Yup…he did.

“I’ve been a believer for maybe almost a year. I researched it for several months in between doing everything else — you know, I’ve still got to make a living and all that kind of stuff, and building this rocket actually eats up a lot of my time,” he told the flat-Earth Web show. “But when I’m not doing that, I research things.”

And Hughes intends that research to continue well beyond Saturday’s launch, which he says he will be streaming online. He envisions the launch as just one step toward eventually getting himself into space, at which point he plans to take a photograph “to prove once and for all this Earth is flat,” he told his interviewer.

“This is the king of the deceptions,” Hughes said. “Once this domino falls, this is it.”