Edgar Mitchell

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Edgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later describe as a savikalpa samadhi, a state of profound spiritual awakening. For an aeronautical engineer who had graduated first in his class at the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School and earned his doctorate from MIT, this was not supposed to happen. Yet Mitchell spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of it.

  He grew up on a ranch in New Mexico, learned to fly at age thirteen, and earned a private pilot license at sixteen. He accumulated five thousand hours of flight time before NASA ever called. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 back alive. He spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands. And then, after all of that, he walked away from NASA and spent decades pursuing questions that no flight manual could answer: about consciousness, about extraterrestrial life, about the edges of what science can measure.

  What drives a person who has already stood on the Moon to keep reaching? And what do you do with the rest of your life after you have been to the one place almost no one will ever go?

• 2. A Life Built for Speed and Distance

  ›

  Hereford, Texas, on the 17th of September 1930, was where Mitchell arrived, the son of Joseph Thomas Mitchell and Ollidean Margaret Mitchell. The family moved to New Mexico during the Depression and put down roots near Artesia, a town close to Roswell. Ranching shaped him early, and so did aviation. By thirteen he was already in a cockpit. By sixteen he held a private pilot license.

  He was a Boy Scout who reached the rank of Life Scout, one level below Eagle. He was active in DeMolay International and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame. These were not casual affiliations. Mitchell joined Artesia Lodge No. 29 of the Masonic Fraternity, and those organizational commitments ran through his life alongside his technical ambitions.

  His brother Jay, known as Coach, graduated with the inaugural class of the United States Air Force Academy in 1959 and rose to the rank of colonel. The Mitchell family produced military aviators as steadily as it had once produced ranchers. Edgar graduated from Artesia High School in 1948 and headed east to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he joined Kappa Sigma and earned a bachelor's degree in industrial management in 1952. That same year he entered the Navy. Nine years later, he added a second bachelor's, in aeronautical engineering, from the Naval Postgraduate School. Three years after that came a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT.

  By 1966, the year NASA selected him as part of its fifth astronaut group, Mitchell had logged five thousand flight hours, two thousand of them in jets. He had flown the A3D Skywarrior off the carriers USS Bon Homme Richard and USS Ticonderoga. He had graduated first in his class at the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School. He had also, during those same years, served as an instructor in advanced mathematics and navigation theory for astronaut candidates, teaching the skills he was simultaneously perfecting.

• 3. Crisis Above the Earth

  ›

  Before Mitchell ever reached the Moon, he had to help save three men who nearly did not make it back. When Apollo 13 failed in April 1970, Mitchell joined the Mission Operations Team on the ground. One specific problem fell to him: figuring out how to control the attitude of the Lunar Module with a dead Command and Service Module attached to it. Under normal conditions the arrangement was reversed, with the Service Module providing control. The Service Module had been damaged, so the entire logic of the spacecraft had to be reinvented on the fly, inside a simulator, while three astronauts waited.

  President Richard M. Nixon awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Mission Operations Team in 1970 for their work during that crisis. Mitchell received the medal along with the rest of the team.

  His path to Apollo 14 had also been shaped by a crew reassignment. Mitchell had been in rotation for Apollo 13, but his crew was switched to Apollo 14 so that Commander Alan Shepard, who had been grounded since the Gemini program by an inner ear condition, could train for a longer period. That switch put Mitchell alongside Shepard for the lunar landing instead. On the 5th of February 1971, the Lunar Module Antares set down in the Fra Mauro Highlands.

• 4. Nine Hours on Fra Mauro

  ›

  Fra Mauro is a hilly upland region, and Mitchell and Shepard worked there for nine hours. They deployed and activated lunar surface scientific equipment. They collected nearly one hundred pounds of lunar samples for the return to Earth. Mitchell logged a total of 216 hours and 42 minutes in space across the mission.

  Apollo 14 set several records. It was the only Apollo mission to use the Mobile Equipment Transporter, a wheeled cart for carrying tools and samples. The crew achieved the first successful use of color television with a new Vidicon tube. They covered the longest distance traversed on foot on the lunar surface to that point. The mission also recorded the largest payload placed in lunar orbit, the first use of shortened lunar orbit rendezvous techniques, and the first extensive orbital science period conducted during Command and Service Module solo operations.

  Mitchell took photographs during the surface excursion, including a shot of Shepard raising the American flag. In that image, Mitchell's shadow falls across the lunar surface near the flag. Popular Science later included the photograph in a gallery of the best astronaut selfies.

  Later in life, Mitchell recalled what drew him toward space in the first place. After President Kennedy announced the Moon program, he said, "that's what I wanted, because it was the bear going over the mountain to see what he could see." Exploration, education, and discovery, he said, had driven him since his earliest years. After the mission, he was designated as backup Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 16, his final official assignment in the astronaut corps before retiring from NASA and the Navy in October 1972 with the rank of captain.

• 5. The Overview Effect and What Followed

  ›

  On the return journey from the Moon, Mitchell experienced what he described as a savikalpa samadhi. The experience shifted something in him permanently. He had also, during the mission, conducted private ESP experiments with friends on Earth. The results were published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971.

  Mitchell described the feeling of looking back from lunar distance this way: "You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" The statement is blunt, unpolished, and entirely characteristic.

  In 1973, he became founding chairman of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto, California, an organization built around consciousness research and related phenomena. Near the end of his life he described what the Institute was trying to do: "Science and religion have lived on opposite sides of the street now for hundreds of years. So here we are, in the twenty-first century, trying to put two faces of reality, the existence face and the intelligence or conscious face, into the same understanding."

  Writer David Jay Brown reported in his 2013 book The New Science of Psychedelics that Mitchell had experimented with LSD, comparing the sensations favorably to weightlessness. Whether that experimentation came before or after Apollo 14 was never established.

• 6. UFOs, Remote Healing, and the Government

  ›

  Mitchell said publicly that he was ninety percent sure that many of the thousands of UFOs recorded since the 1940s belonged to visitors from other planets. On the 19th of April 1996, Dateline NBC interviewed him on the subject. He described meeting with officials from three countries who claimed direct encounters with extraterrestrials and said the evidence was both strong and classified by governments covering up visitations.

  In 2004, he told a newspaper that a group of insiders within the U.S. government had been studying recovered alien bodies and had stopped briefing presidents after John F. Kennedy. On the 23rd of July 2008, he told Kerrang Radio that governments had hidden the truth about extraterrestrial contact for sixty years. A NASA spokesman responded the same day on the Skeptoid Podcast, stating that NASA does not track UFOs and does not share Mitchell's opinions, while also calling him "a great American."

  Two days later, Mitchell clarified on Fox News that his sources were unnamed individuals at Roswell, since deceased, along with an unnamed intelligence officer at the Pentagon. By 2014, he told an interviewer for AskMen that he had never personally seen a UFO and that his statements about a worldwide UFO cover-up were "just speculation on my part."

  The government intersected with Mitchell's post-NASA life in other ways. Journalist Annie Jacobsen asserted that Mitchell's Mind Science Institute served as a conduit for CIA payments to Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller in 1972, while Geller was being evaluated by a research group at SRI International. In 1976, Mitchell met privately with George H. W. Bush, then Director of Central Intelligence, to seek additional funding for the SRI group's remote viewing research. Bush declined, citing post-Watergate scrutiny of the intelligence community, but suggested pursuing military sponsorship. That suggestion, Mitchell's advocates later argued, helped lead to the formation of the Stargate Project in 1978.

  In the area of health, Mitchell claimed that a teenage remote healer living in Vancouver, who used the pseudonym Adam Dreamhealer, treated his kidney cancer from a distance between December 2003 and June 2004. Mitchell stated that sonogram and MRI results had been consistent with renal carcinoma, and that by June 2004 the irregularity had resolved. He acknowledged no biopsy was taken.

• 7. A Camera, a Settlement, and a Legacy

  ›

  On the 29th of June 2011, the federal government filed suit against Mitchell in the United States district court in Miami after discovering that he had placed a camera used on Apollo 14 for auction at Bonhams. Mitchell's position was that NASA had given him the camera as a gift after the mission. Bonhams withdrew the item from auction. By October 2011, the two sides reached a settlement: Mitchell agreed to return the camera, and NASA agreed to donate it for display at the National Air and Space Museum. On the 20th of September 2012, Congress enacted H.R. 4158, confirming full ownership rights of Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini artifacts to the astronauts who carried them.

  Mitchell died under hospice care in West Palm Beach, Florida, on the 4th of February 2016, the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing. He was 85. Stuart Roosa and Alan Shepard had both died in the 1990s, making Mitchell the last surviving member of the Apollo 14 crew.

  He was survived by five children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. The Institute of Noetic Sciences, which he had founded more than four decades earlier, continued its work. In 1997, the same year he was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame alongside twenty-four other Apollo astronauts, Mitchell had reflected on what exploration meant to him. The answer he gave was the same one he had always given: the bear going over the mountain, to see what he could see.