The organizer of the upcoming Flat Earth International Conference to be hosted in Denver next month has a few things he wants to clarify.

“We don’t believe we’re on a pancake flying through space,” Robbie Davidson said.

Instead, the flat Earth is stationary, and the sun and stars revolve around it, he clarified. Further, flat Earthers don’t believe people can fall off the edge of the world.

“When you first hear this topic you laugh at it and think it’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard of,” Davidson said. “But if you keep an open mind, it’s a really compelling topic.”

Davidson and his crowd are going against centuries of scientific evidence that proves the Earth is round. Ancient Greeks are given credit for the discovery, and it has been backed up by scientists ever since.

Hundreds of people who believe the Earth is flat are expected to attend a conference in Denver next month due to Colorado’s reputation as a hub for those who are skeptical of modern science’s conclusion that the Earth is a globe.

Davidson said he has sold about 420 tickets to the Flat Earth International Conference so far and expects about 500 people to attend the two-day event on Nov. 15 and 16. The conference is organized by Davidson’s Canada-based company, Kryptoz Media, and tickets to attend the event range from $199 to $349. About 400 people attended the first conference held last year in Raleigh, N.C.

A number of the conference’s speakers live along the Front Range, Davidson said, including Bob Knodel, a Denver man who runs Globebusters, one of the most popular YouTube channels on the theory. Davidson said he wasn’t sure why so many believers of the theory lived in the area.

The conference is geared toward skeptics and long-time believers of the flat Earth theory alike, though Davidson said about 80 percent of the attendees will already be “on board” with a flat world.

“The biggest reason people become flat Earthers is because they go out to debunk it,” he said.

But not all who investigate the shape of the world come to subscribe to the same alternate shape of the planet — there are variations on the flat Earth theory. Davidson believes in a Christian Biblical interpretation that teaches God created a flat Earth and his videos on YouTube point to scripture as the basis for some of his thoughts. He said that many who deny the world is round come from a religious perspective, but not all.

“If hypothetically, you’re going to take the Bible literally, you gotta be consistent,” he said.

Last week, an advertisement for the conference went up along Interstate 70 east of Aurora. In large white lettering, the billboard asks passersby to use Google to search “flat Earth clues” and shows an image of the Earth overlaid with the word “FAKE” in red lettering.

Flat Earth theory is becoming more popular in part because of social media and the internet, despite scientific consensus that the world is a globe, Davidson said.

“We’re not anti-science,” Davidson said. “We support true empirical science and what we can observe.”

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