I'm just going to weigh in on this once and I applaud your article @kerriknox. I know the odd luddite who would call us ballers ! I have a couple of things to add.

The Ancient Greeks

Thousand of years ago they worked out that the Earth was a spheroid based on calculations of the length of shadows at different latitudes with readings taken at the same time of day. Using mathematics they averaged out a curvature which gave the answer, it's round.

THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT

The Flat Earth Hoax Theory was and is designed by very clever people as an ontological experiment to explore how far people's credulity can be stretched, how far can a conspiracy theory be twisted to create a sense of confusion. It's a sick joke on the people and it's core irony is that it brought back from the dead an idea hundreds of years old and defunct. (thousands if you count the anecdote above) The idea was solely to test the boundaries of incredulity and pour scorn on the kind of people who routinely don't believe the diet of lies they are fed on a daily basis. It was a get back in the box trick. If you seek the truth and you fell for this, they got you, they won this round, you no longer count. you took the sucker punch. Better luck next time.

There are plenty of really dark things going on on this beautiful ball of rock. hurtling through space. Many things which were considered conspiracies later turned out to have a large element of truth in them. It's human nature to control and in this respect there are many conspiracies hiding partial truths and others masking deceit in the most wicked and corruptible ways.
take your pick.

###The obvious ones
are well known and very mysterious. Does anyone really know who killed JFK and why? Aliens and UFO's. The Twin Towers, Out of Place Artefacts.. there are fun ideas and there are nefarious ones. Some conclusions are so difficult to swallow we choose to ignore them, they are well hidden and profited from.

I even saw yesterday an interesting conspiracy

(on steemit) a video clip claiming that the shooting in Vegas was carried out by more than one person. the video purported to show automatic gunfire coming from the 4th floor window of the Mandalay bay. The implication was that it was a false flag attack.. the reasoning, that the anti-gun lobby (someone ?) would deliberately kill and injure 100's of people in an attempt to get bump stocks banned.. it was a country music festival. hey, country music supporters are known to be 2nd amendment supporters right ? the musician who was playing suddenly denounced gun ownership after years of supporting the right to bear arms. it's not a huge stretch of the imagination is it? We are by nature, curious pattern recognisers with a smattering of healthy suspicion and hints of superstition. we are the survivors of history. WE can confabulate incredible from mundane, sometimes we stumble inadvertently into the truth.. Ok so let's just play this one out for the numbers...

A Bump Stock

..turns a semi-automatic weapon into an almost fully automatic assault weapon of military capability. It's interesting that the news report the day before in the Guardian newspaper quoted a witness as saying it seemed like the gunfire was coming from different directions.. to be honest, I don't care if this conspiracy theory is true or not. I'm smart enough to ponder, would it be feasible? yes.. who would have a vested interest ? someone who wanted bump stocks banned. who would that be ? people in authority.. (they have automatic weapons) which gives them a tactical advantage in cases of severe civil unrest. would I agree with their viewpoint ? probably yes. I don't think the public should be allowed to carry automatic assault weapons. I live in the UK, nobody is allowed to carry a gun without a very SPECIAL license.. some police are armed and generally not many people are killed by guns in a population of 60 million.. about 100 per year compared to the USA: 33,612 in 2014

The Earth is Round

GPS satellites aside, the flat earthers will tell you that the moon is projected hologram. what the f*ck is the sun then ? a million watt light bulb. They'll also tell you the milky way is a giant back projection and cassini didn't really explore saturn. I've seen Jupiters's moons with my own eyes and I've photographed deep space. I can tell you, the billions of stars which make up the disc of our galaxy. They are out there. The flat Earth theory is so ridiculous it makes me laugh.. it's designed to make you look stupid and cast a huge shadow of stupidity over those who choose to investigate a plethora of mysteriously off hidden truth. It's dark, very very dark