“Behind the Curve” is a 2018 documentary about flat Earth believers in the United States. It was directed by Daniel J. Clark. And although the movie is about flat-earth matters, it doesn’t necessarily depict the true flat earth reality and in fact, goes completely south. In the start of the picture the interviewers single out some of the greats of the community. Greats like Mark Sargent, Patricia Steere, Darryl Marble and a host of others. And immediately one gets the feeling that maybe we have an advocate here. WRONG! Because a funny thing happened on the way behind the curve, they lied!
That sentiment flies out the window the second the film makers decide to battle off to find a modern magician, uh, scientist excuse the connotation. From that moment on watchers are treated to exactly what most came to see… that flat-earth isn’t real. And that we are all fodder for the loonie bin.
Enter “The Experiment”
One of the main points of the film was an “experiment” conducted by researcher Stu Pedass (real name withheld) and his group “The Stu-peds” from LA conducted at the Salton Sea just East of there. Of course, in both cases the real names have been withheld to protect the innocent and to avoid making The Stu-ped’s look even stu-pider. The experiment loosely involved Mark Sargent, but only in the capacity as an observer, he was not involved with The Stu-peds because Mark is not a stupidass like Stu and his pals.
Why the Salton Sea?
The procedure involved taking a group of observers in a boat 17 miles or so across the calm and caustic lake waters of the Salton Sea. And on the shore where they shoved off, a group of people with telescopes and binoculars that will search the waters and watch to see if the boat and the giant flag aboard disappears over the curve. According to the Pythagorean theorem, which is a fundamental relation in Euclidean geometry among the three sides of a right triangle. It states that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This can also be expressed as 8 inches per mile squared. So figuratively speaking, if Earth were round the hypotenuse of the triangle could not be calculated because the Earth’s surface would get in the way. About 16 inches of water should block the sight of the flag on the boat at 8 miles out, for layperson’s.
But why the Salton Sea? Everybody knows or should know it’s history. It was poisoned by runoff from chemical fertilizers in the 60’s and made a caustic wasteland. Why the researchers chose this location is certainly suspect. Likely that they knew that by 10:00 AM that morning there would be so much haze coming off the poisoned water that it would distort and block the flag from view at just a few miles offshore.
And Mark Sargent warned them of this too… that is why he so wisely distanced himself from the experiment because he knew immediately what their motives were, to taint the results of the experiment by conducting it in an unsuitable environment. They have done exactly that, by 11:00 AM when the crew started across the water there was a black haze floating just above the surface. And it was this that caused the flag in the experiment to drop out of sight. This immediately prompted the Stu-peds and all the other stupid’s there watching to draw a mistaken conclusion. This was featured in the film as evidence the Earth is round.
Enter The Heroes
Another group of LA and San Diego researchers including our own Russell Dibird drove out there just this past week in June of 2019 to repeat the experiment that the Stu-peds wrecked. And they didn’t wait till the haze was so bad that a foghorn was needed either. They completed the experiment by following the same protocol as the one in the film, only they did their experiment at the crack of dawn. And you’ll never guess what happened… they didn’t find the curve. But then, you knew that!
