Edgar D. Mitchell (b. September 17, 1930), US astronaut and parapsychology enthusiast

Dr. Edgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth man to walk on the moon. Born in Hereford, TX, he entered the US Navy upon graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in 1952, becoming a Navy pilot and attaining the rank of Captain. In 1961 he was awarded an engineering degree from the US Naval Postgraduate School and a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT in 1964.

In 1966, he joined the space program. In February 1971, he accompanied Alan Shepard and Stuart A. Roona on the Apollo 14 mission, the third moon landing. Mitchell piloted the lunar lander and he and Shepard explored the area north of the Fra Mauro crater, collecting numerous lunar samples.

On the Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell brought along a deck of 25 homemade Zener cards to conduct experiments (unauthorized by NASA, of course) into ESP. The idea was that four participants back on Earth would correctly identify the cards Mitchell drew via telepathy. Only one of those four participants, a "professional psychic" named Olaf Johnson, has been identified. With the help of Dr. Joseph Rhine, the man responsible for the famous Duke University ESP experiments, Mitchell analyzed the results. Mitchell and Rhine claimed that out of 8 runs though the deck, the earthbound psychics got 51 hits out of a possible 200, which they cited as a significant achievement. Somehow, they arrived at a ludicrous figure of 3000:1 as the odds of this happening by chance.

Upon his retirement from the Navy and NASA in 1972, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto, CA to investigate matters of parapsychology and has written and lectured on these subjects for years. Incidentally, he also believes that plants have telepathy and that Uri Geller is a real psychic.

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