Fake News Strikes Again!

as printed in the Portsend Times

Sailors recently arriving into port from sailing beyond the horizon of the Ur Hilgarria have reported a fabulous tall tale which will form an interesting bedtime story for your small children tonight. They claim that the infamous magic ocean is constantly falling, and only remains below their ships because the world is not a flat surface, but is instead, a round ball.
When asked the question of how large a ball, - well, very large ball is all they can reply.
That would be a very, very large ball.
This fantastic tale seems to have originated with the airborne sailor of the Siren's Sister just prior to it's tragic end eight years ago. According to sailors at the Ocean's Kiss, Sam Tweety, regularly assigned to the crow's nest on the Siren's Sister showed up talking about how the horizon is curved and that that must mean the world in curved all around.
"I got's to thinking that it ain't the water that's at the bottom of the Ur Higarria, it's gonna be the ground," he reported to friends at the seedly tavern. "And then when I looked it was right there in front of me that the Ur Higarria is just sitting on the world all pretty like and it's really the ground itself that holds everything up, not magic and the dome of heaven holding it in." Charlie Dawson told this reporter when contacted about this story. Dawson and his mates recently returned from a sea voyage where all of them claimed to have observed the curvature of the world.
It's the kind of tale children tell each other, but Dr Phineas Flagg of the University of the Arcane explains this common misperception.
"It's true that sailors on the Ur Hilgarria will see a curvature," he explained, "but that is simply an optical illusion. The Ur Hilgarria produces wild fluctuations around the edges of our sight range which appear to curve the world. It's not real, any more than the moon being nothing but a large rock located very far away. Ridiculous stories of an immense world with a curved surface are irresponsible and detract from the important work we do at the university. Why just think, if that were true, then all the people on the world would fall off the bottom of the world."
The University is asking townspeople to please shut down or ignore any suggestions by members of the "Round World Society" that the world is not flat.
Any information leading to the apprehension of people spreading or embellishing this story will be greatly appreciated.