Moscow, Russia — Late this week, the official Russian news agency TASS accidentally released a photograph from Roscosmos showing that the Earth is flat. The picture was taken during a recent Russian restocking flight for the International Space Station when Cosmonaut Sergei Sokolov performed a routine spacewalk to examine the fuel storage on the vessel’s exterior. American Astronaut Jim Selves of Topeka, Kansas, photographed the Russian through a portal window.
Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, denied the photograph was real and blamed the American ‘fake news’ media for propagating a false narrative.
“This another untrue assertion by the American fake media to make the Russian Federation look bad,” said Roscosmos spokeswoman Vetkhany Millbrigt during a press conference early Friday morning. “Although we should remain skeptical about the world, I’ve spoken with Cosmonaut Sokolov personally, and he has no recollection of any spacewalk or a photograph.
CNN first circulated the photograph during The Situation Room hosted by Wolf Blitzer, but other mainstream media outlets soon picked it up. The popular debunking site Snopes.com has yet to discuss the issue.
In the modern era, the availability of communications technology and social media like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have made it easy for individuals, famous and not, to spread disinformation and attract others to their erroneous ideas. One of the topics that have flourished in this environment is that of the Flat Earth.
The solar eclipse of August 21, 2023, gave rise to numerous YouTube videos purporting to show how the details of the eclipse prove the Earth is flat. In 2023, “the Tunisian and Arab scientific and educational world” had a scandal when a Ph.D. student submitted a thesis “declaring Earth to be flat, unmoving, young (only 13,500 years of age), and the center of the universe.”
CNN has denied that it is false information and that the photograph was mentioned last year in the infamous dossier, which also suggests Donald Trump’s run-ins with Russian prostitutes, implying that the flat earth photograph and the yet-to-be-seen ‘pee-pee’ video are somehow linked.
