Articles like this one, make FE look retarded, and purposefully so. Full stop. 

Also, note lines like this from the article, "Sometimes it’s more fun not to do your research." 

The Fake Moon Rock, housed at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and which has been observed under false pretenses  by "tens of thousands" of visitors every day, according to Telegraph.uk, is in fact a "Fugazi!" 

According to ABC.com, "The discovery of a fake moon rock in the Netherlands' national museum should be a wake-up call for more than 130 countries that received gifts of lunar rubble from both the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 and Apollo 17 three years later."

There is a deep irony in my being able to reference Donny Brasco, a film where Johnny Depp plays Don the Jeweler, who becomes a "fake mobster" saying, "Why don't you go home and give it to your wife or something. What I'm saying is, give it to someone who doesn't know any better because that's a fugazi."

Meanwhile Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Armstrong remain "fake astronauts", and as more and more proof floods in, will be seen as the pawns they are, in a larger scheme. Of course it hurts to hear something is a fake. That's don't make it real, so why don't you take your moon rocks NASA and go home and give it to your wives or something? 

"It's a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone," said Frank Beunk, a geologist involved in the investigation.

A Flat Earth Thesis has allegedly been underway since 2011 from the University of Sfax, however it appears to be fabricated, a "shell paper" created to generate a litany of public ignominy rooted in perpetuating Scientism as oppositional to Flat Earth Thinking across Academia, Science, and Religion. 

The student is named as Amira Kharroubi, she has a paper thin LinkedIn Page, which basically only cites one area of study: geology, and that she'd been a studying at The University of Sfax since 2011, and 13 posts on Facebook since 2009 (for some reason you have to be logged in to view). I sent her a message asking if she were the student whom authored the paper but have not heard a reply.

The advisor's name is, Jamel Touir, he is the former Director of the Constitution Assembly of Tunisia, (the group that helped re-write the Constitution in Tunisia back in 2011), he claimed his student's Constitutional right to explore the idea, and defended her by saying it was only a "rough draft". Despite the Professor's point that the paper has not yet gone under review, he co-authored this 6 page "preliminary results" version which purports to have been published back in August of 2016 (Volume 4, Issue 8) in The Journal of Science and Technoledge, but which was only uploaded 3 weeks ago, on yumpoo.com, at the start of this whole shit storm. As of today, April 30th, 2017, it as 7773 views. ​(Click image to keep reading.)

A shitty misspelled six page "draft" of a PhD engenders the condemnation of the Tunisian Astronomical Society, The University of Sfax, the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education, and an Op-Ed by an Astrophycisist who worked for NASA. Is such activity warranted? Doesn't this seem a bit over-reactionary? Is it possible the reaction is the desired imprint of this story? Let's find out.

Reports have come in that a doctoral candidate from the University of Sfax, Tunisia, under Professor Jamel Touir, former deputy at the National Constituent Assembly, presented a Flat Earth thesis entitled, The Flat Earth Model, Arguments and Impacts on Climate and Paleo-Climate Studies, which claims, "all the data and the physical religious arguments have made it possible to demonstrate the central position, the fixation and the flattening of the surface of the earth, and the revolution of the sun and moon around it." After sustaining serious blow-back, possibly incited by a former president of the Tunisian Astronomical Society whom an early copy of the paper was leaked to, Professor Jamel Touir stands by his student defending both of their constitutional rights to 'freedom of thought' and 'academic freedom'. Professor Touir also notes that for this constitutional exercise he is now 'the object of a malicious campaign, damaging his reputation and his scientific skills."  

The question herein is did Professor Jame Touir oversee a Flat Earth PhD Thesis since 2011, and if so, why can't anyone read it or know who wrote it? (Click image for more).