Kyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat

MANILA, Philippines – While we can all agree that Cleveland Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving is a beast on the basketball court, we may become divisive when it comes to his particular views about planet Earth.

The 24-year-old made headlines Saturday, February 18 in Manila for expressing his belief that our own planet Earth is, indeed, flat, and not the oblate spheroid geoscientists determined it to be.

“This is not even a conspiracy theory,” Irving said in a podcast by his teammates Channing Frye and Richard Jefferson, according to Sports Illustrated. “The Earth is flat.”

“It’s right in front of our faces,” he added. “I’m telling you, it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”

ESPN’s Arash Markazi caught up to Irving to ask him the question some may have on their minds. “You’ve seen pictures of the planet though, right? Like, it’s a circle,” said Markazi. Irving responded: “I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system said was real that turned out to be completely false.”

Kyrie Irving was trending on Twitter today because he believes the Earth is flat. I asked him about it. pic.twitter.com/ODe9aP9qmK

— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) February 18, 2017

Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was known to be the first to note the Earth as spherical and not flat.

Irving continued to explain his belief, citing “particular groups” who hold the same beliefs.

“What I’ve been taught is that the earth is round. But if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that, can you really think of us rotating around the sun and all planets aligned, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these planets?”

“Because, everything that they send — or that they want to say they’re sending — doesn’t come back,” Irving added. “There is no concrete information except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe. The truth is right there, you just got to go searching for it.”

The first photo that came back to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from spacecraft Lunar Orbiter I, which orbited the moon in 1966, showed the Earth as spherical in shape from the view on the moon.

Currently, the International Space Station regularly uploads videos of their views of Earth from space on social media. There are also livestreams from space, showing the planet’s curvature.

Astronaut Jeff Williams, who spent at least 534 days in space, shows footage courtesy of a high-definition camera and talks about his experience seeing Earth from space in the video below.

I will certainly miss this view! Vast gratitude toward my crewmates, ground teams, supporting friends, and family. pic.twitter.com/op9vFyWSFT

— Jeff Williams (@Astro_Jeff) September 6, 2016

– Rappler.com