This falls under the heading “You can’t make this stuff up!” The Denver Post published: A Colorado pastor thought he could make flat-Earthers see the light in Antarctica. It didn’t work. – Noelle Phillips, January 17, 2025. The story opens this way:
Colorado pastor Will Duffy’s obsession with the flat-Earth conspiracy theory began with a longtime friend’s post on Facebook.
A quick direct message led to a months-long debate between Duffy and his friend, who held the archaic and false belief that our planet is a flat disc.
Three years later, after immersing himself in the conspiracy online, Duffy thought he could end the debate for everyone by traveling to Antarctica to livestream 24 straight hours of sunlight. The phenomenon occurs because the Earth’s Southern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun as the planet rotates around it, and Antarctica is at its closest point to the sun on the rotation. Flat-Earth believers do not believe this happens.
Duffy launched a YouTube channel called “The Final Experiment” to promote the trip, then invited flat-Earthers and well-known “globers” — people who understand the Earth is round — to accompany him this past December on a four-day stay on the continent.
“I decided that is it. That will solve this once and for all,” Duffy said in an interview this month. “We need to go to Antarctica. I need to take a flat-Earther or two with me and see the 24-hour sun and then this whole thing is over. So that began the journey of ‘The Final Experiment.’
Duffy went to Antarctica with four “globers” and four “flat-Earthers,” and, sure enough, it was light for 24 hours straight, captured on camera and broadcast live. The result was the Flat-Earth Society no longer exists, and all the Flat-Earthers have renounced their folly. Oops. No such luck.
The article continues:
Duffy was correct about the 24-hour sun. But he was wrong in believing he could bring an end to the flat-Earth conspiracy.
Now, the 41-year-old pastor of a Wheat Ridge church is at center of a global firestorm among flat-Earthers, who are flooding social media with ideas on how to debunk “The Final Experiment” by picking apart camera angles, shadows and footprints…
“The flat Earth community is imploding,” Duffy said. “They cannot decide what to believe. They’ve all come up with their own conspiracies.”
You can read the article in its entirety, including the part about an Alabama pastor “…preaching that Satan was involved in the deception.”
The flat-earthers are attacking Duffy’s credibility or coming up with odd theories like “they filmed the trip in a studio, a dome or a sphere similar to the live-music venue in Las Vegas…”
Duffy had at least one convert:
But one person who is changing his mind is Jaren Campanella, a well-known flat-Earth believer who has produced YouTube videos under the name Jarenism for almost 10 years and who traveled with Duffy to Antarctica.
Campanella told The Post he is going to “step away” from the flat-Earth community.
He said the flat-Earth map that he used, called the azimuthal equidistant map, would not be legitimate if a 24-hour sun existed. Once he saw it with his own eyes, he realized his theory no longer worked.
“Even if I don’t feel like I’m on a sphere, even if I don’t feel like I’m upside down, even if I don’t feel like I’m flying through space, the flat Earth doesn’t work for me,” Campanella said. “I couldn’t go on once I knew it was not the case…”
I sent the article to Seth Godin, a marketer who writes a daily blog on a variety of common-sense subjects, telling him the story looked like something he would write about. He replied simply:
no cure for intentional blindness, I’m afraid – Seth Godin
An atheist friend told me once, “If Jesus Christ stood in front of this car right now and told me he was God, I wouldn’t believe him.”
Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. 2 Corinthians 4.1 – 4, NKJV)