Despite countless photos taken from space, scientific evidence, and plain common sense, some people still incredibly think that the Earth, the world that God created, is flat.
Two NBA stars are among them—retired player Shaquille O'Neal and Cleveland Cavaliers starting point guard, according to The Christian Post.
O'Neal was the latest to reject the idea of a round earth. On his recent podcast, "The Big Podcast with Shaq," the 19-year NBA veteran, who is currently an analyst on the television programme "Inside the NBA," declared that "the Earth is flat. Yes, it is."
The NBA legend said he came to this conclusion when he drove from coast to coast. "The [expletive] looks flat to me. ... I do not go up and down on a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity. Have you looked outside of Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? So you mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It's not. The world is flat," he said.
O'Neal even disputed satellite imagery, claiming that it was "drawn and made up."
On Monday night, however, O'Neal took back his comments during the NBA on TNT broadcast, saying he was just joking.
Earlier during a Feb. 17 podcast, Irving challenged scientific evidence that the Earth is round. "This is not even a conspiracy theory. The Earth is flat," the Cleveland guard said.
"For what I've known for many years and 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 align, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what's going on with these 'planets' and stuff like this?" Irving asked.
Responding to the outrageous claims made by O'Neal, Sam Bentley, a professor of geology and geophysics at the Louisiana State University, said although it's easy to dismiss O'Neal's "joke," harm is done when "someone with Shaq's international public platform" begins "spreading blatantly false information."
"People who have a big public presence have a responsibility to be considerate of their bully pulpit when they make statements like this," Bentley told Bleacher Report.
Bill Nye the Science Guy, for his part, told Sports Illustrated that "it is really concerning when you have people in the public eye, or you have people in general who think that the Earth might not be round" because it devalues the scientific method.
Renowned astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, meantime, told TMZ that he was happy that Irving was a basketball player, not working with NASA. He joked that they should "take everybody who thinks Earth is flat and launch them into space," only agreeing to bring them all back when they admit they were wrong.
