Edgar Mitchell

Edgar Dean Mitchell (September 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016) was an American naval officer, test pilot and NASA astronaut who flew as Lunar Module pilot of Apollo 14 and on February 5, 1971 became the sixth person to walk on the Moon. On the three-day journey home he experienced what he described as an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness, which he later identified as a savikalpa samādhi, and in 1973 he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to pursue the scientific study of consciousness that the experience had opened for him. He had also run a private, unsanctioned ESP experiment from the spacecraft, concentrating on targets for four participants on Earth.

From the 1990s until his death he said publicly that extraterrestrial visitation of Earth was real, that the Roswell incident involved a craft from another planetary system, and that governments had concealed it, becoming a prominent voice in the disclosure movement. By his own account none of this rested on anything he had seen himself: he said in 2004 that he had "never had first hand experiences of ETs or UFO phenomena" and relied on "trusted 'old timers'" and government and military personnel who had briefed him, and in 2008 he named neither his Roswell sources, who he said had since died, nor the intelligence officer at the Pentagon who he said told him the same. NASA's spokesman replied that the agency "does not track UFOs" and does "not share his opinions on this issue," and in 2014 Mitchell called his statements about a worldwide cabal "just speculation on my part." Stanton Friedman recorded that Mitchell "spoke openly to me about his conviction that flying saucers are real," in the same passage as Gordon Cooper's UN testimony, while Clas Svahn recalls Mitchell insisting that no astronaut had seen a UFO in space. Robert Carroll of the Skeptic's Dictionary calls the 3,000-to-1 odds Mitchell reported for the Apollo 14 ESP test the product of "an afterthought analysis of the data." The Wilson–Davis memo surfaced from Mitchell's estate: Ross Coulthart judges its provenance solid, while Admiral Thomas Wilson told him in a letter that the conversation it records never took place.

Early life and Navy career

Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas, and grew up in a ranching family that moved to New Mexico during the Great Depression; he considered Artesia, New Mexico, near Roswell, his hometown. He took a bachelor's degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1952 and entered the Navy that year, added a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1961 and a Doctor of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964, and after flying patrol aircraft and the A3D Skywarrior graduated first in his class at the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1966.

Apollo 14

Selected in NASA's fifth astronaut group in 1966, Mitchell was moved onto Alan Shepard's crew so that Shepard, grounded earlier by Ménière's disease, could train longer; during the Apollo 13 emergency he worked in a simulator on procedures for flying the Lunar Module with the inert Command/Service Module attached, work for which President Richard Nixon gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970. He and Shepard landed the Lunar Module Antares in the Fra Mauro Highlands on February 5, 1971, stayed 33 hours and brought back almost 100 pounds of samples; Mitchell logged 216 hours 42 minutes in space on his only flight.

About three weeks before launch, Mitchell has said, two research physicists he names as Drs. Boyle and Maxie suggested an ESP experiment and coordinated it; with a psychic they knew and the Chicago psychic Olof Jonsson they made up the four people on Earth. He generated four tables of 25 random numbers, assigned a Zener symbol to each number, and during rest periods in the flight concentrated on each target for fifteen seconds, at night before going into his sleeping bag. He described it as "a very personal and private experiment" that was never meant to be public, said that Jonsson told the press before the data had been examined, and said NASA management ignored it apart from Wernher von Braun, who he said was "very intrigued by it and was very supportive." The results appeared as "An ESP Test from Apollo 14" in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971, and Mitchell maintained that the test "did show that what had worked in the laboratory also worked in space with the same very positive results." Robert Carroll's review of Dean Radin's Entangled Minds quotes Radin, a senior scientist at IONS, calling it a "successful ESP card experiment from the Apollo 14 space capsule," and answers that the arranged timing failed in flight, so the paper recast the study as one of precognition; that press reports of 51 hits in 200 guesses amount to 25.5 per cent, not significant for four participants; and that the 3,000-to-1 odds Mitchell gave the New York Times came from "an afterthought analysis of the data" showing below-chance guessing. Mitchell's own account of the timing was that the mismatch "didn't seem to make any difference."

The return-flight experience

On the return from the Moon, Mitchell reported a powerful mystical experience that he later described as a savikalpa samādhi. Mitchell later characterized the experience as an epiphany — a sense of connectedness and the presence of intelligence in the universe — that he interpreted as consistent with the extraterrestrial presence he said he subsequently learned of. With the experiment done and the spacecraft working well, he has said, he could "look out the window for three days"; he had "a non-local feeling that there is something here I don't understand" and "felt a part of it," an insight that "set the tone for my last 30 years" and led him to study the mystical traditions, Uri Geller and inner religious experience. In 1998 he described "an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness" as he gazed at the Earth from the command module, and the researchers of the foundation that bears his name later wrote that he had experienced "a Samadhi awakening."

Neil deGrasse Tyson recounted Mitchell's own description of the experience that led to the founding of IONS: during the three-day return from the Moon the Apollo 14 capsule rotated for thermal stabilization in a position where its windows aligned with the plane of the solar system, and Mitchell watched the sun, the Moon, Earth, and all visible planets drift through his field of view in rotation. "He felt like he had descended or ascended into a trance state that was beyond" ordinary consciousness — an experience Tyson connected to the broader scientific and metaphysical framework Mitchell subsequently developed at IONS.

Diana Walsh Pasulka, scholar of religion and UAP phenomena, described Mitchell as one of the first astronauts to document the overview effect — the profound psychological and cognitive shift reported by astronauts upon seeing Earth as a single small object from deep space — and as someone who "did something about it because it changed him so much."

Post-NASA career

Mitchell retired from NASA and the Navy as a captain in October 1972 and immediately founded Edgar D. Mitchell & Associates of Monterey, California, a commercial organization "promoting ecologically-pure products and services designed to alleviate planetary problems." In 1973 he became founding chairman of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto, California; "Science and religion have lived on opposite sides of the street now for hundreds of years," he said toward the end of his life; "…body and mind, physicality and consciousness belong to the same side of reality." A 1971 newspaper profile had already described him as fascinated by extrasensory perception, "closer to the human mind than space flight is." IONS researcher Dean Radin reportedly spent years building a database of meditation and psychic research under Mitchell's foundation — work that, according to accounts within the exoconsciousness community, subsequently influenced military remote viewing programs and the broader scientific study of consciousness.

Mitchell said that Andrija Puharich, who had worked with Uri Geller, telephoned to ask whether he wished to meet Geller, and that he later worked with Geller in a laboratory. Annie Jacobsen asserts that Mitchell's Mind Science Institute was the conduit through which the Central Intelligence Agency paid Puharich and Geller during the 1972 SRI International evaluation led by Puthoff and Russell Targ, and that in 1976 Mitchell asked then-CIA director George H. W. Bush to fund the group's remote viewing research; Bush declined but suggested military sponsorship, a path Jacobsen links to the Stargate Project of 1978.

Mitchell said that a teenage remote healer working under the name "Adam Dreamhealer" had helped clear a suspected kidney cancer between December 2003 and June 2004, though no biopsy was taken, only a sonogram and MRI he called "consistent with renal carcinoma." He co-founded the Association of Space Explorers in 1983. He also co-founded the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE), whose researchers surveyed 3,256 people reporting contact with non-human intelligence.

Public statements on extraterrestrial visitation

At a conference organised by Steven Greer, Mitchell described a "clandestine group" of former government and intelligence people holding technology that, he said, no nation's arsenal contained. From the 1990s he said he was "90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets," and told reporters in 1998 that witnesses from intelligence agencies and the military had convinced him of a fifty-year cover-up, while calling claims of structures on Mars or the Moon "bonkers" and saying none had been seen at his landing site. Dateline NBC interviewed him in 1996 about officials from three countries who told him of personal encounters with extraterrestrials, evidence he called "very strong" and "classified," and his book The Way of the Explorer (1996) speaks of "credible professionals within two governments." In 2004 he told the St. Petersburg Times that a "cabal of insiders" were studying recovered bodies and had stopped briefing presidents after John F. Kennedy, and "We all know that UFOs are real," he said; "now the question is where they come from."

On Roswell he told the London People in 1998, "Make no mistake, Roswell happened. I've seen secret files which show the government knew about it," and that he "wasn't convinced about the existence of aliens until I started talking to the military old-timers who were there at the time of Roswell," told a Swiss forum in 2005 that friends "who saw the events at that time with their own eyes and today long are dead" had told him the truth, and in his foreword to the 2008 edition of Stanton Friedman's Flying Saucers and Science referred to "the recovery of an alien craft at Roswell" and the "now-famous Roswell UFO crash" at the start of the Cold War. In the 2008 Kerrang Radio interview he said "I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real"; NASA's spokesman replied on the Skeptoid podcast that the agency "does not track UFOs," is not involved in any cover-up and does "not share his opinions on this issue." Brian Dunning's episode notes that Mitchell "does not claim to have personally observed any of these alien craft" and sets against his account the blinking light that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reported on the way to the Moon, which Dunning writes was soon identified as a separated adapter panel. Stanton Friedman writes that Mitchell "spoke openly to me about his conviction that flying saucers are real," in a passage that also records Gordon Cooper's written testimony to the United Nations General Assembly, and Clas Svahn recalls that Mitchell was "very adamant" that not a single astronaut had ever seen a UFO in space. In a Fox News interview two days later Mitchell clarified that his comments did not involve NASA, but cited unnamed sources — since deceased — at Roswell who had allegedly confided to him that the incident involved an alien craft, and said an unnamed intelligence officer at the Pentagon had told him the same. Mitchell repeatedly asserted that he had personally been briefed by "old-timers" with direct knowledge of the alleged cover-up, who told him the Roswell crash allegedly involved beings from another planetary system; he further stated that the beings were not hostile and that some crashed vehicles may have resulted from electromagnetic interference with navigation systems from early radar testing. Asked in 2004 about his repeated claims to have seen proof of extraterrestrial life, Mitchell answered "Not so": he had never had firsthand experiences of the phenomenon and relied on the testimony of trusted "old timers" and government and military personnel who had briefed him. In 2014 he told AskMen that he had never personally seen a UFO, that no one had ever threatened him over his claims, and that any statements about a worldwide cabal covering up UFOs were "just speculation on my part." In 2015 he told the Daily Mirror that extraterrestrials "had been attempting to keep us from going to war [with Russia] and help create peace on Earth," and that "White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons — and that's what the extraterrestrials were interested in." He was one of the forty-three witnesses at the May 2013 Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington, produced by Stephen Bassett.

Luis Elizondo writes that Mitchell confided to Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis that his own family was among the Roswell families threatened by the FBI after the crashes, agents visiting ranchers door to door with the message that anyone who spoke about them would be killed.

Steven Greer, founder of the Disclosure Project, identified Mitchell as a scientific collaborator who had "an understanding that, in a very clear way, where it becomes scientific and where the scientific evidence builds" regarding consciousness and extraterrestrial contact — citing Mitchell's work at IONS as providing the framework for understanding how ET contact occurs at the level of consciousness rather than purely through physical encounters.

Greer also recounted that he had "took astronaut Edgar Mitchell to one of those briefings" — specifically the Pentagon briefing for Admiral Thomas Wilson, head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and that Mitchell was reportedly shaken to learn that the officials at the briefing "were being lied to and denied access" to classified programs. Coulthart dates the meeting to 1997, says Wilson told him that it took place, and says Wilson has "adamantly denied" in a letter that the conversation recorded in the Wilson–Davis memo ever happened. When Mitchell died, Elizondo writes, his safe was opened and the memo found and circulated by his estate; Coulthart says a close friend of Mitchell whom he calls "the Spaceman," custodian of Mitchell's private UFO archives, let him see the original there, and that Mitchell sat on the science advisory board of Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science; he adds that he is "not prepared to assert that the Admiral Tom Wilson Memo is for real."

Jeremy Corbell, documentary filmmaker, described spending extensive time with Mitchell in the final years of his life and identified Mitchell as one of his primary sources for authenticating the Wilson–Davis memo: "The reason I know that memo is real is because I spent a lot of time with Dr. Edgar Mitchell, sixth man to walk on the moon, last guy to film him before he died. Right? That's how I know. I don't want any journalists thinking I got it from anywhere else. I know because of Mitchell."

Mitchell appeared in the documentaries In the Shadow of the Moon (2007), The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone and The Living Matrix (2009).

Views and teachings

In The Way of the Explorer Mitchell proposed a dyadic model of reality, and in a 2001–02 interview he described a "quantum hologram," a non-local informational record emitted by every physical object, as the mechanism behind telepathy, healing and the survival of experience, adding, "It's just our ignorance that causes it to seem supernatural." Rebecca Hardcastle, who worked with him, recalls him saying that "400 years ago we made a split" in which science took every facet of study and "the church got consciousness." His books include Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (1974), The Way of the Explorer (1996) and Earthrise: My Adventures as an Apollo 14 Astronaut (2014).

Personal life and death

Mitchell married Louise Randall (1951–72), Anita Rettig (1973–84) and Sheilah Ledbetter (1989–99). He died under hospice care in West Palm Beach, Florida on February 4, 2016, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing, and was the last surviving member of the Apollo 14 crew.

Open questions

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