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.