As someone who works at a company that makes satellite receivers and processes huge amounts of incoming satellite data every day... and actually uses the Earth's major and minor axes in calculations every day... I'd like to hear your alternate explanation :-)

I was more speaking of the average sort of person, who's barely literate and works with their hands. It depends entirely on what sort of direct evidence the person's been exposed to. If it's merely that GPS works or that their TV uses satellites, there could be a myriad different explanations of how these things work that would probably sound less like gibberish than the real one.