MYSTERY WIRE — With much of the nation’s attention on NASA with the new rover landing on Mars, this month also marks another milestone. It was 50 years ago this month that NASA launched and returned the three man crew on board Apollo 14.
Astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell became the 5th and 6th humans to walk on the moon. Astronaut Stuart Roosa was the Command Module Pilot and stayed in orbit around the moon while Mitchell and Shepard explored the moon’s surface.
But Mitchell did more than just explore the moon’s surface; he used his return flight home to conduct a secret experiment into psychic phenomena.
Edgar Mitchell had originally been slated to be on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission to the moon but the crews were switched.
After Apollo 14 landed safely on the moon, he and Alan Shepard spent nine hours outside of the Lunar Exploration Module (LEM) exploring the lunar surface.
Mitchell was a brilliant scientist and a daring test pilot. He was born near Roswell, New Mexico, a town famous for an alleged UFO crash, a topic that became a central interest for Mitchell later in life.
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.”
Edgar Mitchell on seeing the Earth from the Moon
Apollo 14 lunar landing mission crew (L-R): Stuart A. Roosa, Alan B. Shepard and Edgar D. Mitchell, in space suits in front of large Apollo 14 logo. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images) 
31st January 1970: Group portrait of the Apollo 14 astronauts at a prelaunch news conference, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida. L-R: Edgar J Mitchell, Alan B Shepard (1923 – 1998) and Stuart A Roosa. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 
From left to right, astronauts Edgar Mitchell, Stuart Roosa and Alan Shepard in the Command Module simulator at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during their training for the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission, 15th July 1970. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images) 
(Original Caption) Kennedy Space Center, Florida: Apollo 14 Lunar Module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell speaks with a spacesuit technician during suiting activities preceding the countdown demonstration test today at the Kennedy Space Center. Roosa, and Commander Alan Shepard and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell participated in a dress rehearsal for their upcoming lunar voyage, scheduled to take place no earlier than January 31, 1971. NASA Photo. 
One of Apollo 14 souvenirs, United States, 1971 (Photo by Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)
He also studied psychic phenomena and conducted a psychic experiment during the return flight from the moon to earth.
In an interview with George Knapp, Mitchell said the evidence for psychic abilities is solid and scientific. “The psychic experience religion has said Western religion I’m referring to here, of course, has said it’s real, but it’s either satanic or divine, it’s supernatural. And scientists said it doesn’t exist. The reality is it does exist and it is natural.”
According to a 1971 New York Times article, Mitchell had recruited four people who were on earth during his flight. During the return flight, Mitchell used “25 numbered cards in the experiment, in which he attempted to send a thought message to the four persons as to what the symbol on each card was. He said two of the four got 51 of the 200 correct, and the other two were less successful.“
He explained his experiment this way in 2001 during an interview, “My experiment involved four transmission sessions during rest periods programmed into the flight. The well-known experiment in the laboratory was to use cards with the five Zener symbols, but the actual cards aren’t important. It was easier for me to use random number tables than carry the physical cards. Instead, all I did was to generate four tables of 25 random numbers just using the numbers 1 to 5. Then I randomly assigned a Zener symbol to each number. For each transmission, I would then check the particular table of random numbers and think about the corresponding symbol for 15 seconds. Each transmission took about 6 minutes. I did this when I was ready to go to sleep at night. We had sleeping bag hammocks that we would put underneath the couches. Two of us would go to sleep in a hammock while the other one would be on watch. I would do the experiment before going into my sleeping bag.“
NASA did confirm that Mitchell carried out the experiments during the flight, but pointed out it was during his rest periods and that NASA had not sanctioned them.
After NASA, Dr. Mitchell created the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to study psychic abilities. He also joined the board of Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in Las Vegas, which investigated UFOs.
American NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016) studies a map as he walks across the lunar surface during extravehicular activity (EVA), part of the Apollo 14 mission, 5th February 1971. Lunar dust from the surface of the Moon is visible on the boots and lower legs of Mitchell’s spacesuit. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) 
NEW YORK – SEPTEMBER 05: Edgar Mitchell arrives during the premiere of “Shadow of the Moon” at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History on September 5, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by Rick Diamond/WireImage) *** Local Caption *** 
View of a Saturn V SA-509 rocket blasting off during launch from Kennedy Space Center, carrying the Apollo 14 crew of Commander Alan Shepard, Command module pilot Stuart Roosa and Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell, at Cape Canaveral in Florida on 31st January 1971. The Apollo 14 mission would last for 9 days in space and on the surface of the moon before splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean on 9th February. (Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images) 
Apollo 14 – NASA, 1971. Mission commander Alan Shepard Jr. shown during an EVA in a photo by Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, February. 6, 1971. Artist NASA. (Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images) (Original Caption) Kennedy Space Center, Florida: Apollo 14 Lunar Module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell speaks with a spacesuit technician during suiting activities preceding the countdown demonstration test today at the Kennedy Space Center. Roosa, and Commander Alan Shepard and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell participated in a dress rehearsal for their upcoming lunar voyage, scheduled to take place no earlier than January 31, 1971. NASA Photo. 
(Original Caption) Space Center, Houston: Apollo 14 astronauts (L-R) Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa, in quarantine trailer, are welcomed home by their wives (L-R) Louise Shepard, Joan Rosa and Louise Mitchell. 
1971, Return to earth of Edgar Dean “Ed” Mitchell (1930 Ð 2016), United States Navy officer and NASA astronaut. He then went to serve as Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 14, landing with Shepard aboard the Lunar Module “Antares” on February 5, 1971, in the hilly upland Fra Mauro Highlands region of the Moon. They stayed on the Moon for 33 hours, deployed and activated lunar surface scientific equipment and experiments, and collected almost 100 pounds of lunar samples for return to Earth. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) 
(Original Caption) 2/9/1971-South Pacific-Apollo 14 astronauts (L-R) Edgar Mitchell, Stuart Roosa, and Alan Shepard sit in the egress raft as a Navy swimmer closes the door of the command module Kitty Hawk, after spashdown in the Pacific. Moments later the astronauts were lifted aboard an HS-6 recovery helicopter and flown to the recovery ship USS New Orleans. 
View of the Lunar Module craft of the Apollo 14 mission positioned on the near side of the Moon’s surface after a successfull descent and landing on 5th February 1971. The Apollo 14 manned mission to the Moon, with crew comprising Lunar Module pilot Edgar Mitchell, Command Module pilot Stuart Roosa and Mission Commander Alan Shepard, would last for 9 days in space and on the moon before returning to splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean on 9th February. (Photo by Rolls Press/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images) From left to right, astronauts Edgar Mitchell, Stuart Roosa and Alan Shepard in the Command Module simulator at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during their training for the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission, 15th July 1970. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)
Mitchell described his ride through space as an epiphany, a sudden vision about the nature and wonder of the universe. devoted to bridging the gap between science and religion. “The psychic experience religion has said Western religion I’m referring to here, of course, has said it’s real, but it’s either satanic or divine, it’s supernatural. And scientists said it doesn’t exist. The reality is it does exist and it is natural.”
“But then there was Mitchell. After returning to Earth, he left NASA, grew a beard and divorced his wife. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which advocated exploring the universe by means of inquiry that lay outside of science and religion. He sought out South American shamans and Haitian Voodoo priests, promoted the benefits of Tibetan Buddhist lucid dreaming, visited the homes of people who claimed their children could bend spoons with their minds. He went on Jack Paar’s talk show with the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller. Two more marriages came and went. He got deep, very deep, into theories about extraterrestrials. He had a posthumous cameo in the cache of John Podesta’s hacked emails that WikiLeaks published this year, which included messages Mitchell sent to Podesta (a U.F.O. buff) asking him to discuss the possibility of disclosing the federal government’s records of alien contact. He signed the emails ‘6th man to walk on the Moon.’
New York Times – Dec. 21, 2016