COVID HOAX. Those were the words written in the parking lot of the Walmart in chalk. A man who matched the description of Patrick Burke was seen on the property.
There was a man in the security footage writing something on the ground.
A man matching the same description had been seen on the property before.
Although, people doing odd things like scrawling in chalk on public or private places isn’t really that big of a deal in Denton, Texas.
Denton has always had a quirky nature as a town. We love jazz music and festivals. Interesting mom-and-pop stores in our square. A place where people feel comfortable enough to leave their laptop and drink unattended at their table at Jupiter House Coffee while they go to the restroom.
We do things a little different here, and if you ask any of us we’ll tell you about Patrick Burke.
Not by name of course, but by description. He’s the “flat-Earth guy.” The one who drives around town in the broken down old hatchback covered in stickers with the giant American flag.
Patrick likes to express himself via his vehicle.
“EARTH IS FLAT” is posted on the back of the old hatchback in stickers — one “EARTH” bumpersticker plus some single letters that spell out “IS FLAT” (with the “S” upside down). It is unclear whether he thinks that the Earth is a work of art or if it was simply the only sticker he could find.
Combined with the flags and stickers is the shoe polish paint that covers most of the windows and some of the car itself, mostly stating that the world is flat and that’s a fact.
Honestly, as a bystander, I can’t help but feel like the implication of all this pageantry is that we are all suckers and he’s the only one in the know.
Like maybe he feels like he is the freed prisoner who has left the cave to see the sun, while we are the ones who are doomed to watch the world unfold as a pantomime on a cavernous wall.
He is somewhat of a celebrity here.
And while we all know his thoughts on the nature of the Earth (flat), I have to say I was a bit taken aback when I drove by his house (not inconspicuous) and saw sprawled on his lawn (amongst everything else that was sprawled there) a sign that read “REFUSE THE MASK COVID = SCAM.”
“Oh, come on now flat-Earth guy,” I thought to myself. “The coronavirus too?”
I wasn’t sure what to think. We were still in the midst of a pandemic, up is down, left is right, and now flat-Earth guy is just some general conspiracy guy… this was upsetting for some reason.
Before starting this journey, my impression of Patrick was always that he has a lot of passion and that his ultimate goal is to help the world be a more knowledgeable place. That whatever you think about his theories, his heart is coming from a place of good intentions.
I had to get to the bottom of this quandary about Patrick. I felt that this new revelation pushed me to find out if my hunch about this human was correct. I needed to confirm my own intuition, my own gut, and so I began my search for Patrick.
Turns out though, that for someone who parades around town like he does, Patrick is a pretty tough person to get a hold of.
You would think he would have an active Facebook page, but I couldn’t find one. I did find a general Flat Earth Denton page, so I sent them a message saying I wanted to get in touch with Patrick, but I didn’t have high hopes for it.
I asked the woman taking my order at Jupiter House if he ever came in there. She said he didn’t, but he came around the square every once in a while. Well, I like coffee and reading, so I decided that I would hang out outside and wait to see if he showed up. He didn’t. Not that day or the next one that I sat there.
I did some more digging and found that, for someone who now seems so private, he has a lot of information out there about himself including a movie on Amazon Prime titled “FLAT!”.
Who is this person?! Who drives around town with a car like that, but then doesn’t have a way to contact him? Who is Patrick Burke?
I feel like this search is now meandering into new territory, adding genuine curiosity. Now I really must know.
I found a local newspaper article that talked about the incidents with the chalk in the parking lots of some major stores, one in fact, that I had personally seen outside of the Aldi on University around that same time.
I messaged the reporter on Twitter looking for contact information with no luck, so I sent her an email.
Also to no avail.
I realized that I was going to have to dig a little deeper down the rabbit hole to get what I needed. The article had quoted from a police report about the incident, so I figured that there would be a copy of that available. If the Denton Record Chronicle reporter found it, then so could I.
I looked up the number for the Denton County Clerk’s office and dialed it. A woman answered who was quite nice and I explained that I was looking for a police report about Patrick Burke, one that entailed the writing of “COVID HOAX” in chalk on the ground in some parking lots around town.
She needed more information, so I gave her his address only to find that none of the reports had that address connected to it.
Another dead end it looked like. What is with this guy and why am I feeling the need to continue this journey of finding him?
I thought about the answer to that question and why I wanted to talk to him so much. A lot has already been said about Patrick through radio shows, independent Denton films, his own words on the square - but I felt like this wasn’t his story. The story of the Earth being flat or not is not the story of Patrick Burke. Why does he still do this and where did the switch happen between the Earth being flat to COVID-19 is fake?
This is the journey I was on, and if I was being honest with myself, I felt like it wasn’t just about Patrick. I needed to justify myself to myself. To prove that I was right, or at least if I was wrong find out why.
I decided to watch “FLAT!” on Amazon. It only had a 25 -minute runtime, and let’s face it, I had the time to spare, and this might be the closest thing I ever get to an interview.
I watched the film, and the idea that he might be genuinely trying for good is somewhat echoed by what he says in it.
“I’ve done my best…to only push this cause in the cleanest, most pure way that I could come up with to try and stay out of selling anything, or profiting from any of this, because I don’t want people like you saying ‘oh he was just doing it to sell T-shirts’ or ‘he was just doing it for this or that.’”
It seems like I may be on the right track with this guy, at least I might have been before all the COVID hoax stuff.
The thought has occurred to me to just simply knock on his front door. However the thought has also occurred to me that knocking on Patrick’s front door might be inviting trouble. I really don’t think he’d do anything. Honestly, I think he’s probably a pretty sweet guy if you got to know him, but then again I don’t know Patrick and the last thing I want is to get shot through a door. I resist the urge.
I’m likely going to have to catch up with him out and about, but I’ve spent hours on the square lately and haven’t seen him.
I also now have several feelers out there for information. The only thing I can do is wait for someone to get back to me about the outgoing and outspoken, yet somehow still so elusive Patrick Burke.
My mind wondered back to Patrick as a person and his motivations for these actions that so many take for crazy or misguided.
Why did he scrawl in chalk in those parking lots? What possible help could that have been to anyone? Why did it matter so much to Patrick if people wore masks or not, that he would risk getting slapped with trespassing tickets?
I feel I am truly becoming obsessed now… he has become my white whale.
Well, as it turns out I didn't have to wait too long for a break in the story. Out of nowhere, while watching “My Name is Earl” on my phone, I hear the familiar ping! of Facebook messenger and see a little bubble of the Denton courthouse pop up on my screen. It’s a message from the Flat Earth Denton page. All it said was an email address. No text. No explanation. Just an address.
After nine days, four hours, and 21 minutes, I had what I needed.
I popped up and grabbed my laptop, and within minutes I had an email typed up and sent asking for an interview. And as excited as I am about the prospect of getting to the bottom of all my pressing questions and getting the chance to talk to Patrick in person, I’m also pretty relieved not to have to knock on his door unannounced.
I didn't have to wait long for a response. He said he thought my idea for a narrative piece was interesting, so we scheduled a meeting for Thursday at 3 p.m.
The day came and I arrived and knocked on his door, but to no answer. I checked to see if I had the right day and time and I did. I started to look around only to see his car streaking down the road.
I waved, but his face looked distressed, like maybe he had forgotten our appointment and was discouraged to see someone on his front stoop.
He parked on the side of the house and got out. I walked out to the yard to meet him.
“Hi.”
“You like jeeps?”
He had seen my Wrangler parked on the other side of the house.
“Yeah, I like jeeps.”
He smiled and nodded as if he was impressed. He said he used to have jeeps, but he didn’t anymore.
A short-haired tabby wondered up across the yard.
“Is this your cat?” I asked.
“Yeah, she just started showing up.”
Patrick explained that when she first started coming around he thought she might be pregnant so he took her to the vet. They said she was just fine and had actually been spayed already, but not before they cut a notch in her ear to make sure they would recognize her if they ever saw her again. He seemed displeased that they cut her ear even though they didn’t really need to.
“What’s her name?”
“I just call her cat.”
I laughed.
“I have a cat named Kat too, but with a ‘K.’”
“Really?” he said with a smile. “So you like jeeps and cats?”
He seemed pleased.
We went inside and I don’t know what I had imagined, but it wasn’t this. His front room was large, but empty except for two desks. One small one toward the back pushed up against a wall and the other, larger, kiddy-cornered to the front facing in. That was it.
No couch. No TV. No rug. No seating other than each desk’s respective chairs.
The room was cavernous. Our voices echoed.
There was a strong smell of smoke in the air. I could picture Patrick smoking behind the desk for hours as he contemplated his next move, although he never lit a cigarette throughout the entire two-and-a-half-hour interview.
The small desk had an array of neon-colored shoe-polish pens arranged in mostly color order, with some being misplaced.
He told me that he worked as a handy man, and I asked for a business card. He reached under the small desk for a box that surely would have had dust on it had it not been encased underneath. He grabbed a small stack and bent them in order to unstick one from the others and handed it to me.
He grabbed me the chair from the smaller desk and put it in front of the larger one. We both sat down to talk.
We had barely begun talking when he dove right into conspiracies.
The goodwill that was engendered between us with our common likes quickly dissipated into a rage about flat Earth.
Patrick would start off just talking, but he would get louder and louder until he would crescendo into a roar. He would literally shake with anger and rage as he spoke about it.
I sat quietly, across the desk in the cavernous room, and nodded as his rant transitioned from flat-Earth to the virus.
“If we get a hard copy of a medical encyclopedia from the '80s and look up coronavirus, right next to it it says ‘common cold’ right?”
He gets louder.
“So if I tell an entire population that this is a scientific matter of fact right, observable demonstrable repeatable, measurable, science fact right?"
He gets louder.
“Not a bunch of hearsay and subjective nonsense, which is all we get out of the media, Fauci, the CDC!”
He’s shaking.
“Nobody’s talking about how you need a scanning electron microscope to even allegedly see a virus. Have you ever used a scanning electron microscope? I have, right?!”
Although he is correct in that viruses are small, Patrick is missing quite a lot of information and is jumping to conclusions that either aren’t connected or he is conflating different things.
“Coronavirus” is the name of a group of different kinds of viruses named that because of how they look under a microscope. This family of viruses can include things like the common cold and this new virus, COVID-19. Patrick doesn’t seem to understand that these two are different, and he is very confused as to how this “common cold” could possibly be killing so many people — hence his disbelief in the whole idea of COVID-19 as a threat.
While they are both coronaviruses, they are not the same virus. Lone Star and Shiner are both beers; they are not the same beer.
Why a medical encyclopedia from the ‘80s is more applicable to this current pandemic than respected immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, I’m not sure I’ll ever know, however during our conversation he told me about how he first fell into this YouTube black hole he now seems utterly entrapped by. It seems like a smoking gun.
When he was about 32 or 33 he was diagnosed with diverticulitis, an intestinal infection, and he had to have a portion of his intestines surgically removed.
It was then, while he was laid up in bed, taking pain medication and unable to work, that Patrick started watching a lot of YouTube videos about flat Earth. I came to find out that this is when it all started for Patrick, when the path of his life diverted from contractor to fanatic.
He’s vibrating by this point as he continued. Eventually, though, he rampaged through all of his thoughts and came to a natural conclusion as he ran out of steam.
“Do you do yoga?” I asked.
He seemed taken aback. He looked at me for a second like he didn’t know what to do or think. His tone and volume dropped completely and lost all its harsh timbre, as if the wolf became human again.
“Uh, no, not really. I try and do the deep breathing because I obviously get a little fired up.”
He started talking about the guy who got him into flat earth again. And so the interview went like this. He would get himself revved up. It would always start off softly and then intensify until he was in tizzy about it.
I sat calmly, nodding.
In between rants I learned that he is a vegan, something he didn’t want to do at first but was convinced by a popular flat Earth personality. (He has not tried the vegan cat food yet.)
He mentioned that his grandpa had a boat and that he was a certified scuba diver. I mentioned that I love scuba diving and would very much like to get certified.
His car has been totaled three times.
While he was talking I noticed that he had writing on the wall around his front door, like little notes he made to himself. Mostly these were like pep-talks to himself, pushing him further along his path of flat-Earth advocacy.
He kept going.
“As soon as people like wearing masks, and you’re like why? And they’re like, oh, some guy in a white lab coat on TV said like to do it. So we’re all doing it now. It’s like, I don’t think I’m gonna do that. That sounds just kind of dumb.”
Of course, again, Patrick is confused about the virus. While viruses are very small, they do not travel by themselves. They are attached to water droplets in the mouth and travel on the vapor that people emit when they breath. That is why masks, even cloth ones, are effective, because they stop the spread of the water vapor containing the trapped viruses, and thus inhibit the spread.
I continued to learn more about Patrick and his life.
He has been to China and most of the states in the U.S.
He’s been to multiple NASA space centers (and trolled them), even getting offered a $60 per hour job to do carpentry work there, but Patrick said that job is for someone who doesn’t care that their money is coming from deceiving people.
He said that he spent a semester at West Point, but he thought about the fact that he was going to spend his life in a desert fighting people he didn’t know, and that was too much. He didn’t want to be that person, so he quit.
A picture of who this person truly is starts coming into view. He is a masterpiece of dichotomy. He is two people. The human being, Patrick, and the wolf-like flat Earth conspiracy advocate with the albatross around its neck (also probably flat).
I asked Patrick what kind of music he listened to, to yet another 180-degree personality shift.
“Mostly classical.”
“Favorite composer?”
“I’d have to say Vivaldi. I know that’s not very, you know, there’s a lot of Chopin people that are like, wag their finger at me right? But, I don’t know man, every time I hear some Vivaldi you just like, just I dig it.”
“Can you play an instrument?”
“I played trombone for a couple of few years…but I don’t think I can play it now.”
I told him I played baritone in middle school.
“Did you?!” His excitement startled me. "We were sitting right next to each other, man!"
Patrick is referring to the positioning of players in a band, meaning that the trombone and baritone sections are seated next to each other when playing.
This was genuine excitement from Patrick. He seemed actually happy — and happy to be so. It was a huge difference from the crazed excitement I saw when he was talking about flat Earth or other conspiracies.
It’s almost like the fake world and connections that he made via YouTube while he was recovering from surgery are like a facsimile to real life. Like he fabricated a world for his mind to live in to recreate the real human connection that he was missing, but it was all a facade. A twisted and backward copy. The Upside Down.
But the interaction that we had was like a reminder for him that real life still exists. Like real human interaction was still possible. Like an awakening. A sliver of sunlight had reached through a crack in the cave wall.
And despite the misplaced focus and activism of Patrick, he truly seemed much happier talking about literally anything else. He was so angry talking about the things he has devoted his life to, but so genuine and happy talking about anything else. Like the albatross he created for himself is slowly and unwittingly strangling him.
If I could give one piece of advice to Patrick, it would be to think about what truly makes him happy, because from what I can see it’s literally anything but what he’s doing.
In all the time we spent together, Patrick only asked me one substantial question about my life and likes, and it was about music.
“What’s your favorite music?”
Country music on the radio, but I grew up listening to a lot of punk. You wouldn’t think those two go together, but I like country and Operation Ivy.
A genuine smile glides across his face.
“Some things just have the right beat.”
That was the beginning of the end of our time together. I gathered up my things and took a couple pictures, but I was clearly heading out.
He didn’t seem like he wanted me to leave, so he kept talking. Mostly just repeating things he had already said. But I had to go.
We said our goodbyes and I thought about what I had just experienced. What had even just happened?
I looked back at what I had learned about him and realized that while we had many (many many many) differences of opinion on so many (so many) things, when we talked about regular human things like music and hobbies we actually agreed on a lot.
We both like music, we both like jeeps and cats and instruments; Scuba diving and sailing and even handy work. When you dig beneath the surface of someone, even someone who you think you would have nothing in common with, someone who is easily written off as a kook or a weirdo, you can still find similarities.
After all, we’re all human.
We’re all cut from the same cloth, just with different colors. And while it might be difficult to identify with those bright colors flashing by on an old beat up hatchback, that doesn’t give anyone the right to try and diminish or tarnish them.
That’s not to say that I agree with or think that some of Patrick’s beliefs are OK - they are not. Spreading lies about COVID-19, or any other topic that he talked about is abhorrent. But Patrick the man isn’t the sum of his beliefs, they are just a part of a whole person.
Why was Patrick almost late for our meeting by the way? Because he was trying to return a mis-labeled package of medicine to the UPS store so the correct address could be found and the woman could have her medicine. He was harangued for not wearing a mask of course, (which is absolutely wrong of him of course), but at least he was trying to do the right thing.
