Edgar Mitchell is a true American hero: He’s the sixth man to walk on the moon, as part of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. He’s spoken extensively about his journey to the moon—and he has also spoken at length about his unique views on extraterrestrial life and cosmology.
He will be lecturing at Contact in the Desert, a UFO-themed conference at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center May 29-31.
During a recent phone interview from his home in Florida, Mitchell said his interest in extraterrestrial life started thanks to the UFO incident in 1947 in Roswell, N.M. Mitchell, 84, grew up in Artesia, N.M., near Roswell, and remembers it well.
“The truth about it is that it was real,” Mitchell said. “I was there when the Roswell incident took place. I was on my way to college and had just graduated high school. One day, it was in the Roswell Daily Record, which was a newspaper in Roswell, about an alien spacecraft that had crashed, and the next day that it had been denied by the Air Force, saying that it was a weather balloon. I believed that and went off to college. Many years later, after I had been to the moon and came back, I went out to Roswell to give lectures, talk and meet people I knew since I was a kid. Many of the people I knew, along with descendants of the people who had been involved in the Roswell incident, told me their stories.”
Mitchell recounted what he was told.
“Some of them included the son of the undertaker who provided coffins for the alien bodies, and I got that story,” he said. “Another one was from a son of the sheriff who kept the traffic away from the crash site and told me their story. Then a family friend who was a major in the United States Air Force told me it was all real. I got the stories from all of these various people into my head when I came back from the moon, and I then went to the Pentagon and told them my story about that and said, ‘Give me your opinion.’ The admiral who I spoke to said, ‘I don’t know anything about it, but I’m going to find out.’ He went out to New Mexico and checked all around, came back and told me, ‘Your stories are quite correct and all real.’”
Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking made news not long ago by claiming that communication with extraterrestrial life could be dangerous and a threat to Earth. Mitchell disagrees.
“I think that’s a possibility, but I think the evidence I’ve looked into shows that they’ve been coming here for a long, long time,” Mitchell said. “If they were a threat, we would have seen that threat already at this point. Certainly, the fact extraterrestrials have been here is a concern, and my research had led me to believe they’ve been coming here a long time. It’s in the Christian Bible; verses in Ezekiel speak of … fire in the sky and alien visitation. I’ve also talked to Air Force personnel, and during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we had missile silos stationed along our northern border with missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, and I talked with Air Force personnel who … informed me they quite often had UFOs hovering over their silos that were disabling our missiles. All of that tells me that our alien visitors have been doing their darnedest to cut down on our warlike behaviors.”
Mitchell said his work as an astronaut profoundly changed him. “I think the profound effect is the same one you’ve heard from the other people: All of us who have gotten the chance to go to the moon and look back at the Earth from that distance were very profoundly affected by Earth in the cosmos.”
Mitchell said journey motivated his work in cosmology.
“I have an interest in Dr. J.B. Rhine’s work and parapsychology at Duke University, and I did an ESP experiment in space following the work in Dr. J.B. Rhine, and I sent my results to him and another parapsychologist, and we got a good result 200,000 miles in space,” he said. “We now know thanks to Max Planck and Albert Einstein … that what we call psychic stuff is really quantum stuff. Quantum mechanics was formalized by the 1920s by Max Planck and Albert Einstein’s work. It took all of the 20th century to understand that’s the basis of consciousness. When René Descartes made his famous pronouncement that body, mind, physicality and spirituality belonged to different realms of reality and didn’t interact—well, that took us 400 years to start to realize that Descartes was wrong, and they do interact.”
Mitchell said that after being diagnosed with kidney cancer more than a decade ago, he worked with a remote healer named Adam McLeod, known as the Dreamhealer, in Vancouver, British Columbia, who remotely healed him.
“I worked with Adam along with a biologist named Bruce Lipton that I’ve lectured with,” he said. “Adam is very gifted, and he healed me of cancer. Adam eventually got his medical degree and is teaching back in Canada.”
While certain things may be hard to believe, Mitchell said we should all keep an open mind to those things we don’t understand.
“There’s no question if you know a little bit about cosmology and going back to the question of who are we, how did we get here, and what’s this really about, we know from our astrophysicists and cosmologists … our universe is virtually infinite and expands,” he said. “We don’t know the end of it, and we know there has to be life throughout that universe. We’re just one grain of sand on a huge beach, and we know from all the galaxies and galactic clusters out there that we’re a small, tiny portion of all of that. That’s something we’ve only recently come to grips with.”
For more information on Contact in the Desert, visit contactinthedesert.com.