How this archive frames its claims
This site is a collection of the flat-earth reading of the sky and the ground. It is not a scientific finding, not a campaign, and not a claim about anyone's honesty.
Everything on this site is a belief-based reading of observations. It is not a scientific finding, and we do not present it as one. The earth's shape as measured by geodesy is an oblate spheroid with a mean radius near 6,371 km; that measurement is repeatable and independent methods agree with each other. What we collect here is the older reading: a level plane, a firmament overhead, a sun and moon that circle above rather than orbit around. We are interested in it as a way of reading the same sky, and we ask you to read it that way — with the mainstream account open beside it.
How sources are chosen and labelled
Every file on this site draws on two kinds of material, and they are kept apart deliberately. The first is historical or textual: old cosmologies, early modern pamphlets, printed maps, surveying and navigation practice. The second is observational: things that can be seen or measured now, by anyone, with ordinary equipment.
The first kind is cited by author, title and date, with the edition or translation named where more than one exists, because the wording matters in a dispute about what a text says. The second kind is cited by conditions as much as by source: where a sighting was made, from what height, with what instrument, at what temperature and humidity, because refraction decides the outcome of long-distance work and a figure without its conditions is not worth much.
- Quotation means the words are as printed in the source named. If the wording could not be checked, the file paraphrases and says that it is paraphrasing.
- Numbers carry their origin. A figure with no source is not used, including figures that would help our own case.
- Categories are marked. Each file is labelled Observation, Source work, Do it yourself, Steel-man or Reference, so you know before you read whether you are being shown a measurement or an argument.
- Both readings appear. Every observation file states the mainstream explanation as its own sources give it, not as a weakened version of it.
Editorial stance
This archive argues about observations and about texts. It does not argue about people. Three rules follow from that, and they are not negotiable.
- No attacks on individuals. We do not accuse named living people of deception, and we do not name private individuals at all. The argument is with the reading, not with the reader or with the researcher.
- No ethnic, religious or political conspiracy material. The flat-earth case is a question about the shape of the ground. It is not a vehicle for anything else, and pages that use it as one are not part of this archive.
- No calls to action against anyone. Nothing here asks a reader to contact, confront or harass another person or institution. Somebody disagreeing with a page is normal and welcome; pressure on individuals is not.
We also do not give medical, legal or safety advice, and no page here should be read as advice of that kind. Taking instrument readings near water, from height, or in traffic is a matter for your own judgement; the tests on this site are described so that you can decide whether one is worth doing, not so that you can be told it is safe.
We deliberately do not invent citations. If you want the geodetic and astronomical accounts at their source, these are the categories to look in, and the agencies that publish them:
- National geodetic and survey agencies — the bodies that define coordinates and heights in each country, for example the National Geodetic Survey in the United States, Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom, and Geoscience Australia.
- University astronomy and geophysics departments — public course notes, observatory pages and introductory textbooks, which set out the conventional model at the level a first-year student meets it.
- Published surveying and navigation manuals — the working texts of the professions that measure the ground, such as the American Practical Navigator (Bowditch), maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the standard surveying handbooks used in professional training.
- Hydrographic and tide services — the offices that publish charts, tide tables and current data, such as the tide and current services of NOAA.
- Standards bodies — for example the International Astronomical Union, which fixes the definitions used in astronomy, including the units in which solar distance is expressed.
Follow those to the primary documents rather than to summaries, including ours.
Corrections
Corrections are wanted and are published. If a page here gets a fact wrong — a date, a name, a figure, a translation, a quotation that does not exist — write to the archive through the contact page. Say which page and which sentence, and if you can, give the source that shows the error.
When a correction is accepted, the page is amended and a dated line is added to the page's notes, so that a reader can see what changed and when. Corrections that go against the archive's own argument are published in the same way as any other. Where a correction is disputed we will say on the page that it is disputed rather than quietly dropping the point.
The one thing we will not do is leave an unsupported claim standing because removing it would be awkward. If a cited source cannot be found again, the claim depending on it is marked as unverified until it can.
Who runs this
The Flat Earth Files is a small independent archive. It has no institution behind it, no sponsor, and no named staff — pages are written and maintained by the archive itself, and there is no list of contributors to show you because there is nothing to hide and nothing to inflate. Correspondence goes to the archive as an organisation rather than to an individual, through the contact page.
Funding, such as it is, comes from running the site. There is no advertising, no analytics product and no tracking on these pages; the privacy page sets out the little that the server does record. If you want to know who is behind a page, the honest answer is the address on the contact page — write and ask.
This page describes how the archive frames its subject matter. The flat-earth reading it collects is a belief-based interpretation of the observations, not a scientific finding; the mainstream sources for each claim are the ones named above and linked from the pages themselves.