Me, Penn, and Joe Rogan

The Bad Astronomer

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The Bad Astronomer
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Feb 19, 2002
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So a few of you may know that after my brilliant talk at TAM5, I was quickly whisked away to embark on an adventure. It involves the slammer, a slight factor of fear, and of course a vast conspiracy of such epic proportions that it cannot, in fact, even exist.

Therein lies the tale.

Enjoy.
 
Great stuff.

One thing I wondered was.

Isn't the absense of blast craters evidence against the Moon hoax?
If the concept art showed blast craters.
And NASA wanted to fake a landing.
Wouldn't they have included the blast craters?

Another thing I thought about was the game moon lander, the landing would have been a task of easing the lander down right? And the engine would have been shut off a couple of feet beore landing? Only blowing away a little dust?

Where as the takeoff would have been full blast? Blowing out a lot of dust?

Anyway. Great show.
 
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ROBERT Van Allen?? Do I hear the sound of Rogan's credibility washing down the toilet?

Maybe ROBERT Van Allen was the guy who discovered that the belts can catch fire.

By the way, the "belts" are actually shaped more like mushy doughnuts. (The word "belt" implies a thinness that is not really accurate.) And the doughnuts are nested: There is an inner region and and an outer region.

Although the "mushy doughnuts" is my own characterization, I use as my initial source an older Astronomy text: Exploration of the Universe, 3rd Edition, by George O. Abell. The was the text selected for use in a General Astronomy class taught by--um, what was his name? Oh, yeah!--James A. Van Allen.
 
you know I go with the Buzz Aldrin take though.

Rewriting history is not nice.

People, lots of people, not only gave their careers to the moon landing, some gave thier lives.

You repeat a lie often enough, and people believe it.

I just want to thank Bad Astronomer for taking this issue on. Because NASA seems to think taking it on is giving these nut jobs more than they deserve.

For myself, growing up with the space race, it means a lot that something I was so proud of as a young child, gets the respect it deserves.

I have friends that question the moon landing! I mean, these are I thought intelligent people. They come at me with the "where there is smoke there is fire". Well, sometimes smoke is just steam, a lot of hot air spewing out from somewhere.
 
Caught the program on iTunes Podcast. I always catch these things a day after they happen but it gives me something to listen to on my to and from work. BTW, loved the program. It seemed to go so quickly. Penn and Michael only got to talk during the confusion of the blowing dust/blast crater discussion and I Michael was instrumental in getting past that log jam.

Anyway, I have a friend. He's a well educated, published researcher. Imagine my shock when I found out he believed the lunar landing was a hoax. Having looked into some of the arguments in the past, I was able to have an intelligent conversation on the subject and I think I was able to soften his conviction a little. However, he wouldn't shake two concerns. He didn't believe that the astronauts would survive the radiation exposure they'd receive in the Van Allen Belts and the fact that in some pictures the camera reticles appear to be behind the subject astronaut. Phil covered the Van Allen Belts in detail but I didn't hear an answer to the apparent obstructed reticle.

Loved the program, loved the presentation at TAM 5 and looking forward to TAA 2.
 
That was great.

If you can send Joe Rogan the 2x speed version here at You Tube:



At 20 seconds in, the astronaut falls, and sends a perfect parabola of dust straight out, about 3 times as far as you could on earth with that sort of impact. It looks so unreal, that anybody who sees it and says that is what it would look like on Earth in a studio is being dishonest. This single few seconds of film would have been impossible to recreate at that time.
 
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Great job, Phil. A couple times I got the sense that Joe was softening a bit, but then he got his second wind with the whole blast crater subject. Too bad the show was so short!
As far as his problem with the dust kicked up by the rover; with no atmosphere on the moon, wouldn't the dust particles stay more or less clumped together? I would imagine that if you could gather a handful of dust on the moon and throw it snowball-style, it would pretty much maintain its spherical shape until gravity brought it down. Am I right in visualizing it this way?
 
Blackwell said:
Great job, Phil. A couple times I got the sense that Joe was softening a bit, but then he got his second wind with the whole blast crater subject. Too bad the show was so short!
As far as his problem with the dust kicked up by the rover; with no atmosphere on the moon, wouldn't the dust particles stay more or less clumped together? I would imagine that if you could gather a handful of dust on the moon and throw it snowball-style, it would pretty much maintain its spherical shape until gravity brought it down. Am I right in visualizing it this way?
Click to expand...


Just watch how the dust behaves in the video I posted above - very unlike anything I have ever seen on a beach or when digging into cocoa to make hot chocolate (there are never any 'dust clouds' stirred - the dirt goes up and goes down). There is no way that video was filmed anywhere that had air.

The video (during the 2x speed parts) also perfectly illustrates Phil's description of the jerky arm movements when it is sped up.
 
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Nice work, Phil! If only they were all that much fun to debate, eh?
 
I've read your book Phil and it is very well done but it is a whole different animal to hear you debunk live. You come off sounding even smater.
 
I enjoyed this so much - I sat in my hotel room last night listening and chuckling. I've also forwarded to several people. thanks!!
 
Starrman said:
That was great.

If you can send Joe Rogan the 2x speed version here at You Tube:
Click to expand...

I don't get it... where there also wires levitating that guy in order to allow him to jump so high in the air, or does he have special jump boots?
 
Starrman, that's prefect. I'll send that to Joe-- the point I was making with the film is that the astronauts' movements that don't rely on gravity look sped up in those films. So obviously it wouldn't work to simply take the footage and speed it up. Thanks!
 
I enjoyed the piece, too, and it was amazing to hear Penn say so little during his show.

Joe has apparently done his research, and so if there's going to be a round 2, Phil might start off with, "Have your read my book and/or my website?" and "Is there any evidence that I could present that would cause you to change your mind?" Because if the answers are "yes" and "no," not much progress is going to come from the debate.

I wonder if Joe would be convinced by all of the published scientific research out there about the moon rocks and how they couldn't possibly have come from the earth? What do the hoaxers say about that? (That they were sent back by unmanned probes?)
 
I caught the podcast of the show - great job! It was wonderful to have someone with tons of facts in the area to debate a hoax believer.

Keep up the good fight!
 
OK, I do have a question (which seems obvious enough that I'm sure it's just me...)

Isn't in possible that the landing site that can be seen in current images, but doesn't seem like "a blast crater" or whatever in photos, was made by the arrival AND departure of the craft?

Why isn't it possible that the arrival made some disturbance in the dust, and the departure made a little more? That way the photos that were real time on the surface look less dust-disturbed than the current because it was less disturbed.

OK, so someone school me. I should probably do my own research before posting here, but you guys know everything.

-A
 
a.real.girl said:
Isn't in possible that the landing site that can be seen in current images, but doesn't seem like "a blast crater" or whatever in photos, was made by the arrival AND departure of the craft?
Click to expand...

I think that the landing pretty much blew away all of the dust in the area-- as Michael pointed out in the piece, the moon dust is like chocolate powder on a bowling ball-- you can blow it off and leave a little bare spot, but you aren't going to make a crater in the rock, the way a meteorite would. You can clearly see the dust blowing away in the movies from the Apollo 11 landing just before it hits the surface.

The ascent module got out of there pretty fast-- I would be surprised if it had any noticable effect on the surroundings. In fact, somewhere there's video from a TV camera that was left on the moon showing the ascent, and you can see that the ascent engine doesn't really affect the surface.

Also, Phil made the point that the Clementine data showing the smudge is not a photographic image, which you can see here (at the bottom of the page):

http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/lunar_lander.html

It's a "photometric anomaly," showing that there's a bare patch on the rocky crust of the moon. It doesn't really look like a crater at all.
 
I wish I still had our love triangle emails or Joe's email address.

Penn said you guys were amazing. I guess I ought to listen to the show.
 
you should! It's really great.

I just love how Phil comes across as a "real" person, not some scientific know it all. If Phil is part of a vast conspiracy cover up, heck I want to join!

As for Joe and the other moon believers...what DO they have if they don't have the moon hoax? The moon hoax defines their lives. They are nothing but just like the rest of us without the moon hoax. It's very sad.
 
kittynh,

I don't think Joe Rogan is a hard-core Hoax Believer (HB). From what he said, he sounds more like a fence-sitter. He's listened to a lot of the HBs (even admitted that some are NUTS), and there are a few things that make him go, "Hmmm".

I loved the show and their discussion. My only problem is that, at the beginning, Joe went on for a while on the "problems" he saw. Then Phil began his rebutting. They had some nice back-and-forth. But toward the end, Joe seemed to get a little "worked up", and started rattling off several points one after another. Then the show ended. That seems seems to be a standard tactic by believers - after each of your flimsy points are countered by an expert, then return with, "What about this? And THIS! And THIS! And all these! And THESE!!! Ah ha! Got you!!!"
 
The ascent module got out of there pretty fast-- I would be surprised if it had any noticable effect on the surroundings. In fact, somewhere there's video from a TV camera that was left on the moon showing the ascent, and you can see that the ascent engine doesn't really affect the surface.

Also, the ascent module used the landing module as a launch pad, so the blast would never have reached the lunar surface.

I watched all the moon landings and still think it's mankind's greatest achievement (in spite of the political reasons it was done). I think it's truly tragic so many people (including my otherwise intelligent friends) will not acknowledge or accept the clear answers scientists like Phil offer to the hoaxists. I met an actual rocket scientist once who had visited Russia and they proudly showed him radar print-outs they had tracking the Apollo landings which convinced them this couldn't possibly be faked.

I can also recall watching the lunar rovers' wheels spitting out perfect parabolas of dust, proving they were in a vacuum. I enjoy telling my hoaxter friends that when we return to the moon there won't be any stars in the photos they will take, so they'll have to be ready and willing to dismiss these too.
:rolleyes:
 
I heard the 2nd installment of Joe, Phil, and Penn today, and wow, Joe was a much bigger jerk in this episode...

"...van Braun was an evil Nazi!!!!"

"...the guv'mint is full of evil murders! That's why we're in Iraq!"

"Humble," my ass! He kept interrupting Phil and dominating the conversation with irrelevant, emotional rants, preventing Phil from finishing his points. Maybe he thought he could get away with being more aggressive because he was in the studio with Penn this time, and Penn seemed to empower him at the beginning by saying that he was surprised that Phil didn't kick his ass on the last show.

What a jerk. He was not interested in listening to rational evidence-- he has an emotional position based on distrust of authority.
 
I think it showed that we gave him too much credit to believe him to be a fence sitter or someone "just asking questions". That he tried to "prove" his position by referring to the conspiracy of international banking just shows how hardcore he is into all manner of conspiracy thinking. What a whack job.

My wife listened for about 10 minutes and then grew disgusted by his argument tactics. Fortunately, my time here at JREF has gotten me used to that method of attack. Just like the conspiracy nuts, he keeps on throwing hundreds of hundreds of meaningless unrelated points which, of course, nobody would have an answer for all of them. The number of logical fallacies he utters per minute are enough to make ones head spin. It ws as if one of the woos from the CT board were reading their posts outloud. (JREF Forums on tape. It's a goldmine of an idea, I tells ya!)

Bravo to Phil for putting up with it.
 
On the first show Rogan seemed interested in learning. The second show was all about him scoring points against Phil.

The way he was talking about the evil government and conspiracies, it's like he stole Richard Belzer's act.
 
On the first show, Penn kept saying how impressed he was that Rogan had done his research. He didn't do any research. All he did was read the moon hoax sites and adopt their silly beliefs. There is no evidence he had even attempted to read-up on the salient points. All he had to do was to go to Phil's site and he would have found all the answers he needed.

Phil has a lot more patience than most people. A good man.
 
I was amazed at how he managed to weasel out of the moon rocks and radio tracking evidence which I find to be the strongest pieces of physical evidence that we went to the moon. When he mentioned killing kennedy and the formation of world government being a "fact", he totally lost any credibility he may have had with me. I'm glad, even more reason to hate him after that bug and livestock genitalia eating show and ruining the man show.

The way he was talking about the evil government and conspiracies, it's like he stole Richard Belzer's act.
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Sweet SWEET irony.
 
OK, no, not really. The second outing was a lot tougher. He threw a lot of stuff out there I had never heard of, which threw me, but I recall eventually rallying and saying his arguments didn't make sense and were incidental to the main point.
 
You guys are being pretty tough on Joe. I didn't think what he said, was all too bad. But it seemed like he was just trying to say is; "If they allow 'this to happen,' why should we trust them with 'this.' But I'm probably wrong. Anyways, pretty good show Phil. I hope I get a chance to see you at Alaskan Adventure. I'm trying to figure out how to get the money to go.
 
It's so easy for Joe. All he has to say to anything Phil throws back at him is "I don't know.... I'm here just asking." But if Phil says "I don't know." Joe goes crazy. He wants the impossible, a complete and detailed answer to every question. No one can do that and when you can't, he yells at you for not knowing your subject. This is just dishonest.

Phil, my old and dear mate, you cannot win as Joe is not playing by any rules. He is (it would seem but I doubt) looking for simple answers from you that cannot be questioned. This is not going to happen. Even if you did give him a blinding simple and complete answer he would not accept it. There is always an out for him as all he has to do is dip into an endless supply fiction and innuendo.

He seems to know a lot about NASA, trying to put you on the spot about how many people worked in 'compartments' and therefore did not know more about the whole project. Well, how the hell does he know what people knew what?? This is a major part of his argument. He yells at you that this is the way it was at NASA. Oh yeah?? Before he can use that again he must provide evidence and damn good evidence at that.

He also wins by just shouting you down ("NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!") and, as you said on air, poisoning the well. He did that time after time from Wernher von Braun, where he yelled that you were defending an Nazi, to just about everyone in the US government. These are the worst examples of intelligent debate. His agenda is clear and he does not care what tactics he uses.

Also, I would myself draw the line when he starts to not only question but make outrageous allegations about the death of Grissom, Chaffee and White. I always held these men in high respect.

I wonder if you could use some of these tactics against him? I mean his gloves are off.... Ask him about how a TV works as he is on TV. When he fails to answer a question, then you can question is credentials. "You don't know! You work in TV and you don't know!!??"

There are times in my life when I want to jump through my mp3 player and ring someone's neck. This is one of them.

Sigh... sorry Phil. Had to get that off my chest.
 
The Bad Astronomer said:
The second outing was a lot tougher. He threw a lot of stuff out there I had never heard of, which threw me....
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I love your site, Phil, and the work you do to debunk this moon hoax stuff.

But...

I gotta say I was very disappointed in your answers to Joe in the show this week. Joe admits that all of the arguments he brought up are things he has found on the conspiracy sites, and yet you haven't heard of them?

Now I realize you have a day job, and god knows these CT nuts can spew out reams of crap (and do so), not all of which is worth poring through. But you should be more prepared before you go on national radio as an expert on something.

Example:

Right around 15:57 in the podcast, he asks (in reference to the 800 pounds of moon rocks we have): "Isn't it possible they could have done this with unmanned probes just like the Russians did?" Your response there is about 5 seconds of dead silence, followed by basically "that's a stretch". I gotta say, to a CT nut, that sounds like you got nailed.

Here's the thing. There's a fabulous argument against that right in the Wikipedia article on moon hoaxes. The robotic landers at the time were only capable of returning a few grams of samples at a time. In order to collect 800 pounds, they would have had to send hundreds if not thousands of robotic landers. How could that many launches have gone unnoticed?

And Penn had just admitted about a minute earlier that he's personally visited the storage locker! You could have had him verify that it looked like there is indeed a large number of samples in the locker!

Sorry man. Again, I love what you do, but I gotta say, you really blew it on this one.

--Tim Farley
 
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krelnik said:
I love your site, Phil, and the work you do to debunk this moon hoax stuff.

But...

I gotta say I was very disappointed in your answers to Joe in the show this week. Joe admits that all of the arguments he brought up are things he has found on the conspiracy sites, and yet you haven't heard of them?

...

Sorry man. Again, I love what you do, but I gotta say, you really blew it on this one.

--Tim Farley
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Aww, cut Phil some slack! :) I think any of us might've lost our train of thought in the face of Joe's belligerent ranting. It was difficult to keep up with the guy -- he was all over the place. I'm more disappointed by Penn, who kept affirming Joe's mastery of the topic, which clearly wasn't so, and stating that his debate tactics were brilliant, lending him credibility that he didn't deserve.

Still a fan, Penn -- but you were playing Larry King here.
 
Well, I had been thinking along the same lines as krelnik, but since I didn't want Phil dropping a random asteroid on my house (and if you do, Phil, could you aim for the front yard? It'll save me the cost of having two trees removed..)

It's not that the BA isn't highly knowledgable and extraordinaliy personable, but he does have a career and his debunkings are widespread and cover many wild and woo-woo ideas (Planet X, 2012 Mayan Calendar, lousy movies) besides the Moon Hoax. So a guy like Rogan, splatter-gunning many items he's picked up on the anti-moon sites, is likely to come up with some that the BA may not have a ready answer for, simply because Phil has multiple interests to a woo-woo's one.

It is a problem evolutionary scientists have with creationist debaters, if the creationists can come up with one item that the scientist, simply because his training and career paths don't really involve that area all that much, stutters or cannot reply to effectively, in the CT'ers mind he has "won" the debate. No matter how many of his other ideas have been laid to waste on the dungheap of illogic and fallacy.

Let Mr. Rogan take on someone who has devoted an entire webe to the Moon Hoax (i.e., Jay Windley or Bob Brauenig) and my guess is he'll be reaching for the ad-homs and the Godwin's a lot quicker.

That noted, that the BA is out there willing to be heard and to defend rationality and reason is always a reason to cheer.

And I hear that he can stand still a LOOONNNNGGGGG Time...;) :D
 
I totally understand that its hard to get a word in edgewise in those situations. Both Joe and Penn tend to talk over other people ALOT, to be sure. (I listen to Penn's show every day). And its nerve-wracking to be put on the spot, so anyone could freeze up.

But Phil was letting it happen by not having credible answers at the ready. Here's another example.

At about 10:30 in the show Joe says "...the government did something really evil. They brought back a criminal, a horrible person, and they had him run America's space program."

This is technically not correct, since he (and his cohorts) came to the US in 1945, more than a decade before we even had a space program.

But more to the point, a space program was NOT the reason why we brought Von Braun to the U.S. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, combined with a fear of the Soviets, was. It was all about the birth of the Cold War. When you properly frame the story in its historical context, it becomes much clearer why the U.S. Government might have wanted to forgive Von Braun his Nazi past (however unethical you might think that forgiveness was).

And then after the Redstone rocket (and its successors) were successful, and we had the ICBMs we desired, it was only natural for Von Braun to transition over to NASA, to build the space rockets he had dreamed of building even when he worked for the Nazis.

This still doesn't negate Rogan's (thin) argument that since Von Braun worked with the Nazis, he demonstrated an ability to cooperate with a corrupt regime, and therefore be complicit in a hoax. But it does negate the whole "why would the U.S. do this?" nonsense.

Anyway, lesson to be learned here: if a moon hoaxer brings up "Nazi", you should be ready with "Operation Paperclip" and "Redstone Arsenal" (and "Cold War") as the answer.

--Tim Farley
 
Buckaroo said:
Still a fan, Penn -- but you were playing Larry King here.
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Agreed... I blame Penn for that travesty. Joe's points were so completely irrelevant, and he was so ridiculously aggressive (as if he was taking on a heckler) that Penn should have seen what was going on. The only time he pulled Joe back was after a break when he let Phil set the topic.

Phil did seem a bit off his game, but I think it was because he was trying to stay polite and keep the debate civil. Joe was not playing by the same rules.

Anyway, regarding von Braun going to Antarctica, I found this mentioned on the Moon Base Clavius site. It's clear that von Braun was NOT collecting moon rocks-- besides the ridiculousness of sending your chief rocket engineer to collect rocks to hoax the landing, meteorites in Antarctica can be easily distinguished from moon rocks... for one thing they will have been weathered and biologically contaminated. The compositions of meteorites are also quite different from moon rocks, but perhaps the hoaxers claim that von Braun was looking for lunar-origin meteorites. These are very rare and there's no way that anyone could find hundreds of kilograms of lunar-origin material lying around Antarctica.

So why was he there? Just for fun? Was it at all applicable to the Apollo mission? Does anyone know, or does anyone know someone who might know?

I'll be at Marshall Space Flight center in two weeks, I guess I could ask someone there.
 
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