The New Yorker:

People may fervently espouse symbolic beliefs, cognitive scientists say, but they don’t treat them the same as factual beliefs. It’s worth keeping track of the difference.

By Manvir Singh

Millions of people have watched Mike Hughes die. It happened on February 22, 2020, not far from Highway 247 near the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, California. A homemade rocket ship with Hughes strapped in it took off from a launching pad mounted on a truck. A trail of steam billowed behind the rocket as it swerved and then shot upward, a detached parachute unfurling ominously in its wake. In a video recorded by the journalist Justin Chapman, Hughes disappears into the sky, a dark pinpoint in a vast, uncaring blueness. But then the rocket reappears and hurtles toward the ground, crashing, after ten long seconds, in a dusty cloud half a mile away.

Hughes was among the best-known proponents of Flat Earth theory, which insists that our planet is not spherical but a Frisbee-like disk. He had built and flown in two rockets before, one in 2014 and another in 2018, and he planned to construct a “rockoon,” a combination rocket and balloon, that would carry him above the upper atmosphere, where he could see the Earth’s flatness for himself. The 2020 takeoff, staged for the Science Channel series “Homemade Astronauts,” was supposed to take him a mile up—not high enough to see the Earth’s curvature but hypeworthy enough to garner more funding and attention.

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