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Feb. 10, 2011 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:43
Edition 53 - Dr Edgar Mitchell

In 1971, Dr Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 became the sixth man to walk on the Moon... Listento Edgar in conversation with Howard Hughes now!

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
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This time round, a very, very special guest and a man who it's been well worth waiting for.
A few days ago, I had the absolute delight and pleasure to speak with Apollo 14 astronaut, the sixth man on the moon, Edgar Mitchell.
You may well know his name because he's had some quite controversial things to say that have been reported over the years.
So we'll be talking with Edgar about what that experience was like of going to the moon and how it changes you in terms of your philosophy and in every other way.
An experience that none of us are going to have unless there's something we don't know.
We'll also be hearing about his views to do with the future of this planet, aliens and UFOs, which he's been much reported as talking about.
And I wanted to speak to him directly about that so we'll get his fascinating views about all of that.
An amazing show and it's just about 30 seconds away.
I just want to say thank you to Adam for his hard work on this website.
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Okay, enough said.
Let's get to the man now himself, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon, a member of Apollo 14.
And I have to say, when I did this, I was nervous about doing it.
This is Edgar Mitchell.
Now, Edgar Mitchell, I have to say that in my time, I've been lucky enough to interview people like Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prince Albert of Monaco, and a lot of other people that, you know, life has given me the opportunity to talk to.
David Bowie, rock stars, all kinds of people.
You know, it's just one of the things that goes along with being a journalist.
I have to say that I have never felt as excited as I do now speaking to a man who walked on the moon.
Do you get that all the time from people?
Well, frequently, it's very kind of you to say that.
But it's true because you have had an experience in your life.
And these days, you know, that most people can do most things.
You know, if you have a certain amount of money, not a great deal these days, you can have most experiences in life.
But you've had an experience that nobody in this generation, I am guessing, unless there's something we really don't know, will have.
You have something over all of us, really.
Well, certainly something that money can't buy right now.
You may be able to do it here.
Well, no, that's true.
There are people planning to do this.
And, of course, Sir Richard Branson is very much into the idea of allowing people to fly themselves into space experience, what it's like to be in orbit.
What do you think of all that?
Well, just I use an analogy, Howard, that when the Wright brothers invented it and first flew the airplanes in 1903, then the military got a hold of it, and then by the 1920s, we had an airline industry, certainly in the United States and Europe and now all over the world.
So I think the same thing may be true of spaceflight, and it probably must be true because we have to become a space-faring civilization.
Our sun's going to burn out in due course, and if we're going to survive as a species, we have to become an international, rather universal species, as opposed to just a species around this planet.
Trouble is, that's going to be the view of visionaries, isn't it?
People who see the future like yourself and understand what's happening.
But for the average Joe in the street who's intrigued and fascinated by those great pictures that we've just had sent of the sun like we've never seen it before, it really doesn't mean anything.
And yet, for a lot of us who've read into this, and for you because you know more about this than I do, this is a reality.
Unless we find other ways of existence, this existence that we have here is not going to be there for us.
That is correct.
But I fully expect that if we continue But if we get smart and realize that we are a universal species and must become one and start to develop the propulsion systems, we don't have propulsion systems right now that can take us out of this solar system with manned flight or human flight.
But that's on the agenda.
We have to learn how to do that.
And when you look at these guys in Russia who are in that great big bus-size mock-up of the planet Mars and they're going to be there for a period trying to see what it's like to be on a mission like that, what does that make you think and feel?
Well, as a matter of fact, a colleague of mine have lead articles in a book about going to Mars that just came out, published by the Cosmology Association, Cosmology Society,
with professors from Harvard and a couple of other, well, another astronaut, Jack Schmidt, that discusses actually the very difficulty of having manned mission to Mars, which we don't have yet.
We've had unmanned Missions to Mars and technology missions, but we really don't have the propulsion systems to carry on real commerce with Mars.
I want to wind you back, if I may.
You know, not too far and not for too long, but we've all seen the movies, the right stuff.
We've watched how we think as members of the public, astronauts are selected and trained.
When you think back on that process, which I am guessing is a very difficult process, how you went from a background of science from what I read and the military from what I read, became an astronaut, that's a chance.
It's like being hit by lightning almost.
It's an amazing chance to be selected to do something like that.
What does that make you think now?
Does it feel like somebody else did that when you think back on it?
Well, let me give you my real history.
I was in the Korean War after I graduated from college, and I enlisted because I was already a pilot and I wanted to fly.
And the draft board, we had draft, we had obligated military service, draft into the Army.
But I didn't want that.
I wanted to fly if I was going to go into the service, which I really hadn't planned on.
So I enlisted in the Navy, then got an officer's commission as a naval officer, and then went to Navy flight school.
And I flew in the Korean War, as a Navy squadron, and then it so happened I had to finish out my obligated service to the Navy.
So I was coming back aboard an aircraft carrier from the Pacific in 1957 on October the 4th when Sutnik went up.
And I realized at that moment, on the way back on the carrier, that life had just changed.
We had just become, because humans would follow robot spacecrafts quickly, we had just become a space-faring civilization or entering into a space-faring world.
And I wanted to be a part of that.
So I came back.
I was coming back as a test pilot.
I was a pretty good pilot.
So I'm coming back as a test pilot.
I did a couple years of that, and I realized to be selected into the astronaut program because the fellows that were already being selected for the original seven, they had a little more jet time and a little more experience and were a few years older than me.
I realized to compete, I would have to have more education.
So I was able to successfully ask for and get sent to school, back to school, and I got my doctorate from MIT.
And very shortly, short after that, I got assigned to Edwards Air Force Base, where I was both an instructor and a student.
And I was selected into the astronaut program in 1966 from Edwards Air Force Base and was selected into the Apollo group of astronauts.
You make it sound really easy, but I guess that was a really difficult progression, or was it?
Well, it went pretty smoothly for me.
There were a lot of people that didn't make it, that wanted to make it.
There were 1,900 applicants when our group was selected.
And one out of 100 got selected.
There were only 19 of us selected.
So what do you think that you had that they didn't?
Is it what they call over there intestinal fortitude?
You think that's what it was?
A part of that and desire, drive.
And I scored pretty high on all sorts of tests, so not a dummy.
And very much devoted to the mission.
And so it all worked for me.
And at that stage when you were selected, at what stage did you become aware that you were going to be sent on a big mission?
Well, I'll have to tell you our protocol a little bit.
When we were first selected in, the 19 of us that went into our group, we were asked to choose a technical specialty in the space industry that we wanted to serve our time in kind of an apprentice job.
I, along with Fred Hayes, Apollo 13 astronaut and a shuttle astronaut, Fred Hayes, chose to be associated with the lunar module and help build the lunar module.
And so we were the astronaut representatives to go to Grumman Aircraft Factory on Long Island in New York and be the astronaut representative during the building and testing of the first lunar modules.
So in other words, you had an input into the whole thing?
Yeah.
But it was just a choice.
I thought that would get me a little closer to going to the moon, which it did.
Then when we finished that assignment with delivery of the first lunar module, flight test lunar module to Cape Kennedy for testing on Apollo 9, we were freed up to start into the cruise cycle.
So I got selected then as backup crew, which was essentially a training assignment.
Backup crew on Apollo 10.
Fred got went to Apollo 11.
Now our procedure at that point in time was three flights later, if you served a backup position, and which they used as a training session, then three flights later you were eligible to become a prime crew.
Well that meant I would be eligible for prime crew on Apollo 13 and Fred on 14.
Okay.
However, I served my backup on Apollo 10 with Gordon Cooper and he retired, wanted to retire from the program shortly after that assignment.
And Alan Shepard, who had been grounded for a medical problem for a number of years, mynear syndrome, an inner ear problem, had that fixed and he wanted to take Gordo's place, which he was selected to take the place.
However, headquarters in Washington said, Alan, you have been grounded and not training for a number of years.
Best you take a little more training time with your crew.
And so we switched missions with Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes and that crew.
They had 14, but they took 13, got the bad Machine, and we took 14, got the good machine, and flew the Apollo 13 mission.
Boy, they got the bad machine and how.
But of course, you were training up for 14 while that drama, which I remember when I was a little boy following, we all did around the world the sense of drama about that thing.
Obviously, you'd have been seeing that as somebody training up for the next mission.
When you watched the dilemma of the ground crew and when you watched the fate of those guys up there, how did that make you feel?
Well, you see, because I was the most experienced lunar module pilot on the ground at that point in training, ready to fly, I went to the simulators and was practicing in the simulators everything they had to do in space with the damaged machine because the lunar module was the lifeboat, the recovery vessel, to get them back.
So I practiced in the simulator everything they had to do before they had to do it.
And Edgar, was it just like the movie where you had to work day and night, really, practicing with this thing, and the air filter was the big problem, wasn't it, to be able to filter out the carbon dioxide?
I let the engineers work on that one.
I was more concerned with the flight maneuvers they'd have to do with the lunar module.
And that was what I did.
Now, it so happened, if you remember the Apollo 13 movie, Ken Matchingly was a command module pilot on Apollo 13 that got bumped because he had been exposed to measles by one of the astronauts' children.
So he and I were the two senior astronauts in line there during the Apollo 13 recovery.
And we both were in the simulators and working on the problems of how do we get him home.
And so we both eventually then went on to go to the moon in a different flight than when we were initially closed.
I was supposed to go on 13, went on 14.
He was supposed to go on 13, went on 16.
Did you feel, this is a struggle, I'm looking for the word, but did you feel lucky that you avoided that experience of going on 13?
You know what I'm saying?
Well, I have to look at, of course, I have to look at it that way because I got to land on the moon and do the first science mission on the moon without a shepherd.
So, yes, in my career, that was a lucky thing to do.
Fred Hayes stayed on, then threw shuttle flights after that because he was one of the test pilots to test the early shuttle spacecraft.
But he didn't get to land on the moon, and I did.
We were close buddies and very close buddies then.
But I consider myself very lucky that I was able to help he and the crew get back safely to Earth.
But then I got to take over and do the first science on the mission on the moon.
We just called it Apollo 14 instead of 13.
What a tremendous responsibility you had, though, when you were practicing those maneuvers.
You had to absolutely get it right because the margin for error for those guys coming back on 13 was so slim, wasn't it?
Yeah, we didn't have much room for error, but we had thought about, okay, we might have to use the lunar module as a lifeboat, but nobody really took that too seriously.
But we thought about it, and we had the protocol in place.
We just had to practice and make sure we could do it, and that's what I was doing in the simulator during that period.
And Ken was doing in the command module simulator, were learning how to bring the command module back through the atmosphere with virtually no power, with a limited amount of power, because they had lost virtually all of their power during the explosion.
I mean, it was absolutely miraculous to be able to use the lunar module to do as much as it did.
Did anybody really believe that it was capable of that?
You made it do things it wasn't designed to do.
Oh, yes, it was.
It was an initial, the initial backup plan was the lunar module could be used to move the whole stack around in case of emergency, but it was never taken very seriously, and it wasn't a high-priority item, but it was in the back of the mind of the designers and the planning back in the early days.
The world, including myself as a little schoolboy in Liverpool, England, Edgar, breathed a massive sigh of relief when those guys came home.
You know, a lot of us didn't believe that it was possible.
I remember my parents waiting with bated breath as we watched the TV pictures here.
When you saw that, when the guys came back, having been through all of that, all of it that we pulled it off.
Well, a fantastic achievement, Edgar.
But I wonder if in your mind, you wouldn't be human if you didn't have thoughts.
You were going on 14.
Maybe you didn't want to do it.
Or you were afraid at that stage, perhaps?
No, no.
Felt very lucky and exhilarated to get to go ahead and do it.
We were very, we spent a lot of time with the factories, with the people who are building the lunar module, doing quality control, doing encouragement.
Hey guys, our fannies are on the line.
Let's do this right.
Don't make a mistake, please.
Let's don't repeat 13.
All of those things were in our minds, and we were very confident that we weren't going to have a second blowout of the same kind.
And I suppose what goes through your mind on a philosophical level, tell me if it does, is the fact that you're doing the greatest thing that any human being could possibly do.
And if anything did go wrong and you were to die doing it, it's a horrible thought, but an interesting one, then it's a fantastic way to go.
There's probably no better way to go if you're going to.
Well, Aaron, very frankly, all of us were professionals.
We were test pilots, we were military officers.
Nothing that we did in our military career or in our flight career wasn't without its hazards and its risks.
But we knew there was this was a test mission, but we realized that the risk was worth it, the reward of doing it was worth the risk of taking it.
And so we didn't dwell on those things.
If you dwelled on them too much, you were wasting your time.
You were losing time when you ought to be thinking about other things.
And most of us were more disciplined than to get into a worrisome state.
Now, there are a few guys that are a little nervous nellies, but not many.
Not many of us are.
Well, I think I'd have been with those guys.
You sound very calm about the whole thing.
I'd have been very, very scared, but I can understand with your background, having flown test flights and that kind of stuff, you were just used to this.
This was just an extension of routine for you.
Exactly.
And we had trained for this.
I mean, we've been military pilots, we've been test pilots, we've been in war.
These sorts of hazardous things were, I won't say we welcomed them all the time because that wasn't the case, but we were used to having to deal with the emotion of it.
Here's a question that you've probably heard from people you meet on the bus.
If you travel by bus there, people you've met on planes, school kids when you've done NASA education things, which I guess you've done as well.
So I'm asking it too now.
What's it like to go to the moon?
What more can an explorer want than to go where humans have never been, gather the data, take pictures, bring back samples, and tell the people about it?
That's what explorers do.
And that's what we were when we went to the moon.
We were just, by looks that were turned into explorers.
But an amazing experience as you step out of that craft on the lunar surface.
I cannot even begin to, and I will never be able to, sadly, although I'd love to, imagine what that feels like.
Well, it's kind of certainly an aha experience.
Wow, look at all of that.
And of course, the moon, when you first land on it and look out there, looks like any desert, virtually like any desert.
Although sand dunes look a little different than crater, pockmark craters.
Nevertheless, the surface is barren of any vegetation.
There's no oxygen or air on the surface.
So it's a very barren gray-brown surface, kind of like a desert.
And this was what struck us, the fact we knew it was a barren place, but it is really very desolate and very, very, but it was exhilarating to be the first human to ever land at that particular spot.
And we left the remnants of equipment there that will be there forever, or some of it will be there forever.
So again, what more can an explorer want than to go to where humans have never been, gather data, take pictures, bring back samples, and tell the people what you've done?
Those astronauts who do talk, and we know that some are a little publicity shy, one in particular is very publicity shy, they describe the awestruck feeling of that time when you turn around for the first time and you see that ball that is the earth, and that's your home, that's the place that nurtured and made you, and yet it's so far away.
What's that like?
That is the powerful experience.
It was for me, and it was for all of the gentlemen, particularly those of us who were lunar module pilots.
On the way out, we were concerned with getting our job done and doing it correctly.
On the way home, after we had landed on the moon, and our job was the lunar module itself and the work on the moon, because lunar module pilots were responsible for the spacecraft and for the science on the moon, and we had successfully completed our job.
It was coming home, we had a little more time to be touristy and able to look at the moon, look at Earth from that distance.
And that's the wow experience.
That's the mind-blower.
It was for me, it was for nearly all of us.
And although we may describe it a little differently, each one of us, seeing Earth as a tiny little ball in the enormity of the heavens with a star-studded background and recognize that's home, that's a wow.
That is a wow.
Edgar, does it frustrate you then that as a schoolboy, there I am watching you on television, we watched all the missions over here in England they did around the world, and we were all expecting that there would be a next phase in lunar exploration, and there wasn't.
It was a very costly thing to do, and for whatever reasons, America stopped going to the moon.
That must have been, surely, if you have human feelings, that must have been a massive frustration to you.
Well, certainly I think for all of science, for the astronauts, it is true, we thought we needed to go on, and there's no doubt but what we will.
But John Kennedy, when he announced the lunar program, really as a challenge to the Soviet Union, that we were going to be dominant in space and we were going to beat them to it, that was his whole program.
And essentially what he did, as one of our guys said, he plucked a decade out of the 21st century and put it in the middle of the 20th century and said, let's go to the moon.
But the public really wasn't ready for that yet.
They hadn't been properly prepared for it.
Sure, it was an exciting thing to do.
We went and did it.
But the public wasn't ready to continue to fund that, and they told Congress so.
So they cut off our funding.
The last three flights to the moon after Apollo 17, Apollo's 18, 19, and 20 were canceled.
In fact, as I should have been on Apollo 19, I was prepared to command Apollo 19 after being on 14 and fleeting up to go to another flight.
But the people weren't ready to do that and to allow the Congress to fund that, so we didn't.
Well, now we have an era where there's a great shortage of money for a lot of people.
These have been hard times for a lot of people, both in the U.S. and the U.K. Food is very expensive.
There's great competition for food resources now.
That's a huge problem.
Our natural resources here, some of them are running out, so we may not be able to power our cars.
We weren't ready for it then.
We weren't ready to go to the moon then, but we did.
Do you think that we will ever be ready again?
Oh, yes.
Well, I agree with you.
Sustainability is civilization, From all the reasons you just cited, is the heavy thing on the agenda right now.
But also, as I said earlier, President Obama here in the United States has set a policy whereby he's encouraging free enterprise and private sector of the economy to get involved in space flight.
And as happened in the aviation industry 100 years ago, it could very well happen.
We will go back to the moon.
I don't have any doubt about it.
We, in due course, will go on to other planets and eventually outside our star system.
But it's going to take a while.
We've got to recover from this massive economic collapse that had three years ago and damaged the whole United States and everybody else.
As a matter of fact, Howard, I wrote a paper in 1984 after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that said, how long can free market capitalism endure in the absence of an ideological opponent?
And we've seen now, it's not very long, that without, it doesn't matter what economic system or what political system you have, unless there is consideration for the greater good of all people, it's not going to endure.
And this free market capitalism that we endured that virtually collapsed the economic system by its insidious greed a few years ago, we've got to get past that.
We can consider reigniting a space program and traveling to space.
But before we do that, from what you've just said, and an awful lot of people are going to agree with you, Edgar, we have to have enormous human and political change.
But I wonder if there is the will for that change, if the people who are watching reality television, going about their lives trying to make a living, if they have the will to make that kind of change?
Well, we will see, Howard.
I started talking about this 25 years ago, actually.
But we'll just see.
In chaos, there is cause, we're reaching a bifurcation point.
We can either get much better or we can go the other way and get much worse.
And I think that's going to happen in the next year or so.
We'll reach crunch point.
We'll either get, and particularly people are calling upon the Mayan prophecy at this point to say it's the end of everything.
I don't believe that.
I think we can come out of it.
But do you believe that next year, 2012, is going to be some kind of watershed, even if it isn't what the Mayans said it was?
A lot of people are saying it's going to be something.
Well, sometime in the next couple of years, yes.
We're either going to get this economy turned around back on a good straight course and start building it back up again and feeding people because people are getting hungry and our direction right now is not the best.
So it's a possibility we won't make it, but I think we will.
And we'll get past this point and keep on going.
Of course, you know that there are some people in the U.S. I know the U.S. pretty well.
You know it better than I do because you live there.
But there are some people in the U.S. who'd say that guy who walked on the moon, he's talking communism.
Not hardly.
We've had our experiment with communism.
People in Russia didn't like it.
It fell apart and changed to something else.
We've tried socialism of various sorts.
As a matter of fact, if we had philosopher kings, we've had one or two in the ancient past, philosopher kings, even that could work.
But it depends upon what the people are willing to do.
And when we're ready to work for the greater good for each other and consider ourselves a collective that needs to cooperate instead of compete, it's great competition for games and the Olympic Games, etc.
That's wonderful.
If we're competing to see if we can beat the other guy down economically, that's not going to work.
We've got to learn, well, I tell a little story hard, but I speak to children a lot about going to Mars, that in due course we will go to Mars.
But when we go to Mars and look back at this tiny, tiny little planet we call Earth, which is a little even smaller than when we went to the moon, it would be kind of silly to say we came from the United States, Canada, England, Israel, Russia, or wherever.
No, we came from Earth.
And we're not ready to do that yet.
When we're ready to go out and explore our universe as a civilization, not as individual nations, we might be on the right track.
That's a very profound thought.
Did your experience on the moon and the decades that have succeeded it, because it must change you as a person, is that what's brought you to this point?
Or were you always that way inclined?
Well, no, it was the view of Earth from space after coming back from the moon that helped me realize that.
And what I thought about was to recognize that almost 400 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes, René Descartes, wrote a paper accepted by the Catholic Church that said body-mind, physicality, spirituality are two different realms of reality that don't interact.
Now, that served the noble purpose that it got the Inquisition of the period, Spanish Inquisition, off the backs of the intelligentsia of Europe, and they quit burning them at the stake for disagreeing with the church.
But it had the downside effect that science, which modern science as we know it, classical science as we know it, started to grow up at that time.
They didn't burn them at the stake as long as they stayed away from the subject of mind, consciousness, and spirituality.
Well, so as a result, science has evolved strictly as a materialist concept over the last 400 years.
And that's what I'm talking about.
Once we use the tools of science, that's why when I came back, I started developing, I developed a research foundation here in the United States to understand the nature of consciousness and bring the tools of science to that study, which it hadn't done for 400 years, with the idea of breaking down exactly the biases that are killing us right now.
And we've got making some progress in that, but we're not there yet.
Do you think that mankind will reach this stage by hisself, himself, or do you think it will take some cataclysm to get us there?
Well, now you're allowing me to open up another aspect.
There is a bit of evidence that we're already getting that help and that we have been visited and that our visitors, there's several species of them, according to the best information I have.
This isn't my prime area of concern, but it's becoming an important one.
There's several species here trying to help us.
Well, several species here.
Some of them are trying to help us get past this very thing we're talking about.
I wanted to get you onto this because, of course, if you Google your name, and I don't know what this makes you feel, but these days what comes up is, yes, your biography, but also Edgar Mitchell, UFOs are real.
Well, I certainly agree.
I certainly believe that.
And the evidence, I don't believe things without evidence, and the evidence is pretty strong.
And did you get that evidence when you were on Apollo 14?
No.
No, as a matter of fact, it's a little longer story.
I'll give you a shortened version.
I grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, where the famous Roswell incident took place in 1947.
And it appeared in the newspaper one day that aliens have crashed near here.
And the next day, the Air Force denied that and said, no, it was a weather balloon and shushed up everybody that was talking about aliens under severe penalty, threat of penalty.
It's taken quite a few years of research.
And the story of weather balloon has changed three or four times.
If it were really any one of anything that the Air Force had said, one story would be enough.
But it has been changed several times.
And there have been a number of, as you well, Nick Pope in your own country and quite a few others.
Sure, I know Nick, absolutely.
Have been very serious investigators and have done a lot of work.
I know all these gentlemen personally these days.
And so there's not any doubt in my mind that the evidence stacks up that we have been visited and at least some of the species are trying to help us.
All right.
Well, let's get into this.
Do you believe that the U.S. government has got crashed craft, seized craft, donated craft in Area 51 and that maybe even aliens are living here?
Let's I won't put it on the U.S. government, although it's certainly evolved.
I would prefer to use the term cabal and there's a couple of ways I will approach this.
Our President Dwight Eisenhower, when he left the presidency in the end of the 50s and before John Kennedy took over, in his farewell speech, he made a very important statement.
He said, beware the military-industrial complex.
I think we don't, we have had many nations in recent years open up their files on UFO experiences, including your own country, including the Belgium, including the French, including Brazil, Mexico.
The United States has not, because most of the leadership of this cabal has been here.
But it's not strictly government.
It is military-industrial.
And what I say, and what seems to be the fact, is that it's a matter of power and control.
Who controls the most powerful technology in and out of this world that can get us somewhere else?
And who can make the most money out of it?
That is the problem that we're dealing with, in my opinion.
But if aliens were trying to help us, they wouldn't get involved with people who didn't have our best interests at heart, would they?
Well, that's why there seem to be several species here.
And that's a longer subject than I want to get into today.
Have you heard of the Phoenix Lights incident?
Not only have I heard of the Phoenix Lights incident, I've interviewed Dr. Lynn Keetay, who was there and saw it, yeah.
Okay.
I happen to have been on the phone, not with Lynn, but I know Lynn, on the phone with Village Labs when that happened, so I got a second-hand account for it over the telephone.
And those huge craft that were present there have also made flyovers in other parts of the United States.
Those seem to be the ETs that are most helpful to us, but they're not going to interfere in our affairs here.
They're trying to help us and show us away, but they're not coming in to try to conquer us or anything.
Now, Edgar, do you think that or do you know that?
And if you think you know it, do you have reason to know that?
Well, let's say I don't have absolute proof of that idea, but I have a pretty good feeling that that's what it is.
But in your situation, of all the situations, much more than some guy like me, people must tell you things.
Over the years, there must be people in positions of power who have confided in you.
That is true.
And so my opinion is based upon all of that evidence.
But do I have absolutely hard-written proof of everything I'm saying?
No, I do not.
This is a matter of experience, it's a matter of talking to people, it's a matter of being involved.
And so, I'm giving you my best opinion when I say these things: that there are those trying to help us, but it's up to us to help ourselves.
They're not going to do it for us.
If we have to want to listen and be wise and get past this horrible economic predicament that we're in right now and accept the fact that we're not alone in the universe and that ET presence has been around us here for a very, very long time, perhaps for hundreds of years, then we can accept that or we can reject it.
But the whole point is we're going to have to save ourselves.
But they are trying to encourage you to help us, I believe.
You don't have to answer this.
You don't have to say anything when I ask you this, but do you know more than you're telling me?
Do you know more than you are saying publicly?
And would there come a time when you might reveal more?
Well, I might have more evidence that I could reveal, or more that, yes, that I could reveal.
I'm telling you, giving you my best opinion and best evidence right now.
All right.
And that evidence, do you think the time will come when you or somebody will reveal that evidence if you still?
Well, we might have better, yes, we might have, there's a time when we might have better evidence of the ET presence.
However, we've had so many flyovers of UFOs and ETs and huge craft that have been momentarily reported in the papers and then it goes away.
So anybody that wants to dig through ancient papers, and we know all those who go through, the people like Nick Pope and people here in the United States that have dug through all of that and accumulated the evidence, it's all there.
You just have to dig through and look at it.
Edgar, what do you think of the highly controversial Billy Meyer material?
I'm sorry.
Billy Meyer is one of those, according to what I've heard from him, doesn't even believe we went to the moon.
I'm sorry, I don't give much freedom to Billy Meyer.
Okay.
You know that there are quite a few people and some people who've made money out of books saying that the U.S., the world never went to the moon.
What do you say to them?
All I say to them is, do you really think the Soviets would have let us get away with that since they were telling it to the Soviets to beat them to the moon?
And we did.
Well, do you know something?
That is always the one argument that's pushed back and you can't answer.
Of course.
Unless, of course, as I've heard from one conspiracy theorist, that the U.S. was in league with the Soviets in this.
Well, they've got to make up something to justify that.
But the fact of the matter is, it was a race to beat the Soviets.
And Kennedy put out the challenge, and we did it.
And the very recent lunar orbiter, the recent lunar orbiter photographs we've taken that have high-definition photographs, you can in those, and they took pictures of each one of the landing sites.
If you blow them up enough, you can see our footprints where we walked from them.
Okay.
So here we are.
It's 2011.
We're looking out to space.
Maybe the time hasn't come because maybe we can't afford it, and maybe spiritually we're not ready for it yet when we have to go out there again.
So if you think about it, what would you want your legacy to be if you have thought about that stuff?
Well, I think just the historical record of what I've done speaks for itself.
The research foundations I have begun in order to research frontier science.
The fact that our mission on the moon were successful, and we did do what we said we did.
That's all I ask is to be accurate about it.
If there was a possibility of going back to the moon, would you want to do it again?
Yes.
There's a cute story about that that I'm kind of saddled with at this point.
And there's a likelihood I may do that.
When John Glenn went back into space at 77, I'm a few years younger than John.
I just turned 80, and that was about seven or eight years ago when he did that.
People started asking me, Edgar, don't you want to go back into space and go to the moon again?
And I said, well, of course, but I'm going to wait till I'm 100 and beat John's record.
Well, that kind of got out into the public, and it keeps coming back to haunt me.
So I guess I'm going to have to do it.
And I had lunch with John at Cape Kennedy.
We're both involved with the Astronaut Scholarship Fund.
I had lunch with John some time ago, a year or so ago, and told him that story, and he laughed and said, well, go for it.
So I'm set with now with the legacy of having said, of course, I want to beat John's record by going back into space when I'm 100, so I guess I'm going to have to.
You've got to stick around to do it.
Absolutely.
And you're going to be there to report on it.
So is it kind of still a fellowship?
Do you see the guys who went to the moon and the ones who went into space?
Are you still quite close to them?
Yes, I'm on the board of the Astronaut Scholarship Fund, which is an offshoot of the original seven astronauts, Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Dick Slayton, et cetera, et cetera, organized this to encourage good science and young people to go into space studies.
And we've continued that.
At the moment, we give $25,000, $10,000 scholarships per year to promising students just to encourage studies of science and particularly space science.
And so I'm on the board up there, and John is also, as a number of us.
And we just had a celebration of the 40th anniversary of my flight to the moon, and there were about 15 of the guys who showed up for that.
And it was, again, a fundraiser for the Astronaut Scholarship Fund.
But we had a good time at the party and a dinner.
I kind of half asked you this at the beginning, but I'll ask you it properly now.
It is 40 years, it's a long time ago.
I was a little boy, I can remember it.
It seems reasonably clear in my mind, although a little bit cloudy now.
When you think back on it, how real does it feel to you?
Well, I have a pretty good memory, but not of all the little details until somebody reminds me of it and it pops back into my head.
But it's just very real.
Yes, I did that.
I have, in this room that I'm sitting in, it's my office, and I have all sorts of memorabilia on the walls and in pictures.
Have you got a piece of moonrock?
Beg your pardon?
Do you have a piece of moonrock?
Well, none to speak of.
Don't you think you should?
Well, you see, that we were supposed to have, and it was promised to us in those days, but then NASA chose not to honor that.
But we made such a big fuss about it that a few years ago, the government donated to a museum of our choice, a moon rock, in our name.
And so that took place.
That was to take the place of giving us individual moonrocks.
The South Florida Science Museum has a moon rock that was donated in my name to them.
Well, that means where you are in Florida, you can go and see it anytime you like.
Of course, of course.
Having done the thing that you did, Edgar, do you feel special?
No, I feel like a very lucky man to have been able to be a part of that.
From the day I was on the carrier coming back when the fundament went up, I set my goal on it and achieved it.
So I feel very lucky to have been able to achieve that life's goal.
And as we bring this thing to a conclusion, I have to ask you, you've been very gracious in answering all of my questions.
Do you ever get tired of doing interviews about this?
Oh, I do enough.
I turn down a few interviews every once in a while when they get too much up too close together.
But I enjoy speaking and getting the news out and particularly the ideas of our need for sustainability and our need to pull this thing together to keep us going and the fact that we will in due course become universal species.
Because we have to.
Yes, because we have to, exactly.
I want to ask you your answer to this.
I'm going to get emails from people now who will know that I've had you on here.
The word will go round.
And those people will email me and say, you had Edgar Mitchell on.
You didn't press him hard enough about the UFOs and the aliens.
He knows more than he's saying.
What should I say to them?
Well, tell them whatever it is, it will come out in due course.
Me, you know, too, not just me.
I'm not holding back anything that I know for sure.
And of the people that you know who've spoken to you, we talked about those people who may have told you things, privileged information in the past.
Are there quite a few of those people who know stuff that one day will come out, do you think?
Do you know?
Well, there are some, particularly those who have been inside the program itself, who are unable to speak because of that or unable to be totally candid.
Yes.
And I know some of those folks, but they can't tell me anything that they can't tell the general public either.
But you're confident that in due course at some point, and you know, some of these people are getting up in years now, so if they're going to say something, they have to do it fairly soon.
You say that some of them are still within the program, so they're bound by confidentiality.
But as we both...
Sure.
Okay, and so one day, more stuff than we know, you're quite confident will come out, and we will know that there are aliens, we are being visited, and there is this, not exactly conflict, but there's this divergence between different species, some of whom have our best interests at heart and some of whom don't.
Yeah?
I think that's probably true, and I think it will come out appropriately, yes.
Do you believe the most famous, the most parodied species of all, the greys, the ones who are supposed to be not so nice, do you believe they exist?
Well, the greys, they're the ones that we seem to know the most about, yes.
There's some questions exactly to their origins and what type of critters they are.
Now, you being you, and having done what you've done, and having the open mind that you have, do you find it odd that perhaps if you believe in alien abductions that they haven't tried to abduct you?
Maybe they have.
No, they haven't.
And I'm not sure I want it, but it is an intriguing subject.
And I have talked with quite a few people who have had that experience, and quite some who don't like that experience and feel abused.
So that's a mixed bag.
It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
How do you spend your, I know you're quite busy with the program, with the Astronauts Foundation and all the rest of it.
How do you spend your days now, Edgar?
Well, I'm going to have to sign off very quickly here, Howard, but I spend my days in Research Foundation and Frontier Research with my Noetic Foundation, Institute of Noetic Sciences.
So I sit on the board and a new foundation which I'm funding to investigate frontier science, particularly areas called the zero-point energy field, or space energy, and an area called quantum phallography, which has recently been discovered in the last few years, and its implication to biology.
So I stay very busy in my science.
A charming, interesting, fascinating, thought-provoking man, all of those things, Edgar Mitchell.
And that interview was well worth the wait.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Edgar was the sixth man on the moon, a member of the Apollo 14 crew, and he's just made time to talk with us here on the internet on the unexplained.
I am so thrilled.
And as I said at the top of this show, in my lifetime, as an ordinary guy from Liverpool who trained to be a broadcast journalist, I've been lucky enough to meet and interview Some amazing people like Prime Ministers, Prince Albert of Monaco, like I said, Paul McCartney.
In my time, I've met them.
But that was one of the most thrilling things I have ever done.
And I hope you enjoyed it.
It was well worth persevering with.
And Edgar, if you're hearing this, thank you for making time for me.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for maintaining the website, designing it and getting the show out to you, and also for being a great support to me.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
And above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
Please visit the website.
If you can make a donation, do send me an email.
And if you have sent me an email, thank you very much for it.
I do see them all.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv.
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