The problem with this is when the idea gets taken over by people who aren't in on the joke. . . Remember how flat earth used to be a gag?
People were adamantly trying to prove a flat earth at least 150 years ago, and even got the co-discoverer of evolution via natural selection(Wallace) roped into the controversy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_experiment
It may have been theflatearthsociety dot org.
But maybe I remember wrong. It was that they were pretending to believe and trolling, but now as it is more serious they stopped trolling in such a way.
If you want to photograph a wide field of view, you use a fisheye lens. Humanity hasn't spent a lot of time far enough from Earth that it doesn't fill a wide field of view, although we do have some rather nice photographs from both humans and machines which have made it out that far.
It's sort of useful to have people around who just believe stuff and argue for stuff completely outside the usual scientific method just to keep people on their toes.
— René Descartes
I even remember some people in my small town getting together to talk about it.
(It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though!)
Maybe there's other factors at play, such as X-Files ending, or people getting more interested in flat earth.
> It seems aliens have wised up to the ubiquity of cameras, though
And I was listening to a Behind the Bastards podcast about the history of the Illuminati and how a lot of the modern conspiracy beliefs about the Illuminati come from the Discordian movement parodying conspiracy beliefs.
On the one hand you have to appreciate when people game so hard they manifest a zeitgeist entirely out of their own irony-poisoned fart clouds, but on the other hand we no longer have the level of education or degree of critical thinking to offset the nonsense, nor any kind of consensus reality to tether ourselves to, and the people who believe in the flat earth and Jewish space lasers are everywhere now, and that just kind of sucks.
The real problem is that we are spending a bazillion of hours on dubious philosophical amusements, while the planet is being slowly cooked with us on board.