Tyler Owens has some interesting (?) thoughts on the cosmos.
The Texas Tech defensive back raised eyebrows Thursday while speaking to reporters at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis. At one point during the event, Owens revealed he didn’t believe in outer space and thought the flat-earth conspiracy theory had a few “valid points.”
“Nah, I don’t believe in space,” Owens said in a video shared by Brent Sobleski of the Bleacher Report. “I’m real religious, so I think we’re alone right now. I don’t think there’s other planets and other stuff like that. I don’t know.”
He continued: “I used to believe in the heliocentric thing. Like, we used to revolve around the sun and stuff, but then I started seeing flat Earth stuff, and I was like, that’s kind of interesting. And they started bringing up some valid points, so… I mean, I don’t know. It could be real. It could be bull. I don’t know.”
Naturally, Owens’ comments resulted in some heavy criticism — and tons of jokes —on social media.
Owens isn’t the only athlete who’s expressed skepticism about the Earth and outer space. Boston Celtics’ Kyrie Irving received backlash several years ago for peddling the flat earth conspiracy theory. The NBA guard was roasted over his comments, but later revealed he was simply trolling.
“Look, look. Here it is. All I want to do is be able to have that open conversation,” he said during a 2017 interview on The Toucher and Rich Show. “It was all an exploitation tactic. It literally spun the world — your guy’s world — it spun it into a frenzy and proved exactly what I thought it would do in terms of how all this works. It created a division, or, literally stand up there and let all these people throw tomatoes at me, or have somebody think I’m somehow a different intellectual person because I believe that the earth is flat and you think the world is round. It created exactly that.”
