Flat Earth 101*

ON A MUGGY Thursday last August, I joined 250 researchers and other attendees at West Edmonton Mall’s Fantasyland Hotel to learn about new findings in a field of geography many have deemed dangerous, others groundbreaking.

- Omar Mouallem

Though conference speakers would shy away from using the S-word (too many negative connotations), they were ready to present science proving everything we know about the Earth — its shape, size, position in the solar system and the whole damn system itself — is wrong. The research was so breathtaking that some had brought their child ren and grandparents to hear it. We arrived at 8 a.m. to collect our name tags and itineraries for the two-day conference. Many were thrilled to see that the first presenter was none other than Mark Sargent, arguably the reason we were here. For he had almost singlehandedly caused a resurgence of the ancient and beleaguered Flat Earth Sciences.

“People are wondering, what is going on?” Robbie Davidson, organizer of Canada’s first Flat Earth International Conference, said proudly during his words of welcome. “How in the world, in 2018, can so many people be questioning something as simple as the Earth?”

In short, on Feb. 10, 2015, Sargent, a Washington-based former software consultant, uploaded “Flat Earth Clues Introduction,” the first video on his YouTube channel, which now has nearly 65,000 subscribers. It created a Cambrian explosion of amateur scientists conducting observable, repeatable experiments supporting the theory that we live on a stationary disc inside of a pressurized system (which gives us the illusion of gravity), encircled by the Antarctic ice walls (which contain our oceans), beneath a physical dome (beyond which there isn’t much else other than the Creator). As for the sun, moon and stars, they may either hang from the ceiling or are projected upon it; the science is incomplete. The Flat Earth community, which numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, can’t agree on all worldly matters — not even that the Earth is, well, flat. But they’re dead certain it’s not a globe.