Rant: That guy at the Denver diner who swore the moon landing was faked because of a flag

I was grabbing breakfast at a greasy spoon off Colfax about 3 years back, and this older guy in the booth next to me starts going off about how NASA faked the moon landings. He pointed to a photo on his phone of the flag looking like it was waving, said there's no wind on the moon so that proves it was a studio shoot. I told him the flag had a horizontal rod to hold it out, and he just laughed and called me a sheep. I tried pulling up a NASA page on my phone about the flag's design, but he waved me off and said all sources are corrupted. Been thinking about that conversation lately because I see the same flag argument pop up on social media all the time. It's wild how one bad claim can stick with someone for decades. Has anyone else ran into a person who just refuses to look at the actual source material?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_miles21h ago

That flag thing always comes up like clockwork, right alongside flat Earth stuff.

murray.robert20h ago

People get so caught up in these ready-made arguments they find online, they stop checking things for themselves. It's like the whole "pumpkin spice" debate every fall - everyone has a strong opinion about it based on a meme they saw, not because they actually bought one. Same with how folks insist you need to wash a cast iron skillet with soap, even though any old cook will tell you different. Once an idea gets a foothold in the group mind, facts don't really matter anymore.

emma9617h ago

I read that the flag thing actually started from a misunderstanding of a NASA press release. Some guy at a bar once told me the whole moon landing was filmed in a desert in Arizona, and when I asked why the sky was black instead of blue, he just said it was "special effects." It's like once someone picks a conspiracy, they build a whole wall around it with no doors. The same people who won't believe NASA will believe some random YouTube video with bad music and no sources. Social media loves these short, simple arguments because they fit in a caption, but the real story takes paragraphs to explain.