No, that’s not the problem. I’ve been working with this setup for almost a year and the blue is red and red is blue behavior is about a week old. Very closely look at the sphere that’s drawn and you’ll see a gray line of lattitude. That’s the equator. Without blendMode(), you won’t see through an image and won’t see the equator. To show this, I took an earth.jpg image and load that instead of alphatest.png. I comment out the blendMode(SCREEN) and the blue ocean in earth.jpg is now red. The lat and lon are now red because I used GoToLoop’s workaround, but the equator is not visible, thus the image loses transparency without blendMode().
GoToLoop provided a link to Endianness and JDK 11. I ran java -version and javac -version. It says my jre is 1.8 and my jdk is the same, 1.8. I suppose the java.nio.ByteOrder is not unique to Java SE 11, or I couldn’t import it but I’m not sure “Alice”. 
Here’s a screenshot showing that blendMode(SCREEN) provides transparency. The land masses in the Northern Hemisphere would not be visible unless the earth.jpg is transparent, as provided by blendMode().
