I'm here today to tell you that your government
is keeping you divided.
With trust in institutions in its all-time low
and the concept of objective truth seemingly harder to agree upon,
conspiracy theories are flourishing.
The people that are perpetrating this hoax and the people
that really run this world, they're not gonna let go of all that power easily.
No one has an official nomination for a trusted source of mainstream media.
The mother of all conspiracies is surely the Flat Earth.
There is no curvature on this earth, it cannot be measured.
But how do you know that you live on a globe?
Can you prove it?
I know I'm not crazy so why should I be bothered if somebody says I'm crazy?
We're not spinning around on the ball.
It's not a clear-cut line.
Does the horizon stay to your eye level?
I can't remember.
Or do you simply trust the evidence you've been shown?
Assuming such a lie would be too big.
Well, I can see the curve.
Yeah, sure you can.
Over the past few years, Flat Earth communities have sprung up online.
Not only sharing research supporting their theories but often incorporating
conspiracies that for many are far more dangerous.
From vaccinations to Sandy Hook.
But when I visited truth-seeker Dave Murphy near his home in Sussex,
he seemed keen to distance himself from any formal grouping of globe denials.
I'm not part of any movement, I'm just a guy who knows the earth's flat.
Describe for me if you will, what your beliefs are?
I personally believe that we live on a big disc of water,
there's a North Pole in the centre and all the continents are strung around it.
And the edge is what we call Antarctica.
Beyond that, who knows what's down there?
So this is where anywhere is beyond here,
there isn't anywhere … Does that make sense?
If this is a realm over 3D space and time,
well there can't be anything outside it because that implies, you know,
3D space and time.
But that only applies here.
Right, I wonder if you could describe to me your circumstances …
When you started to look into this?
I've spent the last 15 years looking for truth.
I was at 9/11, you know, I stood there
watching it and accepted it for what I saw.
Just like everybody else.
It wasn't until about four years later that I figured out that it can't have
happened the way I saw it.
I mean I was having my midlife crisis about that time.
Everyone gets to that point in their life, you know, around about 40 odd that
you start wondering, you know, what is this all for?
What am I doing here?
Dave took me down to the beach to show me the most simple Flat Earth experiment.
A curvature calculation.
Batteries?
I took the battery out.
There should be just under three feet of curvature,
hiding of the lighthouse.
Do you feel like the mainstream scientific community will concede to …?
They can't because it means then almost the the breakdown of civilisation.
If you realise that the Earth's flat well then hang on, why are we sending
things up into space?
There is no space, where's all this money going to?
What's the point?
The reason behind all this deception is they've relegated us
to a microbe, a speck of dust in an infinite void with nothing in control.
Powerful people who have got more money than us, can now say, 'you do as we say'.
How did your family take the news?
My son went off and did his own research,
came back and he said, 'yeah, now I agree with you.'
And my ex-wife actually thinks I'm crazy,
she thinks I'm mentally ill.
It's not craziness, it's literally what a true scientist should be like.
Should be open to everything.
Before you became a flat-earther, did you feel part of society?
Now increasingly I've removed myself from this society because
it's a wicked society, it's evil in places.
You just have to turn on that hypno-box, you know, in the corner and every night
you see the wickedness coming out of it.
Do you ever have any doubt?
I've seen so much now
that I can't, I can't see it any other way.
Why am I standing here? I'm a 50-year-old man, I could easily be sitting at home
watching the Formula One or some other mindless activity.
In Hyde Park Speakers' Corner, truth-seekers gather to spread the word.
There are no spinning balls in space.
Balls in space come down.
Play a game of football, eventually that ball will come down.
There's no ifs and buts.
There's one up and there's one down.
This is Roxanne Glen, a relative newcomer to the world of Flat Earth activism.
The first time I came here and the first time I got heckled by a bunch of trolls,
I really had to question what it was I was doing.
I realised, you know, this is actually an argument to fight that I am having here.
Is this my fight?
And then I went home, pondered on it
and went back to my mundane job, doing my mundane tasks
and realised that no, it is.
The more you genuinely take time looking into it,
the more it's like opening up Pandora's box, it's like, you peel back one lie
and then you realise, 'oh they haven't been completely honest about that either'.
But then why lie? Why do all that?
Why not just be honest with us?
Is this a growing movement?
Yes, yes.
I think it is very much so.
The public interest in it I think it's definitely growing as well,
especially with the children, they're not buying into
everything that they're shown on TV,
like I did when I was that age.
What's changed?
We didn't have YouTube.
Thanks to Trump, they are all walking around going, 'you are fake news!'
If someone like Trump wasn't in office, I don't think even people would be
critically thinking about the media.
Roxanne and her friends have been on tour across the UK for the past seven weeks.
You must get some funny looks.
Yeah, but good looks as well.
There was a lot of people who beeped and gave us a thumbs up.
Really?
I was invited to the end of tour party at a school in west London.
Complete with speeches, music and a glacier mint cake.
Despite their vocal distrust of the media, several people were keen to share their ideas.
So pretend there's a dinner plate stood in the middle
so on the outside, you spin it, if there's something outside you'll zoom off.
Right.
Stood in the middle, you don't.
And then I did the curvature calc and I realised
that the curvature calc said 240ft should have been missing from a 30ft elevation.
And a 123ft from the 1ft observations and that's what clicked then because that's 49%.
I've gone as far back as the Egyptian bible and the scriptures
and I am reading these and to me, when I'm reading these words, you know,
these aren't the words of someone who's trying to deceive us.
These are the words of someone who was trying to help and guide us.
So imagine spinning at 1000 miles/hour,
at the edge of a roundabout, how tight would you have to hold on?
I feel like I'm holding on pretty tight now.
We've got to the end of this tour now
and we've positively started a massive wave of conversation for people.
This is not about Flat Earth but it's about you.
We're trying to all find that feeling,
what we're all missing, which is love.
So in the name of love, let's keep telling people that it is flat.
Thank you, thank you.
Do you think that the Flat Earth provides some clarity where previously there has been
fuzz and mess and complexity?
Yeah, I do think it provides a bit of clarity.
I am on a journey, I'm also going through surgery at the moment, on my face,
because I got a fracture on my face that no one knows about.
Yeah, I was involved in a horrendous attack,
still standing, nearly lost my life though.
Went to court, got done for it, been there, done,
that was back in 2008.
I was knocked out for three weeks by the hospital to repair, in a drug-induced coma.
And yeah, I'm still standing.
Still fixing myself from that
and yeah that's got nothing to do with Flat Earth but you know …
But doesn't it though, I mean do you feel that this there's …
is there's something in …?
Maybe so.
It may have changed, kind of your outlook,
have changed your willingness to investigate things.
I mean, who knows, right?
Maybe so, yeah.
I do believe that, I do believe that sometimes your life experiences mould you
into the path you end up going on, or the pursuit of truth that you're going on …
So, yeah, you're probably quite right with that.
For Roxanne to still be undergoing surgery for the physical scars of domestic abuse a decade ago,
was shocking.
To say nothing of the emotional impact of such a breakdown in trust.
Singing: We know now, that the Earth's not round
That it don't spin round
because the truth's been found.
Despite the celebratory feel to the event,
this was still a fairly small gathering of committed activists.
For a taste of the Flat Earth on a bigger scale,
I flew to Denver, Colorado, to join 800 paying guests at the Flat Earth International Conference,
the biggest of its kind to date.
The world's going to watch, they're going to be amazed,
they're going to be blown away
at not the conspiracy theories, the conspiracy facts.
We're all with the facts.
Next to the main auditorium, flat-earthers from all over were exhibiting their wares.
And we leave it alone and it will just be still.
How can that hang upside down anywhere in the world?
That's down to gravity though, isn't it?
Well, in the imagination.
It's opposite, and we're going to be moving in opposite directions.
and that's where you get …
We're going to get stuck.
The day and night.
I mean, how does a lunar eclipse work?
That I am not sure about.
This is a rocket.
What was the idea with this?
Basically I just wanted to do a man a vertical launch.
But what's that got to do with the flat earth?
Nothing, nothing.
In the conference itself, a familiar face was drawing the crowds.
So what dropity is, it's the tendency for things to fall when you let go of them.
You're a bit of a star here, right? I mean, come on, don't be modest.
Lots of people have come up to you.
I mean people come up to me and said they've come all the way from,
you know, Sweden and places like that just to see me.
We've got a photographer now.
He can't move anywhere, he's the man isn't he?
He says the truth.
'He says the truth', there you go, what do you think of that?
I am just doing what I have to do.
Dave, I love you.
Thanks a lot, bro.
You better get back to your adoring fans now.
I don't want to sort of take any of your time …
You shut up.
Do you want me to slap you?
Dave wasn't the only star attraction on the bill at this Flat Earth Woodstock.
Another speaker, Denver's own Bob Knodel.
How is everybody doing?
Beside your eardrums are bleeding, I understand.
Bob, great to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
Unlike many of the people I met at the conference, whose Flat Earth beliefs
stem from a literal interpretation of the Old Testament,
Bob's approach is based on scientific rationalism.
I've always been a little bit different, I've always seen the world a little bit different.
I was put in special schools, they said that you know I had a genius IQ which, whatever,
but I had a hard time relating to other people and the world in general.
I never was able to understand why the world seems to be so messed up, you know?
Why all these wars, why all the killing, why do they spend so much money
on things like this, when they could just spend that same money and fix the problems?
If you were shown conclusive proof of a globe earth with your own eyes,
how would you feel and would you be able to adjust your viewpoint to match?
Honestly, I would be relieved, I would be because that would mean
that this nightmare is over.
Is it a nightmare?
It is.
It is a nightmare because we're going against the entire belief system of the entire world.
I certainly do not want to be in the position that I'm in, you know,
being ridiculed, being fired from jobs …
Nobody wants that and the only reason I do it is because
I truly care about the future of humanity.
Bob took me up to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, on the edge of the Rocky Mountains
to cast a view out over the flat horizon.
What are your hopes and expectations for the future of Flat Earth?
My hopes are for all this to go through as seamlessly as possible,
without, you know, bloodshed and without you know too much conflict.
But the people that really run this world are not going to let go of that power easily.
In the short term, things are going get a lot worse before they get better
but when things do start getting better,
we're going to go into what I would term a more utopian type of world
instead of a dystopian-like world that we're clearly headed for.
Everyone I've spoken to,
when you really boil it down,
what people want is the same as what anyone wants,
to have some sort of agency to be relevant to something, to have love, all these things.
Yes.
Do you feel the Flat Earth really delivers that in a way
that the globe earth never could perhaps?
Of course people are going to want to feel
like they're part of something and not so insignificant, you know,
that makes perfect sense.
So yeah, when you realise that and you realise
that this world is much more special and you are much more special,
then yeah, it makes a huge psychological impact, absolutely.
Some have referred to the Flat Earth as a post-truth landscape
and whilst this may be meant mockingly,
it also reveals a very present need for finding common ground
in the face of irreconcilable differences.
If we're to address the broader polarisation of society,
attempting to understand, empathise and build trust,
are surely important tools to use
whatever the shape of your world.