CBS sees surge in US Flat Earthers who say there’s no rover on Mars: ‘Most people think we’re idiots’

CBS News recently spoke to a group of so-called Flat Earthers who believe that the scientific community has pulled off a great hoax by claiming that the world is in the shape of a globe.

In a segment that aired on CBS Sunday Morning, reporter Brook Silva-Braga interviewed a group of people who are trying to prove that the world is flat and that a wall of ice around the perimeter is containing all of the sea water.

"Probably most people who hear about it will laugh at it, think we're idiots," Flat Earth believer Patricia Steere told CBS News. "We're not idiots. We're intelligent people from all walks of life and all ages."

According to Steere, photos of the Earth from space are "completely and utterly false." She believes that the Sun and the Moon are "probably about the same size." And she said that photos of astronauts are always "completely fake."

"We didn't go to the Moon," Steere explained. "And we don't have a rover on Mars. And we didn't do a fly-by of Pluto. And we've never been to space! Period."

"It's a giant game of chess and, we -- all of us in humanity -- are the pawns," she added. "Part of the whole fodder thing is keeping us locked down, not knowledgable about who we are, who we really are as people and what we're capable of."

But national security expert Tom Nichols told CBS News that the Flat Earth trend is part of a bigger problem.

"People have lost faith in experts," he said. "We've developed a kind of reverse snobbery that says, if you have a great deal of education, if you're at a well-known institution, by definition, you must be a liar."

"Younger people will say, 'The internet is a big library,'" he continued. "That's wrong. The internet is a big dumpster. There's no guarantee that anything you find on it is true."

Silva-Braga also spoke to Flat Earther Michael Hughes, who shot himself 6,000 feet high in a rocket to prove the Earth has no curvature.

"I just want people to question everything," Hughes said. "Question what your congressman's doing, your city council, question what really happened during the Civil War, what happened during 9/11."

Hughes vowed to take another rocket trip to the edge of space.

"I expect to see a flat disc up there," he insisted.

Watch the video below from CBS News.