It is possible that Rogan is using the Moon Landings as source material to make his point about questioning everything and everyone. He is ultimately a comedian, and he isn’t the first to use the topic (Kaufman). However, he is pretty convincing that he actually believes what he says.

Rogan was invited to participate on the Bad Astronomy Board, he declined. Several members here attempted to talk on his board, but the rules there are not conducive to intelligent conversation or polite debate.

So Rogan is afraid of ignorance, but cultivates it on the Moon Hoax topic.

The Moon landing (and aliens, though that may be just a comedy routine) seems to be his blind spot, and instead of setting him up as the “big bad believer opponent” I think it’d be better to just overwhelm this otherwise bright guy with the evidence and make him a full-fledged skeptic.

…and here I thought his greatest fear was people not posting porno to his forum. Yeah, you read that correctly…to qualify as a member, you MUST post some form of pornography or face banning.

And this really goes to the heart of the problem with the moon hoaxers mentality: it requires you to believe in a massive, sophisticated, highly-organized conspiracy of brilliant scientists and Machiavellian politicians… who made incredibly dumb mistakes like not noticing that the flag shouldn’t wave in the breeze or sending the most famous and identifiable rocket scientist in the world on an attention grabbing scavenger hunt at the height of launch preparations. In other words, the people being the “Moon Hoax” are smart enough to fool all of the world’s professional journalists and professional scientists… but dumb enough to make glaring mistakes like not collecting rocks in secret well in advance. D’oh!

(Footnote: yes, I know what the usual Hoaxer excuse for the flag, etc. is: those “mistakes” were deliberately sneaked in by people who wanted to expose the hoax. But this still requires you to believe not only that they managed to sneak them past the notice of thousands of conspirators… but that everybody who for decades after has patiently explained why these are not mistakes is also part of the conspiracy.)

My wife (a comedian) and I were meeting with Joe and another comedian, Doug, at a dive bar in Hollywood one night to see Extreme Elvis perform. It was the night after Fox aired some worthless documentary that claimed we didn’t really go to the moon. ( I didn’t watch the show but did notice it as I channel surfed and was highly irritated that Fox would spew this garbage for our impressionable kids to hear.)

After the show we were all talking and Joe started going on about how we never really went to the moon and how the “documentary” proved it. We got into an argu…er…uh…we had a difference of opinion but I didn’t have the exact facts to refute what he was saying about camera angles and shadows, etc.

I went home to research the issue and stumbled across BA. I shot off an e-mail to Joe right away. He remained and remains convinced of the conspiracy theory.

Joe is a really nice guy who is quite bright and his comedy is sharp, witty and to the point. His theme is that we should question authority on all fronts and for the most part I agree but on this issue he gives us a glaring example illustrating that at some point reason must step in. It baffles the mind