UFC commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan unleashed one of his most scathing critiques of the official moon landing narrative in a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience featuring guest Danny Jones.
The podcast host didn’t hold back, expressing deep skepticism about humanity’s supposed achievement in 1969, particularly focusing on the implausibility of certain technological claims from that era.
The conversation began with discussions about ancient civilizations and the pyramids of Egypt, but it quickly pivoted to one of Rogan’s favorite topics of skepticism: the Apollo moon landings. What started as a casual exchange about historical mysteries evolved into a full-throated interrogation of NASA’s most celebrated achievement.
“This is 1969. You’re on the phone with Richard Nixon from the moon. Are you out of your f*cking mind? Is this supposed to be real?” Rogan exclaimed, his voice dripping with incredulity.
The comment came during a broader discussion about the credibility of government narratives during the Cold War era, a time when deception was standard operating procedure for intelligence agencies.
Rogan’s skepticism wasn’t limited to the phone call detail. He pointed out numerous inconsistencies in the official story, from the quality of the footage to the behavior of the astronauts in post-flight press conferences. “The post-flight press conference looks like these guys have a gun to their head. It looks like a hostage video,” he observed.
According to Rogan, the astronauts appeared nervous and uncomfortable rather than jubilant about their historic achievement.
The podcast host also highlighted what he sees as a fundamental problem with the moon landing footage: it looks less sophisticated than contemporary film production. “The stuff from 2001 [A Space Odyssey] is more sophisticated. It looks better than the stuff from the moon landings,” Rogan noted, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking science fiction film released just a year before the first moon landing.
This observation led to one of the episode’s most compelling threads: the theory that Kubrick himself might have been recruited to film fake moon landing footage. Rogan and Jones discussed the documentary “Room 237,” which explores hidden meanings in Kubrick’s film “The Shining,” including possible confessions about faking the moon landing. They pointed to specific details like a child wearing an Apollo 11 shirt and the room number 237 supposedly representing the distance from Earth to the moon.
Rogan has consistently argued that if anyone could have faked the moon landing, it would have been Kubrick. “That guy could fake it 100%,” he stated emphatically.
The director’s technical genius and his work on “2001: A Space Odyssey” demonstrated he had both the skill and the resources to create convincing space footage.
The conversation also addressed the common counterargument that such a massive conspiracy would be impossible to keep secret. Rogan dismissed this notion outright.
“People keep secrets. This idea that people can’t keep secrets because some people can’t keep secrets—high level military guys keep secrets all the f*cking time. They go to the grave with those secrets,” he explained. He pointed out that individuals with top-secret clearance regularly withhold information from their own families for their entire careers.
Another point of contention Rogan raised was the Van Allen radiation belts, which surround Earth and contain dangerous levels of radiation. “They never even flew a chicken through those f*cking things and had it come back alive,” Jones added, supporting Rogan’s skepticism about whether humans could have safely traversed this hazardous region with 1960s technology.
The lunar module’s departure from the moon’s surface also drew Rogan’s scorn. He described the footage as looking “like it’s being pulled by strings” and questioned how such a craft could generate enough thrust to escape the moon’s gravity with what appeared to be minimal propulsion systems. “It’s still one-sixth the Earth’s gravity. It’s still a significant amount of gravity,” he noted.
Rogan also found it suspicious that the camera perfectly panned to follow the lunar module as it ascended, despite being operated remotely in an era when such technology was primitive. “This is 1969. You’re getting that footage? Like, what are you doing?” he asked rhetorically.
The timing of the moon landing also struck Rogan as convenient—occurring right in the middle of Operation Paperclip, MK-Ultra, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, a period he characterized as “the time in history where they probably had the most f*cking lies.” The government’s track record of deception during this era, in Rogan’s view, makes it entirely plausible that the moon landing was another elaborate hoax designed to win the space race against the Soviet Union.
Werner von Braun, the N*zi scientist who became the head of NASA, also came under scrutiny. Jones mentioned that von Braun ran a rocket factory in Berlin where he would hang the five slowest Jewish workers at the entrance as a warning to others. “That was the head of NASA who supposedly got us to the moon,” Jones said.
Throughout the discussion, Rogan emphasized the geopolitical context of the space race. He explained how the United States was engaged in a strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend massive amounts on military and space programs they couldn’t afford. Faking a moon landing, he suggested, would have been the perfect way to demoralize the Soviets and declare victory in the space race without actually achieving the technological feat.
The conversation repeatedly returned to one central question: why would anyone trust the official narrative given everything else we know about government deception during that period? For Rogan, the burden of proof lies with those defending the moon landing, not with skeptics questioning it.
The implausibility of 1960s technology, the suspicious behavior of the astronauts, the convenient timing, and the government’s documented history of lies all combine to create what he sees as a compelling case for skepticism.
As the discussion wound down, both Rogan and Jones acknowledged they couldn’t prove the moon landing was faked, but they remained unconvinced by the official story.
