Flat earther Mark Sargent: 'We're living in a big sound stage'
He’s the godfather of the flat earth movement, and he’s hoping to convert us! Mark Sargent, who rose to fame in hit Netflix documentary Behind the Curve, firmly believes that we all live on a flat disc.
Not only that but Mark thinks gravity is a myth, and that round images of the Earth have been faked by NASA.
Mark has flown the long ‘flat’ journey from the US, to tell us why it’s time we all woke up and accepted the Earth is as flat as a pancake.
Throwing away a round Earth-shaped beach ball, Phillip and Holly introduced Mark's version of our planet as a flat disc surrounded by a giant ice wall.
So would Mark be able to convince Phillip, who has seen the Earth's curvature with his own eyes, that the Earth is in fact flat?
"I flew in Concorde, and I was lucky enough to fly in Concorde, and you get up to 65,000 feet, and I could see the curvature of the Earth - that was proof to me. How come that wasn't true?", asked Phillip.
Mark replied, "I could show you weather balloon footage from 120,000 feet, and it's absolutely table-top flat! I'm not saying that you're lying, I'm saying that you wanted to see the curvature."
"But don't you want to believe that it's flat? I have more proof than you do", replied Phillip, showing Mark live footage direct from the International Space Station.
Mark replied, "You're looking at CGI, nothing more. Something that started out very simple back in the 1950s, and advanced till today."
Being a self-proclaimed 'space nut', Phillip revealed that he's looked at live Space Station footage on his laptop and at the same time watched the solid light from the Space Station passing overhead.
Mark said, "There's something up there, no question. Is there a vehicle that could be the ISS up there? Yeah. Are there people inside it? No, not a chance. And you can look at the interior footage, and the production value is horrible."
Holly then explained that she'd talked to astronaut Tim Peake from the very sofa they were sitting on. "So who was I talking to?"
"You were talking to a military officer, nothing more." Replied Mark. "Everyone that goes up there are high-ranking military."
"But why fake it?", asked Holly.
"Because if you don't fake it, eventually the private industries are going to get involved, and then they're going to find out on their own."
"And that would be bad, because?", pushed Holly.
"Remember, we're talking about something that was discovered back in 1060. The public wasn't ready in 1960. They just weren't. The potential academically, economically, religiously - chaos. Potentially. So they weren't going to take that chance."
As the conversation moved on to explaining the logistics of a flat Earth, Mark explained, "We're saying that we live on a flat enclosed world - you're basically living in a big sound stage with walls, and a floor..."
"The Truman Show!", exclaimed Phil.
"The Truman Show, yeah, very very similar. It's so big that our best and brightest didn't figure it out until about 1960, and when they did, they decided to keep it a secret", said Mark.
"So why don't we just fall off the edge?", asked Holly.
"Ah, the space asteroid question", sighed Mark. "For the same reason you don't fall off the edge here. Antarctica is the only continent that doesn't look like anything else ... It's not necessarily an ice wall, it's just Antarctica, this really, really, really high continent".
"What's outside?", asked Phil.
"That's a tough one, isn't it. If you can't get outside you're not going to know for sure", replied Mark, gesturing to his disc-shaped Earth, "But my personal opinion is this isn't a one-off, there's not just one of these, there's more".
NASA SAYS: We've known that the Earth is round for more than 2,000 years. The Earth is not a perfect sphere because of the force caused when Earth rotates, the North and South Poles are slightly flat. Earth's rotation, wobbly motion and other forces are making the planet change shape very slowly, but it is still round.