Bob Knodel

Bob Knodel (Robert Lawrence Knodel), United States Air Force veteran and co-host of the flat-earth YouTube channel GlobeBusters, who walked the 2018 documentary Behind the Curve through the group's $20,000 gyroscope experiment. He died on 6 April 2023, aged 62; his memorial service was live-streamed on YouTube on 16 April 2023.

In the documentary he walks viewers through it: 'when we turned on that gyroscope we found that we were picking up a drift. A 15 degree per hour drift... Wow, that's kind of a problem... We obviously were not willing to accept that.' Despite refinements it 'consistently behaves as if the Earth is round'. At a Denver meetup: 'We've got $20,000 in this freaking gyro. If we dumped what we found right now, it would be bad. What I just told you was confidential.' The instrument was the group's - a fiber optic gyroscope, per the group's leaked Skype chat, where co-host Rick Zimmerman reports a one-hour test of +7.4° counter-clockwise in Ashland, Ohio (the globe predicts 15° × sin 40.9° = 9.8°/hour there) and Knodel writes: 'we clearly detected rotation.' A 15°/hour drift is exactly the Earth's rotation: 360°/24 h = 15°/h. The most expensive experiment in the flat-earth community measured the rotation it was built to disprove - and his on-camera confession gave the globe side its viral phrase: 'Thanks Bob.'

Built on fiber-optic gyroscope technology - the same Sagnac-effect physics as the gyroscopes that steer aircraft and spacecraft. Enabled the film's central irony and the case card's walk: the gyroscope (this card) → Jeran's light experiment → the 2024 admission.