Almost seven percent of the Brazilian population thinks the earth is flat.
South Dakota real estate developer Orlando Ferguson drew a unique map of the Earth in 1893 that brought biblical and scientific knowledge together in a different way.
Ferguson believed that the Earth was flat, and his map represented the blue planet as a giant rectangular plate with dimples on the surface.
Like him, in Brazil, 11 million people reject the concept that the Earth is a sphere.
One of the most prominent ideologues, writer and former astrologer Olavo de Carvalho, said that he 'cannot refute' the flat earth theory.
Nonetheless, Brazilian flat-earthers are a secretive, sometimes paranoid community, communicating via encrypted messages on WhatsApp, invite-only Facebook groups, and especially YouTube, where their channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.
There, they can freely express what they believe in without fear of ridicule: the Earth is a flat, motionless body.
This is the argument they put forward with different interpretations of physics, optics and the Bible, dismissing all evidence to the contrary as a conspiracy.
If the Earth is spinning at 1,700 kilometers per hour at the equator, why doesn't motion make everything take off? If it's a sphere, why can't we see the curve from the plane?
They have little confidence in photographs from space or scientific articles on gravity, Foucault's pendulum, and two millennia of astronomical observations.
Astronomer Roberto Costa of the University of São Paulo: 'We know the world has not been flat since the early 17th century. But the ancient Greeks realized this over 2000 years ago. Flat world theory seems to be a topic for psychologists or sociologists, not scientists. The shape of the world is not a scientific problem for astronomers. '
Sources: Photo: Wikimedia
