The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Edgar Mitchell.md

category	tags	aliases	summary	born	died	location	created	updated	relations
Scientists & Researchers	Astronaut Person Psi SRI Stargate Apollo14 IONS	Edgar Mitchell Edgar D. Mitchell Edgar Dean Mitchell Ed Mitchell Edgar D. Mitchell Jr.	Edgar Mitchell was a Navy captain and Apollo 14 lunar module pilot who ran a telepathy test during the flight and later founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences.	1930-09-17	2016-02-04	Hereford, Texas	2026-10-09	2026-10-09	type with start end role fn employed_by NASA 1966 1972 astronaut, NASA Group 5 1 type with start end role fn participant_in Apollo 14 1971-01-31 1971-02-09 lunar module pilot 1 type with start fn founded Institute of Noetic Science 1973 1 type with start role fn employed_by EDMA Corporation 1971 chief operating officer 14 type with start role fn funded Uri Geller 1972 original funding source for SRI tests of Geller 16 type with start end role fn participant_in Stanford Research Institute 1972 1973 co-experimenter on Geller tests 16 type with start role fn member_of National Institute for Discovery Science 2000 Science Advisory Board 25

Edgar Dean Mitchell (1930 to 2016) was a United States Navy captain and NASA astronaut. He flew as lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, which launched on January 31, 1971 and ended on February 9, 1971, and he became the sixth man to walk on the Moon.¹ After leaving government service he founded the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) and worked as a public advocate for psychic research.

Navy and NASA service

Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas on September 17, 1930. He received a bachelor's degree in industrial management from Carnegie Mellon University in 1952, a bachelor's degree in aeronautics from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1961, and a doctorate of science in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. He was commissioned an ensign in the Navy in May 1953.¹ He flew A3 aircraft with Heavy Attack Squadron Two from 1957 to 1958 and was a research project pilot with Air Development Squadron Five until 1959. From 1964 to 1965 he was chief of the project management division of the Navy field office for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. He attended the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School in 1965 and 1966, and in April 1966 he was selected for astronaut training as a member of NASA Group 5.¹ He served on the astronaut support crew for Apollo 9, was backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10, and was later designated backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 16.¹ His NASA biography gives Artesia, New Mexico as his hometown.¹ Luis Elizondo places Mitchell's childhood in the Roswell area of New Mexico and traces his interest in the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena topic to those years.²

On the Moon, Mitchell and Alan Shepard landed in the Fra Mauro highlands, and the crew's lunar surface EVA lasted 9 hours and 17 minutes. Mitchell logged 216 hours and 42 minutes in space on the flight. He retired from NASA and the Navy in 1972.¹ In a 1997 interview for the NASA Johnson Space Center oral history project he said he had decided in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, to orient his career toward spaceflight.³

Apollo 14 telepathy test

Mitchell conducted an unofficial telepathy test during the flight. A proposal for a direct brain action research program, prepared by Andrija Puharich and submitted by Mitchell, describes the test as one in which Mitchell concentrated on five standard ESP symbols in space while four earth-based persons tried to guess the order in which the symbols appeared. The proposal says the outcome was statistically significant and names Mitchell to the program's research committee.⁴

Mitchell's report, "An ESP Test from Apollo 14," appeared in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971, volume 35, number 2, pages 89 to 107.⁵

In an interview published in Cabinet Magazine in winter 2001 to 2002, Mitchell said that about three weeks before the mission he met research physicists he named as Drs. Boyle and Maxie, who "gathered and coordinated everything," and that the Earth-side group consisted of the two physicists, "a reputable psychic that they knew, and Olof Jonsson, who was a well-known public psychic in Chicago." He described four transmission sessions during rest periods programmed into the flight. Using four tables of 25 random numbers drawn from the digits 1 to 5, each number assigned a Zener Cards symbol, he thought of the symbol for each number for 15 seconds, each transmission taking about six minutes, before sleeping. He said the liftoff was forty minutes late and the Earth-side group could not be coordinated to an exact time. He said NASA management largely ignored the work, though Wernher von Braun was supportive and later spoke at an Institute fundraising dinner.⁶

In the 1997 oral history Mitchell said that six experiments were planned, "three out and three coming back," that he had time for four, and that "the a priori results were that chance could have produced our results one out of 3,000 experiments," with a post hoc analysis giving "one out of 13,000 experiments." He described the results as showing psi-missing, and said that matching his four sessions to the six Earth-side sessions in sequence, not by clock time, produced the strong result. He said that the press misread the data before it was analyzed and that the write-up in the Journal of Parapsychology "set the record very straight." Of Shepard's reaction after the flight he said that Shepard, laughing, asked "Ed, what's this all about?"³

An article in the Central Intelligence Agency's STARGATE files describes a pre-flight test that Mitchell arranged two weeks before launch with a Chicago drafting engineer named Olof Johnson, using 25 colored ESP cards. Mitchell looked at each card for 15 seconds at Cape Kennedy while Johnson in Chicago guessed which of five symbols it was. The article gives ten sessions and 250 guesses, reports that Johnson got about half, or 125, of the 250 correct against an expected 50, calculates a deviation of 75 and "odds of ten million to one against chance," and states of the six lunar sessions of 25 guesses each, 150 guesses in all, that "it is not reported how many Johnson got correct."⁷ A 1972 study prepared for the Defense Intelligence Agency by Captain John D. LaMothe of the Army Medical Intelligence Office describes 150 separate attempts by Mitchell to project his thoughts from inside the capsule to an individual on Earth, and refers readers to the Journal of Parapsychology for the results. The same study closes its parapsychology section with Mitchell's remarks on The David Frost Show of March 16, 1971: "Extrasensory perception is not a matter of belief."⁸

Olaf Johnson, the Earth-side receiver Mitchell named, was a Swedish-born American citizen. He died in Las Vegas on May 11, 1998 at the age of 79, after living there for 18 years, and the Las Vegas Sun described him as a former psychic adviser to Ferdinand Marcos who had taken part in the Apollo 14 experiment.⁹ The Chicago Tribune reported that he worked for nearly two decades as an engineer with the Chicago architectural firm of Schmidt, Garden and Erikson, remained in Chicago until 1980, and "named the cards in the correct order about half the time" in the Apollo 14 experiment.¹⁰ Annie Jacobsen names Olaf Johnson as the receiver on Earth and writes that Mitchell was inspired to run his telepathy experiments by the work of Sir Hubert Wilkins, whose book Thoughts Through Space describes his own experiments in mind-to-mind telepathy.¹¹

A STARGATE-file document, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400290002-1, is a translated Chinese-language article attributed to Qian Xuesen. The passage on the Apollo 14 flight states that spatial remote viewing experiments were also conducted on the flight, that "Astronaut Mitchell conducted this experiment," and that he "has worked closely with Stanford."¹²

Institute of Noetic Sciences and EDMA

In 1971 Mitchell launched EDMA (Edgar D. Mitchell and Associates) Corporation to research psychic phenomena and to market related inventions and products. A 1971 issue of READ Magazine carried a feature on the company and its plans to study Uri Geller.¹³ A survey of parapsychology organizations in New Psychic Frontiers describes EDMA as a business enterprise organized by Mitchell and states that Mitchell had stepped down as its chief operating officer to take up responsibilities in the Institute of Noetic Sciences.¹⁴

NASA's biography states that Mitchell founded the Institute in 1973, one year after retiring from government service, as a foundation to sponsor research into the nature of consciousness.¹ The Internal Revenue Service tax exemption of the California Institute of Noetic Sciences was issued in June 1973.¹⁵ A New Scientist report of October 1974 states that Mitchell "two years ago set up his Institute of Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto" and names John White as his assistant at the Institute there.¹⁶ In 1997 Mitchell said that he had started the Institute after the flight to understand what the experience of the trip home meant, and that the Institute was looking at biofeedback, psychic phenomena and Uri Geller.³ On August 11, 1994 C. B. Scott Jones wrote to John Gibbons that Mitchell, the Institute's founder, would be glad to meet Gibbons on the subject the two of them had been discussing, and Claiborne Pell sat on the Institute's board at the time.¹⁷

In 1974 Putnam published Psychic Exploration, a 708-page volume titled Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, edited by John White and credited to Mitchell and others.¹⁸ Mitchell's NASA biography lists the book as his own, together with The Way of the Explorer (Putnam, 1996).¹ Time reported in March 1974 that William Targ, an executive at Putnam, had contracted to publish the book and said at the signing that "the real race now between the Russians and us is in the area of sciences like ESP."¹⁹

Government contacts

In 1976, according to an Air War College research report by Dolan M. McKelvy citing Ronald McRae's Mind Wars (1984), CIA director George H. W. Bush enthusiastically gave Mitchell "permission to organize high-level seminars at the CIA to discuss possible intelligence applications" of parapsychology. The report says that interest waned in 1977 when Stansfield Turner replaced Bush.²⁰

Uri Geller, SRI and the funding trail

A January 24, 1973 memorandum of the CIA Office of Research and Development, numbered ORD-413-73, records that Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff of Stanford Research Institute had shown a film of their recent experiments with Geller on January 23, and states: "The SRI work with Geller has been supported by Edgar Mitchell's foundation, by something with a name like Mind Science Institute of Los Angeles, and by TSD."²¹ The Nature paper by Targ and Puthoff published on October 18, 1974 thanks Judith Skutch and Mitchell, identified as of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, for support.²²

New Scientist reported in October 1974 that Mitchell was Geller's original funding source and a co-experimenter on Geller at SRI, who had fallen out with Geller the year before. The report says that Geller visited SRI over an 18-month period beginning in November 1972, that Mitchell and Wilbur Franklin assisted in the first series of tests, and that funding came mainly from Skutch and Mitchell.¹⁶

Jim Schnabel wrote that Mitchell was present during some of Geller's tests at SRI and drove Geller while blindfolded in a demonstration of Geller's alleged abilities. Schnabel also wrote that the Institute provided a grant that funded Puharich's efforts to bring Geller to America in 1972, and that Mitchell suggested Ingo Swann look for Patty Hearst using remote viewing, an effort Swann did not succeed in.²³ The Internal Revenue Service exemption of the Institute is dated June 1973, the ORD memorandum of January 1973 speaks of "Edgar Mitchell's foundation," and the New Scientist report of 1974 dates the founding to about 1972.¹⁵²¹¹⁶

An unsigned CIA fact sheet on James Randi's The Magic of Uri Geller quotes Randi's text in which Mitchell says "I was there virtually all the time. I am a co-investigator on all that work." The fact sheet answers that "Captain Mitchell was not at SRI for any of the experimentation reported in Nature, but rather only during early efforts to find whether it was possible to introduce strict protocols as was finally done successfully."²⁴ In 1997 Mitchell said of Geller: "He's a pretty powerful guy, very real."³

The National Institute for Discovery Science website, as captured on December 6, 2000, listed Mitchell on its Science Advisory Board, chaired by Warren Burggren.²⁵

UFO statements

In July 2008 NBC News reported Mitchell's remarks to Kerrang Radio host Nick Margerrison: "I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it's been covered up by governments for quite a long time." The same report says that in follow-up interviews Mitchell stated that his views rested on unofficial talks with witnesses to the 1947 Roswell Incident and other sightings and on the experience of a Navy admiral who tried to follow up on the witnesses' claims, and that on the July 4, 2008 broadcast of Larry King Live he said "we would be gone by now" if the visitors had been hostile.²⁶

Elizondo writes in his 2024 book that Mitchell claimed his family was among those threatened by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the Roswell Incident of 1947.²

The Wilson meetings

Two sets of records concern Thomas R. Wilson, then the Joint Staff's Vice Director for Intelligence (J2) and later Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Mitchell's name appears in both.

The first is a Pentagon briefing in 1997. Steven Greer said in a lecture at Portland, Oregon on September 12, 2001 that "This admiral, Tom Wilson, who was the J2 position, the head of intelligence Joint Staff and I, met along with one of the Apollo astronauts and a couple of these military witnesses."²⁷ In his 2006 book Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge Greer wrote that it "was a stand-up briefing" and that the meeting ended when "Ed Mitchell had to get up to New York for a TV interview."²⁸ Jacques Vallee's journal entry of 3 October 2003 gives the meeting with Greer, Ed Mitchell and Commander Miller as 4 April 1997 and says that Miller met Wilson at a Pentagon briefing organized by Greer. The same entry says Wilson was unimpressed by Greer and found Miller flaky, and that Wilson, reportedly influenced by a second officer, agreed to look into the existence of a secret project involving UFO hardware.²⁹ The Loose Threads report, by Daniel Elizondo and The Hermetic Penetrator, gives the date as April 10, 1997, citing the researcher Giuliano Marinkovic, and lists the attendees as Mitchell, Commander Willard Miller, Greer, Stephen Lovekin and Shari Adamiak. It writes that Wilson confirmed taking a meeting about UFOs with Mitchell and others in 1997.²⁸ Wilson told Billy Cox in 2020: "I don't remember the details, but they [Mitchell was accompanied by UFO researcher Steven Greer] said there would be evidence in black programs, and would I be interested in chasing it down. I told them I had far too many things to do."²⁷ In August 2008 Cox reported that Wilson answered "Never" when asked whether he had ever been barred from retrieving classified material.²⁷

Mitchell gave his own account on Larry King Live in 2008, as transcribed in the Loose Threads report: he went to the Pentagon with another naval officer, "we told our story," and the Vice Admiral said "Well, I don't know about that, but I'm going to find out," then called some weeks later and said he had found the source of the black budget funding for the project, and that he was then told he did not have a need to know.²⁸

The second is a set of notes by Eric Davis of a meeting with Wilson, which The Black Vault dates to 2002 and the Loose Threads report to October 2002. In the notes Wilson describes his attempt in 1997 to enter a contractor program.²⁷²⁸ The Anomaly Archives essay on the memo states that Wilson met Davis in 2002 and shared details of his efforts in 1997.³⁰ Vallee's journal entry of 2 October 2003 states that the details are written down in a transcript of an interview Wilson gave to an Air Force officer, identifies him as Davis, and says they met in April 1997 in the parking lot of EG&G in Las Vegas.²⁹ Wilson told Cox in 2020: "It's all fiction. I wouldn't know Eric Davis if he walked in right now," and "I haven't been to Las Vegas since 1979, 80."²⁷ Asked on The Basement Office about the notes, Davis said: "They were leaked out of Ed Mitchell's estate. There's nothing I can say about them."²⁸

Elizondo describes Mitchell as a close friend and confidant of Puthoff and Davis, writes that they gave him a copy of the Wilson-Davis Memo, and writes that the memo was found in Mitchell's files after his death and leaked.² Vallee's journal entry of 3 October 2003 lists who might know the truth and states: "Ed Mitchell has no details."²⁹

Death

Mitchell died on February 4, 2016, at a hospice in West Palm Beach, Florida, after a short illness, according to his daughter Kimberly Mitchell as quoted by the Associated Press in an obituary of February 5, 2016.³¹ NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued a statement on February 5, 2016 that described Mitchell as "one of only 12 men to walk on the moon."³² Mitchell had lived in Palm Beach County, Florida, since 1975.¹

Footnotes

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1. NASA, "Edgar Dean Mitchell (Captain, USN, Ret.), NASA Astronaut (Former)," Biographical Data, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, September 2007. https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/mitchell_edgar.pdf ↩︎

2. Luis Elizondo, Imminent (William Morrow, 2024). ↩︎

3. Edgar D. Mitchell, oral history interview by Sheree Scarborough, assisted by Paul Rollins, Houston, September 3, 1997, NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, pp. 12-1, 12-32 to 12-34, 12-35, 12-40 to 12-42. https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/nasa/EDM_9-3-97.pdf ↩︎

4. Andrija Puharich, editor, direct brain action research proposal, submitted by Captain Edgar D. Mitchell, USN, undated, research committee list. CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000100190001-2. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000100190001-2 ↩︎

5. Edgar D. Mitchell, "An ESP Test from Apollo 14," Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 35, no. 2 (1971), pp. 89-107. Volume index: https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-parapsychology_1971_35_index. Issue record: https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-parapsychology_1971-06_35_2 ↩︎

6. Fia Backstrom, "Private Lunar ESP: An Interview with Edgar Mitchell," Cabinet, issue 5 (Winter 2001-2002). https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/backstrom_mitchell.php ↩︎

7. Article, CIA Reading Room STARGATE files, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400040001-5. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000400040001-5 ↩︎

8. John D. LaMothe, "Controlled Offensive Behavior: USSR," ST-CS-01-169-72, Defense Intelligence Agency task T72-01-14, prepared by the Medical Intelligence Office, Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, July 1972, parapsychology section, quoting E. D. Mitchell, Jr., The David Frost Show, March 16, 1971. CIA-RDP96-00788R001300010001-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300010001-7 ↩︎

9. "Prominent Swedish-born psychic Jonsson dies at 79," Las Vegas Sun, May 21, 1998. https://lasvegassun.com/news/1998/may/21/prominent-swedish-born-psychic-jonsson-dies-at-79/ ↩︎

10. "Olof Jonsson, Engineer, Psychic," Chicago Tribune, May 24, 1998. https://www.chicagotribune.com/1998/05/24/olof-jonsson-engineer-psychic/ ↩︎

11. Annie Jacobsen, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis (Little, Brown, 2017). ↩︎

12. Qian Xuesen, "Some Knowledge of the Study of Somatic Science," translated article in the Chinese Journal of Somatic Science, CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00792R000400290002-1. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00792r000400290002-1 ↩︎

13. "Another World," READ Magazine, 1971, feature on EDMA Corporation. CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400100022-5. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000400100022-5 ↩︎

14. "Research, Investigation and Teaching: A Survey of the International Scene," New Psychic Frontiers, p. 208. CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00788R001200230018-6. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001200230018-6 ↩︎

15. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, "California Institute of Noetic Sciences" (EIN 23-7236986), tax exemption issued June 1973. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/237236986 ↩︎

16. Joseph Hanlon, report on Uri Geller and the Targ and Puthoff paper, New Scientist, vol. 64, no. 919, October 17, 1974, reprinted in CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090024-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200090024-7 ↩︎

17. C. B. Scott Jones to John H. Gibbons, August 11, 1994, pp. 1-2. https://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/Rockefeller%20Documents/RID-8-11-94.htm ↩︎

18. Edgar D. Mitchell et al., Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, ed. John White (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974), 708 pp., ISBN 0399113428, LCCN 73093737. Internet Archive record: https://archive.org/details/psychicexplorati0000unse ↩︎

19. "Boom Times on the Psychic Frontier," Time, March 4, 1974, CIA Reading Room, CIA-RDP96-00787R000700030001-3. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp96-00787r000700030001 ↩︎

20. Dolan M. McKelvy, Psychic Warfare: Exploring the Mind Frontier, Air War College research report, Air University, CIA-RDP96-00789R001001420001-3, citing Ronald M. McRae, Mind Wars (1984), p. 103. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r001001420001-3 ↩︎

21. CIA Office of Research and Development memorandum ORD-413-73, January 24, 1973, CIA-RDP96-00787R000400070029-2. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000400070029-2 ↩︎

22. R. Targ and H. Puthoff, "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding," Nature, vol. 251, October 18, 1974, pp. 602-607, acknowledgments. CIA Reading Room copy, CIA-RDP96-00787R000200090024-7. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200090024-7 ↩︎

23. Jim Schnabel, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies (Dell, 1997). ↩︎

24. Unsigned CIA fact sheet on James Randi, The Magic of Uri Geller (1975), quoting Randi, p. 55, CIA-RDP96-00787R000500240021-0. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000500240021-0 ↩︎

25. National Institute for Discovery Science, "Personnel," capture of December 6, 2000. https://web.archive.org/web/20001206032200/http://www.nidsci.org/personnel.html ↩︎

26. Alan Boyle, "Moonwalker reopens UFO files," NBC News, July 28, 2008. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/cosmic-log/moonwalker-reopens-ufo-files-flna6c10405026 ↩︎

27. John Greenewald, "The Admiral Wilson Leak: An Analysis," The Black Vault, quoting Steven Greer's Portland lecture transcript (September 12, 2001) and Billy Cox's reports of August 2008 and June 2020. https://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-admiral-wilson-leak-an-analysis/ ↩︎

28. Daniel Elizondo and The Hermetic Penetrator, Loose Threads, pp. 6-10, 23 (quoting Greer, Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge, 2006, Mitchell on Larry King Live, 2008, and Davis on The Basement Office). https://anomalyarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF-Loose-Threads.pdf ↩︎

29. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science, vol. 5, journal entries of 2 and 3 October 2003, pp. 202-205. https://anomalyarchives.org/wp-content/uploads/vallee-fs-journals-vol5-pgs-200-205.pdf ↩︎

30. Anomaly Archives, "The Wilson Memo." https://anomalyarchives.org/collections/file/wilson-memo ↩︎

31. Curt Anderson, "Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, 6th man on moon, dies in Florida," Associated Press, February 5, 2016. https://phys.org/news/2016-02-astronaut-edgar-mitchell-6th-moon.html ↩︎

32. NASA, "NASA Administrator Remembers Apollo-Era Astronaut Edgar Mitchell," release 16-014, February 5, 2016. https://www.nasa.gov/?p=51976 ↩︎