As conspiracy theorists colonise the crazier corners of the Internet, seducing and converting the credulous and the cranky with ever more outlandish claims of certainty, Esquire attends Britain’s first Flat Earth convention (in Birmingham).
ON A FRIDAY EVENING IN LATE APRIL, around 70 people gathered in a brightly lit conference room at Jurys Inn Birmingham to hear news of an important discovery. The audience shifted in the tightly packed chairs and the room was filled with the buzz of conversation, which hushed as Anthony Riley began his presentation. The stocky 37-year-old law graduate from Manchester wore a blazer over his T-shirt, which lent him a professorial air of authority, and held a pint of Stella Artois in his left hand, which did not.
Riley told the audience that the footage they were about to see had not been easy to obtain. “I lay, on the beach, on my belly,” he said. “The water was there 20 minutes ago and I’m now lying on the wet sand, and I’m walking the dog at the same time. There’s people on the beach wondering, what the hell is he doing? I’m wondering, can I see it? Is it there?”
An enlarged version of his laptop screen was projected onto a big screen behind him and the audience watched intently as the cursor navigated to a file named ‘wow3. mpf’. Riley’s footage began to play. The camera panned from left to right, capturing a blurry image of the sea and an unidentifiable landmass on the horizon. This was the evidence for which everyone had been waiting. Riley explained the landmass was the Isle of Man, 54.7km away from the camera’s vantage point on the British mainland. The view was only possible, he said, if Earth is flat.
Riley cast doubt on the scientific explanation for this phenomenon: that atmospheric refraction allows light to travel further than the curve of Earth would otherwise allow. “I don’t accept logic and reason,” he said. “I accept the evidence. If we can see that land, is that better, or less than, logic and reason? It’s proof.” A picture of the globe popped up on the screen.
This story is from the September 2018 edition of Esquire Singapore.
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This story is from the September 2018 edition of Esquire Singapore.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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