Hey, my older brother actually sprang these arguments on me when I was a kid! Well, really what he did was proclaim that he believed the Earth was flat and then asked me to prove him wrong. Then I got frustrated as he shot down all of my arguments. I told him that when the Apollo astronauts looked back at the Earth from the moon they saw it was a sphere (and we saw it as well, live on TV). He said that was all staged, and wouldn't listen to my feeble arguments about how grand a conspiracy that would entail (not that I knew the word conspiracy at the time.) Then I told him that in a lunar eclipse the shadow of the Earth was round against the moon. He said that just proved it was a flat disk. I told him that people had sailed around the world without falling off. He replied: "You don't know that; maybe they have fallen off the Earth for all you know." That's probably all I could come up with at the time, and in conclusion he said I had failed miserably to disprove him (although he didn't really believe the Earth was flat).
It was a good lesson to learn at a young age (albeit delivered in the high-handed fashion of an older brother): if people want to believe something they will find ways to dismiss all arguments to the contrary, no matter how reasonable those arguments may seem to the non-believers. So I have learned to state the facts as I know them, and then not be surprised (or hurt) when people don't abandon their beliefs on the basis of those facts. In any case I've done my duty by informing them, and the rest is up to them.
You probably just made that entire story up.....