Edgar Mitchell

Edgar Dean Mitchell, Sc.D. (born September 17, 1930) is an American pilot, retired Captain in the United States Navy and NASA astronaut. As the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14, he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

Biography
Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas. He was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. He was also a member of DeMolay International, part of the Masonic Fraternity, and has been inducted into its Hall of Fame.

Mitchell earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial management from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1952. The following year he joined the U.S. Navy, where he trained as a pilot and flew off the aircraft carriers USS Bon Homme Richard and USS Ticonderoga. He later qualified as a research pilot and taught at the Navy's research pilot school. While on active duty in the Navy, he earned a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a Doctor of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently resides in suburban West Palm Beach, Florida.

Mitchell is a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, and carried one of the order's badges to the Moon; it is now kept at his home chapter of Kappa Sigma at Carnegie Mellon University.

NASA career
Mitchell was selected to be an astronaut in 1966 and was seconded from the Navy to NASA. He was designated as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10, and flew as lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, where he spent nine hours working on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro Highlands region, making him the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

Apollo 14 was Mitchell's only spaceflight. He remained with NASA until 1972, when he retired from the Navy.

After NASA
Ed Mitchell was awarded honorary doctorates from the New Mexico State University, the University of Akron, Carnegie Mellon University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Edgar Mitchell was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970 by President Richard Nixon.

On June 29, 2011, the United States Government filed a lawsuit against Mitchell in the United States District Court in Miami, Florida after discovering that he possessed a camera used by the Apollo 14 crew on the moon, and had put the camera up for auction at the British auction house Bonhams. The litigation asked that the camera be returned to NASA. Mitchell's position was that NASA had given him the camera as a gift upon the completion of the Apollo 14 mission. Bonhams has withdrawn the camera from auction. In October, 2011, prosecutors and Mitchell reached a settlement agreement, under which Mitchell gave up any claims to the camera and agreed to return it to NASA, which in turn would donate it for display at the National Air and Space Museum.

Other interests
Mitchell's interests include consciousness and paranormal phenomena. On his way back to earth during the Apollo 14 flight he had a powerful savikalpa samādhi experience, and also claimed to have conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth. The results of said experiments were published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971. He was the founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) for the purpose of consciousness research and other "related phenomena." On the Opie and Anthony radio show, Buzz Aldrin described a psychic communication experiment that Mitchell conducted during the Apollo 14 flight, wherein Mitchell attempted to transmit information to an observer on the ground. Aldrin stated that the experiment was a complete failure.

Remote healing
Mitchell claims that a teenage remote healer who lives in Vancouver and uses the pseudonym Adam Dreamhealer helped him heal kidney cancer from a distance. Mitchell said that while he never had a biopsy, "I had a sonogram and MRI that was consistent with renal carcinoma." Adam worked (distantly) on Mitchell from December 2003 until June 2004, when the "irregularity was gone and we haven't seen it since".

Views on UFOs
Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is "90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets". Dateline NBC conducted an interview with Mitchell on April 19, 1996, during which he discussed meeting with officials from three countries who claimed to have had personal encounters with extraterrestrials. He offered his opinion that the evidence for such "alien" contact was "very strong" and "classified" by governments, who were covering up visitations and the existence of alien beings' bodies in places such as Roswell, New Mexico. He further claimed that UFOs had provided "sonic engineering secrets" that were helpful to the U.S. government. Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer, discusses his journey into mysticism and space.

In 2004 he told the St. Petersburg Times that a "cabal of insiders" in the U.S. government were studying recovered alien bodies, and that this group had stopped briefing U.S. Presidents after John F. Kennedy. He said, "We all know that UFOs are real; now the question is where they come from."

On July 23, 2008 Edgar Mitchell was interviewed on Kerrang Radio by Nick Margerrison. Mitchell claimed the Roswell crash was real and that aliens have contacted humans several times, but that governments have hidden the truth for 60 years, stating: "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." In reply, a spokesman for NASA stated: "NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue."

In an interview with Fox News on July 25, 2008, Mitchell clarified that his comments did not involve NASA, but quoted unnamed sources, since deceased, at Roswell who confided to him that the Roswell incident did involve an alien craft. Mitchell also claims to have subsequently received confirmation from an unnamed intelligence officer at the Pentagon.



Other projects
Edgar Mitchell appears in the documentaries In the Shadow of the Moon, The Phoenix Lights...We Are Not Alone, and The Living Matrix.

Mitchell has written several articles and essays, as well as two books. In The Way of the Explorer, Mitchell proposed a dyadic model of reality.

He is currently the Advisory Board Chairman of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, co-founded by Dr. Carol Rosin and is a member of INREES.

Mitchell is one of the initial supporters of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly – which would be a first step towards a "world parliament".

Honors and awards

 * Presidential Medal of Freedom (1970)
 * Navy Astronaut Wings
 * Navy Distinguished Service Medal
 * NASA Distinguished Service Medal

In media
1998 HBO TV series From the Earth to the Moon – played by Gary Cole

Books

 * The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds (1996), G. Putnam & Sons, hardcover, ISBN 0-399-14161-8, 2008 paperback edition: ISBN 1-56414-977-3, audio cassette edition: ISBN 1-57270-019-X
 * Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (1974), G. Putnam & Sons, ISBN 0-399-11342-8