Sailing to the Ends of Sanity and a Flat Earth

We don’t quite get websites that intentionally run bogus stories. Well, okay, some ‘articles’ are amusing and we guess that sells ads. But these days, journalism is having a tough enough time with credibility without throwing gasoline onto the fire. Our two cents:

One of the latest tall tales to make the rounds — again  — involves sailing . . . or actually doesn’t because the story is bunk. But perhaps it might have popped up on your radar (as it did ours) recently, so we thought it deserved a mention. Here’s a quick review.

A 68-year-old California man named Irvin Walters has gone missing in the Southern Ocean after departing Sydney, Australia, back in November. The retired trucker believes the Earth is flat and intended to sail his boat to the ‘edge of the disc’ where he would take pictures to prove it to all the doubters. (In the interest of full disclosure, that includes us.)

Supposedly, in addition to all the Australian Navy and Coast Guard assets looking for him, the US, New Zealand and the Philippines have also contributed to the search for Walters — who, if any of this was real, would presumably be somewhere in the Southern Ocean.

Which must be costing them a fortune, since this story first appeared on another bogus website in 2018. So what is that, 16 months and counting?

One of the sites shows an old bearded guy on a boat that doesn’t look as if it could make it across a lake, much less an ocean. We have no idea who the guy in the photo really is. There are certainly numerous American men named Irvin Walters. Whether he is actually one of them is unclear.

We’re not going to tell you the websites where this nuttiness appeared for the simple reason that we don’t want to give them any more attention. We’re telling you on the outside chance you might see it and believe it for more than two seconds. (If you really want to see it, Google.) For the record, we don’t think there’s anything funny about it at all.

As if things couldn’t get any weirder, and once again proving that truth is far stranger than fiction, several ‘legitimate’ websites ran stories last year reporting that the Flat Earth International Conference had announced their “biggest, boldest, best adventure yet: a Flat Earth cruise scheduled for 2020.”

Yes, a cruise – on a cruise ship – to the literal end of the earth, where some believe that a giant ice wall ‘holds the oceans in.’ A spokesperson for the FEIC (which is real) has debunked this story as rumor that — like so much other junk on the internet — has taken on a life of its own. There may be a conference aboard a cruise ship at some point this year, he said, but the ship is not headed to the edge.

Bottom line: don’t believe everything you read . . . well, except that the world is round. You can believe that.