There's a flat-earther called Kate Shemirani who in some kind of podcast has said this:
"Do you think it's a globe hurtling through space? I don't anymore because I worked for British Airways for 10 years on long haul and I met quite a few pilots who said it's not a globe, but we can't talk about it."
It should be quite obvious that no British Airways pilot would ever, or has ever said that, at least not seriously. So what exactly is happening here? There are many possibilities:
1) She's a actually not a flat-earther and she's actually trolling the guy she's interviewing (who is a bona fide flat-earther.) It's all just a social experiment or some kind of prank on stupid flat-earthers. Who knows, maybe she hasn't even worked for British Airways at all and is making it all up to make fun of the flat-earther.
2) She is a flat-earther and she is consciously and deliberately lying through her teeth in order to promote the conspiracy theory. Wouldn't be the first time that flat-earthers (and other conspiracy theorists) just make stuff up and blatantly lie for the cause.
3) She is semi-intentionally lying using rationalizations to justify it.
This actually happens surprisingly often, not just among flat-earthers but among all kinds of conspiracy theorists and peddlers of woo (such as UFO believers, which is one of the quintessential examples of exactly this kind of behavior and thinking.)
What kind of rationalizations? Those of the kind of: "Ok, maybe I have not myself witnessed this directly, but I might just well have because I know it happens all the time. It's so ubiquitous and so certain that for all intents and purposes it is as if I had myself directly witnessed it, so it's a 'lie in name only', it's just technicalities. For all intents and purposes it's the truth."
(A good amount of people who claim having witnessed extraterrestrial visitors in person, or having been abducted, are actually doing this exact thing, using this exact rationalization at some level, consciously or semi-subconsciously.)
4) She is projecting someone else's (alleged) experience onto herself.
This, too, happens all the time, in the same way as the previous one. She may have heard someone tell that kind of story, and later she has "projected" the alleged event onto herself, as if it had happened to her. This may be a case of similar rationalization (ie. "it might just as well have happened to me for all intents and purposes") or, alternatively, an outright false memory (ie. she later incorrectly remembers the event that she was told as having happened to her directly.)
5) She imagined it and is now having a false memory.
Again, happens all the time: Someone imagines an event (perhaps out of the blue, or as a mental picture when reading or hearing a description of events), and then much later she incorrectly remembers it as an actual event that happened to her, forgetting that it was just her imagining the event in her head.
6) She inadvertently misinterpreted what one pilot said (and later attributed it to several pilots.) Again, happens all the time, to all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, both mundane and ridiculous. The pilot might have spoken in an unclear manner, or using obscure aviation jargon, or saying something else entirely in a different context, and she misunderstood what he was saying. The "but we can't talk about it" was most probably added to that by her own imagination later.
7) She deliberately misinterpreted what one pilot said (perhaps in response to some question of hers), and later it became "a few pilots". She added her own interpretation to the pilot's words, probably opportunistically and in bad faith, she "read between the lines", she put words in the pilot's mouth. She probably completely invented the "but we can't talk about it" part.
8) Some pilot might have been joking. She took it seriously.
9) Some pilot might have actually been talking about flat-earthers and the flat Earth conspiracy theory. She essentially quote-mined the pilot, extracting the few tidbits and isolating them from the context (which was that the pilot was actually laughing at or criticizing the entire concept of a flat Earth.) And, of course, one pilot became "a few" in her retelling of the story.
10) Some pilot was actually trolling her, making fun of her, making some kind of prank to mock her or make her be ridiculous and laughable if she took it seriously.
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