can form their own judgment about which dimensions of the story are speculation and which are simply the institutional reality that anyone with an internet connection can verify in an afternoon.

What CERN actually is

CERN — the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, later the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire — was founded by international convention on September 29, 1954, by twelve European member states meeting in Geneva. The founding was a response to two related concerns of the immediate postwar period: the loss of European scientific talent to the United States, and the sense among European political leaders that nuclear and particle physics had become too expensive for any single European nation to pursue at the scale that the global state of the field required. The American national laboratories — Los Alamos, Brookhaven, Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley — had emerged from the Second World War with the institutional infrastructure, the personnel, and the budgets necessary to dominate the global frontier of particle physics. Europe, devastated by the war, faced the prospect of permanent secondary status in the field unless its governments were willing to pool resources and build a continental research institution that could compete with American capacity. CERN was the result.

The founding member states were Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. The membership has expanded over the subsequent decades to include twenty-three full member states plus a number of associate members and observer states from outside Europe (including India, which became an associate member in 2017 after twenty-five years as an observer — the same status it held when its government donated the Shiva statue in 2004). CERN’s headquarters and principal experimental facilities are located on the Franco-Swiss border in the Pays de Gex region, with the main administrative campus in Meyrin (Switzerland) and the underground experimental tunnels extending across the border into French territory.

The institution has produced some of the most important physics discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. CERN scientists discovered the W and Z bosons in 1983, confirming a central prediction of electroweak unification theory and earning the Nobel Prize in Physics for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984. CERN scientists developed the World Wide Web in 1989, when the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee — then working at CERN — proposed and implemented the system of hyperlinked documents that subsequently became the global infrastructure of internet information access. (CERN’s role in the founding of the Web is one of the deeper ironies of the institution’s history: the technology that has subsequently become the principal vector for conspiracy theorizing about CERN was invented by CERN scientists for the practical problem of sharing physics papers across multiple research sites.) And CERN scientists, on July 4, 2012, announced the discovery of the Higgs boson — the elementary particle whose existence had been predicted by the Standard Model in 1964 but had remained empirically unconfirmed for forty-eight years until the data from the Large Hadron Collider finally produced the necessary evidence.

The Large Hadron Collider — the LHC — is the institution’s flagship experimental apparatus and the principal focus of conspiracy attention. It is a circular particle accelerator with a circumference of approximately twenty-seven kilometers (sixteen miles), buried in a tunnel one hundred meters underground beneath the agricultural fields of the Pays de Gex. It accelerates protons (or, in some experimental modes, lead ions) to within a fraction of a percent of the speed of light and then collides them at four interaction points around the ring, where massive detectors record the products of the collisions. The collision energies that the LHC achieves are higher than any other artificial energy source in the history of the planet — currently up to thirteen and fourteen tera-electron-volts (TeV) per collision. The detectors at the four interaction points (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb) are themselves enormous — ATLAS is forty-six meters long, twenty-five meters tall, and weighs seven thousand tons. The total cost of the LHC, from initial planning through construction and the first decade of operation, has been estimated at approximately $9 billion in 2010 dollars, distributed across the contributions of the CERN member states. It is, by any reasonable measure, the largest and most complex single scientific instrument ever built.

The first proton beams were circulated in the LHC on September 10, 2008. Nine days later, on September 19, 2008, a faulty electrical connection between two of the superconducting magnets caused a short circuit that ruptured the helium cooling system, damaged dozens of magnets, and shut down the entire facility for fourteen months. The LHC resumed operations in November 2009 at reduced energy. It reached its design parameters in 2015. It produced the data that confirmed the Higgs boson discovery in 2012. It was upgraded for higher-energy operation during a long shutdown from 2018 to 2022, and resumed at 13.6 TeV in July 2022. It is currently the most active high-energy physics facility on the planet, and it will remain so until either the proposed Future Circular Collider (a one-hundred-kilometer ring also planned for the CERN site) or some equivalent next-generation facility comes online — neither of which is expected before the 2040s.

This is what CERN actually is. It is a real scientific institution. The discoveries it has produced are real. The technology it has developed has had transformative effects on the modern world (the Web alone would justify the institution’s existence many times over). The physics it studies is the most precisely tested theoretical framework in the history of science. The conspiracy literature about CERN does not contest any of these facts. It contests the interpretation of what the institution is doing — and, more interestingly, it focuses on a set of features of the institution’s public presentation that are not denied by anyone but are also not adequately explained by the official accounts.

The Shiva statue

The bronze statue of Shiva Nataraja that stands outside CERN’s main administrative building in Meyrin is approximately two meters tall, mounted on a stone pedestal, depicting the Hindu god in his classic cosmic dance pose. The figure stands on one foot, the other foot raised and bent at the knee. One hand holds a small drum (the damaru, whose beat is said to mark the rhythm of cosmic creation). Another hand makes the gesture of blessing. A third hand holds a flame (representing destruction). The fourth hand points downward toward the demon of ignorance, Apasmara, whom Shiva is crushing under his raised foot. The entire figure is surrounded by a circle of flame — the prabhamandala — symbolizing the boundary of the cosmos within which Shiva’s dance occurs.

The statue was donated by the Government of India to CERN in 2004 to mark India’s relationship with the institution as an observer state. The donation came with a plaque that quotes the physicist Fritjof Capra’s 1975 book The Tao of Physics, in which Capra argued that the Shiva Nataraja iconography was a remarkable visual anticipation of modern particle physics: “Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art, and modern physics.” The plaque attached to the CERN statue presents the donation as an expression of the cultural-philosophical resonance between the ancient Indian conception of cosmic process and the contemporary particle physics that CERN exists to investigate.

This is the official explanation. It is, on its face, perfectly coherent. India is a major scientific power with a long tradition of philosophical engagement with cosmology. The Shiva Nataraja iconography is one of the most aesthetically and conceptually rich religious images in the world. The choice to donate it to a particle physics laboratory as a cultural gift is not, on the standard reading, sinister. It is the kind of cultural diplomacy that international scientific organizations engage in routinely.

The conspiracy reading is that the official explanation does not exhaust the meaning of the choice. Shiva is, in the Hindu pantheon, the destroyer — the third member of the Trimurti alongside Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver. His function in the cosmic order is the dissolution of forms at the end of each cosmic cycle, after which Brahma will create new forms from the void. The Shiva Nataraja is specifically the iconographic depiction of the cosmic destruction-and-renewal cycle in process. The dance is the dance of the destruction of the universe. The flame in Shiva’s hand is the fire of cosmic dissolution. The figure being crushed under Shiva’s foot is not, in the deeper iconographic reading, merely a personification of ignorance — it is the principle of inertia and conservation that the destruction must overcome in order for the cycle to renew. The statue, in other words, is not a generic image of cosmic process. It is a specific image of cosmic destruction, and it has been placed at the entrance of the institution that is conducting the highest-energy experiments on the structure of physical reality in the history of the human species.

The choice of this particular image, in this particular location, is the kind of choice that an institution making it could plausibly defend in either of two ways. It could say, as CERN officially does, that the symbolism is a metaphor and that the metaphor was selected for its aesthetic and cultural resonance with contemporary physics. Or it could say, as the conspiracy literature has been saying for nearly two decades, that the symbolism is exact rather than metaphorical, that the institution has chosen as its iconic figure the deity whose function in the relevant religious tradition is precisely the destruction of the cosmos, and that the choice is a deliberate declaration in symbolic language whose meaning the people who recognize the language will understand and the people who do not will dismiss as mere decoration. The conspiracy reading does not require any actual conspiracy. It requires only that the symbolism be taken seriously as symbolism, and that the question of why this particular image was chosen for this particular location be allowed to remain open rather than foreclosed by the official explanation.

CERN does not, in its public communications, address the deeper symbolic question. CERN’s spokespersons treat the Shiva statue as an unproblematic gift from the Indian government, a piece of public art whose meaning is exhausted by the cultural-diplomatic context of the donation. This is the standard institutional response to symbolic questions of this kind, and it is also the response that, regardless of CERN’s actual intentions, leaves the conspiracy reading available to any observer who is not satisfied with the surface explanation. The Shiva statue stands at the entrance to CERN. It is the first thing visitors see. It is the iconic image of the institution in countless photographs and documentary films. Its meaning — whatever its meaning is — is part of the institution’s public face. And the institution has chosen, deliberately and over the course of two decades, not to engage with the question of what its iconic image actually represents.

The Mandela Effect connection

The single most popular conspiracy framework for understanding CERN is the framework that connects CERN’s experimental activities to the phenomenon known as the The Mandela Effect — the collective experience of false memories shared by large numbers of people about specific cultural details that did not actually exist as remembered. The Mandela Effect was named for the case in which large numbers of people reported clear memories of Nelson Mandela having died in prison in the 1980s, despite Mandela in fact having been released from prison in 1990 and having lived until 2013. Other commonly cited examples include the spelling of “Berenstain Bears” (which many people remember as “Berenstein”), the existence of a hyphen in “KitKat” (which most people remember but which is not present in the trademark), the geographic position of New Zealand (which many people remember as being to the northeast of Australia rather than to the southeast), the line “Luke, I am your father” from The Empire Strikes Back (which is actually “No, I am your father”), and dozens of other similar cases.

The conventional explanation for the Mandela Effect is straightforward: human memory is reconstructive rather than playback-based, and large populations of people will reliably converge on the same memory errors when the details in question are sufficiently similar to other details they have encountered, when the memories are not regularly verified against the original source, and when the social transmission of the memories reinforces the errors across the population. The conventional explanation is, at the level of individual memory science, well established and largely uncontroversial. It accounts for most cases of the Mandela Effect.

The CERN-Mandela hypothesis holds that the conventional explanation does not account for all cases — that some of the shared false memories are too consistent, too detailed, and too widespread to be explained by ordinary memory error, and that the alternative explanation is that the experiencing population has, at some point in the recent past, been transferred from one branch of possible histories to another. The transfer, in this account, is not a metaphor. It is a literal change in the history that the population is now experiencing, with the residual memories of the previous history surviving in the form of “Mandela Effects” that the population cannot consciously reconcile with the world as they currently find it. The cause of the transfer, in the strongest version of the hypothesis, is the operation of the Large Hadron Collider — specifically, the high-energy collisions that produce conditions extreme enough to either (a) create black holes or wormholes that connect to other branches of the multiverse, (b) destabilize the local vacuum state of space-time and trigger a transition to a different vacuum, or (c) create exotic particles whose interaction with the rest of physical reality is not adequately predicted by current theory and whose actual effects are unknown.

The hypothesis has been refined and elaborated by a community of researchers operating largely outside the institutional structures of academic science. The most influential single article on the subject was published in 2016 on the conspiracy research site The Mind Unleashed and has since been reproduced in various forms across hundreds of websites. The core argument of the article and its successors is twofold. First, the timing of the most-noted Mandela Effects correlates approximately with the periods of LHC activity — the major Mandela Effect cases became widely discussed around 2010, after the first major LHC runs of 2008-2009; a second wave of cases became prominent around 2015-2016, after the LHC restarted at higher energies in April 2015; a third wave is now emerging in the period after the 2022 restart at 13.6 TeV. Second, the official scientific community has consistently refused to engage with the Mandela Effect as a phenomenon worthy of empirical investigation — a refusal that the hypothesis interprets as evidence of either institutional embarrassment or deliberate suppression.

The mainstream physics community’s response to the CERN-Mandela hypothesis has been uniform dismissal. The physicists’ standard refutation is that the energies achieved by the LHC, while extraordinary by terrestrial standards, are vastly smaller than the energies routinely produced by natural cosmic ray collisions in Earth’s upper atmosphere, that no observable effects on macroscopic reality have been detected from cosmic ray collisions over billions of years, and that there is therefore no plausible physical mechanism by which LHC operations could have effects on the macroscopic structure of historical reality. This refutation is technically correct on its own terms, but it does not address the deeper question that the CERN-Mandela hypothesis is asking — which is not whether the LHC’s energies are sufficient to achieve some specific physical effect calculable in current theory, but whether there could be effects of the LHC’s operations that are not predicted by current theory at all. The whole point of doing the experiments at the LHC is that they are exploring conditions that have not previously been observed. The argument that current theory predicts no observable effects on macroscopic reality is, in this context, an argument that current theory adequately predicts the behavior of the experiments — which is the very thing the experiments exist to test.

Whether or not the CERN-Mandela hypothesis is correct in any of its specific claims, the structural feature it points to is real. CERN is an institution that is conducting experiments at the empirical frontier of physics, and the empirical frontier of physics is, by definition, the place where current theory might break down. The hypothesis that the LHC has produced effects that current theory does not predict is the hypothesis that the LHC is doing what it was built to do. The question is not whether such effects are possible — they are, by the institution’s own self-description, the entire purpose of the institution’s existence — but what such effects, if they are occurring, actually look like, and whether the methods of observation and inference that the physics community uses to interpret experimental data are adequate to recognize them when they occur. The CERN-Mandela hypothesis is one possible interpretation of one set of unusual phenomena. The deeper observation it embodies — that the empirical frontier of physics is a place where the unexpected should be expected — is the structural condition of the entire enterprise.

“A door to another dimension”

In 2009, in an interview that has subsequently been quoted in nearly every conspiracy article about CERN that has been published in the following decade, Sergio Bertolucci, then the Director of Research and Scientific Computing at CERN, made the following statement during a press briefing about the upcoming high-energy runs of the LHC: “Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.” The “door” he was referring to was the experimental conditions that the LHC was about to produce. The “something” he was referring to was, in the strict reading of the context, particles of types that had not previously been observed in earthbound experiments. Bertolucci was speculating about the possibility that the high-energy collisions would produce particles whose existence is predicted by various extensions of the Standard Model — supersymmetric partners of the known particles, particles associated with dark matter, particles associated with extra spatial dimensions of the kind required by string theory.

The conspiracy reception of the quote stripped it of its technical context and read it literally. Bertolucci was, in this reading, openly admitting that CERN was about to open a door to another dimension and that something might come through. The reading is, on a strict parsing of Bertolucci’s words, available — he did, in fact, use the language of doors and of things coming through. The reading is also, in the technical context, an obvious distortion of what he meant. He meant that the LHC was about to access experimental territory in which previously unobserved particles might be produced. He did not mean that an actual portal was about to open in the conventional metaphysical sense.

But the interesting thing about the Bertolucci quote, and about the broader pattern of public communication that CERN has engaged in across the years of LHC operation, is that the language used by senior CERN scientists has consistently been the language of dimensional thresholds, vacuum decay, parallel universes, and cosmic-scale phenomena. The language is not invented by conspiracy theorists. It is the language CERN itself has chosen to use in its press communications, its educational materials, and its outreach to the public. The CERN website includes detailed pages on the search for extra dimensions, on the possibility of producing micro black holes in LHC collisions, on the relationship between the Higgs field and the stability of the vacuum, and on the various scenarios in which the LHC might produce evidence of physical structures that go beyond the Standard Model. These pages are written by professional physicists for an audience of educated non-specialists, and they consistently use the kind of language that, when extracted and reframed by conspiracy researchers, becomes the source material for the conspiracy literature.

The pattern is not unique to CERN. It is characteristic of the way modern physics communicates with the public. The deepest concepts in the field — quantum field theory, general relativity, the standard model of particle physics — are mathematically precise but conceptually disorienting, and the metaphors that physicists use to communicate them to lay audiences are the metaphors of dimensions, portals, parallel universes, and cosmic forces. These metaphors are not accurate translations of the underlying mathematics. They are approximations chosen for their power to evoke what the mathematics actually describes in a form that non-physicists can imagine. The conspiracy literature reads the metaphors as if they were literal descriptions, which they are not — but the metaphors were chosen for the metaphorical resonances they carry, and the resonances are real even when the literal readings are false. CERN is, in the language its scientists use to describe what they are doing, the place where the structure of physical reality is being tested at conditions that have never existed before on the surface of this planet. Whether one takes that description literally or metaphorically, the description is what CERN itself has chosen to offer.

Vacuum decay and the Hawking warning

In August 2014, the British physicist Stephen Hawking — at that time the most famous theoretical physicist alive — wrote a preface to a new edition of the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space, in which he addressed the question of whether the Higgs boson, recently discovered at CERN, could pose any kind of existential risk to the universe. His answer was guarded but specific. The Higgs field, he wrote, has a particular vacuum state that determines the masses of the elementary particles and the structure of physical interactions in the universe as we know it. The vacuum state is metastable — meaning that there exists, mathematically, the possibility of a lower-energy vacuum state to which the universe could in principle transition. If such a transition were to occur in any region of space, it would propagate outward at the speed of light, and the universe inside the expanding bubble of new vacuum would have entirely different physical laws — including, presumably, laws under which the structures of matter and energy as we know them could not exist. Hawking wrote that the Higgs vacuum could become unstable at energies above approximately 100 billion gigaelectronvolts, and that “this could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light. This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

The relevant detail, for the CERN conspiracy literature, is that the energies at which Hawking warned the vacuum could become unstable are vastly higher than the energies the LHC currently produces — by approximately ten orders of magnitude. The LHC produces collision energies of about 14 TeV, or 14 trillion electron-volts. Hawking’s warning concerned energies of about 100 billion GeV, which is about 100 quintillion eV, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 eV. The LHC is not even close to producing such energies and would not be able to do so within any reasonably foreseeable extension of the existing technology. Hawking’s warning was, in technical terms, addressed to a hypothetical scenario rather than to any actual current experimental capacity.

But the conspiracy reception of the Hawking warning, like the Bertolucci reception, stripped it of its technical context. What remained was the headline: the most famous physicist alive had publicly stated that the Higgs boson could trigger vacuum decay and destroy the universe. The qualification — that the energies required would be vastly beyond the LHC’s capacity — was treated as either an institutional cover or as a piece of optimistic theory that might turn out to be wrong. If Hawking was uncertain enough about the stability of the Higgs vacuum to warn about catastrophic decay even as a hypothetical scenario, then the question of whether the LHC could trigger such a decay was not as definitively settled as the institutional dismissals of the conspiracy literature pretended. The dismissals rested on the assumption that current theory was reliable enough to predict the behavior of the experiments. The whole point of the experiments was to test the limits of current theory. If current theory was being tested, then current theory could not be the basis on which the safety of the tests was guaranteed.

This is the recursive structure that makes the CERN conspiracy literature so durable. The institution exists to explore phenomena that current theory cannot fully predict. The current theory predicts that the exploration is safe. The exploration is testing the limits of the theory that predicts its own safety. The reasoning is not strictly circular — the predictions are based on extensive prior experience with high-energy physics in other contexts, and the safety arguments are not arbitrary — but it is also not strictly closed. There remains, at the deepest level, an irreducible uncertainty about what could happen at the empirical frontier, and the dismissals of the conspiracy literature consistently understate the magnitude of this uncertainty in order to present a more confident institutional face than the underlying physics actually warrants. The conspiracy literature, in turn, consistently overstates the magnitude of the uncertainty in order to generate a more dramatic narrative than the underlying physics actually supports. The two distortions are mirror images of each other. The truth, as best it can be reconstructed by anyone who is willing to read the actual physics literature, is that nobody knows for certain what the LHC might produce, that the probability of any catastrophic effect is very small but not zero, and that the institutional response to the question has been to communicate the very small probability as if it were exactly zero. The conspiracy literature is wrong to claim that the probability is high. The institutional response is wrong to claim that the probability has been definitively shown to be zero. Both responses are products of the deeper difficulty of communicating uncertainty about the empirical frontier of physics in a culture whose institutions of public communication require certainty as the price of being heard at all.

The CERN logo and the “666” claim

The current CERN logo, adopted in the 1968 redesign, consists of a stylized representation of the institution’s particle accelerators — a series of curved lines that form a circular pattern around a central point. Conspiracy literature about CERN has consistently identified the logo as containing three interlocking sixes — that the curved lines, when read in a particular way, form the digits 6, 6, and 6, and that the choice of this design is a deliberate occult signature placing the institution under the symbolic protection (or invocation) of the Beast of the Book of Revelation, whose number is 666.

The CERN response to this claim is that the logo represents the synchrotrons and storage rings of the institution’s particle accelerators and that any visual resemblance to the digits 666 is coincidental. This response is plausible. It is also incomplete. The visual resemblance is not in fact accidental in the strong sense — the curves of the logo do form patterns that closely match the digits 6, repeated three times, in a particular reading. Whether the resemblance was intended by the designer, or whether it emerged from the constraints of the visual representation of the underlying particle accelerator geometry, is a question that the CERN institutional record does not adequately answer. The 1968 logo design process is documented in CERN’s institutional archives, and the documentation does not address the 666 question because the question was not raised at the time of the design. The conspiracy reading of the logo is a retrospective interpretation that emerged in the conspiracy research community in the 1990s and 2000s, after CERN’s prominence had grown to the point where its visual identity attracted symbolic analysis.

The deeper question, here as with the Shiva statue, is not whether the resemblance was intended in the strong sense but what kind of organization chooses, repeatedly across decades, the visual and symbolic motifs that consistently align with the deepest layers of esoteric apocalyptic tradition. The Shiva statue at the entrance. The 666 in the logo. The “door to another dimension” language. The location in a region whose ancient name connects to the angel of the abyss. The institutional culture of senior physicists publicly speculating about vacuum decay and timeline destabilization. None of these features individually establishes that CERN is engaged in any kind of occult enterprise. Taken together, they establish that the institution operates within a symbolic vocabulary whose resonances it has, at minimum, declined to disavow. The resonances are not accidental in the cumulative sense, even if any individual resonance can be plausibly explained as coincidence. The pattern is the thing that requires explanation, and the institution’s official explanations have consistently addressed the individual elements rather than the pattern.

The deeper question

The reason CERN belongs as a node in the apeirron project is not that the conspiracy literature about it is correct in its strongest claims. The strongest claims — that the LHC has shifted the timeline, opened dimensional portals, destabilized the local vacuum, produced the Mandela Effect — are not supported by the available evidence and are not consistent with the physics that current theory has established. The reason CERN belongs as a node is that the institution sits at the empirical frontier of the deepest open questions in modern physics, and the conspiracy literature, while wrong in many of its details, has correctly identified the structural significance of what is happening at that frontier.

The structural significance is this: physics has reached a point at which the questions it is asking — about the nature of matter at the smallest scales, about the structure of space-time at high energies, about the relationship between observers and observed phenomena, about whether the standard model is the final theory or a low-energy approximation to something deeper — are questions that cannot be answered without producing experimental conditions that have never existed before. The experimental conditions are not metaphorically novel. They are literally novel. The high-energy collisions in the LHC produce momentary states of matter that may not have existed in the observable universe since the first microseconds after the Big Bang. The institution’s whole purpose is to produce conditions that have not previously existed, in order to observe what happens under those conditions. Whatever happens under those conditions is, by construction, something the institution did not previously know and could not previously predict with full confidence. That is the entire definition of what an experimental frontier is.

The conspiracy literature reads this situation through the older framework of esoteric tradition — the framework in which deliberate human intervention into the foundational structures of reality is understood as a serious matter requiring careful consideration of consequences that may exceed the calculative grasp of the intervening agents. This framework is not crazy. It is the framework that informs every traditional account of magical practice, alchemical work, and ritual interaction with the deep structure of the cosmos. The traditional account holds that such interventions are dangerous, that they require purification and preparation, that they invoke forces whose nature exceeds the conscious grasp of the operator, and that the consequences of incompetent intervention can be catastrophic. The mainstream scientific account treats this framework as superstition. The conspiracy literature treats the mainstream scientific account as the superstition.

The apeirron project’s interest is in holding the question open. CERN is the place where modern industrial science, operating with budgets in the billions of dollars and the institutional credibility of every major Western government, is conducting the most extreme experimental probes of physical reality that any human civilization has ever attempted. The institution’s iconic image is the destroyer god of an ancient esoteric tradition. The institution’s senior scientists publicly use the language of dimensional portals and vacuum decay. The institution’s experiments have produced, at minimum, the Higgs boson — confirming that the universe is structured in ways that current theory predicted but had not previously verified — and may, in the experimental runs of the next several decades, produce evidence of physical structures that current theory does not predict. The conspiracy literature about CERN is, in many of its details, wrong. The structural intuition that CERN is operating in territory where the ordinary categories of mainstream science are no longer adequate to the questions being asked — that the institution stands at a kind of threshold that the older traditions had vocabulary for and the modern tradition does not — is not wrong. It is the most interesting thing about the institution, and it is the reason the institution belongs in any serious account of the contemporary frontier of human knowledge about the structure of physical reality.

The 2016 Shiva ritual video was probably a prank. The probability is high. But the question of why the video became one of the most-viewed pieces of conspiracy content of its decade is the question of why the symbolic resonance of CERN is so much stronger than the institution’s official self-presentation acknowledges. The video was prank-shaped, but the soil it landed in was the soil of a real intuition about what kind of institution CERN actually is. The intuition is the thing the apeirron project takes seriously, regardless of whether any specific piece of conspiracy content about the institution turns out to be accurate.

Sources

CERN. Annual Reports and institutional documentation, 1954-present. Available at the CERN institutional website and in the CERN Library archives in Geneva.

ATLAS Collaboration and CMS Collaboration. “Observation of a New Particle in the Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC” and parallel CMS paper. Physics Letters B, 716, 2012. (The original publications announcing the Higgs boson discovery.)

Sample, Ian. Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science. Basic Books, 2010.

Carroll, Sean. The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World. Dutton, 2012.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Shambhala, 1975. (The book whose passage on the Shiva Nataraja is reproduced on the plaque at the CERN statue.)

Hawking, Stephen. Preface to Garik Israelian (ed.), Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space. Canopus, 2014. (The text containing the vacuum decay warning.)

Hossenfelder, Sabine. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Basic Books, 2018. (Critical perspective on the methodological assumptions of contemporary high-energy physics from a working physicist.)

Smolin, Lee. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Woit, Peter. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. Jonathan Cape, 2006.

Krauss, Lawrence M. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Free Press, 2012.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. W. W. Norton, 1999.

Bertolucci, Sergio. Quoted in Andrea Thompson, “Hadron Collider could prove parallel universes exist.” Live Science, November 6, 2009. (The “door to another dimension” interview.)

“CERN releases statement on filming incident at Shiva statue.” CERN press communication, October 19, 2016. (The official response to the 2016 ritual video.)

The Mind Unleashed and other conspiracy research publications, 2010-present, on the CERN-Mandela Effect hypothesis.

Nakamura, K. et al. (Particle Data Group). Review of Particle Physics. Updated annually. (The standard reference for the experimental results of high-energy physics, including the LHC data.)

Stibel, Aaron. “The Mandela Effect: Memory, the Internet, and Our Strange New Reality.” Forbes, July 6, 2018.

French, Christopher C. “The Mandela Effect: Memory and Misremembering in the Internet Age.” The Conversation, October 2017.

The CERN Document Server. The institutional archive of CERN scientific publications, technical documents, and historical records, available online and in the CERN Library.

Connections

The Mandela Effect — Since ~2010, the dominant conspiracy framework for the Mandela Effect holds that LHC high-energy collisions have destabilized the timeline, transferring the experiencing population from one branch of possible histories to another. CERN denies this; the denial doesn’t satisfy the people making the claim, who note it’s exactly the denial that would be issued if the claim were true.

The Simulation Hypothesis — If reality is a computational simulation, the most plausible way to discover it would be to generate physical conditions the simulation wasn’t designed to handle — high-energy events whose outputs the underlying engine would have to approximate or reveal through visible glitches. The LHC, producing the highest artificial collision energies in planetary history, is the closest thing humanity has built to such a probe.

Saturn & The Black Cube (see Origins) — A two-meter bronze Shiva Nataraja stands at CERN’s main entrance — donated by India in 2004. Shiva and Saturn occupy the same role of cosmic destroyer; placing the destroyer at the threshold of the highest-energy physics on Earth is the same declaration Saturn worship has always made in plain sight.

Consciousness (see Mind) — The deepest unresolved problem in quantum mechanics — the role of the observer in determining physical outcomes — is more visible at CERN than anywhere else in contemporary science. Some interpretations require consciousness as constitutive of physical reality. Whatever the LHC discovers about matter, it cannot avoid intersecting with what ‘discovery’ itself is.

The Nature of Time — General relativity treats time as a curvable dimension of spacetime; quantum mechanics treats it as an external parameter. Reconciling the two is the central unsolved problem of theoretical physics, and CERN’s high-energy collision data is one of the principal sources of empirical input. The LHC is where the question of what time actually is gets its sharpest empirical pressure.

Sacred Geometry (see Origins) — The standard model of particle physics is built on symmetry groups (SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)) whose internal geometric properties determine which particles can exist — particles are literally representations of geometric symmetry groups. The same structural insight that underlies sacred geometry, in different vocabulary.

The Bermuda Triangle

On the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five torpedo bombers lifted off from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a routine training mission designated Navigation Problem Number One. The flight was known as Flight 19. It consisted of five TBM Avenger aircraft, crewed by fourteen men — thirteen students and one instructor, Lieutenant Charles Carroll Taylor, a veteran pilot with over 2,500 hours of flight time. The mission was simple: fly east, conduct a practice bombing run over Hen and Chickens Shoals, continue east and then north, turn southwest, and return to base. The entire exercise was expected to take approximately two hours. The weather was fair. The seas were moderate. There was no reason for anything to go wrong.

At approximately 3:45 p.m., Lieutenant Robert Cox, a senior flight instructor who was airborne near Fort Lauderdale, picked up a transmission from Taylor. The transmission was unusual. Taylor reported that both his compasses had malfunctioned — both the magnetic compass and the gyrocompass — and that he could not determine his position. “We cannot find west,” Taylor said. “Everything is wrong. Strange. We can’t be sure of any direction. Everything looks strange, even the ocean.” Cox attempted to guide Taylor by directing him to fly with the sun on his port wing, which would bring him west toward the Florida coast. Taylor acknowledged but did not follow the instruction. Over the next several hours, fragmentary radio transmissions from Flight 19 indicated growing confusion. Taylor believed at various points that the flight was over the Florida Keys, then over the Gulf of Mexico — locations inconsistent with the planned flight path and with each other. Other pilots in the flight reportedly disagreed with Taylor’s assessment and urged him to turn west, but military protocol placed the flight leader in command. The transmissions grew weaker and more garbled. The last confirmed transmission from Flight 19 was received at approximately 7:04 p.m. Then silence.

A massive search-and-rescue operation was launched immediately. One of the aircraft dispatched was a PBM-5 Mariner flying boat with a crew of thirteen. The Mariner took off from the Banana River Naval Air Station at 7:27 p.m. At 7:50 p.m., it sent a routine radio message. It was never heard from again. The crew of a merchant vessel, the SS Gaines Mills, reported seeing an explosion in the sky and a subsequent oil slick in the area where the Mariner would have been operating. The Mariner was known in the Navy as a “flying gas tank” due to persistent fuel vapor problems, and the most likely explanation for its loss is an in-flight explosion. But no wreckage was recovered. No bodies were found. Twenty-seven men — the fourteen of Flight 19 and the thirteen aboard the Mariner — vanished into the Atlantic that evening, and the sea returned nothing.

The Navy Board of Inquiry convened to investigate. Its initial finding attributed the loss of Flight 19 to Taylor’s navigational error — his confusion about his position and his failure to follow the heading that would have brought the flight back to Florida. Taylor’s mother protested the finding vigorously, arguing that it unfairly blamed her son. The Navy acquiesced and amended the official cause of the loss to “causes or reasons unknown.” This change — from a specific, explicable cause to a bureaucratic shrug — would prove fateful. It transformed a navigational tragedy into an official mystery, and official mysteries attract explanations that are anything but official.

This was the incident that, more than any other, created the Bermuda Triangle.

The geography and the name

The Bermuda Triangle is not a formal geographical designation. It appears on no official map. No government agency recognizes it as a distinct region. The United States Board on Geographic Names does not acknowledge its existence. And yet it is one of the most recognized place names on Earth — a region loosely bounded by three vertices: Miami, Florida; Bermuda; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The area enclosed by lines connecting these three points encompasses roughly 500,000 square miles of the western Atlantic Ocean, including the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas, and a substantial portion of the Sargasso Sea.

The name itself is surprisingly recent. The region’s reputation for swallowing ships predates its christening by centuries, but the term “Bermuda Triangle” did not exist until 1964, when Vincent Gaddis — a freelance writer with a long-standing interest in anomalous phenomena — published an article in Argosy magazine titled “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Gaddis was not the first to note the concentration of disappearances in the western Atlantic. As early as 1952, George X. Sand had published a brief article in Fate magazine cataloguing the losses. E.V.W. Jones, an Associated Press reporter, had noted the pattern in 1950. But Gaddis gave the region a name, and in doing so, he gave it an identity — a bordered, nameable, mappable zone where the normal rules did not apply. The power of naming is considerable. Before 1964, there were strange disappearances in the Atlantic. After 1964, there was the Bermuda Triangle.

It was Charles Berlitz who made it famous. Berlitz — grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools, a polyglot who reportedly spoke thirty-two languages, and a prolific writer on anomalous topics — published The Bermuda Triangle in 1974. The book was a global publishing phenomenon. It sold over twenty million copies, was translated into dozens of languages, and transformed a fringe topic into a permanent fixture of popular culture. Berlitz catalogued dozens of disappearances in the Triangle, presented them in dramatic and often embellished prose, and proposed explanations ranging from electromagnetic anomalies to alien abduction to the submerged technology of Atlantis. The book was not scholarship in any rigorous sense — as we shall see, many of its claims were inaccurate, misleading, or fabricated. But it was extraordinarily compelling, and it established the Bermuda Triangle as one of the twentieth century’s defining mysteries.

The region’s eerie reputation, however, extends far deeper than the twentieth century. The Sargasso Sea — the calm, weed-choked heart of the Triangle, bounded not by land but by the rotating currents of the North Atlantic gyre — had been feared by sailors since the age of sail. Ships becalmed in the Sargasso could drift for weeks in windless waters, their hulls fouled by the dense mats of Sargassum seaweed that gave the sea its name. Legends accumulated: ghost ships manned by skeletal crews, vessels trapped forever in the weed, entire fleets consumed by the stillness. The reality was mundane — the Sargasso is simply the calm center of a circular current system — but the reality did nothing to dispel the legends.

And then there is the oldest account of all. On October 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus, sailing through what would later be called the Bermuda Triangle, recorded in his journal a series of anomalies. His compass behaved erratically, the magnetic needle deviating from its expected orientation — one of the earliest recorded observations of magnetic declination, though Columbus did not understand it as such. On the same evening, Columbus and several crew members observed a strange light on the horizon — “a small wax candle that rose and lifted up,” flickering on and off, too low to be a star and too persistent to be a meteor. He also noted the Sargasso weed, which alarmed his already mutinous crew, who feared they had reached the edge of navigable water. Columbus’s observations are documented in the surviving copies of his journal (the original is lost; the primary source is Bartolome de las Casas’s transcription) and are not in dispute. Whether they constitute evidence of anomalous phenomena in the region or simply the expected observations of a mariner encountering unfamiliar conditions is a question that cuts to the heart of the entire Triangle debate.

The disappearances

The Bermuda Triangle’s reputation rests on a catalogue of incidents — ships and aircraft that vanished under circumstances that, depending on who is telling the story, were either inexplicable or entirely explicable. The cases vary enormously in their documentation, their credibility, and their actual strangeness. Some are genuine mysteries. Some are tragedies with clear causes that have been distorted beyond recognition by retelling. And some may never have happened at all.

Flight 19 — December 5, 1945

The case that started it all deserves the closest scrutiny. Flight 19 was a training flight of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, each carrying a crew of three (though one crewman did not report for the flight, reducing the total to fourteen). The flight leader, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, was an experienced pilot, but he had a history of getting lost — he had ditched aircraft twice before in the Pacific theater after becoming disoriented. On the afternoon of December 5, Taylor’s compasses malfunctioned. Without working instruments and with increasingly limited visibility as the afternoon wore on, Taylor became convinced the flight was over the Gulf of Mexico when it was almost certainly over the Atlantic east of Florida. His radio transmissions, pieced together from multiple ground stations and other aircraft, paint a picture of escalating confusion: “I don’t know where we are. We must have gotten lost after that last turn.”

At approximately 5:50 p.m., Taylor was overheard instructing the flight that if they did not reach land by a certain time, they would ditch. At 6:20 p.m., the ComGulf Sea Frontier Evaluation Center triangulated the flight’s position as being east of New Smyrna Beach, Florida — not over the Gulf of Mexico, as Taylor believed, but far out over the Atlantic and heading further away from land. Efforts to contact the flight by radio failed, possibly because Taylor had switched frequencies to avoid interference from Cuban commercial radio stations, or because atmospheric conditions were degrading reception. By 7:04 p.m., the last fragments of radio communication were picked up. Then nothing.

The search that followed was one of the largest in the history of the Navy. Over 300 aircraft and 21 ships scoured 380,000 square miles of ocean over the following five days. Not a single piece of wreckage, not a life raft, not a body, not an oil slick attributable to the Avengers was ever found. The TBM Avenger was designed to float for approximately sixty seconds after a water landing — enough time for a crew to evacuate, in theory, but not much margin. The seas on the evening of December 5 were rough and growing rougher, with wave heights of ten to twelve feet. A water ditching at dusk or after dark in heavy seas, by a disoriented flight that had been airborne for over five hours and was running out of fuel, was almost certainly unsurvivable. The absence of wreckage, while unusual, is not unprecedented: the Atlantic is vast, the Gulf Stream is powerful, and wooden and aluminum debris in heavy seas can scatter and sink quickly.

The loss of the PBM Mariner search plane compounded the tragedy and deepened the mystery. The explosion reported by the SS Gaines Mills, combined with the Mariner’s known fuel vapor issues, strongly suggests a mechanical failure. But the timing — a search plane vanishing while looking for aircraft that had already vanished — gave the incident an uncanny quality that no mundane explanation could entirely dispel. Six aircraft and twenty-seven men had been swallowed by the Atlantic in a single evening, and the ocean had given back nothing.

The Navy Board of Inquiry’s amended verdict — “causes or reasons unknown” — was technically accurate but rhetorically catastrophic. It invited speculation. And speculation came.

USS Cyclops — March 1918

The USS Cyclops was a Proteus-class collier — a large naval cargo ship — displacing over 19,000 tons and measuring 542 feet in length. In March 1918, the Cyclops departed Bahia, Brazil, carrying a full cargo of manganese ore bound for Baltimore, Maryland. The ship carried 309 crew and passengers, including the captain, Lieutenant Commander George W. Worley, a man of questionable background and reputation. Worley had been born Johan Frederick Georg Wichmann in Germany, had changed his name upon emigrating to the United States, and had been the subject of multiple complaints from crew members who accused him of cruelty and erratic behavior. At least one officer had requested transfer from the ship, citing Worley’s fitness for command.

The Cyclops made an unscheduled stop in Barbados on March 3-4, 1918, where it took on additional coal and supplies. It departed Barbados on March 4 and was never seen again. No distress signal was sent. No wreckage was ever found. No bodies were recovered. The loss of 309 souls made it the single largest non-combat loss of life in the history of the United States Navy — a record it held until the Second World War.

The theories proposed at the time and since include: capsizing due to the heavy cargo of manganese ore shifting in the holds; structural failure (the ship was overloaded and one of its engines was not functioning); a German U-boat attack (the Cyclops disappeared during World War I, and U-boats were active in the Atlantic); and mutiny or sabotage by the German-born captain. The U-boat theory was investigated after the war, when German naval records became available; no U-boat reported sinking a vessel matching the Cyclops’s description. The structural failure theory is the most widely accepted — a heavily loaded ship with a non-functioning engine and cargo that could shift unpredictably was a disaster waiting to happen. But the complete absence of any wreckage, debris, or distress signal remains genuinely puzzling. A ship of the Cyclops’s size does not simply cease to exist without a trace under normal circumstances.

Two sister ships of the Cyclops — the USS Proteus and the USS Nereus — also disappeared without a trace in the same region in November and December 1941, respectively, both while carrying heavy cargoes of bauxite ore. The loss of three sister ships in the same waters, each without distress signals or wreckage, is a coincidence that has never been satisfactorily explained.

Star Tiger and Star Ariel — 1948 and 1949

The British South American Airways Corporation operated a fleet of Avro Tudor IV aircraft on transatlantic routes between London and the Caribbean. The Tudor IV was a troubled aircraft — a pressurized airliner derived from the Avro Lincoln bomber that had been plagued by design issues and had a troubled service record. On January 30, 1948, the Star Tiger disappeared on a flight from Santa Maria in the Azores to Bermuda, carrying 25 passengers and 6 crew. The aircraft’s last communication, received at 3:15 a.m. local time, reported its position as approximately 400 miles northeast of Bermuda. It did not arrive. An extensive search found no wreckage.

Less than a year later, on January 17, 1949, the Star Ariel — another Tudor IV — vanished on a flight from Bermuda to Kingston, Jamaica, carrying 13 passengers and 7 crew. The aircraft sent a routine radio message approximately one hour after departure, reporting good weather and an expected arrival time. No further communication was received. No wreckage was found.

The British Ministry of Civil Aviation investigated both losses. The inquiry into the Star Tiger concluded that the cause of the loss was never determined, but noted the aircraft’s altitude of 2,000 feet — dangerously low for an ocean crossing — which was necessitated by a malfunctioning cabin heater that required flying at lower, warmer altitudes. At 2,000 feet, any engine failure or downdraft would leave almost no time for recovery. The inquiry report stated, with unusual philosophical candor: “It may truly be said that no more baffling problem has ever been presented for investigation.” The Star Ariel investigation was equally inconclusive. BSAA withdrew the Tudor IV from transatlantic service shortly afterward, and the airline itself was merged into BOAC in 1949.

SS Marine Sulphur Queen — February 1963

The SS Marine Sulphur Queen was a T-2 tanker that had been converted to carry molten sulfur in heated tanks. On February 2, 1963, the ship departed Beaumont, Texas, bound for Norfolk, Virginia, with a crew of 39 and a cargo of 15,260 tons of molten sulfur maintained at a temperature of approximately 275 degrees Fahrenheit. The ship’s last known communication was a routine radio position report on February 4, placing it near the Dry Tortugas in the Straits of Florida. It was never heard from again.

A search conducted over the following weeks recovered scattered debris: life jackets, life rings, name boards, a shirt, and a fog horn — all positively identified as belonging to the Marine Sulphur Queen. No bodies were found. No intact wreckage was located. A Marine Board of Investigation convened by the Coast Guard determined that the ship had been in poor structural condition — it had been built in 1944, converted from an oil tanker to a sulfur carrier, and had a history of structural deficiencies. The board could not determine the specific cause of the loss but identified several possibilities: an explosion of the sulfur cargo, which could have released toxic hydrogen sulfide gas; structural failure of the hull, which was known to have experienced cracking; or capsizing in heavy seas. The board’s report was sharply critical of the ship’s owners and operators for the vessel’s condition.

The Ellen Austin — 1881

The case of the Ellen Austin is among the most dramatic in Bermuda Triangle lore — and among the most poorly documented. According to the legend, the Ellen Austin, an American schooner, encountered a derelict vessel adrift in the Atlantic in 1881. Finding it seaworthy and its cargo intact but its crew entirely absent, the captain of the Ellen Austin placed a prize crew aboard to sail it to port. The two ships became separated in a squall. When the Ellen Austin relocated the derelict, the prize crew had vanished — the ship was once again adrift and empty. A second prize crew was placed aboard, and once again the ships separated and the derelict was found crewless. Whether the story ends there, or whether the derelict itself vanished on the third encounter, depends on which version of the tale one reads.

The problem is sourcing. The earliest known account of the Ellen Austin incident appears in Rupert Gould’s The Stargazer Talks (1943), a collection of radio broadcasts on maritime oddities. Gould does not cite a primary source. The story does not appear in Lloyd’s List, in the maritime press of the 1880s, or in any contemporaneous record that researchers have been able to locate. Charles Berlitz repeated the story in The Bermuda Triangle without additional sourcing. Larry Kusche, in his debunking investigation, was unable to find any primary documentation for the incident. The Ellen Austin herself was a real ship — a 1,812-ton schooner registered in New York — but the specific incident may be apocryphal, embellished, or conflated with another event. It illustrates a recurring problem in Triangle research: many of the most compelling stories have the least reliable provenance.

The Carroll A. Deering — 1921

On January 31, 1921, the five-masted commercial schooner Carroll A. Deering was found grounded on Diamond Shoals, off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The ship was intact — sails set, anchors missing, lifeboats gone. The galley showed evidence of a meal being prepared. The crew’s personal belongings were still aboard. The ship’s log, navigation equipment, and the crew’s own papers were missing. The steering apparatus had been deliberately disabled. The twelve crewmen were never found.

The Deering case was investigated by multiple government agencies, including the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department, and the State Department — the last because the ship had been reported by a lightship keeper as behaving strangely the day before it grounded, with a crewman hailing the lightship to report that the Deering had lost its anchors. The investigation considered piracy, mutiny, and rum-running (Prohibition had begun in 1920, and the Outer Banks were a known route for smugglers). The investigation was inconclusive, hampered by the fact that the Deering was dynamited by the Coast Guard as a hazard to navigation before a thorough forensic examination could be completed — a decision that conspiracy theorists have viewed as suspicious.

The Deering is geographically marginal to the Bermuda Triangle — Cape Hatteras lies north of the commonly defined boundaries — but it is frequently included in Triangle literature because of the eerie ghost-ship quality of the discovery and because at least nine other vessels were reported lost or found abandoned in the same stretch of the Atlantic in the winter of 1920-1921. Whether this represents a genuine cluster of anomalous events or the expected attrition rate for wooden sailing vessels in winter seas off the most dangerous stretch of the American coastline is a matter of interpretation.

Other notable cases

The catalogue of Triangle disappearances extends well beyond these major incidents. On December 28, 1948, a Douglas DC-3 carrying 32 passengers and crew vanished on a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami. The pilot’s last transmission reported being 50 miles south of Miami with the lights of the city visible, and indicated no distress. The aircraft was never found. On December 22, 1967, the cabin cruiser Witchcraft, with two men aboard, radioed the Coast Guard from approximately one mile offshore of Miami to report a malfunctioning compass. A Coast Guard cutter reached the position within nineteen minutes. The Witchcraft was gone — no debris, no oil slick, no life jackets. The boat was equipped with built-in flotation devices that made it, according to its manufacturer, essentially unsinkable.

Each case, taken individually, can be explained. Taken collectively, the cases create a pattern — or the appearance of a pattern — that demands either a unifying explanation or a thorough demonstration that no pattern exists.

The theories — naturalistic

Methane hydrate eruptions

Beneath the continental shelves of the world’s oceans lie vast deposits of methane gas trapped in crystalline structures known as gas hydrates or clathrates — ice-like formations in which methane molecules are enclosed within a lattice of water molecules under conditions of high pressure and low temperature. The Blake Ridge, a sedimentary formation on the continental shelf off the southeastern United States, contains one of the largest known methane hydrate deposits in the world and lies within the general boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle.

The methane eruption hypothesis, proposed in the early 1980s and developed by researchers including Alan Judd at the University of Sunderland and subsequently explored by others at laboratories including Monash University, suggests that periodic releases of methane gas from the seafloor could explain the sudden loss of ships. The mechanism is as follows: if a large methane hydrate deposit becomes destabilized — by seismic activity, changes in water temperature, or changes in pressure — it can release enormous volumes of methane gas in a sudden eruption. A sufficiently large eruption would reduce the density of the water above it by introducing gas bubbles, potentially causing any ship above the eruption zone to lose buoyancy and sink rapidly. The released methane, rising to the surface and into the atmosphere, could also stall the engines of aircraft flying at low altitude by displacing the oxygen in the air-fuel mixture.

Laboratory experiments conducted at Monash University in Australia in 2003 demonstrated that objects floating in water can indeed lose buoyancy and sink when the water is aerated with sufficient gas to reduce its density below a critical threshold. The physics is sound. The question is whether natural methane eruptions of sufficient magnitude occur in the Triangle with sufficient frequency to account for the documented losses. The USGS has studied the Blake Ridge deposits extensively and has concluded that while methane hydrate dissociation events do occur, there is no evidence of a large-scale eruption in the Bermuda Triangle region within the last 15,000 years. The methane hypothesis remains physically plausible but geologically undemonstrated for the specific region and time frame in question.

Rogue waves

The western Atlantic is one of the most hydrodynamically active regions in the world. The Gulf Stream — a warm, fast-moving current that flows northward along the eastern seaboard of the United States before turning northeast toward Europe — moves at speeds of up to five knots and carries a volume of water exceeding the combined flow of all the world’s rivers. When the northward-flowing Gulf Stream encounters weather systems moving southward or eastward, the collision of current and wind can generate extreme wave conditions — including rogue waves, individual waves of extraordinary height that exceed twice the significant wave height of the surrounding sea state.

Rogue waves were considered semi-mythical by oceanographers until the Draupner wave was instrumentally recorded in the North Sea on January 1, 1995 — a single wave measuring 25.6 meters (84 feet) that emerged from a sea state with a significant wave height of 12 meters. Since then, satellite monitoring has confirmed that rogue waves occur far more frequently than linear wave theory predicts. In the convergence zone where the Gulf Stream meets opposing weather systems — which encompasses much of the Bermuda Triangle — the conditions for rogue wave formation are optimal. A single rogue wave could capsize or break apart a vessel of moderate size with no warning and with insufficient time to send a distress signal.

Compass anomalies and agonic lines

One of the most frequently cited anomalies in Triangle lore is compass deviation — the erratic behavior of magnetic compasses reported by Columbus, by Flight 19’s Lieutenant Taylor, and by numerous other sailors and pilots over the centuries. The explanation is both real and prosaic. Magnetic compasses point toward magnetic north, which does not coincide with geographic (true) north. The angular difference between the two — known as magnetic declination — varies depending on one’s position on the Earth’s surface. Along a line known as the agonic line — where magnetic north and true north are in alignment — there is zero declination, and the compass points to true north. The agonic line is not fixed; it migrates slowly over time as the Earth’s magnetic field shifts. In the early twentieth century, the agonic line passed through the Bermuda Triangle. A navigator unaware of or failing to correct for the local declination could be led significantly off course — a navigational error that would compound with distance and time.

This is almost certainly what happened to Flight 19. Taylor’s compasses malfunctioned — whether mechanically or due to pilot error in applying declination corrections — and without reliable instruments, he became progressively more lost. In an era before GPS, before reliable over-water radar, and before automated navigational systems, compass failure over open ocean was a potentially fatal problem. It does not require electromagnetic anomalies or space-time distortion to explain. It requires a broken compass and a lot of ocean.

The Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream itself is a powerful and underappreciated factor. Moving at up to five knots, the current can transport debris, wreckage, and bodies hundreds of miles from the site of a disaster within hours. A ship or aircraft that goes down in the Triangle may leave wreckage that is carried rapidly away from the search area, dispersed across a vast expanse of ocean, and sunk beneath the surface by wave action before searchers arrive. The Gulf Stream explains, in many cases, the most unsettling feature of Triangle disappearances: the absence of wreckage. The wreckage existed; it was simply carried away before anyone could find it.

Waterspouts and microbursts

The tropical and subtropical waters of the Triangle are a breeding ground for severe localized weather phenomena. Waterspouts — tornado-like vortices that form over warm water — are common in the Straits of Florida and the Bahamas, particularly during the warmer months. Microbursts — sudden, powerful downdrafts of air from thunderstorm cells — can generate surface winds exceeding 100 knots over an area less than two miles across. A microburst striking a small vessel or a low-flying aircraft would produce a sudden, violent, and essentially unpredictable force — precisely the kind of event that could cause a loss without warning and without a distress signal.

Human error and statistical normality

This is the explanation that explains everything and satisfies no one. Larry Kusche, a reference librarian at Arizona State University, published The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved in 1975, one year after Berlitz’s bestseller. Kusche’s approach was methodical and devastating. He tracked down the original sources for every major incident cited by Berlitz and the earlier Triangle authors — newspaper reports, Coast Guard records, Navy inquiries, Lloyd’s of London insurance filings, weather data — and compared them to the versions presented in Triangle literature. What he found was a systematic pattern of distortion.

Cases that had clear explanations — storms, mechanical failure, human error — were presented by Berlitz as unexplained. Cases that occurred far outside the Triangle’s boundaries were included as Triangle incidents. Cases that were reported in bad weather were described as having occurred in calm conditions. Cases that had known wreckage were described as having vanished without a trace. In at least one instance, Berlitz cited a disappearance that appears never to have occurred at all — a vessel for which no registration, no Lloyd’s record, and no maritime report could be found.

Kusche’s most powerful argument was statistical. The Bermuda Triangle encompasses one of the most heavily traveled shipping and aviation corridors in the world. Thousands of ships and aircraft pass through the region every year. The number of losses, when calculated as a proportion of total traffic, is not statistically anomalous. The U.S. Coast Guard stated in its official position on the Triangle: “The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or aircraft. In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years, there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.” Lloyd’s of London, the world’s largest maritime insurer, confirmed that the Triangle did not have an unusually high rate of insurance claims compared to other regions with comparable traffic volumes. Norman Hooke, a casualty analyst at Lloyd’s, compiled maritime disaster data spanning decades and found no statistical anomaly attributable to the region.

The skeptical case is strong. It is arguably conclusive. But it has a weakness that its proponents do not always acknowledge: it explains the aggregate without fully explaining every individual case. The statistical argument demonstrates that the overall pattern of losses in the Triangle is unremarkable. It does not explain why Flight 19’s wreckage was never found, or why three sister ships of the Cyclops vanished without trace, or why the crew of the Carroll A. Deering abandoned a seaworthy vessel. Each of these individual cases may have a mundane explanation. But the mundane explanations are, in several instances, speculative — not proven, but inferred from the absence of contrary evidence. The skeptics are right that there is no mystery requiring supernatural explanation. They are not always right that there is no mystery at all.

The theories — anomalous

Electromagnetic anomalies and electronic fog

On December 4, 1970, Bruce Gernon, a private pilot, took off from Andros Island in the Bahamas in a Beechcraft Bonanza with his father as a passenger, bound for Palm Beach, Florida. What happened next — according to Gernon’s account, which he has maintained consistently for over five decades — was the experience that would define his life.

Shortly after takeoff, Gernon observed an unusual cloud formation ahead of him — a lenticular cloud that appeared to be expanding rapidly. As he climbed to avoid it, the cloud seemed to engulf the aircraft from all sides, forming what Gernon described as a tunnel — a cylindrical passage through the cloud mass with clear sky visible at the far end. Gernon flew into the tunnel. Inside, he experienced what he described as “electronic fog” — a grayish-white mist that clung to the aircraft, caused his compass to spin counterclockwise, and made his navigational instruments behave erratically. The tunnel walls appeared to rotate around the aircraft. The fog seemed to attach itself to the plane.

When Gernon emerged from the tunnel, he was over Miami Beach — a location that should have been at least thirty minutes of flying time ahead of him. His watch and his aircraft’s clock indicated that only three minutes had passed since he entered the cloud formation. He had covered approximately 100 miles in three minutes — a speed of roughly 2,000 miles per hour in an aircraft with a cruising speed of 180 mph. His fuel consumption confirmed the anomaly: he had burned far less fuel than the actual distance traveled should have required.

Gernon’s account was published in The Fog: A Never Before Published Theory of the Bermuda Triangle Phenomenon (2005), co-authored with Rob MacGregor. Gernon theorized that the electronic fog was an electromagnetic phenomenon — a naturally occurring field generated by the unique geological and oceanic conditions of the Bahamas — that could warp space and time, creating what he called “a time storm.” He connected his experience to the broader electromagnetic anomalies reported in the Triangle — compass failures, instrument malfunctions, disorientation — and proposed that these anomalies were not random but were manifestations of a consistent physical phenomenon that science had not yet identified.

The scientific community has not embraced Gernon’s account. The experience, as described, is physically impossible under known physics — no atmospheric phenomenon can accelerate an aircraft to ten times its rated speed without structural disintegration, and no electromagnetic field generated by natural processes can compress time. Skeptics have suggested instrument error, disorientation in cloud cover, or simple misremembering. But Gernon is a credible witness — a licensed pilot with thousands of hours of flight time, no history of sensationalism, and a story he has told consistently for over half a century. His account connects to the The Philadelphia Experiment — the alleged electromagnetic warping of space around the USS Eldridge — and to laboratory research on the effects of electromagnetic fields on human perception of time, conducted by researchers including Michael Persinger at Laurentian University. Whether Gernon experienced an anomalous physical phenomenon or an anomalous perceptual one, his testimony remains the single most detailed first-person account of a Bermuda Triangle experience.

Underwater structures and the Bimini Road

In September 1968, J. Manson Valentine, a zoologist and amateur archaeologist, discovered a formation of large, flat limestone blocks on the seafloor near North Bimini Island in the Bahamas — within the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle. The formation, which became known as the Bimini Road (or the Bimini Wall), consists of a roughly J-shaped alignment of rectangular stones extending approximately half a mile along the ocean floor at a depth of about eighteen feet. The individual blocks are large — some exceeding fifteen feet in length — and are arranged in what appears to be a deliberate, pavement-like pattern.

The discovery electrified the alternative history community, and for one specific reason: Edgar Cayce, the American mystic and psychic known as the “Sleeping Prophet,” had made a prediction in 1940 — nearly three decades before Valentine’s discovery — that “a portion of the temples” of Atlantis would be found “under the slime of ages of sea water — near what is known as Bimini” and that this discovery would occur in “1968 or 1969.” The coincidence of Cayce’s prediction with Valentine’s discovery was, for believers, staggering. Here was a specific, testable prophecy — a named location, a named timeframe, and a described type of discovery — that appeared to have been fulfilled with remarkable precision.

Geological examination of the Bimini Road has produced divided opinion. The mainstream geological consensus, established by Eugene Shinn of the USGS and others, is that the formation is natural — a case of beachrock that fractured along regular joints, producing the appearance of cut blocks. Radiocarbon dating of the stone yielded ages of approximately 2,000 to 4,000 years, far younger than the Atlantean timeframe. However, dissenting researchers, including David Zink, who conducted underwater archaeological investigations at Bimini in the 1970s, argued that the regularity of the blocks, the consistency of the joints, and the presence of what he interpreted as tool marks indicated artificial construction. The debate has never been definitively resolved. What lies beneath the Bimini Road — whether there are deeper, older layers of construction below the visible surface — has not been thoroughly investigated.

If the Bimini Road is artificial — if it represents the remnant of a pre-diluvian construction on what was dry land during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were 120 meters lower than today — then the implications are far-reaching. An artificial structure in the Bahamas, predating known civilization, would not only vindicate Cayce’s prophecy; it would place a constructed, engineered artifact directly within the Bermuda Triangle, raising the question of whether submerged technology from Lost Ancient Civilizations could be responsible for the electromagnetic anomalies reported in the region.

USOs — Unidentified Submerged Objects

The Bermuda Triangle is not only associated with phenomena above the surface. A persistent subcurrent in Triangle research involves reports of unidentified submerged objects — USOs — observed in the waters of the western Atlantic. These reports describe luminous objects moving at high speed beneath the surface, ascending from or descending into the ocean, and behaving in ways inconsistent with any known submarine, marine animal, or natural phenomenon.

The earliest report often cited is Columbus’s own: the “light like a small wax candle” observed on October 11, 1492, which rose and fell on the horizon. Whether this was a USO, a torch on a distant shore, bioluminescence, or a fabrication added by later chroniclers is impossible to determine from the surviving sources. More recent reports include accounts from Navy personnel during and after the Second World War of luminous objects tracked on sonar moving at speeds exceeding 150 knots — far beyond the capability of any known submarine.

Ivan T. Sanderson, the Scottish-American biologist, author, and paranormal investigator, compiled USO reports in his 1970 book Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs. Sanderson argued that the reports pointed to an underwater intelligence — either extraterrestrial or an advanced civilization indigenous to Earth’s oceans — that used the deep sea as a base of operations. The Bermuda Triangle, in Sanderson’s analysis, was one of twelve equidistant “vile vortices” distributed around the globe — zones where anomalous activity, including UFO sightings, magnetic anomalies, and unexplained disappearances, was concentrated. The twelve vortices included the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea near Japan, the Wharton Basin in the eastern Indian Ocean, and several locations in the Southern Hemisphere. Sanderson argued that the regularity of their distribution — at roughly equal intervals along specific latitudes — suggested a global phenomenon rather than a local one.

The USO hypothesis connects the Bermuda Triangle to the broader UFO phenomenon and raises a question that has become increasingly prominent in the era of renewed government interest in unidentified aerial phenomena: if UAPs are real, and if they are capable of transitioning between air and water (as multiple military witnesses described in the USS Nimitz encounter of 2004 and subsequent incidents), then the ocean — which covers seventy percent of the Earth’s surface and remains largely unexplored at depth — is the logical place to look for their origin or their base.

The Atlantis connection

Charles Berlitz made the connection explicit in his 1974 book: the Bermuda Triangle was anomalous because it contained the submerged remnants of Atlantis, and Atlantean technology — still active on the ocean floor after millennia — was generating the electromagnetic disturbances responsible for the disappearances. The Bimini Road was, in Berlitz’s interpretation, the first visible evidence of this sunken civilization, and Cayce’s prediction was its validation.

The theory is unprovable in its current form, but its internal logic is coherent. If an advanced pre-diluvian civilization existed in the western Atlantic — a civilization that possessed technology capable of generating powerful electromagnetic fields (a capability attributed to Atlantis by Cayce and by Plato’s description of orichalcum, the mysterious red-gold metal) — and if that civilization was destroyed by the catastrophe that ended the last Ice Age, its submerged infrastructure could theoretically interact with passing ships and aircraft. Electromagnetic generators do not require active maintenance to cause interference if they retain residual charge or if geological processes — tectonic shifts, undersea volcanic activity, methane hydrate releases — periodically reactivate them. This is speculation piled upon speculation, but it connects three independently attested phenomena: the Bermuda Triangle anomalies, the Bimini Road, and the global tradition of a lost advanced civilization.

The electronic fog and the Philadelphia Experiment

Bruce Gernon’s electronic fog experience has been explicitly connected to the The Philadelphia Experiment by researchers including Rob MacGregor. The connection is electromagnetic: both the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle anomalies allegedly involve intense electromagnetic fields that distort space, time, and human perception. If the Navy’s 1943 experiment successfully generated an electromagnetic field powerful enough to render a ship invisible — as the legend claims — then a naturally occurring version of the same phenomenon, generated by the unique geological and oceanic conditions of the Triangle, could produce similar effects on a smaller and less controlled scale: compass failures, instrument malfunctions, time distortion, disorientation, and, in extreme cases, the complete disappearance of vessels and aircraft.

This is the unifying theory that connects the Triangle’s naturalistic and anomalous explanations. The methane hydrate deposits, the electromagnetic properties of the seafloor, the convergence of ocean currents, and the geological instability of the region could combine to produce transient, localized electromagnetic phenomena — not supernatural, but natural in a way that current science does not fully understand. Whether this constitutes a genuine scientific hypothesis or a just-so story dressed in the vocabulary of physics is a question that can only be answered by the kind of systematic, instrumented investigation that has never been conducted in the Triangle with the specific goal of detecting transient electromagnetic anomalies.

The skeptical case

The case against the Bermuda Triangle as a genuine anomaly is formidable, and intellectual honesty requires giving it its full weight.

Larry Kusche’s The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved remains the most thorough debunking of the Triangle legend ever published. Kusche, working as a reference librarian with access to extensive newspaper and maritime archives, went through every major case cited by Berlitz, Gaddis, and the other Triangle authors and checked the original sources. His findings were damning. Case after case, Kusche demonstrated that the Triangle authors had distorted, embellished, or fabricated the evidence.

Flight 19? A navigational error by a pilot with a known history of getting lost, compounded by his refusal to follow instructions that would have brought the flight home. The USS Cyclops? An overloaded, structurally compromised ship with a malfunctioning engine, commanded by a captain of questionable competence. The Star Tiger? An aircraft forced to fly at dangerously low altitude due to a broken heater, in an airframe with known design deficiencies. The Marine Sulphur Queen? A structurally deficient tanker carrying a hazardous cargo, cited by the Coast Guard for safety violations.

Beyond individual cases, Kusche identified systematic problems with the Triangle literature. Authors routinely omitted weather data that showed storms at the time and place of disappearances. They listed incidents that occurred hundreds of miles outside the Triangle’s boundaries. They described vessels as “vanished without a trace” when wreckage had been found. They cited cases from the nineteenth century without noting that the loss rates for sailing vessels in the age before radio, radar, and modern navigation were vastly higher than modern rates everywhere, not just in the Triangle.

The Coast Guard’s position has been consistent for decades: there is no mystery. The NOAA states on its official website: “The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard contend that there are no supernatural explanations for disasters at sea. Their experience suggests that the combined forces of nature and the unpredictability of mankind outmatch even the most far-fetched science fiction many times each year.”

Lloyd’s of London, which insures more maritime vessels than any other entity in the world, does not charge higher premiums for vessels transiting the Triangle. Norman Hooke, Lloyd’s casualty analyst, compiled maritime loss statistics spanning decades and found no statistical clustering in the Triangle region. Insurance companies are not in the business of ignoring patterns of loss; if the Triangle were genuinely more dangerous than comparable waters, premiums would reflect it.

The selection bias argument is perhaps the most devastating. The Bermuda Triangle encompasses the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas, and a major portion of the transatlantic shipping corridor. It is one of the most heavily trafficked maritime regions on Earth. More ships and aircraft pass through the Triangle in a given year than through almost any comparably sized region of ocean. The absolute number of losses is higher because the absolute amount of traffic is higher. When expressed as a rate — losses per vessel-transit or losses per aircraft-flight — the Triangle is unremarkable.

The phenomenon that Kusche identified is what might be called “mystery by omission.” Take any maritime loss. Remove the weather data. Remove the maintenance records. Remove the pilot’s history. Remove the wreckage reports. Remove the insurance findings. What remains is a ship or aircraft that “vanished without explanation in the Bermuda Triangle.” The mystery is not in the data; it is in the deliberate exclusion of data. Berlitz and his successors were not investigators; they were storytellers, and they shaped their material accordingly.

This is a powerful critique, and it is largely correct. But it is not quite the final word, because Kusche himself acknowledged that not every case could be explained. Some disappearances — particularly those involving multiple losses of the same vessel type in the same area, or losses in good weather with experienced crews — remain genuinely puzzling even after all available data is considered. The skeptical position is not that everything is explained; it is that nothing requires a paranormal or anomalous explanation. This is a defensible position. Whether it is a complete one is a different question.

The Devil’s Sea and global parallels

Ivan T. Sanderson’s twelve “Vile Vortices” — equidistant zones of anomalous activity distributed around the globe — represent the most ambitious attempt to place the Bermuda Triangle within a global pattern. The most prominent of these other vortices is the Devil’s Sea (also called the Dragon’s Triangle), a region of the Pacific Ocean south of Japan between Iwo Jima and Marcus Island.

The Devil’s Sea has its own history of anomalous losses. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a series of fishing boats and other vessels were reported missing in the region. In 1952, the Japanese government dispatched the research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 5 to investigate the disappearances. The Kaiyo Maru itself was lost with all 31 crew aboard, presumably destroyed by an undersea volcanic eruption — the region is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and is geologically active. The Japanese government declared the area a danger zone, which Triangle proponents have cited as official recognition of anomalous conditions.

However, Kusche and other skeptics have demonstrated that the Devil’s Sea legend is, like the Bermuda Triangle legend, significantly embellished. The Japanese government’s danger designation referred to volcanic activity, not electromagnetic anomalies. The missing vessels were mostly small fishing boats operating in waters known for extreme weather and volcanic hazard. The statistical rate of losses was not anomalous for the region and period. Sanderson’s other vortices — in the Wharton Basin, near the Loyalty Islands, in the Afghan deserts — have even less supporting evidence.

The question Sanderson raised, however, is not easily dismissed. If the Bermuda Triangle’s anomalies are real, are they unique? Or are they one expression of a planetary phenomenon — related to the structure of the Earth’s magnetic field, to geological fault lines, to the distribution of tectonic stress — that manifests at multiple points around the globe? The question is premature in the absence of confirmed anomalies in the Triangle itself. But it illustrates the way that the Triangle functions as a node in a larger network of ideas — connected to UFOs & UAPs, to Atlantis, to Lost Ancient Civilizations, to the The Nature of Time — each one reinforcing the others, each one drawing evidential support from the pattern as a whole.

Cultural impact

Whatever the truth about the Bermuda Triangle, its cultural impact is beyond dispute. Berlitz’s 1974 book spawned an entire genre. Richard Winer published The Devil’s Triangle (1974) and The Devil’s Triangle 2 (1975). John Wallace Spencer wrote Limbo of the Lost (1969). Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey published The Bermuda Triangle (1975). The topic became a staple of television — Leonard Nimoy devoted episodes of In Search Of… to the Triangle in the 1970s; the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and their successors have produced dozens of documentaries. The 1978 film The Bermuda Triangle, the 1979 children’s cartoon The Bermuda Depths, and countless B-movies explored the theme. Fleetwood Mac named a 1974 album Mystery to Me partly after Triangle lore. Barry Manilow released a song called “Bermuda Triangle” in 1981. The Triangle became a metaphor — a cultural shorthand for any situation where things disappear without explanation.

The genre Berlitz created — the anomaly compendium, the catalogue of unexplained events presented in breathless prose with minimal sourcing — became one of the defining literary forms of the 1970s. It was the golden age of the paranormal paperback, and the Bermuda Triangle was its flagship topic. The genre produced very little scholarship and an enormous amount of entertainment. It also produced a backlash — Kusche’s debunking, the emergence of organized skepticism as a cultural movement, and the eventual marginalization of the topic from serious discourse. By the 1990s, the Bermuda Triangle was considered a solved mystery in mainstream media: a combination of bad weather, human error, and sensationalist journalism, signifying nothing.

The tension between the believers and the debunkers — between Berlitz and Kusche, between the anomalists and the skeptics — is itself a cultural phenomenon worth examining. It is a microcosm of a larger conflict about the nature of evidence, the limits of official explanation, and the role of anomalous experience in a scientific culture. Kusche was right that Berlitz was careless with facts. But Berlitz was right that the ocean is a place of genuine danger and genuine mystery, and that the impulse to explain away every anomaly is as intellectually dishonest as the impulse to magnify them. The truth about the Bermuda Triangle lies between the two — but the cultural energy of the debate, the millions of books sold, the thousands of hours of television produced, suggests that the question the Triangle raises is not really about compass anomalies and methane hydrates. It is about the human relationship to the unknown.

The deeper question

The Bermuda Triangle endures because it asks a question that science has not fully answered and that human psychology cannot release: Is the ocean knowable?

Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is water. More than eighty percent of the ocean floor remains unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored. We have better maps of Mars than of the seafloor beneath the Gulf Stream. The Mariana Trench has been visited by fewer human beings than the surface of the Moon. When we say that the Bermuda Triangle has been “explained,” we mean that each individual incident can be fitted into a plausible framework of natural causes. We do not mean that we understand the ocean. We do not mean that we have surveyed the seafloor of the Triangle with instruments capable of detecting transient electromagnetic anomalies. We do not mean that we have explained every case to the satisfaction of every competent investigator.

The Bermuda Triangle occupies a unique position in the network of ideas that connects Atlantis to the The Philadelphia Experiment, UFOs & UAPs to the nature of time, and Consciousness to the physical anomalies of the natural world. It is the one node in this network that is both fully debunked and not fully explained — a mystery that has been solved in the aggregate but that retains, in its individual cases and in its cumulative weight, a residue of genuine strangeness that resists final resolution.

Perhaps the Triangle is nothing. Perhaps it is exactly what the Coast Guard says it is: a busy stretch of ocean where things go wrong at the expected rate, no more and no less. Perhaps Larry Kusche solved it fifty years ago and everything since has been repetition.

Or perhaps — and this is the possibility that keeps the Triangle alive in the human imagination — the ocean is not fully known, the seafloor is not fully mapped, and there are phenomena in the deep Atlantic that do not fit neatly into the categories of existing science. This does not require invoking Atlantis, or aliens, or time warps. It requires only the acknowledgment that the ocean is the largest unexplored environment on Earth, and that the history of science is, in large part, the history of discovering that things dismissed as impossible were merely undiscovered.

The Bermuda Triangle will endure because the ocean endures — vast, dark, and not yet fully understood. The losses are real. The grief is real. The explanations are mostly adequate. And the mystery, despite everything, persists.

Sources

Berlitz, Charles. The Bermuda Triangle. Doubleday, 1974.

Kusche, Lawrence David. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. Harper & Row, 1975.

Gaddis, Vincent. “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Argosy, February 1964.

Gernon, Bruce, and Rob MacGregor. The Fog: A Never Before Published Theory of the Bermuda Triangle Phenomenon. Llewellyn Publications, 2005.

Sanderson, Ivan T. Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs. World Publishing Company, 1970.

Quasar, Gian J. Into the Bermuda Triangle: Pursuing the Truth Behind the World’s Greatest Mystery. International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2004.

United States Navy. Report of the Board of Investigation: Flight 19. Naval Air Advanced Training Command, December 1945.

NOAA. “What is the Bermuda Triangle?” National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cayce, Edgar. Readings 364-1 through 364-13 and 958-3 (on Atlantis and Bimini). Association for Research and Enlightenment, Virginia Beach, VA.

Valentine, J. Manson. “Archaeological Enigmas of Florida and the Western Bahamas.” Muse News, June 1969.

Winer, Richard. The Devil’s Triangle. Bantam Books, 1974.

Group, David. The Evidence for the Bermuda Triangle. Aquarian Press, 1984.

U.S. Coast Guard. “Bermuda Triangle Fact Sheet.” Department of Homeland Security.

Lloyd’s of London. Maritime shipping loss statistics, 1955-1975 (cited in Kusche, 1975).

Hooke, Norman. Maritime Casualties, 1963-1996. Lloyd’s of London Press, 1997.

Columbus, Christopher. Diario de a bordo, entries for October 11, 1492. Transcribed by Bartolome de las Casas; various English translations.

Sand, George X. “Sea Mystery at Our Back Door.” Fate, October 1952.

Shinn, Eugene A. “Geology and the Bimini Stones.” Sea Frontiers, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1978.

Zink, David. The Stones of Atlantis. Prentice-Hall, 1978.

Spencer, John Wallace. Limbo of the Lost. Phillips Publishing, 1969.

Gould, Rupert T. The Stargazer Talks. Geoffrey Bles, 1943.

McDonell, Michael. “Lost Patrol.” Naval Aviation News, June 1973.

Persinger, Michael A. “Geophysical Variables and Behavior: The Tectonic Strain Model as a Heuristic for Understanding Psi Phenomena.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 79, 1985.

May, Joseph, and others. “Methane Hydrate Experiments and the Bermuda Triangle.” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 71, No. 12, 2003.

Connections

The Philadelphia Experiment (see Operations) — Both the Philadelphia Experiment and the Bermuda Triangle involve claims of electromagnetic anomalies in the Atlantic that can cause ships and planes to disappear or experience strange effects.

Atlantis (see Origins) — The Bimini Road, an underwater rock formation found in the Bahamas, and Edgar Cayce’s prophecies both place Atlantis inside the Bermuda Triangle. Some theorists think Atlantean technology on the ocean floor causes the Triangle’s anomalies.

UFOs & UAPs (see Cosmos) — There have been reports of unidentified submerged objects (USOs) in the Bermuda Triangle. Some researchers think these could be evidence of underwater alien bases in the area.

The Nature of Time — Pilots and sailors in the Bermuda Triangle have reported time distortions: watches stopping, hours seeming to pass in minutes, and electronic clocks resetting. These reports suggest something in the area may affect how time works.

Consciousness (see Mind) — Compass failures, instrument malfunctions, and disorientation are commonly reported in the Triangle. Lab studies have shown that strong electromagnetic fields can cause similar confusion and altered mental states in humans.

Lost Ancient Civilizations (see Origins) — If advanced ancient civilizations existed before a great flood, their technology could still be on the ocean floor in the Triangle area. Some theorists think this buried tech explains the strange energy readings reported there.

The Flat Earth

There is a belief so apparently absurd that its very existence demands explanation. Not explanation of why it is wrong — that part is trivially easy, settled science since the third century BCE — but explanation of why, in an era when any person can book a flight that traces the curvature of the Earth, when satellite imagery is available on every smartphone, when the physics of a spherical planet are confirmed a thousand ways daily by GPS systems, weather models, telecommunications, and intercontinental navigation, millions of people have come to believe that the Earth is flat. This is not a question about astronomy. It is a question about epistemology, about the architecture of belief, about what happens when institutional trust collapses so thoroughly that a significant portion of the population decides to reject not just particular scientific claims but the entire apparatus of scientific knowledge production. The Flat Earth movement of the twenty-first century is not a relic of pre-modern ignorance. It is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, born on YouTube, propagated by algorithms, and sustained by a community of believers who have constructed an elaborate alternative framework of evidence, argument, and mutual support. Understanding it requires taking it seriously — not its claims about the shape of the planet, which are false, but its claims about the untrustworthiness of the institutions that tell us the planet is round, which are not entirely without foundation.

The Myth of Medieval Flat Earth Belief

Before examining what Flat Earth believers actually claim and why they claim it, a persistent myth must be cleared away: the idea that “people used to think the Earth was flat.” This is itself a conspiracy of sorts — a historical fabrication so successful that it has become common knowledge, repeated in schools, invoked in casual conversation, and deployed as a metaphor for scientific progress triumphing over religious ignorance. The myth goes like this: in the ancient and medieval world, people believed the Earth was flat; the Catholic Church enforced this belief as doctrine; Christopher Columbus was opposed by flat-Earth-believing churchmen who thought he would sail off the edge; and the eventual acceptance of the spherical Earth represents the victory of reason over superstition.

Almost none of this is true. Educated people in the Western world have known the Earth is spherical since at least the fifth century BCE. Pythagoras is traditionally credited with the earliest Greek assertion of a spherical Earth, though the evidence for his specific contribution is thin. What is not thin is the evidence from the fourth century BCE onward. Aristotle, in De Caelo (On the Heavens), written around 350 BCE, presented multiple empirical arguments for the Earth’s sphericity: the circular shadow cast by the Earth on the Moon during lunar eclipses, the way new constellations appear as one travels south, and the way ships disappear hull-first over the horizon. These were not theoretical speculations. They were observations, and Aristotle treated the spherical Earth as established fact.

The definitive ancient demonstration came from Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief librarian of the Library of Alexandria, who around 240 BCE calculated the Earth’s circumference with remarkable accuracy. His method was elegant: he knew that at noon on the summer solstice, the sun was directly overhead in Syene (modern Aswan), casting no shadow at the bottom of a deep well. On the same day, in Alexandria, approximately 800 kilometers to the north, a vertical stick cast a shadow indicating the sun was about 7.2 degrees from vertical. Since 7.2 degrees is one-fiftieth of a full circle (360 degrees), and the distance between Syene and Alexandria was approximately 5,000 stadia, the total circumference of the Earth was approximately 250,000 stadia. Converting stadia to modern units is imprecise because the exact length of the stadion Eratosthenes used is debated, but the most common estimate places his result at approximately 39,375 kilometers — astonishingly close to the actual circumference of 40,075 kilometers. He was off by roughly two percent, more than two thousand years before satellite measurement.

The medieval Church did not teach a flat Earth. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (1991) documents this definitively. Russell identified only five writers in the entire span of late antiquity and the Middle Ages who argued for a flat Earth — most notably Lactantius (c. 240-320 CE) and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century) — and both were considered eccentric by their contemporaries. The major medieval scholars — the Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Jean Buridan, Nicole Oresme — all affirmed the Earth’s sphericity as uncontroversial fact. Aquinas discussed it as a basic assumption in the Summa Theologica. Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1308-1320), arguably the most important literary work of the Middle Ages, is structured around a spherical Earth, with Hell at the center, Purgatory on the opposite side of the globe from Jerusalem, and the spheres of heaven surrounding the whole. The idea that Columbus’s sailors feared sailing off the edge of a flat Earth is pure fiction — the actual debate was about the circumference of the Earth and whether ships could carry enough provisions to reach Asia by sailing west, a perfectly rational concern that Columbus answered incorrectly (he underestimated the distance by roughly 75 percent and was only saved from disaster by the unexpected presence of two continents).

So where did the myth come from? Two nineteenth-century sources bear primary responsibility. The first is Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), a fictionalized biography that invented the dramatic scene of Columbus defending himself before a council of ignorant monks who believed the Earth was flat. Irving knew this was fiction — he was a novelist, not a historian — but the scene was so dramatically satisfying that it entered the cultural bloodstream as fact. The second and more consequential source was Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), a two-volume polemic that constructed an elaborate narrative of perpetual conflict between scientific progress and religious obscurantism. White, the co-founder and first president of Cornell University, needed the flat Earth myth for his thesis to work — it served as the perfect illustration of religion suppressing obvious scientific truth. His scholarship on this point was atrocious, relying on selective quotation and outright misrepresentation of medieval sources, but his book was enormously influential and cemented the warfare thesis in popular culture for over a century.

This matters for understanding the modern Flat Earth movement because it disposes of the lazy explanation. Modern Flat Earthers are not continuing an ancient tradition of ignorance. There is no ancient tradition of ignorance to continue. The Flat Earth belief they espouse was invented in the nineteenth century by a single, specific individual, and it is to him we must now turn.

Samuel Birley Rowbotham and the Birth of Zetetic Astronomy

The modern Flat Earth movement begins with Samuel Birley Rowbotham, born in 1816 in Manchester, England. Rowbotham was a fascinating and elusive figure — a traveling lecturer, medical quack, patent medicine salesman, and tireless self-promoter who operated under the pseudonym “Parallax.” He was not an ignorant man. He was well-read, articulate, a skilled debater, and possessed of a showman’s instinct for what would play to an audience. He was also, by every available account, thoroughly sincere in his belief that the Earth was flat.

Rowbotham’s foundational experiment took place in 1838 on the Old Bedford Level, a six-mile straight stretch of the Old Bedford River in Norfolk, England. The Bedford Level was an ideal test site — a long, straight canal with no significant bends, flowing through flat fenland terrain. Rowbotham waded into the river and, using a telescope held eight inches above the water, watched a rowing boat with a flag mounted on a pole at a height of five feet above the waterline recede from him along the full six-mile length of the canal. According to Rowbotham, the flag remained visible for the entire distance. On a spherical Earth with a circumference of approximately 25,000 miles, the curvature over six miles should cause an object at water level to drop approximately 24 feet below the line of sight. A five-foot flag, Rowbotham argued, should have been entirely invisible behind the curvature of the water. The fact that it remained visible proved the water was flat, and therefore the Earth was flat.

The experiment was not properly controlled. Rowbotham did not account for atmospheric refraction — the bending of light through air of varying density and temperature near the surface of a body of water. Over flat terrain and water, refraction effects are particularly pronounced and can make objects beyond the geometric horizon appear to rise above it. This is the same physical phenomenon that produces mirages. Under certain atmospheric conditions, refraction over the Bedford Level can make objects visible at distances well beyond what simple geometric calculation would predict. Rowbotham either did not know this or chose to ignore it.

From this experiment, Rowbotham built an entire cosmological system. He published his ideas first as a pamphlet, Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments Which Prove that the Surface of the Sea is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth is Not a Globe (1849), then as a greatly expanded book, Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe (1865), and finally as a substantial 430-page volume in 1881. The word “zetetic” was central to his project. Derived from the Greek zetetikos, meaning “seeking” or “inquiring,” it signaled Rowbotham’s epistemological stance: that truth should be determined by direct sensory observation and personal investigation rather than by accepting the theoretical conclusions of scientific authorities. This was not anti-intellectualism in the crude sense. It was an empiricist claim — that the evidence of one’s own senses should take precedence over abstract mathematical models, especially when those models are produced by institutions that demand trust rather than offering proof accessible to ordinary people.

Rowbotham’s model held that the Earth was a flat disc centered on the North Pole, with the Arctic at the center and the Antarctic ice forming a barrier wall around the circumference. The sun and moon were small objects — Rowbotham estimated the sun at approximately 32 miles in diameter — circling above the disc at an altitude of a few thousand miles, their light illuminating different portions of the surface at different times to produce day and night. Stars were small luminous bodies at a similar or slightly greater altitude. The zetetic model rejected not only heliocentrism but also gravity as conventionally understood, replacing it with the simpler claim that objects fall because dense things naturally descend.

Under the name Parallax, Rowbotham traveled England giving public lectures and challenging audience members and scientists to debates. He was, by most accounts, remarkably effective. He had a practiced debater’s skill at turning technical challenges to his advantage, exploiting the complexity of optical physics and geodesy to create doubt in the minds of lay audiences. When scientists argued that refraction explained his Bedford Level results, Rowbotham would counter that the refraction theory was itself an unproven assumption — an attempt to save the globular hypothesis from the evidence of direct observation. When confronted with the fact that ships disappear hull-first over the horizon, he argued that this was a perspective effect, not curvature. His arguments were wrong, but they were not stupid, and they were difficult to refute in the format of a public lecture where the audience had no background in optics or geodesy.

The most dramatic episode in Rowbotham’s career involved Alfred Russel Wallace — the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and one of the most accomplished scientists of the Victorian era. In 1870, John Hampden, a vocal Flat Earth supporter, placed a wager of 500 pounds (a substantial sum, equivalent to roughly 60,000 pounds today) that no one could prove the Earth’s curvature using the Bedford Level. Wallace accepted the challenge. He devised a carefully controlled experiment: he placed two markers at the same height above the water, one at each end of a six-mile stretch, and used a telescope with a crosshair. If the Earth were flat, both markers would align with the crosshair. If the Earth were curved, the middle marker would appear to rise above the line connecting the two end markers. Wallace’s experiment clearly showed the predicted curvature effect. The independent referee, the editor of The Field magazine, J.H. Walsh, awarded the bet to Wallace.

What followed was extraordinary. Hampden refused to accept the result. He accused Wallace, Walsh, and the entire scientific establishment of fraud. He launched a campaign of harassment against Wallace that lasted years, including threatening letters to Wallace’s wife. Hampden was eventually jailed for threatening behavior, but upon release resumed his attacks. The legal disputes over the wager dragged through the courts for over a decade. Wallace eventually received the money but later wrote that the entire affair had been a mistake — it had cost him far more in legal fees, time, and aggravation than the 500 pounds was worth, and it had done nothing to change the minds of those committed to the Flat Earth belief. The episode prefigured, with uncanny precision, every subsequent attempt by scientists to debunk Flat Earth claims: the evidence is presented, the evidence is rejected, and the scientists are accused of being part of the conspiracy.

Rowbotham died in 1884, having lived a life of considerable comfort thanks to his lecturing income and his sales of “phosphorus pills” — a patent medicine he marketed as a cure for various ailments, a sideline that suggests either versatile credulity or flexible ethics. After his death, his followers organized themselves into the Universal Zetetic Society, led by Lady Elizabeth Blount, who published a journal called The Earth Not a Globe Review and continued to promote Rowbotham’s ideas into the early twentieth century. The Society persisted for several decades but never achieved mass appeal, remaining a small community of dedicated enthusiasts.

The Institutional Lineage: From Zetetic Society to Internet Forum

The organizational history of Flat Earth belief traces a surprisingly unbroken line from Rowbotham to the present day, though the organizations themselves changed character dramatically at each transition.

The Universal Zetetic Society, founded in 1884 in the wake of Rowbotham’s death, operated primarily through Lady Elizabeth Blount’s publications and public advocacy. Blount was an energetic promoter who organized a repetition of the Bedford Level experiment in 1901 — this time, she hired a photographer to capture images of a white sheet suspended at a specific height across the canal, claiming the results supported the flat Earth model. Henry Yule Oldham, a lecturer in geography at Cambridge, conducted his own Bedford Level experiment shortly afterward using proper surveying equipment and accounting for refraction, confirming the curvature. The Zetetic Society continued to operate in various diminished forms into the 1930s before effectively dissolving.

The next incarnation came from an unlikely quarter. In 1956 — the same year the Soviet Union was preparing to launch Sputnik and inaugurate the space age — Samuel Shenton, a sign painter from Dover, England, founded the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS). Shenton was a sincere and stubborn man who maintained his beliefs through the early years of spaceflight with remarkable composure. When the first satellite photographs of Earth from space were published, showing an obviously spherical planet, Shenton responded with what has become one of the most quoted lines in the history of conspiracy thinking: “It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.” The statement is revealing not for its content — it is trivially dismissible — but for its epistemological structure. Shenton was not arguing that the photographs were fabricated (though later Flat Earthers would). He was arguing that the interpretation of a photograph requires training and that the untrained viewer was being misled by appearances. This is, in a strange way, a legitimate philosophical point — photographs are not transparent windows onto reality but mediated representations that require interpretation — deployed in service of a demonstrably false conclusion.

Shenton’s organization remained small, operating from his home in Dover, but it kept the Flat Earth idea alive through the 1960s and into the 1970s. When Shenton died in 1971, the organization passed to Charles Kenneth Johnson, an American living in Lancaster, California, in the high desert of the Antelope Valley. Johnson would prove to be the most effective Flat Earth organizer of the twentieth century. He renamed the organization the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and operated it from his home with the help of his wife, Marjory, an Australian who had independently arrived at Flat Earth beliefs before meeting Charles.

Johnson was a prolific writer and correspondent. He published a newsletter, the Flat Earth News, that at its peak went out to approximately 3,500 subscribers — a remarkable number for a newsletter advocating a position considered ludicrous by essentially everyone outside the subscriber list. Johnson’s Flat Earth News was a lively, combative publication full of scriptural arguments (Johnson was a Christian who took the Bible’s references to the Earth’s “foundations,” “pillars,” and “firmament” literally), attacks on NASA (which he called “the National Aeronautics and Space Actors”), and defenses of the zetetic method. He was quotable, colorful, and entirely sincere. He once told a reporter from Science Digest: “If the Earth were a ball spinning in space, there would be no up or down.” He offered membership in the Society for ten dollars a year and promised a diploma certifying the holder as a “genuine member of the International Flat Earth Society.”

Johnson’s model of the Earth was essentially Rowbotham’s, updated to account for the space age. The Earth was a flat disc with the North Pole at the center. The sun and moon were each approximately 32 miles in diameter and circled 3,000 miles above the surface. The “space program” was an elaborate fraud — the Apollo missions had been filmed in a studio (a claim that directly overlaps with the The Moon Landing Hoax hoax theory), and all subsequent space imagery was fabricated. The Antarctic ice wall was guarded by the military forces of the nations party to the Antarctic Treaty, who conspired to prevent independent access. Gravity did not exist; the disc accelerated upward at 9.8 meters per second squared, producing the same effect.

Johnson died in 2001, and his organization effectively died with him. A fire at his home in 1997 had already destroyed much of the Society’s membership records and archives. His wife Marjory had died in 1996. By the time of his own death, the International Flat Earth Research Society was a one-man operation with a dwindling mailing list. The Flat Earth movement appeared to be dead.

It was not dead. It was about to be reborn in a form that neither Rowbotham nor Johnson could have imagined.

In 2004, Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel) launched a new website and forum for the Flat Earth Society, reviving the name and creating an online community that would serve as a bridge between the old organizational Flat Earth movement and the explosive viral growth of the 2010s. The forum attracted a mixture of sincere believers, curious skeptics, and people who were never entirely clear about which category they belonged to. It was a small, eccentric corner of the internet — but it proved that there was demand for the idea, that people were interested, and that the internet could do what newsletters and lecture halls never could: connect scattered believers into a community with the critical mass to sustain and grow itself.

The Modern Revival: YouTube, Algorithms, and the Birth of a Movement

The modern Flat Earth revival — the version that made international headlines, attracted millions of adherents, inspired international conferences, and became the emblematic conspiracy theory of the social media age — did not emerge from the Flat Earth Society’s forums. It emerged from YouTube, and the story of how it emerged is one of the most important case studies in the history of algorithmic radicalization.

The key figure is Eric Dubay, a Bangkok-based American yoga instructor and martial arts enthusiast who in 2014 self-published The Flat Earth Conspiracy, a book that synthesized Rowbotham’s arguments with modern anti-NASA sentiment, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and a New Age spiritual framework. Dubay was not the first person to post Flat Earth content on the internet, but he was the first to package it for the YouTube era — in short, punchy, visually engaging video format designed for shareability and algorithmic promotion. In early 2015, he released “200 Proofs Earth is Not a Spinning Ball,” a video that ran through two hundred separate arguments against the spherical Earth model, drawing from Rowbotham, from amateur observation, from selective readings of physics, and from a deep well of institutional distrust. The video went viral. Not viral in the sense of a cute cat video — viral in the sense that it began appearing as a recommended video alongside mainstream science content, conspiracy content, and even unrelated videos, pushed by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm into the feeds of millions of people who had never searched for Flat Earth content.

Mark Sargent, a software analyst from Whidbey Island, Washington, became the second major figure of the revival with his “Flat Earth Clues” YouTube series, launched in February 2015. Sargent’s presentation was more polished and less ideologically extreme than Dubay’s — he avoided the anti-Semitism and focused instead on a “Truman Show” narrative, arguing that humanity lived inside an enclosed structure (a dome or firmament) and that the space program existed to maintain the illusion. Sargent’s approach was less aggressive and more inviting, framed as a journey of discovery rather than an angry confrontation with evil institutions. His videos accumulated millions of views.

What happened next is the critical part of the story, and it has been documented by researchers, journalists, and former YouTube employees. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm in the mid-2010s was optimized for a single metric: watch time. The algorithm learned that conspiracy content was extraordinarily effective at keeping viewers watching. A person who clicked on a mildly conspiratorial video — about government surveillance, say, or questions about the JFK assassination — would be recommended progressively more extreme content because the algorithm had learned that each step deeper into conspiratorial thinking increased the probability that the viewer would continue watching. Flat Earth content, in particular, generated remarkable engagement metrics. Videos were long (often 45 minutes to two hours), viewers watched them to completion at unusual rates, and they immediately clicked on more Flat Earth content. From the algorithm’s perspective, Flat Earth videos were among the most successful content on the platform.

Guillaume Chaslot, a French computer scientist who worked on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm between 2010 and 2013, became one of the most important whistleblowers on this phenomenon. After leaving Google (YouTube’s parent company), Chaslot created AlgoTransparency, a tool that tracked what YouTube’s algorithm recommended. His research, published beginning in 2018, showed that YouTube’s algorithm disproportionately recommended Flat Earth videos to users who had watched mainstream science content. A person who watched a NASA video about the International Space Station might be recommended a Flat Earth debunking video, which might lead to a recommendation of an actual Flat Earth video, which would lead to another, and another. Chaslot’s data showed that Flat Earth content was recommended hundreds of millions of times, vastly exceeding the number of people who had ever actively searched for it. The algorithm was not passively hosting Flat Earth content — it was actively distributing it, because distributing it increased the metric the algorithm was designed to optimize.

Asheley Landrum, a psychologist at Texas Tech University, conducted some of the most important empirical research on the Flat Earth community. Her team attended the Flat Earth International Conference in 2017 and 2018, surveying attendees and conducting in-depth interviews. Her findings, published in a series of papers beginning in 2019, were striking. The overwhelming majority of conference attendees — Landrum reported the figure as nearly all — cited YouTube as the primary source of their conversion to Flat Earth belief. Most had not been seeking Flat Earth content. They had been watching other conspiracy-related or alternative science videos when the algorithm recommended Flat Earth material. Many described a gradual process of conversion that took weeks or months, during which the algorithm served them an escalating diet of Flat Earth content that eventually overwhelmed their prior beliefs. Landrum’s research demonstrated that the Flat Earth revival was not primarily a social movement that found a platform — it was, to a significant degree, a product of the platform itself.

YouTube announced changes to its recommendation algorithm in January 2019, stating it would reduce recommendations of what it called “borderline content” — material that came close to but did not technically violate the platform’s community guidelines. Flat Earth videos were explicitly mentioned as an example. The changes had some effect: recommendation rates for Flat Earth content declined. But by 2019, the movement had achieved critical mass. It had its own conferences, its own social media networks, its own celebrities, and its own internal culture. It no longer needed YouTube’s algorithm to sustain itself, though YouTube remained the primary recruitment tool.

The Flat Earth International Conference (FEIC) held its first event in November 2017 in Raleigh, North Carolina, drawing approximately 500 attendees. The 2018 conference in Denver, Colorado, attracted roughly 650 attendees. The 2019 conference in Dallas, Texas, drew a similar crowd. These were not gatherings of the stereotypically deranged. Attendees ranged from software engineers to nurses to retirees to college students. They were disproportionately male and disproportionately American, but they were demographically diverse. What they shared was not a demographic profile but an epistemological one: a deep distrust of institutions, a commitment to personal empirical investigation, and a sense of having discovered a truth that the majority could not or would not see.

Beyond YouTube, the movement spread across every major social media platform. Facebook hosted dozens of Flat Earth groups with tens of thousands of members. Reddit hosted both r/flatearth (largely a debunking and mockery forum) and r/notaglobe (a sincere Flat Earth community, since banned). Instagram and TikTok provided new platforms for short-form Flat Earth content. The movement proved remarkably adaptable to different media formats — from two-hour YouTube documentaries to fifteen-second TikTok clips — because its core proposition was simple enough to express in a single sentence (“the Earth is flat and they’re lying to you”) while being complex enough to sustain endless elaboration.

The Flat Earth Model: What They Actually Believe

The Flat Earth movement is not monolithic — different factions hold different models, and internal disputes about the details are vigorous and sometimes acrimonious. But the dominant model, shared in broad outline by most Flat Earthers, runs as follows.

The Earth is a flat, circular disc. The North Pole is at the center. The continents are arranged around the center as they appear on an azimuthal equidistant projection map — the same map, Flat Earthers note with significance, that appears on the flag of the United Nations. The outer edge of the disc is ringed by Antarctica, which is not a continent in the Flat Earth model but a continuous ice wall extending around the entire circumference. What lies beyond the ice wall — more land, an abyss, the edge of the dome — is a matter of speculation and disagreement within the community. The ice wall is said to rise approximately 150 feet above sea level and to extend an unknown distance beyond what has been explored.

The sun and moon are small objects — most Flat Earthers estimate them at 32 to 50 miles in diameter — orbiting above the flat disc at an altitude of approximately 3,000 miles. They move in circular paths above the surface, with the sun’s path shifting north and south over the course of the year to produce the seasons. Day and night are produced not by the Earth’s rotation but by the sun acting as a spotlight, illuminating a limited area of the disc at any given time as it circles above. The sun’s light does not extend to the full disc because — in various versions of the model — the sun is a local light source with a limited range, or because perspective causes the sun to appear to descend to the horizon and vanish even though it remains above the plane.

Above the Earth is the “firmament” or “dome” — a solid or semi-solid structure that encloses the entire disc. This concept is drawn directly from Biblical cosmology, specifically Genesis 1:6-8, in which God creates a “firmament” (raqia in Hebrew) to separate the “waters above” from the “waters below.” Many Flat Earthers take this literally: the dome is a physical barrier, and what lies beyond it is unknown or unknowable. Stars are either embedded in the dome, projected onto it, or are small luminous objects circling within the enclosed space. Space, as conventionally understood, does not exist. There is no vacuum beyond the atmosphere — only the dome.

Gravity is the most persistent problem for the Flat Earth model, and Flat Earthers have proposed several alternatives. The most common is that what we call gravity is simply the natural tendency of dense objects to sink below less dense objects — “density and buoyancy” replace gravitational attraction as the explanatory mechanism. A rock falls not because it is attracted to the mass of the Earth but because it is denser than the air surrounding it. A helium balloon rises not because it is less affected by gravity but because it is less dense than the air around it. This explanation fails to account for numerous observed phenomena — it cannot explain why objects of different densities fall at the same rate in a vacuum, why the ocean surface follows a curve, or why gravitational acceleration has a specific measured value — but within the Flat Earth community, these objections are answered with secondary ad hoc hypotheses or dismissed as artifacts of the globular model’s assumptions.

Some Flat Earthers invoke the “upward acceleration” model, in which the flat disc accelerates upward at 9.8 meters per second squared, driven by an unspecified force sometimes called “dark energy” or “universal acceleration.” This model, which was favored by the Flat Earth Society’s forum, does produce effects indistinguishable from gravity for most everyday observations, though it creates problems when applied to long time scales (the disc would approach the speed of light) and cannot account for the variations in gravitational acceleration measured at different latitudes and altitudes.

The Antarctic Treaty System of 1959 plays a central role in the Flat Earth narrative. The Treaty, signed originally by twelve nations and now ratified by over fifty, designates Antarctica as a zone reserved for scientific research, bans military activity, and restricts access to approved expeditions. To Flat Earthers, this is evidence of a global conspiracy to prevent independent exploration of the ice wall. The fact that the Treaty was signed during the Cold War by nations that were ideological enemies — the United States and the Soviet Union both being original signatories — is interpreted not as a diplomatic achievement but as proof that the conspiracy transcends national rivalries. The claim is that whatever lies at the edge of the flat Earth (or beyond the ice wall) is considered so significant by the world’s governments that they will cooperate to conceal it even while they are otherwise in conflict about everything else.

In reality, Antarctica is visited every year by thousands of researchers, support staff, and tourists. Over 50,000 tourists visited Antarctica in the 2019-2020 season alone, traveling by cruise ship to the Antarctic Peninsula. Multiple nations maintain permanent research stations across the continent. The ice wall that Flat Earthers describe as a continuous barrier at the edge of the world is, in fact, an ice shelf — the Ross Ice Shelf, the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, and others — that forms at the coast where glaciers meet the sea. These features are well-documented, extensively photographed, and accessible to anyone willing to book a cruise. The claim that Antarctica is off-limits is simply false.

The Evidence They Cite

Taking the Flat Earth evidence claims seriously — as a matter of understanding the epistemology of the movement, not as a matter of entertaining the possibility that the Earth is flat — is essential to understanding why the movement persists.

The Bedford Level experiment and its descendants remain central. Flat Earthers continue to conduct line-of-sight experiments across bodies of water, filming distant objects that “should” be hidden by curvature. These experiments reliably produce the results they expect — distant objects remain visible beyond the geometric horizon — because atmospheric refraction, which bends light downward over water, routinely makes objects visible at distances beyond what simple curvature calculation predicts. The Flat Earth community treats refraction as an ad hoc excuse invented to save the globe model, rather than as a well-understood optical phenomenon independently measurable through a variety of methods.

The visual flatness of the horizon is perhaps the most intuitively compelling argument. When you stand on a beach and look out to sea, the horizon appears flat. When you fly in a commercial airplane at 35,000 feet, the horizon still appears flat to the naked eye. Flat Earthers argue that if the Earth were truly curved, you should be able to see the curvature from these vantage points. The response is mathematical: the Earth is so large relative to human-scale observation that the curvature over the visible horizon from any accessible altitude is extremely subtle. From 35,000 feet, the horizon dips below true horizontal by only about three degrees — noticeable with careful measurement but invisible to casual observation, especially through the small, distorting windows of a commercial aircraft.

Questions about water adhering to a “spinning ball” are common. Flat Earthers ask: if the Earth is spinning at approximately 1,000 miles per hour at the equator, why doesn’t the water fly off? Why don’t we feel the rotation? The answer involves the distinction between speed and acceleration. The centripetal acceleration at the equator due to Earth’s rotation is approximately 0.034 meters per second squared — roughly 0.3 percent of gravitational acceleration. This is far too small to overcome gravity or to produce a sensation of movement. We do not feel the rotation for the same reason a passenger in a car traveling at constant speed on a smooth road does not feel the speed — it is constant velocity, and only changes in velocity (acceleration) are felt.

Flight paths on a globe versus a flat map constitute another common argument. Flat Earthers point to flight routes that appear to make no sense on a standard Mercator projection map but make perfect sense on an azimuthal equidistant projection (the flat Earth map). For example, a flight from Sydney to Santiago, Chile, that routes through the northern Pacific seems bizarre on a Mercator map. On a globe — or on a flat Earth map — it appears as a more direct route. The irony is that this argument actually works against the Flat Earth model. Flight paths are calculated using great circle routes on a sphere, and they match predicted flight times with extraordinary precision. The fact that these routes look strange on a Mercator projection is an artifact of the projection, not evidence of a flat Earth. Every pilot, navigator, and airline route planner on Earth operates on the assumption of a spherical planet, and the system works.

The “NASA fakery” arguments form a substantial category. Flat Earthers point to specific alleged anomalies in NASA imagery and footage: what they claim are harness wires visible in footage of astronauts on the International Space Station, “bubbles” visible during spacewalk footage (which they claim proves the footage is filmed in an underwater pool), inconsistencies between different official photographs of the Earth (different color balances, different relative sizes of continents), and the admission by NASA that the famous “Blue Marble” photograph from 2002 is a composite — assembled from multiple satellite passes rather than a single photograph. This last point is factual: the 2002 Blue Marble image is a composite, and NASA has never hidden this fact. The original 1972 Blue Marble photograph, taken by the Apollo 17 crew, is a single unedited frame, but Flat Earthers dispute its authenticity on other grounds, linking it to the broader The Moon Landing Hoax hoax narrative.

The Scientific Response: Why the Evidence Is Overwhelming

The Earth is spherical (technically, an oblate spheroid, slightly flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator due to its rotation). This is not a matter of debate within any branch of science, and the evidence is not dependent on trusting any single institution, government, or photograph. The evidence is redundant — it comes from so many independent sources, accumulated over so many centuries, using so many different methods, that the conspiracy required to maintain a false globe model would have to encompass every space agency on Earth (NASA, ESA, JAXA, ISRO, CNSA, Roscosmos), every commercial satellite operator, every airline, every maritime shipping company, every telecommunications provider, every geodetic surveyor, every military on Earth, and every physics department at every university, across every nation, for centuries — including nations that are and have been at war with each other. The scope of the required conspiracy is, in itself, a refutation.

But let us catalogue the evidence, because the catalogue is instructive.

Eratosthenes’ method, described above, can be replicated by anyone with two sticks, a measuring tape, and a friend in a city a few hundred miles to the north or south. The fact that the angle of the sun differs by a predictable amount at different latitudes is consistent only with a spherical Earth illuminated by a very distant sun. On a flat Earth with a local sun, the geometry does not produce the observed shadow angles.

Ships disappearing hull-first over the horizon has been observed since antiquity and can be verified with binoculars or a telescope from any coastline. The bottom of the ship disappears first, then the hull, then the superstructure, then the mast. This is precisely what spherical geometry predicts. The Flat Earth explanation — that this is a “perspective effect” and that a sufficiently powerful telescope can bring the ship back into view — has been tested and disproven. Once a ship has geometrically passed below the horizon, no amount of optical magnification will bring it back, because there is a physical obstruction (the curved water surface) between the observer and the ship.

Different star constellations are visible from different latitudes. An observer at the North Pole sees the northern celestial sphere rotate around Polaris; an observer at the South Pole sees entirely different stars rotate around the south celestial pole (near the constellation Octans). An observer at the equator can see both sets of stars at different times of year. This is consistent with a spherical Earth and inconsistent with any flat model — on a flat disc, all observers should be able to see the same stars, because there would be no curvature to obstruct the view.

Time zones and the terminator line — the boundary between the illuminated and dark portions of the Earth’s surface — are visible from space and conform to the geometry of a rotating sphere illuminated by a distant sun. The terminator is a smooth curve that moves continuously across the surface. On a flat Earth with a local spotlight sun, the terminator should be a circle or irregular shape, and transitions between day and night should be abrupt rather than gradual. The existence of dawn and dusk — extended transitional periods — is inconsistent with a local spotlight model and consistent with a rotating sphere.

The Coriolis effect — the deflection of moving objects caused by the Earth’s rotation — is observed in weather systems (cyclones rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere), in ballistic trajectories over long distances, and most precisely in Foucault pendulums. Leon Foucault’s original 1851 demonstration at the Pantheon in Paris showed a pendulum whose plane of oscillation rotated over time, at a rate consistent with the Earth’s rotation at Paris’s latitude. Foucault pendulums are installed in science museums around the world and can be observed by anyone. Their behavior is consistent with a rotating spherical Earth and has no explanation in the flat Earth model.

Circumnavigation has been achieved thousands of times since the Magellan-Elcano expedition of 1519-1522. Ships, aircraft, and individuals have traveled continuously in one direction and returned to their starting point. On a flat Earth, east-west circumnavigation could theoretically be explained as traveling in a circle around the central North Pole. But north-south circumnavigation — traveling over one pole, continuing in the same direction, crossing the equator, passing over the other pole, and returning to the starting point — is impossible on a flat disc with the North Pole at the center. Multiple expeditions and flights have accomplished this.

Satellite imagery from every space agency on Earth, from commercial satellite operators, from weather satellites, from GPS constellations, from amateur radio satellite operators, and from private companies like SpaceX and Planet Labs all show a spherical Earth. The conspiracy required to fabricate all of this imagery would have to encompass not only every government on Earth but also every private company with satellite capability, including companies in countries hostile to one another. China’s space program produces imagery of a spherical Earth. So does India’s. So does Iran’s. The idea that all of these nations are cooperating in a deception while simultaneously being geopolitical rivals strains credulity beyond any reasonable limit.

Perhaps the most devastating piece of evidence from within the Flat Earth community itself comes from Bob Knodel, a prominent Flat Earth YouTuber and organizer. In the 2018 documentary Behind the Curve, directed by Daniel J. Clark, Knodel purchases a $20,000 fiber-optic laser gyroscope to test whether the Earth rotates. A laser gyroscope measures angular rotation with extreme precision. If the Earth is stationary (as Flat Earthers claim), the gyroscope should register zero drift. If the Earth rotates once every 24 hours, the gyroscope should register a 15-degree-per-hour drift. Knodel’s gyroscope registered a 15-degree-per-hour drift. On camera, Knodel acknowledges the result and then says: “Now, obviously we were taken aback by that… we obviously weren’t willing to accept that, and so we started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the spin of the Earth.” He then attempted to shield the gyroscope in a bismuth chamber (bismuth being diamagnetic, which he believed might block some unspecified force causing the drift), but the result persisted. The scene is one of the most remarkable moments in the documentary — a committed Flat Earther conducting a rigorous experiment, obtaining a result that clearly disproves his position, and responding not by updating his beliefs but by searching for reasons to reject his own evidence.

The Psychology of Belief

Why do people believe the Earth is flat? This is not a rhetorical question, and the answer is not “because they’re stupid.” The psychological research on Flat Earth believers paints a more nuanced and more troubling picture.

Asheley Landrum’s research at Texas Tech provides the most systematic data. Her team found that Flat Earth believers score normally on standard measures of analytical thinking and intelligence. They are not, as a group, less intelligent than the general population. What distinguishes them is a cluster of psychological traits: high conspiratorial ideation (a tendency to interpret events as the product of secret plots), high distrust of institutions, and — most interestingly — a strong preference for experiential knowledge over testimony. Flat Earthers place enormous weight on what they can personally see, touch, and verify, and enormous distrust on what they are told by authorities, institutions, or experts. The zetetic method, in other words, is not just a rhetorical pose — it reflects a genuine epistemological commitment that, in a different context, would be called empiricism.

The problem, as Landrum and others have noted, is that modern science has long since exceeded the capacity of any individual to personally verify its claims. No individual can personally verify that the Earth orbits the Sun, that DNA encodes genetic information, that atoms exist, or that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. These claims rest on chains of evidence, instrumentation, and inference that are collectively validated by communities of specialists but cannot be replicated by a layperson in their backyard. The entire structure of modern scientific knowledge depends on trust — trust that the instruments work as described, trust that the researchers are honest, trust that the peer review process catches errors, trust that the institutions of science are fundamentally oriented toward truth. When that trust collapses — and there are legitimate reasons for it to have eroded, from the replication crisis in psychology to the pharmaceutical industry’s manipulation of clinical trials to the politicization of public health messaging — the entire edifice becomes vulnerable.

The need for community is a factor that researchers consistently identify. Many Flat Earth converts describe a period of social isolation or personal crisis preceding their conversion. The Flat Earth community offers something that is genuinely hard to find in modern life: a tight-knit group of people who share a worldview, who support each other, who meet regularly (both online and at conferences), and who provide a sense of belonging and purpose. The cost of admission is belief — or at least the performance of belief — and the reward is acceptance, friendship, and the exhilarating sense of being part of a small group that has seen through the greatest deception in human history. Behind the Curve captures this dynamic with remarkable empathy: the Flat Earthers it profiles are lonely people who have found community, and the documentary makes clear that leaving the community would cost them their social world. The epistemic commitment and the social commitment become inextricable.

The appeal of hidden knowledge — the sense of being among the initiated few who know a truth hidden from the masses — is a powerful psychological motivator that has been recognized since the Gnostics of late antiquity. It provides a sense of specialness, of agency, of intellectual superiority that may be lacking in a person’s everyday life. A factory worker who believes the Earth is flat is, in his own self-understanding, more perceptive and more courageous than the tenured physicist who accepts the globe — because the physicist is either deceived or complicit, while the factory worker has had the intellectual independence to see through the lie. This is an enormously appealing narrative, and it is resistant to counterevidence because any counterevidence can be interpreted as further proof of the conspiracy.

Religious fundamentalism plays a significant role for a subset of the community. The Bible, read literally, describes a cosmology that is far closer to the Flat Earth model than to the modern scientific one. Genesis 1:6-8 describes a “firmament” separating the waters above from the waters below. Job 26:10 describes God inscribing “a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.” Isaiah 40:22 describes God sitting “above the circle of the earth.” Daniel 4:11 describes a tree tall enough to be visible “to the ends of the earth.” Revelation 7:1 describes angels standing “at the four corners of the earth.” For Christians who take the Bible as literally and inerrantly true, these passages pose a problem — they do not describe a spinning sphere orbiting a star in an incomprehensibly vast universe. The Flat Earth model resolves this tension by arguing that the Bible is literally correct and that modern cosmology is a deception designed to undermine faith. This is a minority position even among Flat Earthers, but it is a vocal and committed one, and it provides a motivational framework that secular Flat Earthers lack: the defense of scripture against the lies of Satan, manifested through the institution of NASA and the scientific establishment.

The “dopamine hit” of independent research is another factor that psychologists have identified. The process of “doing your own research” — watching videos, reading alternative sources, finding apparent anomalies, piecing together a narrative — is genuinely enjoyable. It activates the same cognitive systems as puzzle-solving, detective work, and academic inquiry. The Flat Earther who spends hours analyzing NASA footage for anomalies is engaging in an activity that feels like intellectual work and produces the satisfaction of discovery. That the “discoveries” are illusory does not diminish the subjective experience of making them. This helps explain why the Flat Earth community is so productive — constantly generating new videos, new experiments, new analyses, new debates — and why its members describe the experience of conversion in terms that echo religious awakening: “I took the red pill,” “I woke up,” “I can’t unsee it.”

The Algorithm as Radicalizer

The role of the recommendation algorithm in the Flat Earth revival deserves deeper examination because it illuminates a dynamic that extends far beyond Flat Earth into the broader architecture of modern belief formation.

Guillaume Chaslot’s work on AlgoTransparency revealed the mechanism in granular detail. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, as it existed before the 2019 changes, was a neural network trained to maximize a single metric: watch time. The algorithm learned, through billions of data points, what kinds of videos kept people watching. It discovered that conspiracy content was among the most effective categories for this purpose — more effective than music, sports, news, or entertainment. Within conspiracy content, Flat Earth was an outlier: its videos generated unusually high completion rates (people who started watching tended to watch to the end) and unusually high click-through rates on subsequent recommendations (people who finished one Flat Earth video tended to click on the next one). From the algorithm’s perspective, Flat Earth was premium content.

The “rabbit hole” effect that resulted was not a metaphor. Chaslot’s data showed specific pathways: a user who watched a video about, say, the Bermuda Triangle might be recommended a video about government cover-ups, which might lead to a recommendation about NASA deception, which might lead to a Flat Earth video. Each step was individually small — a slight escalation in conspiratorial framing — but the cumulative effect was a journey from mild curiosity to radical belief, mediated entirely by an algorithm that had no understanding of the content it was promoting and no capacity to evaluate its truth. The algorithm was not promoting Flat Earth because it was true or because someone at YouTube wanted people to believe it. It was promoting Flat Earth because doing so kept people on the platform longer, which generated more advertising revenue.

Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, has documented the broader pattern of which Flat Earth is a single instance. DiResta’s work on “information ecosystems” shows how social media platforms create feedback loops in which conspiratorial communities grow through a combination of algorithmic amplification, social reinforcement, and the platform dynamics of engagement optimization. Content that generates strong emotional responses — outrage, wonder, the thrill of forbidden knowledge — is systematically amplified over content that is nuanced, tentative, or boring. Scientific content, which is by nature cautious and qualified, is structurally disadvantaged in this environment. A video titled “NASA Lies: 10 Proofs the Earth is Flat” will reliably outperform a video titled “An Introduction to Geodesy” in every metric the algorithm cares about.

YouTube’s January 2019 algorithm change reduced recommendations of “borderline content” by approximately 50 percent, according to YouTube’s own reporting. Independent analyses suggested the actual reduction was smaller and unevenly distributed. The change came years after researchers had raised alarms and after the Flat Earth movement (and other conspiracy movements) had already achieved self-sustaining size. The broader lesson — that the architecture of information platforms shapes the beliefs of their users in ways that are measurable, predictable, and potentially devastating — remains one of the most important and least adequately addressed problems of the digital age. The Flat Earth movement is a demonstration, in extremis, of what happens when the design of information systems optimizes for engagement rather than truth.

The Conspiracy Within the Conspiracy

The Flat Earth movement is not a unified body of believers marching in lockstep. It is riven with internal disputes, factional conflicts, accusations of infiltration, and competing models that are, in some cases, mutually exclusive.

The most significant schism is between Eric Dubay and the broader Flat Earth community. Dubay, who was arguably the single most important figure in the revival, alienated much of the community with his aggressive personality, his anti-Semitic ideology (Dubay frames the globe deception as specifically a Jewish conspiracy), and his insistence that he alone was the authentic voice of Flat Earth truth. He accused Mark Sargent, the Flat Earth Society, and numerous other Flat Earth figures of being “controlled opposition” — agents deliberately planted within the movement to discredit it, co-opt it, or steer it away from the anti-Semitic angle that Dubay considered essential. The accusation of controlled opposition is one of the most corrosive dynamics in conspiracy communities: it means that anyone who disagrees with the dominant figure can be accused of being a secret agent, and no amount of evidence of sincerity can disprove the accusation. The Flat Earth movement has torn itself apart repeatedly over these accusations.

The Flat Earth Society itself — the organizational descendant of Samuel Shenton and Charles K. Johnson, revived by Daniel Shenton in 2004 — is viewed with deep suspicion by many grassroots Flat Earthers. The Society’s forum has long been considered too tolerant of debate, too willing to engage with skeptics, and too focused on abstract philosophical discussion rather than activist truth-telling. Some Flat Earthers believe the Society is a deliberate psyop — an organization designed to make Flat Earth belief look eccentric and impractical, thereby discrediting the “real” movement. This is a pattern seen across conspiracy culture: the oldest and most established organization in a movement is accused by newer, more radical members of being part of the cover-up.

There is also a “concave Earth” faction that believes the Earth is not flat but rather a hollow sphere with humanity living on the inside surface. In this model, which draws on some of the same intellectual lineage as the The Hollow Earth tradition, the sky is the interior of the sphere, and the sun, moon, and stars are inside the sphere with us. This model has a small but dedicated following and generates fierce arguments with conventional Flat Earthers, who view it as an absurd distortion of the truth. The concave Earthers, naturally, view the Flat Earthers the same way.

The overlap between Flat Earth and other conspiracy communities is extensive but uneven. The strongest overlap is with The Moon Landing Hoax denial — virtually all Flat Earthers deny the Apollo landings, since a spherical Earth visible from the Moon is incompatible with their model. There is significant overlap with anti-vaccination communities, QAnon, young Earth creationism, and various forms of anti-government conspiracy thinking. Some Flat Earthers have moved from Flat Earth into The Simulation Hypothesis territory, arguing that the dome/firmament is evidence that we live inside a constructed simulation. Others have moved into Biblical cosmology, interpreting the Flat Earth as confirmation of a literal Genesis. The Flat Earth community functions as a kind of gateway — once a person has accepted that the shape of the Earth is a lie, the psychological barriers to accepting other radical claims are dramatically lowered. If NASA can fake the shape of the planet, what else is fake? The answer, for many, is: everything.

The Antarctic Treaty Argument

Among the specific claims in the Flat Earth arsenal, the Antarctic Treaty argument deserves special attention because it illustrates how a real institution with a real history can be repurposed into conspiratorial evidence through selective presentation.

The Antarctic Treaty was signed on December 1, 1959, by twelve nations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It entered into force on June 23, 1961. The Treaty established Antarctica as a zone dedicated to peaceful purposes and scientific research, prohibiting military activity, nuclear explosions, and the disposal of radioactive waste. It suspended all territorial claims (seven nations had claimed sectors of Antarctica) without resolving them, and it guaranteed freedom of scientific investigation and the exchange of scientific data.

Flat Earthers interpret the Treaty as a mechanism to prevent independent exploration of the “ice wall” that they believe rings the edge of the flat Earth. They note that the Treaty restricts independent access to Antarctica, that military forces patrol Antarctic waters, and that civilians cannot simply travel to Antarctica without governmental authorization. The implication is that the world’s governments, despite their other conflicts, cooperate to guard the secret of the Earth’s true shape.

The reality is considerably less dramatic. The Antarctic Treaty does regulate access to Antarctica, but it does not prevent access. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) coordinates tourism to the continent, and over 74,000 tourists visited Antarctica in the 2019-2020 season. Multiple nations operate permanent research stations staffed by thousands of scientists and support personnel. Ships travel to and from Antarctica regularly during the austral summer. The continent has been extensively mapped, photographed from the ground and from space, and traversed by numerous expeditions, including solo crossings. The idea that Antarctica is a forbidden zone, inaccessible to ordinary people, is simply not true — it is remote, expensive to reach, and regulated, but it is not off-limits. Anyone with approximately $10,000 to $15,000 can book a tourist cruise to the Antarctic Peninsula and see the ice for themselves.

The persistence of the Antarctic Treaty argument despite its easy refutation illustrates a broader dynamic in conspiracy thinking: the argument functions not as an empirical claim subject to falsification but as a narrative element that reinforces group cohesion. When a Flat Earther is told that thousands of tourists visit Antarctica every year, the response is not to abandon the argument but to incorporate the new information into the conspiracy — the tourists only visit the Peninsula, not the ice wall; they are escorted and monitored; they see what they are allowed to see. The argument is unfalsifiable because any evidence against it is interpreted as further evidence for the conspiracy’s thoroughness.

What Flat Earth Tells Us About the Modern World

The significance of the Flat Earth movement extends far beyond the question of the Earth’s shape. It is a case study in the epistemological crisis of the twenty-first century — the crisis of how we know what we know, whom we trust, and what happens when the institutions that mediate knowledge between specialists and the public lose their authority.

The post-truth environment in which Flat Earth thrives is not an accident. It is the product of specific historical forces: the decades of documented government deception (from the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the corporate manipulation of science (the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to manufacture doubt about the link between smoking and cancer, the fossil fuel industry’s parallel campaign on climate change), the pharmaceutical industry’s corruption of clinical research, the media’s decline from reporting to engagement optimization, and the social media architecture that rewards sensationalism over accuracy. None of these forces caused people to believe the Earth is flat. But they created the conditions in which such a belief could take root — a landscape of eroded trust in which the leap from “the government sometimes lies” to “the government lies about everything, including the shape of the planet” became psychologically navigable for a non-trivial number of people.

There is a deep irony in the Flat Earth movement. It is both a product of and a response to the information age. The same technology that makes the evidence for a spherical Earth more accessible than ever — satellite imagery, GPS, live streams from the International Space Station — also makes the distribution of Flat Earth propaganda more efficient than ever. The same tools that enable anyone to access scientific knowledge also enable anyone to access an alternative epistemological framework that rejects that knowledge. The internet did not merely give Flat Earthers a platform. It gave them a community, a library of alternative evidence, a set of charismatic teachers, and an algorithmic distribution system that actively promoted their content to people who had never sought it. The information age was supposed to make ignorance impossible. Instead, it made a certain kind of chosen ignorance more accessible, more social, and more self-reinforcing than at any point in human history.

The question of whether Flat Earth is the reductio ad absurdum of conspiracy culture — the point at which conspiratorial thinking becomes so extreme that it discredits itself — or whether it reveals something genuine about the failure of scientific institutions to maintain public trust is, itself, unresolved. Both readings have merit. It is absurd to believe the Earth is flat, and the absurdity is a warning about where unchecked institutional distrust can lead. But it is not absurd to distrust institutions that have, in documented and repeated instances, prioritized their own interests over the truth. The Flat Earther who says “NASA lies” is wrong about the shape of the Earth but not entirely wrong about the trustworthiness of large institutions. The challenge is distinguishing between specific, documented instances of institutional failure and the totalizing claim that all institutions lie about everything always — a distinction that conspiracy thinking, by its nature, is designed to collapse.

The comparison to other “reality” conspiracies in the Apeirron project is instructive. The The Simulation Hypothesis asks whether the entire physical universe is a construct — a question that is at least philosophically respectable and entertained by serious physicists. The The Hollow Earth theory proposes an alternative physical structure for the planet — a claim that was once taken seriously by major scientists and only gradually discredited as seismological evidence accumulated. The The Mandela Effect suggests that collective memory can diverge from recorded history in ways that hint at anomalies in the fabric of reality. Flat Earth occupies a peculiar position among these: it is the most easily disproven, the most recently revived, the most dependent on modern media infrastructure for its existence, and the most revealing about the relationship between technology, trust, and belief. It is a mirror held up to the epistemological condition of the twenty-first century, and the image it reflects is not flattering.

The final irony is this: the Flat Earth movement, which claims to champion personal observation and empirical investigation against the authority of institutions, has produced some of the best evidence against its own position. Bob Knodel’s laser gyroscope, which confirmed the Earth’s rotation. The high-altitude balloon experiments launched by Flat Earthers, whose cameras consistently record a curved horizon. The “flat Earth rocket” launched by “Mad Mike” Hughes — a daredevil and Flat Earth sympathizer who built a steam-powered rocket to ascend high enough to see the shape of the Earth for himself, and who died on February 22, 2020, when his homemade rocket crashed in the California desert. Hughes never flew high enough to settle the question, and his death was a tragedy, not an experiment. But the image of a man launching himself into the sky in a homemade rocket to test whether the ground beneath him is flat captures something essential about the movement: the genuine hunger for direct knowledge, the distrust of mediated information, the willingness to risk everything on personal experience — and the catastrophic consequences of pursuing truth without the tools, methods, and institutional frameworks that make truth accessible.

The Earth is not flat. But the reasons people believe it is — the distrust, the loneliness, the algorithmic manipulation, the hunger for community and meaning, the failure of institutions to earn and maintain public trust — are as real and as consequential as the curvature of the planet itself.

Sources

Rowbotham, Samuel Birley (as “Parallax”). Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe. 3rd ed. Day & Son, 1881.

Garwood, Christine. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. Thomas Dunne Books, 2007.

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Praeger, 1991.

White, Andrew Dickson. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. D. Appleton and Company, 1896.

Irving, Washington. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. G. & C. Carvill, 1828.

Dubay, Eric. The Flat Earth Conspiracy. Self-published, 2014.

Landrum, Asheley R. “Flat Smacked! Converting to Flat Earthism.” Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 18, no. 2, 2019, pp. 46-59.

Landrum, Asheley R., Alex Olshansky, and Othello Richards. “Differentiating Conspiracy Theorists and Flat-Earthers Using Semantic Content Analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 12, 2021.

Chaslot, Guillaume. “How YouTube’s AI Boosts Alternative Facts.” Medium, March 2017.

DiResta, Renee. “Computational Propaganda.” Yale Review, vol. 106, no. 4, 2018, pp. 26-30.

DiResta, Renee. “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite.” The Atlantic, September 2020.

Clark, Daniel J., dir. Behind the Curve. Delta-V Productions, 2018.

Olshansky, Alex, Robert M. Peaslee, and Asheley R. Landrum. “Flat-Smacked! Converting to Flat Earthism.” Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 19, no. 2, 2020, pp. 46-59.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions. Chapman & Hall, 1905.

Hampden, John. The Bedford Canal: Is the Earth a Globe? Self-published, 1870.

Johnson, Charles K. Flat Earth News. International Flat Earth Research Society, various issues, 1970s-2000.

Shenton, Samuel. Papers and correspondence of the International Flat Earth Research Society, 1956-1971.

Aristotle. De Caelo (On the Heavens). c. 350 BCE.

Eratosthenes. As cited in Cleomedes, On the Circular Motions of the Celestial Bodies, c. 1st century CE.

The Antarctic Treaty, December 1, 1959. United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 402, no. 5778.

Paolillo, John. “The Flat Earth Phenomenon on YouTube.” First Monday, vol. 23, no. 12, December 2018.

Roose, Kevin. “YouTube’s Product Chief on Online Radicalization and Algorithmic Rabbit Holes.” The New York Times, March 29, 2019.

Nicas, Jack. “How YouTube Drives People to the Internet’s Darkest Corners.” The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2018.

International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO). Annual tourism statistics, 2019-2020.

Van Allen, James A. “Radiation Belts Around the Earth.” Scientific American, vol. 200, no. 3, 1959, pp. 39-47.

Foucault, Leon. “Demonstration Physique du Mouvement de Rotation de la Terre au Moyen du Pendule.” Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences, vol. 32, 1851, pp. 135-138.

Connections

The Moon Landing Hoax (see Cosmos) — Flat Earth and moon landing denial share the same institutional target — NASA — and the same foundational claim: that the space agency fabricates imagery of Earth and space. The modern Flat Earth movement explicitly incorporates Apollo denial, and the community overlap between the two is extensively documented.

The Hollow Earth (see Origins) — Flat Earth and Hollow Earth are competing alternative models of Earth’s structure, both rejecting mainstream geology and geophysics. The two communities overlap significantly, with some theorists attempting to reconcile the models, and both trace intellectual lineage to 19th-century alternative science movements.

The Mandela Effect

In 2009, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome attended Dragon Con, the massive science fiction and fantasy convention in Atlanta, and struck up a conversation about Nelson Mandela. Broome mentioned her vivid memory of Mandela dying in a South African prison in the 1980s. She remembered the news coverage. She remembered a funeral. She remembered a speech by Winnie Mandela, grieving and dignified. The memory was detailed, textured, and completely wrong. Nelson Mandela had not died in prison. He had been released in 1990, had become the first Black president of South Africa in 1994, and was, at the time of Broome’s conversation, still alive. He would not die until December 5, 2013, at the age of 95, in his home in Johannesburg.

What startled Broome was not her own faulty memory — people misremember things constantly. What startled her was that when she mentioned this false memory to others at the convention, person after person said they remembered it too. The same event. The same details. The same prison death, the same funeral, the same coverage that had never aired. These were not vague recollections. They were specific, consistent, and shared by people who had no connection to one another. Broome launched a website to document the phenomenon, and she gave it a name: the Mandela Effect. Within months, thousands of people had written in with their own examples — not just about Mandela, but about a startling range of shared false memories that seemed to follow the same pattern. The same specific error. The same alternative version. Held by far too many people to be easily dismissed.

The catalogue of the impossible

The Mandela Effect would be a curiosity if it consisted of a single example. It does not. The catalogue is extensive, and the most famous cases share a peculiar feature: the false memory is not merely wrong, it is wrong in the same precise way across thousands of independent reports.

The Berenstain Bears — the beloved children’s book series created by Stan and Jan Berenstain, first published in 1962 — are remembered by a staggering number of people as the “Berenstein Bears,” with an “-stein” ending. This is not a trivial difference. People do not simply fail to recall the spelling; they specifically and confidently remember “-stein.” Some recall seeing it on book covers, on the animated television show, on library cards. The actual spelling has always been Berenstain, matching the surname of the authors. The “-stein” version has never appeared on any official product. And yet, if you ask a room of adults who grew up with the books, a substantial fraction will insist, with genuine conviction, that the name was Berenstein.

In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Darth Vader reveals his identity to Luke Skywalker with the line: “No, I am your father.” The line is almost universally remembered as “Luke, I am your father.” The misquotation is so pervasive that it has appeared in countless parodies, references, and cultural discussions. James Earl Jones, who voiced Vader, has himself occasionally used the incorrect version in interviews. The actual line, as spoken in the film and confirmed by the original screenplay, begins with “No.” Not “Luke.”

The Monopoly Man — Rich Uncle Pennybags, the mascot of the Parker Brothers board game since 1936 — is widely remembered as wearing a monocle. He does not. He has never worn a monocle in any version of the game’s artwork. The character Mr. Peanut, the Planters mascot, does wear a monocle, and the conventional explanation attributes the confusion to this cross-contamination. But the specificity of the false memory is notable: people do not vaguely think the Monopoly Man looks fancy. They specifically remember a monocle — a single, round lens over one eye.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall” — the Evil Queen’s invocation in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) — is one of the most quoted lines in cinema. The actual line in the film is “Magic mirror on the wall.” The Brothers Grimm original, in German, translates roughly to “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” which may be the source of the confusion. But the Mandela Effect claim is specifically about the Disney film, and in the Disney film, the word “mirror” is not repeated.

Curious George, the beloved children’s book monkey created by Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey in 1941, is widely remembered as having a tail. He does not. He has never had a tail in any of the original illustrations. This is particularly striking because George is a monkey, and monkeys have tails — the false memory follows a logical schema. But George is not technically a monkey in the conventional anatomical sense; he is drawn without a tail, consistently, across every book and adaptation.

And then there is the Fruit of the Loom logo. This is the case that most resists conventional explanation, and it deserves special attention. The Fruit of the Loom clothing brand, established in 1851, uses a logo featuring an arrangement of fruits — apples, grapes, currants, and leaves. A large number of people remember the logo as containing a brown cornucopia — a horn of plenty — behind or beneath the fruit. There is no cornucopia. There has never been a cornucopia in the Fruit of the Loom logo, according to the company itself and every archived version of the logo that has been located. Yet people do not merely “think” there was a cornucopia. They can draw it. They describe its position, its color, its shape, its angle relative to the fruit. In online surveys and experiments, people who claim to remember the cornucopia produce drawings that are remarkably consistent with one another. And there is a strange piece of residue: the album cover of Frank Wess’s Flute of the Loom (1973), a jazz record whose title is a pun on Fruit of the Loom, features an illustration of a flute emerging from a cornucopia filled with fruit. The album art appears to be referencing a cornucopia that the actual logo never contained.

Finally, there is Shazaam — a 1990s children’s film starring the comedian Sinbad as a genie. The film does not exist. There is no record of it in any film database, no physical copy has ever surfaced, no production records exist, and Sinbad himself has repeatedly denied making it. The film Kazaam (1996), starring Shaquille O’Neal as a genie, does exist, and the conventional explanation posits simple confusion between the two. But people who claim to remember Shazaam describe specific scenes, specific plot points, and specific details that do not correspond to Kazaam. They remember Sinbad in a purple genie outfit. They remember the film being mediocre. They remember renting it from video stores. They are describing, in considerable and consistent detail, a movie that was never made.

The conventional explanation

Cognitive psychology has a well-developed framework for understanding false memories, and it explains the Mandela Effect convincingly in many cases. The framework deserves to be taken seriously, because it is grounded in decades of rigorous experimental work.

Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has spent over four decades demonstrating the malleability of human memory. Her research, beginning with landmark studies in the 1970s, has shown that memories are not recordings. They are reconstructions — assembled each time from fragments, filled in with assumptions, and vulnerable to distortion from post-event information. In her famous “lost in the mall” study, published in 1995, Loftus and her colleague Jacqueline Pickrell successfully implanted entirely false memories of childhood events in approximately 25 percent of participants. The subjects did not merely accept the false event as plausible — they elaborated on it, adding sensory details and emotional responses that had never occurred. Memory, Loftus demonstrated, is not a filing cabinet. It is a creative act.

The misinformation effect, which Loftus documented extensively, shows that exposure to incorrect information after an event can alter a person’s memory of the event itself. If you witness a car accident and are later asked, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” — you will remember the cars going faster than if you were asked the same question with the word “hit.” The word “smashed” does not merely change your estimate; it changes your memory. Some participants in Loftus’s studies later remembered seeing broken glass at the scene, even though there was none.

Source monitoring errors, described by Marcia Johnson and colleagues in the 1990s, explain how we can misattribute a memory’s origin. You remember something — but you misremember where you encountered it. You think you saw the Berenstain Bears spelled “-stein” on a book cover, but in fact you inferred the spelling from the common “-stein” suffix in names like Einstein, Frankenstein, Goldstein. The memory feels visual and specific, but it was constructed from a linguistic inference.

Schema-driven memory errors are particularly relevant. The brain uses schemas — mental frameworks of how things typically are — to fill in gaps in memory. Monkeys have tails, so Curious George has a tail. Rich old men wear monocles, so the Monopoly Man wears a monocle. Fruit arrangements are often depicted with cornucopias, so the Fruit of the Loom logo has a cornucopia. The memory is not of what was seen but of what should have been seen, based on general knowledge.

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, developed through work by James Deese in 1959 and refined by Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott in 1995, demonstrates this principle with clean experimental precision. Participants are given a list of words — bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber — all semantically associated with the word sleep, which is not on the list. When tested, a large proportion of participants falsely recall or recognize the word sleep as having been on the list. They are remembering the schema, not the data.

Social reinforcement compounds these effects. Once a false memory enters cultural circulation — “Luke, I am your father,” “Mirror, mirror on the wall” — it is repeated, shared, and confirmed by others who hold the same false memory. Each repetition strengthens the memory. Each confirmation makes it feel more real. The internet, which allows millions of people to discover and validate shared false memories simultaneously, has supercharged this process.

This explanation is robust. It is well-supported by experimental evidence. It accounts for the vast majority of Mandela Effect cases, probably all of them.

Probably.

The residue and the resistance

The conventional explanation has an elegance to it. Memory is reconstructive. Schemas fill in gaps. Social reinforcement spreads errors. Case closed. And for most individual examples, this is almost certainly correct. “Luke, I am your father” is a cultural misquotation that has been reinforced for decades. The Berenstain-Berenstein confusion maps neatly onto English naming conventions. The Monopoly Man’s monocle is plausibly a cross-contamination from Mr. Peanut.

But there are features of the Mandela Effect that sit uncomfortably within this framework, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging them.

The first is the specificity of the convergence. False memories, in the psychological literature, tend to be vague. They are gist-based, not detail-based — you remember the general theme, not the precise image. But the Mandela Effect examples often involve high specificity. People do not merely think the Fruit of the Loom logo “had something else in it.” They specifically remember a cornucopia, they place it in the same position relative to the fruit, and they describe it in consistent detail. This level of convergent specificity is not well predicted by schema theory alone, because schemas produce thematic consistency, not perceptual consistency.

The second is the residue problem. If a false memory is simply an error, then there should be no trace of the “wrong” version in the external world. But in several Mandela Effect cases, researchers have located what they call “residue” — instances where the supposedly false version appears in secondary sources. The Frank Wess album cover is one example. Another frequently cited case involves a 1994 interview transcript in which the interviewer appears to reference the Berenstain Bears using the “-stein” spelling. Individually, each piece of residue can be explained — the album artist made the same schema-driven error, the transcriber misspelled the name. But the pattern of residue, taken collectively, creates an odd situation: the “false” version keeps appearing in places where someone interacted with the original and came away with the supposedly wrong memory, then created a new artifact based on that memory. This is exactly what the conventional theory predicts. It is also exactly what you would expect to find if the original had actually been changed.

The third is the sheer demographic breadth. The Mandela Effect is not confined to a single culture, age group, or level of education. The Berenstain Bears example cuts across English-speaking countries. The Fruit of the Loom cornucopia is reported by people who have no connection to one another and no exposure to the same media discussions. Confabulation research typically finds that false memories are more common in people with poorer memory in general, but Mandela Effect reports come from people across the full spectrum of cognitive ability.

None of this disproves the conventional explanation. But it does leave a residue of its own — an explanatory gap that mirrors, in a different domain, the gap at the heart of Consciousness. The mechanism is understood. The mystery is why the mechanism produces this particular pattern.

The simulation patch

If we live inside a The Simulation Hypothesis, then reality has a codebase. And codebases get patched.

This is the simulation-theoretic interpretation of the Mandela Effect, and its appeal lies in its structural elegance. In software development, a “patch” is a retroactive modification to a program — a change applied to the existing code that alters its behavior going forward. When a patch is applied to a running system, most of the system updates seamlessly. But occasionally, artifacts of the old version persist — in cached data, in log files, in references that the patch did not reach. These artifacts are bugs. They are residue from the previous version.

The Mandela Effect, in this framework, is exactly that: residue from a previous version of the simulation’s data. The cornucopia was in the Fruit of the Loom logo — in a prior version of the code. The logo was patched, the cornucopia removed, and the change propagated retroactively through the simulation’s history. But human memory, which is stored in biological neural networks rather than in the simulation’s central data store, was not fully overwritten. The memories of the cornucopia are cached data from before the patch. The Frank Wess album cover is an artifact the patch missed — a secondary reference to the old data that escaped the update.

This interpretation is unfalsifiable, which is a serious epistemological problem. Any discrepancy between memory and reality can be attributed to a “patch,” and any absence of discrepancy can be attributed to a successful patch. The theory explains everything and predicts nothing, which, by Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, places it outside the domain of science. But it is worth noting that the The Simulation Hypothesis itself, as formulated by Nick Bostrom, is also not directly falsifiable — and yet it is taken seriously by philosophers and physicists at Oxford, MIT, and beyond. The question is not whether the simulation-patch theory is proven, but whether it is coherent. And it is. It maps precisely onto how software actually behaves.

If someone were editing reality, this is what the edit would look like from the inside.

Quantum bleed-through

In 1957, a Princeton physics graduate student named Hugh Everett III submitted a doctoral dissertation that would eventually become one of the most discussed ideas in the history of physics. Everett proposed what is now called the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. The standard Copenhagen interpretation holds that a quantum system exists in a superposition of states until it is measured, at which point the wave function “collapses” into a single outcome. Everett argued that the collapse never happens. Instead, at every quantum measurement, the universe splits — branching into multiple copies, one for each possible outcome, all equally real. The wave function never collapses because all outcomes occur, each in its own branch of an endlessly proliferating multiverse.

Everett’s thesis advisor, John Archibald Wheeler, supported the work but insisted on significant revisions before publication. The idea was largely ignored for decades. But beginning in the 1970s, it gained traction, and today the Many-Worlds Interpretation is the preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics among many leading physicists, including David Deutsch of Oxford, who argued in The Fabric of Reality (1997) that the multiverse is not a philosophical speculation but a direct consequence of quantum theory, taken literally.

The Mandela Effect, viewed through the lens of Many-Worlds, could be “bleed-through” — the leaking of memories from one branch of the quantum multiverse into an adjacent branch. In one branch of the multiverse, the Fruit of the Loom logo has a cornucopia. In another, it does not. If the boundaries between branches are not perfectly sealed — if Consciousness can, under certain conditions, access information from a neighboring timeline — then the Mandela Effect is what that access feels like. You remember the cornucopia because, in a very real sense, you saw the cornucopia. Just not in this branch.

Mainstream physics does not support this interpretation. The branches of the Everett multiverse are understood to be decoherent — they do not interact after splitting, and there is no known mechanism by which information could pass between them. But “no known mechanism” is not the same as “impossible,” and the history of physics is littered with phenomena that were declared impossible until a mechanism was found. Quantum entanglement itself — the instantaneous correlation of particles across arbitrary distances — was dismissed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance” and is now a cornerstone of quantum information science.

The quantum bleed-through hypothesis is speculative. It is also the only interpretation that treats the Mandela Effect as evidence of something physically real rather than psychologically erroneous.

The CERN question

On September 10, 2008, the European Organization for Nuclear Research — CERN — activated the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built. Located beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, the LHC accelerates protons to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light and smashes them together, recreating conditions not seen since fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The machine’s primary achievement was the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012, confirming the mechanism by which particles acquire mass.

A conspiracy theory, persistent and widespread in certain online communities, holds that the LHC has done something else: it has altered the fabric of reality itself. By creating energy densities not present in the natural universe since its earliest moments, the LHC has — inadvertently or deliberately — torn the boundary between adjacent timelines, merged parallel universes, or corrupted the underlying code of the simulation. The Mandela Effect, in this theory, is the consequence. Reality was stable before 2008. After the LHC was activated, the edits began.

The theory draws on several coincidences that are, at minimum, aesthetically striking. CERN’s logo, designed in 1954, contains interlocking shapes that, when viewed from certain angles, appear to contain the number 666 — a fact that CERN itself has acknowledged is an accident of the original design. Outside CERN’s headquarters stands a two-meter statue of Nataraja — Shiva, the Hindu deity of destruction and transformation — a gift from the Indian government in 2004, symbolizing the cosmic dance of creation and destruction that particle physics investigates. In 2016, a video surfaced appearing to show a mock human sacrifice performed by hooded figures in front of the Shiva statue on the CERN campus. CERN stated that the video depicted a prank by employees that was “not sanctioned” and conducted an investigation.

Many Mandela Effect reports do cluster around or after 2008, though this correlation is confounded by the simultaneous rise of social media, which provided the first platform for large-scale comparison of memories across populations. The Mandela Effect may have existed for centuries without being noticed, simply because there was no mechanism for thousands of strangers to compare their recollections.

The CERN conspiracy theory is almost certainly wrong. The LHC operates at energies that, while unprecedented in human technology, are routinely exceeded by cosmic rays striking Earth’s atmosphere. If proton collisions at these energies could alter reality, cosmic rays would have been doing so for billions of years. The physics does not support the claim.

The coincidences are striking.

Retrocausality and the mutable past

There is a quieter and more respectable line of inquiry that bears on the Mandela Effect, one that does not require simulations or parallel universes: the possibility that the past is not fixed.

In 1945, John Archibald Wheeler (the same physicist who would later supervise Hugh Everett) and Richard Feynman proposed the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, a reformulation of classical electrodynamics in which electromagnetic waves travel not only forward in time but also backward. The theory was mathematically elegant and physically consistent, though it fell out of favor as quantum electrodynamics superseded it. But the idea of backward-in-time causation — retrocausality — did not die.

John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, published the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1986. In Cramer’s framework, every quantum event involves two waves: an “offer wave” traveling forward in time and a “confirmation wave” traveling backward. The transaction between these two waves — a handshake across time — determines the outcome of the quantum measurement. The interpretation is mathematically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics, meaning it makes all the same predictions, but it implies that the future influences the past.

Huw Price, a philosopher of physics at Cambridge, has argued in Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (1996) that physics is fundamentally time-symmetric — that the laws of nature make no distinction between past and future — and that our assumption of time’s one-directional flow is a prejudice, not a physical fact. If the equations of physics work equally well in both directions of time, then retrocausality is not exotic. It is the default expectation that we have been trained to ignore.

If the past can be influenced by the future — if retrocausality is real — then the Mandela Effect takes on a different character entirely. It is not a memory error. It is not a simulation glitch. It is the phenomenological signature of temporal editing: what it feels like, from inside a Consciousness embedded in the The Nature of Time, when the past is changed. You remember the cornucopia because the cornucopia was there. And then it wasn’t. Not because your memory failed, but because the past was rewritten, and your memory — anchored in the biology of your brain rather than the physics of spacetime — retained a trace of what was there before.

This is not established science. But it is constructed from established science — from interpretations of quantum mechanics that are mathematically rigorous and physically consistent. The retrocausality hypothesis does not violate any known law of physics. It merely violates our intuition about time. And as the The Nature of Time demonstrates, our intuition about time has been wrong before.

Philip K. Dick and the overwritten world

On September 17, 1977 — thirty-two years before Fiona Broome coined the term “Mandela Effect” — the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick delivered a speech at a festival in Metz, France, that now reads as prophecy.

Dick told the audience that he believed reality had been retroactively altered. He described possessing memories of an alternative present — a different version of the world that had been overwritten and replaced with the one he currently inhabited. He claimed to have experienced what he called “anamnesis” — the Platonic term for the recovery of lost knowledge — in which the true nature of reality broke through the surface of the false one. The world we live in, Dick said, is a “Black Iron Prison” — a counterfeit reality layered over the authentic one, maintained by forces he could not fully identify.

Dick was not speaking metaphorically. He had experienced, beginning in February and March of 1974, a series of visions and communications that he spent the rest of his life trying to understand. He saw beams of pink light that transmitted information directly into his mind. He experienced what he described as the superimposition of first-century Rome over twentieth-century California — as if two time periods were occupying the same space simultaneously. He wrote about these experiences obsessively in a private journal that eventually reached over 8,000 pages, now known as the Exegesis, portions of which were published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011.

In his 1977 Metz speech, Dick described the phenomenon with eerie precision: “We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” He went further: “We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present — deja vu. And we would receive disturbing impressions — Loss of memory, a sense of the familiar but with wrongness about it.” This is, almost word for word, a description of the Mandela Effect as it would be defined three decades later.

Dick explored these themes in his novel VALIS (1981), a semi-autobiographical work in which the protagonist, Horselover Fat — a literal translation of “Philip Dick” from the Greek and German — experiences a breakdown of consensus reality and begins to perceive what he believes is the true structure of the universe beneath the manufactured one. VALIS is simultaneously a novel about madness and a novel about gnosis — the ancient idea that the material world is a prison and that knowledge of its true nature is the key to liberation.

Dick died on March 2, 1982, at the age of 53. He did not live to see the Mandela Effect named, the simulation hypothesis formalized, or the cultural explosion of interest in the questions that consumed his final years. But he described the phenomenon, identified its implications, and embedded it in a philosophical framework that anticipated the discourse by decades. Either Dick was mentally ill, or he perceived something about the nature of reality that the rest of us are only now beginning to discuss. Or perhaps — as is so often the case with the questions in this graph — both are true simultaneously.

The deeper question

The Mandela Effect sits at the intersection of Consciousness, The Simulation Hypothesis, and the The Nature of Time, and it forces a question that none of these fields can comfortably answer on its own.

If thousands of people share the same specific false memory — not a vague impression, but the same detailed alternative version of a fact, independently and without a common source — what does this tell us about the relationship between memory, consciousness, and reality?

The conventional answer is confabulation. Memory is reconstructive. Schemas fill in gaps. Social reinforcement spreads the errors. This answer is well-supported, experimentally validated, and probably correct for the vast majority of cases. It should be the default explanation, and anyone investigating the Mandela Effect honestly must reckon with the strength of the cognitive science.

But the edge cases resist. The Fruit of the Loom cornucopia has no identifiable source image from which the false memory could have been constructed. People who have never seen the Frank Wess album independently produce drawings of the cornucopia that are remarkably consistent. The “residue” — secondary sources that appear to reference the “wrong” version — accumulates in ways that are individually explainable but collectively strange. The Shazaam film has no traceable origin for the false memory, no single point of contamination that could explain why thousands of people remember specific scenes from a movie that does not exist.

And the philosophical implication is deep regardless of which explanation is correct. Our experience of reality is mediated by memory. We do not perceive the present directly — we perceive a reconstruction, assembled from fragments, filtered through expectations, and stored in a biological medium that degrades, distorts, and invents. If memory is not a recording but a reconstruction, and if the reconstruction can be shared across thousands of minds with no common source, then what exactly are we reconstructing? Are we remembering reality? Or are we remembering something else — something that was real once, or real somewhere, or real in a way that our current framework of physics and psychology does not have the language to describe?

The Mandela Effect may be nothing more than a catalogue of cognitive errors, elevated to mystery by the internet’s ability to connect people who share the same mistake. This is the most likely answer. It is also the least interesting one — not because it is wrong, but because it closes the door on a question that deserves to remain open.

The door is this: if memory and reality can disagree, and if the disagreement is shared and specific and consistent, then either memory is less reliable than we think, or reality is less stable than we think. The conventional answer chooses the first option. The Mandela Effect, at its most unsettling, asks us to consider the second.

Sources

Broome, Fiona. The Mandela Effect (website and collected writings). mandelaeffect.com, 2009-present.

Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Pickrell, Jacqueline E. “The Formation of False Memories.” Psychiatric Annals, Vol. 25, No. 12, pp. 720-725, 1995.

Loftus, Elizabeth F. and Palmer, John C. “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 585-589, 1974.

Roediger, Henry L. and McDermott, Kathleen B. “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 803-814, 1995.

Johnson, Marcia K., Hashtroudi, Shahin, and Lindsay, D. Stephen. “Source Monitoring.” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 114, No. 1, pp. 3-28, 1993.

Prasad, Deepasri and Bainbridge, Wilma A. “The Visual Mandela Effect as Evidence for Shared and Specific False Memories Across People.” Psychological Science, Vol. 33, No. 12, pp. 1971-1988, 2022.

Bostrom, Nick. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255, 2003.

Everett, Hugh. “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 454-462, 1957.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes — and Its Implications. Allen Lane, 1997.

Cramer, John G. “The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 58, No. 3, pp. 647-687, 1986.

Wheeler, John Archibald and Feynman, Richard P. “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 17, Nos. 2-3, pp. 157-181, 1945.

Price, Huw. Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Dick, Philip K. Speech at the Metz Science Fiction Festival, Metz, France, September 1977. Transcript available in: Sutin, Lawrence (ed.). The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Pantheon Books, 1995.

Dick, Philip K. VALIS. Bantam Books, 1981.

Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time. Riverhead Books, 2018.

Barbour, Julian. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Connections

The Simulation Hypothesis — If reality is a simulation that gets updated, the Mandela Effect could be leftover memories from before a change was applied to the code

Consciousness (see Mind) — The Mandela Effect raises questions about how consciousness interacts with reality, since thousands of people share the same false memories in very specific detail

The Nature of Time — If time is a block that can be changed retroactively, the Mandela Effect could be people retaining memories from a timeline that was altered

CERN & The Large Hadron Collider — The dominant conspiracy framework for the Mandela Effect since ~2010 holds that LHC operations have shifted the structure of reality, and that collective false memories are residual traces of a previous timeline. The major waves correlate loosely with periods of intense LHC activity.

The Nature of Time

You have never experienced the past. You have never experienced the future. You have only ever experienced now. The past exists as memory — a pattern in your brain, accessed in the present. The future exists as anticipation — another pattern, also accessed in the present. The flow of time, the sense that moments are arriving and departing, is the most fundamental feature of your experience. And physics says it may not be real.

Augustine set the terms of the problem in Book XI of the Confessions, around 400 CE: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Sixteen hundred years later the physics has become extraordinary and the question is the same. Whatever time is, it is something that every human being uses continuously, that no serious definition has ever captured, and that the best physics we possess has managed to describe in mathematical detail while revealing less and less about what it actually is.

Newton and the invention of absolute time

Modern physics begins with Newton’s Principia (1687) and a decision that, because it has become invisible through familiarity, is no longer recognized as a decision. Newton wrote, in his Scholium to the Definitions, that “absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.” This is the framework every schoolchild is taught without being told that it was an invention, one that Newton’s contemporary Leibniz attacked as incoherent. For Leibniz, time was not an absolute container but a relation between events. If nothing changed, there would be no time. Time is what we call the ordering of changes, nothing more.

The Newtonian view won. For two hundred and forty years it was the physics of time. It has, since 1905, been the physics of time only as an approximation.

Einstein and the death of the present

In 1905, in his fifth annus mirabilis paper, Albert Einstein published “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” in Annalen der Physik and broke the Newtonian picture. The argument was not complicated. Einstein asked what it would mean for two events, separated in space, to be simultaneous, and proved from the constancy of the speed of light that simultaneity is not a fact about the events — it is a fact about the reference frame from which they are observed. Two observers moving relative to each other will disagree, in general, about whether two spatially separated events happened at the same time. Neither is mistaken. There is no privileged observer. There is no absolute present.

The consequences were worked out over the following decade by Einstein, Minkowski, and others. Time slows for moving observers. Clocks in gravitational fields run slow relative to clocks in weaker fields. The flat Newtonian stage — an absolute arena in which events unfold — dissolved into a four-dimensional spacetime continuum in which time is a direction, mathematically related to space but distinguished only by the sign of its contribution to the metric. In Hermann Minkowski’s famous formulation at the 1908 Cologne address: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

The philosophical consequence was drawn out with unusual force by Einstein himself in a letter to the family of his friend Michele Besso, written days after Besso’s death in March 1955: “Nun ist er mir auch mit dem Abschied von dieser sonderbaren Welt ein wenig vorausgegangen. Das bedeutet nichts. Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer wenn auch hartnäckigen Illusion” — “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Einstein was writing a condolence letter. He was also summarizing what he took relativity to have established.

The block universe

The mathematical structure that replaced the Newtonian stage is the block universe, or eternalism: a four-dimensional structure in which all events — past, present, future, from any observer’s perspective — exist equally. Time is a dimension analogous to space. The phenomenal flow of time is not something the universe does. It is, on this reading, something that Consciousness does while traversing a four-dimensional structure that is, in itself, static.

The block-universe view received a famously sharp argument from Hilary Putnam and the Dutch philosopher C.W. Rietdijk in the mid-1960s. The Rietdijk–Putnam argument runs: if relativity is correct, then what is present for me is not in general what is present for an observer moving relative to me. If presentness is real, then the set of presently existing things must include what is present for each observer. But for distant observers moving at even walking speeds, the “present” plane tilts enough that events millions of years away on their timeline are simultaneous with the observer’s “now.” Therefore, if presentness is real, all events at all times are real. Eternalism follows, more or less as a theorem, from special relativity.

The three standard philosophical positions on this map are:

Presentism: only the present moment exists. The past is gone; the future has not yet come. This is the intuitive view, defended in the analytic tradition most prominently by Dean Zimmerman and William Lane Craig. It has serious difficulty fitting relativity without invoking a preferred reference frame.

Eternalism (block universe): all moments exist equally; the distinction between past, present, and future is perspectival. This is the view that relativity appears to demand, defended by the majority of physicists and by philosophers including Michael Tooley and J.J.C. Smart.

Growing block: the past and present exist; the future does not yet exist. As time “passes,” new slices are added to the block. Defended by Michael Tooley (in some formulations), C.D. Broad, and — in his own specific form — Lee Smolin.

The debate is not merely academic. The positions make different predictions about free will, personal identity over time, the reality of mortality, and what we mean when we say an event “happens.”

McTaggart and the A-series argument

In 1908, the British philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart published “The Unreality of Time” in the journal Mind, independently of Einstein’s special relativity but in the same intellectual moment. McTaggart distinguished two ways of ordering events. The A-series orders events as past, present, or future — properties that change as time passes. The B-series orders events as earlier-than or later-than each other — a fixed relation that never changes. McTaggart argued that only the A-series captures what we actually mean by time (the B-series is compatible with a frozen four-dimensional structure), but that the A-series is incoherent, because the same event must be all three of past, present, and future at different times, and this requires a second time dimension to make sense of, which leads to infinite regress. Therefore, McTaggart concluded, time does not exist.

A century later the argument is still alive. It has produced the central division in modern philosophy of time. Defenders of the A-series (A-theorists) accept McTaggart’s claim that tense is essential to time and reject his claim that the A-series is incoherent. Defenders of the B-series (B-theorists) accept McTaggart’s claim that the A-series is incoherent and reject his claim that tense is essential — time, for the B-theorist, is just the relational structure of events, and the apparent flow is a feature of how conscious beings move through that structure.

The arrow of time

Even if the block-universe view is correct and the fundamental physics is time-symmetric, one stubborn asymmetry refuses to dissolve: the arrow of time. Physical processes do not look the same running forwards and backwards. Eggs break; they do not un-break. Heat flows from hot to cold; it does not spontaneously flow back. Memories point to the past; no known process produces memories of the future. The second law of thermodynamics — that entropy in an isolated system tends to increase — is the mathematical expression of this asymmetry, and it appears to rule the macroscopic world.

The puzzle is that the underlying microphysics is time-symmetric. Newton’s equations, Maxwell’s equations, Einstein’s field equations, the Schrödinger equation — none of them prefer a direction in time. Reversing the direction of time in any of these equations produces an equally valid solution. If the fundamental laws don’t pick a direction, why does the macroscopic world pick one so emphatically?

The standard answer, developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the nineteenth century, is statistical: a system can be in far more high-entropy microstates than low-entropy ones, so the overwhelming probabilistic tendency is toward higher entropy. This explains why entropy increases — but it shifts the puzzle, because it requires the universe to have started in an extraordinarily low-entropy state. David Albert, in Time and Chance (2000), calls this the Past Hypothesis: the brute posit that the early universe was in a low-entropy configuration. Why it was is not yet explained. The arrow of time, on this account, is not explained by the laws of physics. It is explained by a boundary condition on the universe’s beginning. Roger Penrose, in The Road to Reality (2004) and subsequently, has argued that this low-entropy initial condition requires an explanation of fantastic specificity — the Big Bang had to be fine-tuned to one part in 10⁽¹⁰123) to produce the universe we observe — and that current cosmology has no such explanation.

Quantum time, and no time at all

Quantum mechanics complicates the picture in the opposite direction from relativity. Where relativity makes time into a dimension continuous with space, non-relativistic quantum mechanics treats time as an external parameter — a classical variable ticking away outside the quantum system, against which the wavefunction evolves. This works extraordinarily well for practical calculations. It makes no sense relativistically.

The attempt to reconcile the two — to produce a quantum theory of gravity — has produced, over more than half a century of effort, several frameworks and one stubborn feature: time either disappears or becomes secondary. In the Wheeler–DeWitt equation (1967), the foundational equation of canonical quantum gravity, the time derivative vanishes entirely. The universe, on this reading, is a timeless wavefunction. What we call time is an emergent relational feature — the way certain subsystems change with respect to others.

Carlo Rovelli, the principal living proponent of loop quantum gravity, has argued this case in increasing depth, most accessibly in The Order of Time (2018). Rovelli’s position is that time, as we experience it, does not exist at the fundamental level of physics. What we call time is an emergent macroscopic phenomenon — a thermal and statistical average, analogous to temperature, that arises from our coarse-grained view of an underlying quantum structure in which there is only relation, not duration. Time is real the way a wave is real. A pattern, not a substance.

Julian Barbour, in The End of Time (1999) and The Janus Point (2020), takes an even more radical position. For Barbour, time is entirely illusory at every level. The universe is a collection of Nows — instantaneous configurations he calls Platonia — arranged in a structured but timeless space. What we experience as the flow of time is a feature of the way certain Nows contain within themselves records (memories, photographs, fossils) that are consistent with an earlier Now. We are not moving through time. We are frozen in a Now that is stitched together with the appearance of motion.

Not everyone agrees. Lee Smolin, in Time Reborn (2013), argues forcefully that time is real and fundamental, and that the block-universe view is a mathematical artifact, not a description of reality. For Smolin, the laws of physics themselves evolve in time — which makes time prior to law, rather than derivable from law. Smolin’s framework ties the reality of time to the cosmological history of the universe and to what he calls cosmological natural selection. The crisis in modern physics, he argues, is not despite the block universe but because of the block universe: by treating time as ontologically secondary, theorists have produced a physics whose predictions of a final theory keep receding. Time must be taken seriously, Smolin argues, before physics can make progress.

Time and consciousness

The hardest problem is not what time is in physics. It is why time feels the way it does. If the block universe is correct, the passage of time — the sense that this moment is arriving, the previous moment departing, the next moment looming — is a product of how Consciousness interacts with the four-dimensional structure. But no current theory of consciousness explains why there is a subjective flow at all. This is a specialized instance of The Hard Problem. A block universe contains no mechanism for the present to “move.” And yet, from the inside, that is exactly what it feels like.

The psychology of time perception is well-studied. The “specious present” — the temporal width of what feels like a single moment — has been measured in the range of roughly 2 to 3 seconds, a value stable across cultures and independent of clock time. Time perception distorts systematically under emotion, attention, and substance influence: dopaminergic stimulation lengthens the perceived present, serotonergic psychedelics can dissolve it entirely. Eagleman’s work on time perception in emergency situations has shown that people who report time “slowing down” during a life-threatening event are not actually perceiving time more finely — they are laying down memory more densely. The subjective report of time slowing is a retrospective reconstruction from memory density, not a real-time experience of altered temporality. This has implications that propagate: much of what we believe about our own temporal experience may be artifacts of memory, not perception.

The Altered States literature complicates this further. Meditators in deep absorption, long-term DMT experiencers, and subjects of high-dose psilocybin studies consistently report a dissolution of temporal flow — sometimes described as timelessness, sometimes as simultaneous access to all moments. Whether these reports describe contact with the underlying timeless structure of reality that physics points toward, or merely disruptions of the brain’s time-binding mechanisms, is precisely the question that a resolved theory of time and consciousness would answer. We have no such theory.

Time, simulation, and the data-structure reading

The connection to The Simulation Hypothesis is immediate. In a simulation, “time” is the sequence of computational frames. There is no actual flow — just one state followed by the next, rendered in order. The experience of time passing would be, in this framework, exactly what you would expect a simulated being to feel: the illusion of flow created by sequential processing. The block universe, viewed through this lens, looks less like a physical reality and more like a data structure — a four-dimensional array of world-states, accessed by consciousness-instances indexed by what they call their present.

This framing converts several puzzles into features. The arrow of time becomes the render order. The specious present becomes the frame buffer. The apparent passage of time becomes the streaming of one array slice after another into the observer’s processing. Whether this account is true or merely suggestive, it has a curious virtue: it is internally consistent in a way that the “block universe plus unexplained experienced flow” position is not. Either possibility should unsettle. Both do.

The question that remains

We do not know what time is. We can measure it with extraordinary precision — atomic clocks accurate to one second in 15 billion years. We can describe how it behaves under extreme conditions: time dilation near black holes, the asymmetric arrow, the vanishing time of quantum gravity. We can model it mathematically. But the question of what it is — whether it is fundamental or emergent, whether it flows or is static, whether it is a feature of the universe or a feature of mind — remains as open as when Augustine asked it sixteen centuries ago.

What makes the question irreducible is that every serious candidate answer reconfigures something else in the worldview. If time is a fundamental dimension, relativity is right and presentism is wrong and the future already exists. If time is an emergent statistical average, the most intimate feature of experience is an artifact of our coarse-graining of a deeper reality. If time is illusion, the felt present is either a useful fiction or a trace of a timeless substrate that consciousness is, at its deepest, in direct contact with. If time is real but the block is mathematical fiction, physics has been confused for a century about what its own equations mean.

Time is where physics, Consciousness, and the nature of reality converge. It is the most intimate and most mysterious feature of existence — something we live inside every moment and understand not at all. And the honest answer, past every theorem and every mystical report, is that the investigation is not closed. It is not even clearly begun.

Sources

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Einstein, Albert. “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”). Annalen der Physik, Vol. 17 (series 4), No. 10, pp. 891-921, 1905.

Einstein, Albert. Letter to the family of Michele Besso, March 21, 1955. Reproduced in Pierre Speziali, ed., Albert Einstein – Michele Besso: Correspondance 1903-1955. Paris: Hermann, 1972.

Minkowski, Hermann. “Raum und Zeit.” Address delivered to the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, Cologne, September 1908. Published in Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, Vol. 18, pp. 75-88, 1909.

McTaggart, J.M.E. “The Unreality of Time.” Mind, Vol. 17, No. 68, pp. 457-474, 1908.

Rietdijk, C.W. “A Rigorous Proof of Determinism Derived from the Special Theory of Relativity.” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 341-344, 1966.

Putnam, Hilary. “Time and Physical Geometry.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 8, pp. 240-247, 1967.

Wheeler, John A. and DeWitt, Bryce S. “Quantum Theory of Gravity. I. The Canonical Theory.” Physical Review, Vol. 160, No. 5, pp. 1113-1148, 1967.

Barbour, Julian. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Barbour, Julian. The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time. New York: Basic Books, 2020.

Smolin, Lee. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

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Penrose, Roger. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004 (see especially Ch. 27–28 on entropy and the Weyl curvature hypothesis).

Eagleman, David M. The Brain: The Story of You. New York: Pantheon, 2015 (chapter on time perception under threat).

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Connections

Consciousness (see Mind) — Physics says time doesn’t actually flow, so the feeling that it does might be something consciousness creates rather than something real about the universe

The Simulation Hypothesis — In a simulation, time would just be the order that frames are rendered in, not a real dimension, which would explain why physics says time doesn’t flow

The Mandela Effect — If past, present, and future all exist at once in a block universe, and that block can be changed, the Mandela Effect could be memories from a version of the past that was altered

CERN & The Large Hadron Collider — Relativity treats time as a curved dimension; quantum mechanics treats it as an external parameter — reconciling the two is theoretical physics’ central unsolved problem. CERN’s LHC produces the high-energy collision data on which the eventual answer will depend.

The Hard Problem (see Mind) — The felt flow of time is one of the most basic facts of experience and has no explanation in the physics of time, which is time-symmetric and static. Time’s passage is a specialized instance of the hard problem — a qualitative feature of consciousness with no physical correlate.

The Simulation Hypothesis

In 2003, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a fifteen-page paper in Philosophical Quarterly titled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” The paper did not claim that we are living in a simulation. It claimed something more precise and more unsettling: that a specific logical trilemma forces us to accept one of three options, the third of which is the simulation hypothesis itself, and that the other two are surprisingly difficult to defend. The argument was not science fiction. It was probability theory applied to the plausible trajectory of any technological civilization, including our own.

The paper spread slowly through philosophy departments, then rapidly through the wider culture as the twenty-first century’s sense of unreality metastasized. By 2016, Elon Musk was stating at a tech conference in California that the probability we are living in base reality was “one in billions,” and the audience did not laugh. By 2022, David Chalmers — the philosopher who, in 1995, had coined the term The Hard Problem — had published a six-hundred-page book called Reality+ defending the thesis that even if we live in a simulation, what we experience is still real. The simulation hypothesis had moved, within two decades, from the margins of speculative philosophy to a live option within mainstream analytic thought. The question it raises is no longer whether we should take the hypothesis seriously as a logical possibility. The question is what follows, practically and metaphysically, from the fact that we cannot rule it out.

The trilemma, precisely

Bostrom’s argument begins with an assumption he calls substrate-independence: the thesis that consciousness arises from a certain pattern of information processing and does not depend on the specific physical substrate (carbon-based neurons versus silicon-based transistors) on which that pattern runs. This is a position that most functionalists in philosophy of mind already accept, and it is also the foundational assumption of mainstream artificial intelligence research. If substrate-independence is true, then a sufficiently detailed computational simulation of a human brain would produce genuine conscious experience — not a representation of consciousness, but consciousness itself.

From this assumption, Bostrom constructs a probability argument. Suppose that a technological civilization eventually reaches what he calls a post-human stage — a level of development at which its computational resources vastly exceed anything currently available. A post-human civilization with access to planetary-scale computing could run detailed simulations of entire historical periods of its own past, populated by simulated conscious beings. Bostrom calls these ancestor simulations. The computational cost of such a simulation, estimated on the basis of the information-processing capacity of a human brain and the number of humans that have ever lived, is enormous but not impossible — Bostrom’s rough estimate is on the order of 10^33 to 10^36 operations for a full ancestor simulation of human history. A mature post-human civilization, harvesting energy at the scale of a star or a galaxy, could run such a simulation many times over.

Given this, Bostrom argues, at least one of the following three propositions must be true.

The first proposition: the fraction of civilizations that reach the post-human stage is close to zero. Almost all intelligent species go extinct, collapse, or otherwise fail to develop the technology required for ancestor simulations. This is the position that the Great Filter of the The Fermi Paradox lies ahead of us rather than behind us, and that any civilization like ours will be stopped before it achieves the computational power to simulate its past.

The second proposition: the fraction of post-human civilizations that actually run ancestor simulations is close to zero. Civilizations reach the relevant level of technology but, for ethical, resource-allocation, or motivational reasons, choose not to run such simulations in significant numbers. This requires that the decision not to simulate be effectively universal across all post-human civilizations — a convergence that is difficult to defend given the diversity of motivations that any large civilization would contain.

The third proposition: the fraction of all beings with human-type experiences that are living in a simulation is close to one. In other words, the overwhelming majority of beings who believe themselves to be humans are in fact simulated, and by straightforward statistical inference, you — the reader of this sentence — are almost certainly one of them.

The argument does not establish which of the three propositions is true. It establishes that the three propositions cannot all be false. If you reject the third proposition — if you believe you are almost certainly not in a simulation — you must defend one of the first two, and the defense is harder than it looks.

The first proposition requires that some filter reliably prevents civilizations from reaching post-human computational capacity. But the capacity in question is not dramatically beyond what our own civilization appears to be approaching on its current trajectory. Moore’s law has held for sixty years. Quantum computing, neuromorphic hardware, and planetary-scale data center construction are all extending the trend. The first proposition requires not that computational progress eventually slow — it already is slowing in some respects — but that it stop categorically before reaching the threshold for ancestor simulations, and that this stopping be so universal that essentially no civilization anywhere in the cosmos ever breaks through.

The second proposition requires that every post-human civilization — every one — converges on the decision not to run ancestor simulations. This is a strong claim. Human civilization already runs vast simulations of historical events, military scenarios, economic systems, and fictional worlds. The motivations for running ancestor simulations include scientific research, entertainment, historical memorialization, and the simple exercise of computational power. The second proposition requires that all of these motivations, across all post-human civilizations, be reliably suppressed. It is not impossible, but it is not easy to motivate either.

The third proposition — that we are in a simulation — is not inherently more probable than the other two. It is inherently harder to escape. If you think the first two are unlikely, the third is what remains.

The ancient lineage

The simulation hypothesis is often treated as a product of the computer age, a philosophical novelty made possible by the development of machines that simulate worlds. This framing is wrong. The core idea — that the reality we experience is a constructed appearance generated by some underlying process that we do not directly perceive — is one of the oldest ideas in human philosophy, and it appears in cultures that had no concept of computation at all.

Around the fourth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi recorded a dream in which he was a butterfly, fluttering happily without knowing he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he wondered: is Zhuangzi the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or is he a butterfly now dreaming he is Zhuangzi? The passage is short, but the problem it poses is exactly the modern problem: from inside an experience, there is no internal feature that reliably distinguishes it from a generated experience. The butterfly dream is a simulation of a kind the butterfly itself cannot detect.

Plato’s allegory of the cave, from Book VII of the Republic (c. 380 BC), presents the same structure in a different vocabulary. Prisoners chained in a cave since birth perceive shadows on a wall cast by objects and figures they cannot see directly. The shadows are their entire reality. The objects casting the shadows are the true reality, inaccessible to the prisoners until one is freed and ascends out of the cave into the light of the sun. The philosophical work of the allegory is to establish that what appears to be reality may be a derived projection of a more fundamental reality that the observer inside the projection cannot, by their own resources, perceive. Plato’s cave is a simulation. The shadow-casters are the simulators. The sun is the ground of being that the simulated observer must somehow come to understand.

Hindu philosophy developed an even more radical version. The concept of maya, elaborated extensively in the Upanishads and the later Vedantic tradition, holds that the entire phenomenal world is a kind of cosmic illusion generated by the divine consciousness of Brahman. Maya is not simply deception; it is the productive power by which unity appears as multiplicity, by which the singular ground of being presents itself as the bewildering variety of phenomenal experience. The doctrine holds that liberation — moksha — consists precisely in seeing through the illusion and recognizing one’s identity with the underlying reality. The structural identity with the simulation hypothesis is exact: a generated world, experienced as real, whose illusory character can in principle be seen through by an observer who recognizes what is actually occurring.

The Gnostic tradition, emerging in the Mediterranean world in the first and second centuries AD, took the same insight and gave it a darker inflection. The material world, in the dominant Gnostic cosmology, was constructed by a lesser divinity — the demiurge — who is ignorant of, or hostile to, the true God. The material world is not merely illusory but deceptively constructed, designed to trap consciousness in false perception and prevent it from recognizing its origin in the divine pleroma beyond the material realm. This is the simulation hypothesis with a malicious programmer. It is also, more than two thousand years before Bostrom, the recognition that the question of who built the simulation and why is the deepest question the hypothesis raises.

And in 1641, four centuries before anyone used the word computer in its modern sense, Rene Descartes & Cartesian Dualism wrote the Meditations on First Philosophy and introduced the figure that would become the direct ancestor of the simulation hypothesis: the malin genie, the evil demon. Descartes imagined a being of great power and cunning who devotes his entire existence to deceiving Descartes about everything — feeding him false sensations, false memories, false inferences. The point of the thought experiment was to find what, if anything, survives total skeptical doubt. Descartes’ answer was the cogito — the fact that even a totally deceived mind must exist in order to be deceived. But the setup of the thought experiment — a mind fed a consistent illusion by a deceiving intelligence — is formally identical to the simulation hypothesis, with the demon replaced by a computer and the metaphysics replaced by probability.

Bostrom’s contribution was not to invent the idea. It was to move the idea from theology and metaphysics into probability theory, and to do so using the specific vocabulary of a civilization that had recently invented machines that did, in fact, run simulations of convincing worlds. The simulation hypothesis is an ancient idea translated into the language of a generation that has grown up inside video games.

Suggestive features of our reality

The simulation hypothesis, as Bostrom originally formulated it, is not a scientific claim. It is a logical argument about probabilities, not a prediction about observable phenomena. But a second tradition, running in parallel to Bostrom’s philosophical argument, has attempted to identify features of the physical universe that are consistent with — not proof of — a simulated substrate. The most rigorous version of this tradition goes by the name of digital physics, and it has a longer history than the simulation hypothesis itself.

The first systematic attempt to treat physical reality as fundamentally computational was made by the German engineer Konrad Zuse, who in 1969 published a short book called Rechnender Raum (“Calculating Space”) proposing that the universe is a cellular automaton — a discrete grid of cells whose states update according to local rules, producing the appearance of continuous physics as an emergent approximation. Zuse’s proposal was largely ignored at the time. It was revived and extended by Ed Fredkin at MIT in the 1980s, who developed a formal program of digital mechanics arguing that the universe is literally a computational system. John Wheeler, one of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century, crystallized the view in his 1989 phrase “it from bit” — the claim that every physical entity derives its existence from binary information-theoretic operations. Gerard ’t Hooft, the Dutch physicist who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electroweak interaction, has subsequently argued for a cellular automaton interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the apparent probabilistic behavior of quantum systems emerges from deterministic discrete operations at a deeper level. Stephen Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science (2002), pushed the program further, proposing that all physical laws derive from simple computational rules, and in 2020 launched the Wolfram Physics Project — an attempt to derive general relativity and quantum mechanics from a single computational framework based on hypergraph rewriting.

Whether or not digital physics is the correct theoretical framework for the fundamental laws, the features of our observed universe that digital physicists and simulation hypothesists point to as suggestive are specific and worth enumerating carefully.

The Planck length, approximately 1.6 × 10⁻³⁵ meters, is the scale at which the classical concept of space itself breaks down. Below the Planck length, the notion of distance loses meaning in current physical theory. The Planck time, approximately 5.4 × 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds, plays an analogous role for time. These scales appear, from the perspective of the simulation hypothesis, to function as the pixel size and frame rate of the underlying substrate. A continuous universe with no fundamental unit of spatial or temporal resolution would require infinite information to describe any finite region. A discrete universe with finite Planck-scale resolution requires finite information, exactly as a simulated universe would.

The speed of light, approximately 2.998 × 10⁸ meters per second, is the maximum rate at which information can propagate through space. Every causal interaction — every photon, every gravitational effect, every quantum-field correlation — is bounded by this speed. From the perspective of the simulation hypothesis, this looks like the bus speed of the underlying computer: a limit on how fast the simulator’s engine can update the state of the system. A simulation with no such limit would require instantaneous synchronization of arbitrarily distant regions, which is computationally enormous. A simulation with a fundamental speed limit can parallelize computation across distant regions with no interference.

Quantum measurement is the feature most often cited as suggesting a simulated substrate, and the analogy is unusually tight. In quantum mechanics, a particle’s physical properties — its position, its momentum, its spin — are not determined until they are measured. Before measurement, the particle exists in a superposition of possible states described by a wave function. Measurement causes the wave function to collapse to a single definite value. This behavior is strikingly similar to the rendering optimization used in modern video game engines: the engine does not compute the detailed state of objects that no player is looking at, because doing so would waste computational resources. Objects are rendered into definite form only when observation demands it. The double-slit experiment, in which a particle behaves as a wave when unobserved but as a particle when observed, is the canonical demonstration of quantum measurement — and it is also, from the simulation perspective, the canonical demonstration of on-demand rendering.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, as the physicist Eugene Wigner famously called it in a 1960 paper, is the observation that abstract mathematical structures developed without any reference to physical reality turn out, again and again, to describe the deep behavior of the physical universe with uncanny precision. Riemannian geometry, developed in the 1850s as an abstract extension of Euclidean geometry, turned out half a century later to be the mathematical framework of Einstein’s general relativity. Group theory, developed in the nineteenth century to study algebraic symmetries, turned out to be the mathematical framework of the Standard Model of particle physics. The alignment of pure mathematics with physical reality is, on the standard view, a remarkable coincidence or a deep feature of mind. On the simulation view, it is exactly what we should expect: the physical universe is computed, and computation is mathematics, and the mathematical structures we discover in pure thought are the structures being executed on the underlying substrate.

The discovery of error-correcting codes in supersymmetric equations is a specific and recent piece of the suggestive evidence. In 2012, the theoretical physicist James Gates Jr., working on the equations of supersymmetric field theory, reported that certain mathematical structures in the equations correspond to what computer scientists call doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block codes — the specific kind of code used to correct errors in digital communication systems. Gates was careful not to claim that this proves we are in a simulation. But he did state publicly, including at the 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History, that the equations describing fundamental physics “literally” contain error-correcting computer code. His presentation of the finding has been cited repeatedly in both scholarly and popular discussions of the simulation hypothesis as an example of how the deepest mathematical structures of physics appear to have computational character.

None of this is proof. All of it is consistent.

The attempt to test the hypothesis

The simulation hypothesis is often dismissed as untestable in principle, and in its strongest form this dismissal is correct: any observation we could make inside the simulation would be, by construction, an observation the simulator permitted us to make, and therefore could not serve as evidence against the simulation. But a weaker version of the hypothesis — the claim that our universe is specifically a numerical simulation running on a discrete computational lattice — is, interestingly, testable. In 2012, a team of physicists at the University of Washington — Silas Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, and Martin Savage — published a paper titled “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation.” The paper’s argument was technical but the structure was elegant. Simulations of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) — the theory of the strong nuclear force — are routinely performed on discrete space-time lattices as a standard research technique in theoretical physics. Beane and his colleagues asked: if our entire universe were such a lattice simulation, what signatures would be detectable from inside?

Their answer was specific. A cubic space-time lattice would introduce a preferred direction in space — the orientation of the lattice axes — and this preferred direction would affect the propagation of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays in ways that could, in principle, be measured. Specifically, cosmic rays traveling at the highest energies observed — at or near the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff, around 5 × 10¹⁹ electron-volts — would show an anisotropy aligned with the lattice axes rather than being isotropically distributed across the sky. Existing observations of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are limited in resolution, but the Beane-Davoudi-Savage paper proposed that with sufficient data collection, the signature could be confirmed or ruled out. This is the first, and still one of the few, empirically testable versions of the simulation hypothesis.

The paper’s ultimate verdict was cautiously negative for the specific lattice model: no anisotropy has been detected to date at the resolution of current observations, though the constraint is not yet strong enough to rule out more refined lattice schemes. The paper’s deeper contribution was methodological. It established, as a matter of principle, that certain specific implementations of a simulated universe — particular choices about how the simulation is structured — have observable consequences and can therefore be tested. The broad claim that “we are in a simulation” remains untestable. The narrow claim that “we are in this specific kind of simulation” sometimes is testable, and testing has begun.

In 2020, the astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University published a probabilistic analysis in the Universe journal titled “A Bayesian Approach to the Simulation Argument,” which attempted to calculate the posterior probability that we are in a simulation given various assumptions about the distribution of simulators and simulated beings. Kipping’s analysis, using the principle of indifference between the two hypotheses (base reality versus simulated reality) as a prior, concluded that the probability we are in a simulation is just under 50 percent — roughly a coin flip, with a small bias toward base reality. Kipping’s calculation has been criticized on multiple grounds (the choice of prior is contested, the analysis assumes that simulators do not themselves run nested simulations, and the meaning of “probability” in a context where there may be only one universe is itself philosophically contested), but it represents the most rigorous probability-theoretic analysis of the simulation hypothesis yet attempted, and it arrives at a conclusion that neither confirms nor rejects the hypothesis but treats it as a live epistemic possibility.

The resource objection and the lazy-evaluation reply

The most frequently raised scientific objection to the simulation hypothesis is the computational resource objection: to simulate a universe at the full resolution of its quantum mechanical behavior would require more matter and energy than the universe itself contains, because each simulated quantum state requires some finite amount of physical computation to represent, and the total number of quantum states in an observable universe is astronomically larger than the number of bits any physical computer could store. On this objection, a full simulation of our universe would require a computer larger than our universe, and therefore our universe cannot be a simulation running inside a larger universe with comparable physics.

The standard reply — the lazy-evaluation reply — has become the most discussed piece of technical argument in the simulation literature. The reply draws on a technique that is standard in actual computer simulations of complex systems: don’t compute what isn’t observed. In computer graphics this is called view-frustum culling, occlusion culling, and level-of-detail scaling. In software engineering generally it is called lazy evaluation. A well-designed simulator does not compute the detailed state of a system unless that state is about to affect an observer. The simulator maintains a coarse-grained description of the system adequate to preserve its statistical properties and generates detailed computations only when an observer’s measurement demands them.

The lazy-evaluation reply claims that our universe shows exactly this signature. The quantum-mechanical wave function, which describes a particle’s possible states probabilistically, is the coarse-grained description. Collapse upon measurement is the generation of a detailed state when one is needed. The speed of light, which limits how quickly an observer can be affected by distant events, ensures that the simulator has time to compute the detailed states of distant regions only when an observer is about to arrive at them. Every feature of our observed physics that corresponds to limits on what observers can know corresponds, on the simulation view, to limits on what the simulator has to compute. The universe might require infinite resources to simulate down to the Planck scale everywhere at all times. It requires vastly less to simulate the coarse-grained version and fill in the details on demand.

The reply is not conclusive. It rests on the claim that the simulator’s computational resources scale with what observers inside the simulation require, rather than with what the simulation as a whole contains — and this claim may or may not hold depending on the specific architecture of the simulator. But the reply has been sufficient, in the serious simulation literature, to prevent the resource objection from settling the question.

Chalmers and the “Reality+” argument

The philosopher David Chalmers, whose work on Consciousness has dominated the philosophy of mind for three decades, published in 2022 a six-hundred-page book called Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, offering the most extensive philosophical engagement with the simulation hypothesis yet produced by a major mainstream philosopher. Chalmers’ central move is surprising. He does not argue that we are in a simulation, and he does not argue that we are not. He argues instead that the distinction between simulated reality and base reality is less metaphysically significant than it initially appears, and that if we are in a simulation, what we experience is still real in every sense that matters.

The argument proceeds in several stages. First, Chalmers argues that virtual objects — the objects that appear inside simulations — are not illusions. A tree in a virtual world is not a fake tree, he argues. It is a digital tree, an object made of information patterns rather than carbon, but an object nonetheless, with real effects on the other objects in its virtual environment. Simulated rain really does get simulated things wet, in the sense that the functional consequences of wetness occur. The category of virtual objects is a new category, not a failure of the category of real objects.

Second, Chalmers argues that if we live in a simulation, our minds are just as real as they would be in base reality. The substrate-independence thesis — the same thesis Bostrom uses to get the argument off the ground — implies that a simulated conscious being has genuine consciousness, not pretend consciousness. If our minds are real and our environment is real in the sense that it produces genuine effects on our minds, then we live in a real world. It is just a real world that happens to be implemented in a particular computational substrate rather than in a particular physical substrate.

Third, Chalmers argues that this conclusion dissolves most of the horror traditionally associated with the simulation hypothesis. The fear that nothing is real, that our lives are illusions, that we have been cheated out of a genuine existence — all of this rests, Chalmers argues, on the assumption that simulated reality is a lesser, derivative kind of reality. If instead we understand simulated reality as a different kind of reality, equally real but differently implemented, the horror evaporates. We would not be living in a lie. We would be living in a digital universe. The ontological status of our existence would shift, but the ontological status of our experience — the thing that matters to us — would not.

Chalmers’ argument has been controversial among philosophers, partly because it seems to prove too much (everything becomes real, including the most obvious illusions) and partly because it seems to prove too little (even if simulated reality is real, the question of whether we are simulated still matters in terms of who has authority over our world and why it exists). But Reality+ has become the standard reference point for contemporary philosophical discussion of the simulation hypothesis, and its central move — the dissolution of the real/simulated distinction in favor of a pluralism of kinds of reality — has shaped the terms in which the question is now debated.

The critics

The most sustained critique of the simulation hypothesis from within the physics community has come from the theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, whose 2021 essay “The Simulation Hypothesis Is Pseudoscience” argues that the hypothesis, as commonly defended, fails to meet the criteria of a scientific claim. Hossenfelder’s objection is threefold. First, the hypothesis as typically stated is unfalsifiable — no observation is specified that would decisively rule it out, and in the absence of such a specification the claim has no empirical content. Second, the “evidence” routinely cited in support of the hypothesis — the Planck scale, quantum measurement, the speed of light — is not genuine evidence but post-hoc pattern matching; these features of physics were known long before the simulation hypothesis was proposed, and their interpretation as simulation signatures requires exactly the framework the signatures are supposed to support. Third, the probability arguments typically associated with the hypothesis — including Bostrom’s trilemma — rely on assumptions about the distribution of simulators and the self-sampling of observers that cannot be justified without exactly the knowledge that we are trying to obtain from the argument.

Hossenfelder’s critique is technical and sharp. It does not refute the simulation hypothesis. It argues that the hypothesis, in its current form, is not the kind of thing that can be refuted, and therefore is not the kind of thing that can be supported either. This is a classical Popperian objection, and it is one the hypothesis’s serious defenders have had to address. The standard response — that the simulation hypothesis is a philosophical claim rather than a scientific one, and that philosophical claims are not required to meet Popperian falsifiability criteria — concedes the core of Hossenfelder’s point while denying that the concession is damaging. Whether this is sufficient is a matter of active debate.

A second family of critiques focuses on Bostrom’s trilemma specifically. The philosopher Brian Eggleston and others have argued that the trilemma depends on an implicit fourth option Bostrom does not adequately address: that the relationship between simulators and simulated is non-standard in ways that break the probability calculation. If simulators deliberately simulate only one observer (us), or simulate many observers but weight their existence in specific ways, the indifference principle Bostrom uses to derive the probability of being simulated fails. The trilemma as usually stated assumes that every simulated observer is exchangeable with every other, and this assumption is exactly what a simulator might violate. A second technical objection is that the trilemma assumes consciousness is substrate-independent in the specific sense Bostrom requires — not merely that consciousness can arise from non-biological computation, but that it arises in the same way and at the same rate as it arises from biological computation, so that counting simulated observers makes sense. If substrate-independence is substantially weaker than Bostrom assumes, the statistical argument weakens correspondingly.

None of these critiques has persuaded a majority of the serious engagers with the hypothesis. They have, however, moved the center of gravity of the debate away from the question of whether the hypothesis is true and toward the question of whether it is well-posed.

The deeper theological question

If we are in a simulation, someone built it. Something, somewhere, decided to run the computation whose output is our experience. The question of who built the simulation, and why, is the question the simulation hypothesis shares most directly with the oldest religious and metaphysical traditions. The word for the builder, in most of those traditions, is God. The word for the motivation is usually some combination of love, curiosity, play, suffering, moral education, and cosmic process. None of these motivations translates perfectly into the vocabulary of a post-human civilization running ancestor simulations — but the translation is not as bad as it might first appear.

A post-human civilization running a historical simulation of its own past is, in some sense, in the position of a creator-god with respect to the beings inside the simulation. The simulator has authority over the physical laws of the simulated universe, the initial conditions, the distribution of suffering, and the boundary conditions that determine what the simulated beings can learn. The simulator can choose whether to intervene and when. The simulator can choose whether to preserve the simulated beings after the simulation ends, or let them be deleted with the rest of the state. The theological categories developed over thousands of years to describe the relationship between the divine and the human map onto the technological categories required to describe the relationship between simulator and simulated with surprisingly little friction. The problem of evil becomes the problem of why the simulator includes suffering in the simulation. The problem of prayer becomes the problem of whether the simulator receives and responds to signals from inside the simulation. The problem of an afterlife becomes the problem of whether the simulator archives simulated minds after the simulation ends or deletes them.

These translations are not coincidences. The traditional religious frameworks and the simulation hypothesis are asking the same question in different vocabularies: what is the relationship between the reality we experience and the ground from which it emerges? Traditional religion answered with theology. Idealism answered with consciousness as fundamental. The simulation hypothesis answers with computation. The answers are formally distinct but structurally continuous. The hypothesis is the contemporary form of the oldest question, and the fact that it now arrives in the vocabulary of computer science rather than of scripture is a feature of the culture doing the asking, not of the question itself.

What is at stake

The simulation hypothesis is not a claim whose truth or falsity can be conclusively settled by any currently imaginable experiment. It is a framework within which certain ancient questions acquire new precision and certain contemporary discoveries acquire new significance. Its value lies less in its probability — which remains profoundly contested — than in the conceptual vocabulary it provides for thinking about the relationship between information, consciousness, and physical reality.

If the hypothesis is correct, then every question in philosophy of mind, in cosmology, and in theology must be reopened. If consciousness can be simulated, then the distinction between genuine minds and artificial minds begins to dissolve, with all the moral consequences that implies. If our universe is computational, then the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is no longer unreasonable — it is definitional. If we have a simulator, then the question of death changes: the termination of the simulation is different from the termination of the simulated beings, and the simulator’s choices about what happens after the simulation ends become the central questions of eschatology. Every piece of what we thought we knew about ourselves and our world becomes provisional, subject to revision in light of the architecture of the system we are running inside of.

If the hypothesis is incorrect — if we are in base reality, the physical universe is all there is, and consciousness somehow arises from it without any simulator behind the scene — then the question of why the universe has the specific features that make it look like a simulation becomes pressing in its own right. Why is there a Planck length? Why is there a speed of light? Why does quantum mechanics look like lazy rendering? The digital physicists’ answer is that the universe is literally computational, simulated or not. The standard physicist’s answer is that these features are brute facts of how physics happens to work, and their resemblance to features of engineered simulations is coincidental. The simulation hypothesis is, in this weaker form, a hypothesis about the structure of reality regardless of whether there is a simulator behind it — the claim that reality is computational in character, not necessarily simulated in execution.

Either way, the hypothesis has reshaped the terms of the deepest questions. It takes the ancient intuition of the Gnostics and the Hindus and Plato — that the world we experience is not the world as it is — and places it in the most rigorous logical framework our civilization can offer. It allows us, for the first time, to discuss the question of whether reality is genuine or constructed without resorting to the vocabulary of religion, without committing to any specific metaphysics, and without leaving the domain of things that can be analyzed with the tools of probability theory and physics. The question of whether we live in a simulation is not settled, and may never be. The question of how to live, given that we cannot rule it out, is beginning to become one of the central questions of our time.

Sources

Bostrom, Nick. “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255, 2003. Link

Bostrom, Nick. Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Routledge, 2002. (The statistical framework underlying the simulation argument.)

Chalmers, David J. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. W. W. Norton, 2022.

Beane, Silas R., Davoudi, Zohreh, and Savage, Martin J. “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation.” European Physical Journal A, Vol. 50, No. 148, 2014. arXiv

Kipping, David. “A Bayesian Approach to the Simulation Argument.” Universe, Vol. 6, No. 8, August 2020. Link

Zuse, Konrad. Rechnender Raum. Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1969. (English translation: Calculating Space, MIT Technical Translation, 1970.)

Fredkin, Edward. “Digital Mechanics: An Informational Process Based on Reversible Universal Cellular Automata.” Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Vol. 45, pp. 254-270, 1990.

Wheeler, John Archibald. “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links.” Proceedings III International Symposium on Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989.

’t Hooft, Gerard. The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Springer, 2016.

Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, 2002.

Wolfram, Stephen. “Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful.” Wolfram Physics Project announcement, April 14, 2020.

Wigner, Eugene P. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 1-14, 1960.

Gates, S. James Jr. “Symbols of Power: Adinkras and the Nature of Reality.” Physics World, June 2010.

Virk, Rizwan. The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game. Bayview Books, 2019.

Tegmark, Max. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Knopf, 2014.

Hossenfelder, Sabine. “The Simulation Hypothesis Is Pseudoscience.” BackReAction, February 13, 2021. Link

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. 1641. (First Meditation on the evil demon is the historical ancestor of the hypothesis.)

Plato. Republic, Book VII (the allegory of the cave), c. 380 BC.

Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge University Press, 1981. (Chapter 1: “Brains in a Vat,” the modern philosophical formulation of the skeptical scenario.)

Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: “Is the Universe a Simulation?” American Museum of Natural History, April 5, 2016. Panelists: Neil deGrasse Tyson (moderator), Lisa Randall, Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, James Gates, David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi.

Musk, Elon. Remarks at Code Conference, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, June 2, 2016. (The “one in billions” formulation that brought the hypothesis into mainstream public discussion.)

Hanson, Robin. “How to Live in a Simulation.” Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 7, 2001. Link

Terrile, Rich. Interview in Vice, “Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?” February 2012. (NASA JPL scientist articulating the simulation hypothesis in the context of computational cosmology.)

Connections

Consciousness (see Mind) — If we live in a simulation, consciousness might be a programmed feature, and whether simulated consciousness is real consciousness is the deepest question the hypothesis raises

The Fermi Paradox (see Cosmos) — If our universe is a simulation, the reason we see no aliens might simply be that they were never included in the program

The Hard Problem (see Mind) — The simulation hypothesis makes the hard problem even harder: if consciousness can be simulated, does simulated experience count as real experience?

The Hermetic Tradition (see Origins) — The Gnostics and Hermeticists claimed thousands of years ago that the visible world is a constructed illusion, which is essentially the same idea as the simulation hypothesis in ancient language

The Mandela Effect — If reality is a simulation that gets updated, the Mandela Effect could be people remembering things from before a patch was applied

Sacred Geometry (see Origins) — If reality is computed, the recurring mathematical constants in sacred geometry could be the underlying code showing through, like seeing the math behind a video game’s graphics

CERN & The Large Hadron Collider — If reality is computational, CERN’s LHC — producing the highest collision energies ever generated — is the closest thing to a probe capable of forcing the engine past its rendering resolution. Testing the limits of the standard model is structurally identical to testing whether the simulation will glitch under sufficient computational stress.

Descartes & Cartesian Dualism (see Mind) — Descartes’ evil demon in the 1641 Meditations is the direct philosophical ancestor of Bostrom’s argument — a systematic deceiver feeding a mind fabricated experiences. Bostrom replaces the demon with a computer and the metaphysics with probability, but the structure of the skeptical scenario is identical.

The Nature of Time — If reality is computed, time is necessarily discrete — a sequence of simulation ticks rather than a continuous flow. The Planck time interval would be the fundamental clock cycle, and questions about what time ‘is’ collapse into questions about how the underlying engine advances its state.

Kant & Transcendental Idealism (see Mind) — Kant’s distinction between phenomena (how things appear) and noumena (things in themselves) is the same structural split the simulation hypothesis makes between rendered experience and whatever substrate produces it. Both frameworks deny direct access to the real.