FLAT EARTH FILES — CLAIMS BRIEF Plain text on purpose: it survives any reader, any device and any converter, and it can be checked without a browser. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THIS ARCHIVE CLAIMS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. It sets out one reading of the observations: a level plane, a firmament overhead, a sun and a moon that circle above the ground rather than around a globe, and a southern ring of ice. This reading is argued from historical and textual sources (Rowbotham's Zetetic Astronomy among them) and from observations a reader can repeat with ordinary equipment. 2. It claims that the observations are real and worth recording: what a ship's hull does as it goes, what a levelled sightline over still water shows, how a solar-noon shadow changes with distance, where the stars turn. Nothing here asks you to accept a measurement you cannot make yourself. 3. It claims the historical material exists and says what it says. Where a text is quoted, the words are as printed in the edition named. Where the wording could not be checked, the archive paraphrases and says that it is paraphrasing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT THIS ARCHIVE DOES NOT CLAIM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. It does not claim to be a scientific finding. It is a belief-based reading of the observations, and it is not presented as anything else. 2. It does not claim the earth's shape is undecided by measurement. The shape 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. The archive keeps that account beside its own on every observation page. 3. It does not claim that a test on this site has settled the question where a test cannot separate the two readings. Where both readings survive a measurement — a sightline short enough that curvature and refraction both fall inside the error bars, for instance — the page says so rather than counting it as evidence. 4. It does not claim anything about named people's honesty, and it makes no claim about any ethnic, religious or political group. The argument is about the ground and the sky, not about persons. 5. It does not give medical, legal or safety advice, and no page should be read as advice of that kind. Nothing here tells you a procedure is safe. 6. It does not invent sources. No study, quotation, figure or URL on this site is made up. A figure without a source is not used, including figures that would help the archive's own case. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE FRAMING RULE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything here is the flat-earth READING of an observation, not a measured result of the archive's own. Each file states, in the same order: OBSERVATION what is seen or measured, with the conditions and equipment recorded, so anybody can try to repeat it; THE READING the flat-earth account, stated as a claim that could turn out to be wrong; THE MAINSTREAM how geodesy or astronomy accounts for the same READING observation, stated as its own sources give it and not as a weakened version of it; WHAT WOULD the sightline, measurement or dataset that would decide SETTLE IT between the two readings. Two consequences follow, and they are the point of the rule. First, a quotation is a quotation and a paraphrase is labelled as one. Second, a run that comes out against the reading is logged the same way as any other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WHERE THE MAINSTREAM SOURCES ARE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The archive deliberately does not fabricate citations or links. For the geodetic and astronomical accounts at their source, go to these categories: * 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, Geoscience Australia). * University astronomy and geophysics departments — public course notes, observatory pages and introductory textbooks. * Published surveying and navigation manuals — the working texts of the professions that measure the ground, including Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and standard surveying handbooks used in professional training. * Hydrographic and tide services — the offices that publish charts, tide tables and current data. * Standards bodies — for example the International Astronomical Union, which fixes the definitions and units used in astronomy. Follow those to the primary documents rather than to summaries, including this archive's own. A separate file, sources-list.txt, names the individual works and institutions referred to across the site. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Flat Earth Files — archive document. Not a scientific finding, not a campaign, and not advice of any kind.