Like many of us, Joe Rogan’s opinion about UFOs has changed over time. At the beginning of his career he used to tell jokes about the Roswell crash, back when he was also into the Apollo lunar conspiracies. Then his friend Neil deGrasse Tyson convinced him the lunar landings were legit, and Rogan swinged hard into “Big-S skeptic mode” when he starred in the SyFy show Joe Rogan Questions Everything, and made fun of both Squatchers and the “giant bulletproof wolves” of Skinwalker ranch.
Now it seems powerful Joe is swinging back into thinking that maybe not everything is ‘fuckery’ when it comes to unidentified flying objects. On April 5 Joe shared on his Facebook wall he had just watched Jeremy Corbell’s very popular documentary Bob Lazar, Area 51 & Flying Saucers –currently ranking as #6 of the top documentary films on iTunes— and gave a rather surprising positive review of it:
Very, very interesting. I have a love/hate relationship with UFO stories and conspiracy theories but this was some really compelling shit. To answer the obvious question, yeah I was high. I feel like watching a documentary on UFOs narrated by Mickey Rourke without getting high first would be disrespectful.
The good impression he had of the Lazar documentary has been recently shared on multiple times with his guests and audience at The Joe Rogan Experience (ranking #3 in the top podcasts of the iTunes chart):
Corbell is understandably excited and flattered at the unsought attention he’s receiving from one of the most influencing Internet personalities in the world, and is asking his followers to kickstart an informal campaign to see if he can get to be invited to the JRE, even hinting at the possibility that he could convince Bob Lazar himself to join him –which is kind of strange, considering how Lazar has a well-established reputation of being incredibly camera-shy and aversive to grant interviews, so the idea that he would be willing to be the guest of a live-streamed show would be uncharacteristic of him, to say the least…
Credit where credit is due, the fact that Joe found Jeremy’s film compelling should be commended, and is no doubt evidence that it is a well-produced documentary (for the record, I have yet to watch the film myself). I’ve already commented on multiple occasions my take on the Lazar case, so I’ll also refrain from Fortsplaining why I don’t agree with some of Joe’s opinion; I’ll just mention that saying “scientists didn’t know about element 115” back in the 80’s might not be exactly accurate. Some scientists have a very good idea of the things they don’t know, and even before the official discovery of Moscovium (the official name of element 115) physicists had predicted an ‘island of stability’ in the periodic chart of elements decades before Lazar became the ‘cosmic whistleblower’ and the American public learned about Area 51 –and again, years before Lazar gave that historic interview with George Knapp, local reporters and investigative reporters were covering the Air Force’s grab of the public lands surrounding the Groom Lake testing site, so even though ‘Dreamland’ hadn’t yet entered the pop culture lexicon, it’s actual existence wasn’t that much of a secret and Lazar wasn’t certainly the first one to reveal it.
“I’m too stupid to understand the science,” Joe says in one of the clips, admitting he’s not equipped to know whether Lazar’s claims of antigravity propulsion are actually plausible or pure BS. Rogan’s evident curiosity on a variety of diverse topics has always been a tell-tale sign of his underestimated intellect, so I think he would do fine if he actually had the opportunity to talk with Bob Lazar. When it comes to UFOlogical guests, unfortunately, The Joe Rogan Experience doesn’t exactly have the greatest of track records –e.g. Dr. Steven Greer and Tom DeLonge— which may or may not have influenced why Joe ended up dismissing the topic of UFOs for so long –my money is on the latter.
So even Corbell by his own and without Bob would definitely be an improvement; even though I stand by my opinion that he sought too hard to embed himself into the Bob Lazar saga, and doesn’t show proper objectivity when it comes to responding to the valid criticism the story has generated over the years. But personally, I’d much rather see Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal sit at the table of Joe’s studio, as was suggested by Dennis McKenna –a man he deeply respects– but I’m fully aware the high strangeness involved in Strieber’s experiences, and Kripal’s academic take on them are not as ‘sexy’ and approachable as tales of back-engineered alien technology.
Then again, after the JRE had Alex Jones rambling for almost five hours about the “globalist conspiracy to steal humanity’s soul via the psychedelic-enable psychic downloads of blueprints provided by deceptive interdimensional aliens,” maybe Joe is in need to upgrade from UFOlogy 101 once and for all, and talk to the kind of people who are proposing alternatives to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis –someone who, unlike Jones, doesn’t go ‘from zero to tinfoil’ in less than 60 seconds.
Diana Pasulka and “Tyler”? Now THAT would be a fucking good show! (hey a man can dream, can’t he?).
