In 1917, American missionary Orville Fowler Barcus published A New World Discovered, a book inspired by a series of observations he conducted over bodies of water in China. He ends his book with this statement:
“If anyone will take the trouble to make an examination, it will be found that the one great, fundamental fact upon which a true conception of the world is to be based is that the Earth’s surface is concave.” —The Author
A century later, an American by the name of Joshua James Bolieiro (known as Zenith Atlas on YT) carried out similar observations over Lake St. Clair in Michigan. Only now, in the 21st century, we have Nikon P1000s with 125× optical zoom, an upgrade over the 8× zoom prismatic telescope that Orville used. We should be able to see what he described even more clearly! And we can.
In April of 2026 I made these observations over a stretch of the Delaware River, just south of the Philadelphia Airport. What I noticed after going there every day for about two weeks straight is something Joshua emphasized over and over in his interviews: we see farther when there is less refraction, not with more refraction as the official model claims.
Hog Island Observation by Joe Dubs
April 14th, 2026
Hog Island Rd, Essington, PA 19029
Camera height: center of the P1000 lens is 4” above the water
- Camera
- Hog Island Rd.
39°51′35.9″N, 75°16′47.0″W - Building
- .56 miles from camera
39°51′30.4″N, 75°17′27.1″W - Boat
- .68 miles from camera
39°51′28.5″N, 75°17′34.9″W - Ship
- 3.2 miles from camera
39°51′02.7″N, 75°20′22.8″W
Weather info
- Air temperature: 82°F
- Delaware River water temperature: 55°F
- Relative humidity: 40%
The convex globe model predicts the horizon would be .707 miles away, but it is miles and miles farther out. In fact, it was so clear that day the termination line was not even visible; I’d have to find a different, lengthier observation location to view it.
Aside from the geometric problems the heliocentric model runs into with observations like this, I’ve found that the horizon doesn't work exactly the way we think. It's true that boats disappear bottom first. However, if given the chance to watch them as they sail away, they disappear into what we call the ‘inferior mirage’; that is, light bending upwards, distorting the image top-to-bottom. The vertical height of what I call the ‘mirrizon’—what Barcus called the ‘superscene’—is dependent upon the height of the observer and the conditions of the day.
The mirrizon is always there over the ocean; you just can’t see it. You can see it when an object is at the correct distance. You can also see it whenever the sun or moon rises or sets over a large body of water. The disc of the sun bleeds into a strip of the sky slightly above what we perceive as the horizon. This horizontal strip inverts the image below it, causing the bottom of the sun to invert and appear as an omega symbol Ω.