This is Part 2. Part 1 of the Edgar Mitchell essay can be found here.
It had taken nine years of training, and his return to university to earn a PhD with a dissertation which designed a mission to Mars. But now the boy who’d once milked cows and mended fences, who’d read Buck Rogers comics and wondered if aliens had smashed into a nearby farm, was going to space. Edgar Mitchell would serve as Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 14 mission, a voyage to the moon launched on 31 January, 1971.
On the way there, he did something very strange. Not only strange, but unauthorised and kept secret from his two crew-mates, Stuart Roosa and “Big” Al Shepard. What Mitchell did was perform experiments in ESP – extra-sensory perception – or mind-reading. He did this twice on the way to the moon, and twice again on the way back to Earth, during designated rest periods.
Three weeks before launch, Mitchell had met with two physicists and two psychics. Together, they arranged an experiment. Mitchell would produce four tables of 25 numbers each, the sequence random and comprising only the digits 1-5. Against each number he would assign one of the five Zener symbols. At arranged times – which were impossible to uphold in practice – Mitchell would concentrate on the string of numbers and symbols, while his four fellow experimenters back on Earth would try and detect the “transmission”. “We practiced a few times with the principles before the flight,” Mitchell explained in a 2001 interview. “As far as we know, it doesn’t take any expertise at all, except relaxation and focus, and the ability of individuals to intuitively resonate with someone else.”
Norman Mailer, in one of his characteristically nutty intuitions, once thought that zero-gravity might be especially congenial for telepathy, but this wasn’t why Mitchell and his buddies had chosen Apollo 14 for their experiments. No, it was the simple novelty of distance. “No one had ever done them at those distances,” Mitchell later remembered. “The question was whether the effect fell off with distance, and the answer is no. People had thought this, but no one had ever proved it at distances of hundreds of thousands of miles.”
To his last days, Mitchell swore that the experiments yielded positive results – as he would maintain that telepathy was real. For a man of science, though, he’d betrayed his own romantic credulity. In that 2001 interview, he says that he’d already believed in ESP for years before. The space experiments weren’t so much testing a hypothesis, as proving something he’d already come to fervently believe in.
As it was, one of the “credible” psychics involved was the Swede Olof Jonsson, who’d been caught previously using street magic tricks in laboratory tests of ESP. “I conducted the experiment on my own time with my friends,” Mitchell said. “It was really intended to be a very personal and private experiment. We had no intention to making it public. Olof Jonsson unfortunately told the press before we ever had a chance to look at the data. The media was a big problem, because they were biased against the experiment.”
*
The Apollo 14 mission created an odd couple. Mitchell and “Big Al” Shepard were designated to walk the surface of the moon together, while Roosa remained in lunar orbit in the command module awaiting their return. Mitchell was eccentric, while “Big Al” had developed a reputation as a frivolous and abrasively self-regarding man. It was Shepard who smuggled a couple of golf balls and a makeshift club to the moon’s surface where, on live television, he drove two of them.
But the mission, which was purely scientific in scope this time, was in many regards a failure. The moonwalkers’ principal task was the examination of the Cone crater, which they failed to reach. They were also tasked with bagging geological samples, of which they claimed few, and those they did bring back were hopelessly labelled – meaning analysts back on Earth were confused about the precise sites they came from. In this light, the golf swings looked like cowboy theatre.
Over two trips, Mitchell and Shepard were on the moon’s surface for a total of nine and a half hours – longer than anyone ever has been – but it was the journey back to Earth which Mitchell nominated as profoundly and permanently transformative. Here he is in Earthrise:
“The ride home was absolutely remarkable and I’ll never forget it… I truly felt like a cosmic sightseer. And then something extraordinary happened to me. As our spacecraft headed toward Earth, it was constantly rotating in the barbecue mode as it had done on the way to the Moon. These slow rotations protected the craft, but they also gave me a spectacular view. As we turned, I was able to see a breathtaking 360-degree panorama of the heavens with the Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the many glistening stars passing by the window. And because there’s no atmosphere in space, everything looked 10 times brighter than on Earth.
“On top of all the good feelings I was experiencing, I suddenly had a moment of deep insight. It was an overwhelming realization that my body and mind were connected to everything in the universe. I felt a deep, deep connection with all of life and a sense of oneness with the cosmos.
“It was a profound and ecstatic realization. First of all, I realized I was connected to the universe, and second, I realized there was a unity to everything and everyone. To my delight, this naturally good feeling lasted for the next three days on our return to Earth. All I needed to do was look out my window and stare at the brilliant stars against the deep black sky—and there was that wonderful feeling again.”
Here was the sublime, the face of God, a permanent impression of awe. And for “awe” here, I’ll use the definition of social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, which I love for reclaiming the deep, medieval flavour of the word’s origin: “Dread mingled with veneration, reverential or respectful fear; and the attitude of a mind subdued to profound reverence in the presence of supreme authority, moral greatness or sublimity, or mysterious sacredness.”
For his first flight, as a four-year-old boy, Mitchell sat upon his father’s lap in a barnstormer’s plane. Now he sat in the lap of the Holy Spirit, embraced by the revelation of a divine consciousness. And life was never the same again.
*
Not long after their return to Earth, the three astronauts of Apollo 14 were invited to the White House for dinner with President Nixon. A golfer himself, Nixon presented Shepard with a joke plaque commemorating his moon swing.
Mitchell said and wrote little about his dinner with the President. But the secret contrast between the men amuses me. I say “secret” because as the men ate their dinner, Nixon was waging war against drugs and long-haired dope fiends, and so presumably Mitchell remained mute about his own cosmic epiphanies and recent transformation from combat veteran to peacenik. It might’ve made for an awkward dinner had the President discovered that the freaks of Aquarius were not contained “out there” in universities and San Fran, but had infiltrated NASA and the goddamn space program itself.
And so I like to imagine Mitchell being respectfully uncontroversial. As I can imagine the President wanting to talk shop with the alpha spacemen. “The Saturn V rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, Mr. President,” they might’ve said, and “holds a million pounds of liquid fuel” and all the while Mitchell squirming with the revelations of cosmic unity and his apprehensions about the Vietnam war.
Mitchell’s wife left him not long after Mitchell left NASA. It was 1972. Of that blow, Mitchell is typically dull and unrevealing in his memoir:
“I realized that after my Apollo 14 journey, I had gone from ‘outer space to inner space’ in a matter of months, and I now wanted to devote the rest of my life to the exploration of the mind. Louise wasn’t thrilled with my new direction. For many years she had been very patient and supportive of my career. She’d already been through a lot of changes while I was in the navy, and the demanding schedule of my work as an astronaut was intense. Suddenly I was very excited about a whole new career path studying the mind, and Louise found this difficult to accept.”
In 1973, Mitchell established the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which still exists today and remains dedicated to “reveal[ing] the interconnected nature of reality through scientific exploration and personal discovery”. He believed in a “quantum hologram”. He was unshakeably convinced of telekinesis and mind-reading. He thought a universal consciousness imbued all things, both living and inanimate. He said that his cancer had once been vanquished by the mind power of a man called Adam Dreamhealer. He believed that the Roswell crash of his boyhood was, in fact, the crash-landing of alien intelligence – and that these infinitely sophisticated beings, possessed of superior wisdom and technology, had come to warn us of our own nuclear annihilation (though they weren’t sufficiently sophisticated, of course, to have avoided crashing their spacecraft).
Mitchell loaned his authority as a NASA astronaut to the gifted magician and illusionist Uri Geller, then world-famous for bending spoons and claiming that his sleight-of-hand tricks were, in fact, supernatural powers. Geller had been serially debunked by fellow magicians, but Mitchell persisted for years in his endorsement of Geller as proof of parapsychology. In the 1970s, Mitchell helped broker a meeting between Geller and the CIA.
Old NASA colleagues were privately dismayed with Mitchell’s spruiking of pseudo-science, of his boundless credulity and untrained enthusiasms, which they felt reflected poorly upon their organisation. Decades later, when Mitchell claimed publicly that the US government had concealed evidence of extra-terrestrial visitation, NASA were moved to issue a polite repudiation: “Dr. Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue,” they said.
*
Richard Nixon wasn’t the only US president Mitchell met. The other was George H.W. Bush, though at the time he was CIA director and some years from becoming president himself. Mitchell wanted to impress upon Bush the fantastic possibilities of the mind, and how useful they could be to the service. But Bush “said his hands were tied because the Agency was in too much [trouble] with Congress,” Mitchell remembered years later. That trouble regarded the now disgraced and former President Nixon, and the various crimes and trespasses we’ve come to know as Watergate.
Despite Bush’s demurral, the CIA had time and money, and amounts of them were given to researching alleged feats of mind-control. Russia and China were doing similarly. Untold money was spent experimenting with telekinesis – it went nowhere (or at least that’s what they want you to believe: you can traverse circles infinitely with those who still think governments have harnessed both telekinetic powers and alien technologies. But if so, it didn’t seem to help in the search for bin Laden, did it?)
*
In 2017, the New York Times reporter Annie Jacobsen published Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. In it, she writes about interviewing Edgar Mitchell in his Florida home, less than a year before his death aged 85. She’s suitably – understandably – respectful, even reverential. This son of Depression-era farmers had become a test pilot, astronaut and moonwalker after all. But the tenderness of Jacobsen’s respect is stretched into bathos when she describes Mitchell sharing with her his most cherished items.
Mitchell takes her to a safe in his house, from which he removes a bent spoon. It was not bent by the mind of Mitchell, nor the mind of his old mate Uri Geller. Rather, here was a spoon alleged to have been bent by the mind of a child after watching Mitchell and Geller on television many years before. It was a talk show, on which Geller performed his signature trick and then encouraged all the children watching at home to test for themselves their own supernatural powers.
Well, one did, and an astonished mother had sent the spoon to Mitchell. And this spoon, of which he hadn’t seen being bent, but had simply received in the mail, along with the handwritten letter testifying to its extraordinary provenance, Mitchell had kept for decades as “inspiration”. That’s faith, to be sure – it’s also an unflattering reflection of his commitment to scientific method.
Edgar Mitchell was born to the Depression, and on farms watched the acceleration of commercial flight and the birth of the atom bomb. He flew in war, then walked on the moon, and later enjoyed the audience of presidents. He saw, experienced and influenced major tech developments and social phenomena of the American century – aviation, spaceflight, television, celebrity, the atom bomb – and was both electrified and electrocuted by its currents.
Stubborn and irritably restless, he also promoted grifters and illusionists. He found refuge in theoretical speculations as his professional and personal life suffered. He retreated further from the epistemologies of his training, and found himself in strange lands populated by cranks. The Noetic Institute may have been referenced by Dan Brown, and enjoyed the donations of wealthy patrons, but in its fifty-year existence has yielded nothing.
It’s brutally reductive, I know, but the single life of Edgar Mitchell, and its messy sum of fulfilled and unfulfilled dreaming, seems to me a fascinating guide to the American century – of its sins and virtues; its ingenuities and pathologies; its will and destructive sentimentality. Shine on, you crazy diamond.