"If you will forgive my use of the term 'global'", he says.Īnd for the casual observer, it is hard to accept that all of this is not some bizarre 21st Century jape. Mr Davis says he is currently creating an "online information repository" to help to bring together local Flat Earth communities into a "global community". Mr McIntyre estimates "there are thousands", but "without a platform for communication, a head-count is almost impossible", he says. So how many flat-earthers are around today? Neither Mr Davis nor Mr McIntyre can say. Mr McIntyre, who describes himself as having been "raised a globularist in the British state school system", says the reactions of his friends and family to his new beliefs vary from "sheer incredulity to the conviction that it's all just an elaborate joke". "Obviously it isn't perfectly flat thanks to geological phenomena like hills and valleys. "The Earth is, more or less, a disc," he states. James McIntyre, a British-based moderator of a Flat Earth Society discussion website, has a slightly different take. "And it is at least 9,000 kilometres deep", he adds. Mr Davis now believes "the Earth is flat and horizontally infinite - it stretches horizontally forever". "We humans seem to be pleased with just accepting what we are told, no matter how much it goes against our senses."
"I came to realise how much we take at face value," he says. Mr Davis, a 25-year-old computer scientist originally from Canada, first became interested in flat earth theory after "coming across some literature from the Flat Earth Society a few years ago". "Many use the term 'flat-earther' as a term of abuse, and with connotations that imply blind faith, ignorance or even anti-intellectualism." "People are definitely prejudiced against flat-earthers," says John Davis, a flat earth theorist based in Tennessee, reacting to the new Microsoft commercial. On the internet and in small meeting rooms in Britain and the US, flat earth believers get together to challenge the "conspiracy" that the Earth is round.
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