Moonshine: The Smearing of a NASA Space Hero

AMONG THE EMAILS of John Podesta that were released by Wikileaks in 2016, one set inspired particular curiosity among readers because of the authority and historic reputation of the sender. These emails were from NASA astronaut Dr Edgar Mitchell (1930–2016), who was the sixth out of just 12 humans to set foot on the Moon. Dr Mitchell's emails were about UFOs and extraterrestrials. The following quote from just one of his emails to Mr Podesta gives a flavour of the entire correspondence.

Remember, our nonviolent ETI from the contiguous universe are helping us bring zero point energy to Earth. They will not tolerate any forms of military violence on Earth or in space.

This is strong and spicy stuff. “ETI” is an abbreviation standing for “Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”, which needs no further explanation. “Zero point energy” is a fringe science topic about harnessing what is theorised to be the most abundant and powerful resource in the Universe. (No joke, it's been talked about by respected physicists, even if so far no-one has a clue about how to get at it.) “The contiguous universe” is a sophisticated way of referring to the idea that our Universe is in fact part of a multiverse. Dr Mitchell is therefore saying that these ETIs are not so much extraterrestrials as ultraterrestrials – visitors from another plane of existence altogether.

No wonder this correspondence got so many people excited. As a NASA veteran Dr Mitchell wouldn't seem to be the sort of person who was given to flights of fancy. Why was he writing to John Podesta in the first place? For one thing, Mr Podesta (pictured right) is a renowned fan of all things ufological. As an aide to President Obama, he fought (unsuccessfully) to get the federal government to declassify its hoards of material on UFOs and Area 51.

And by the time Dr Mitchell was emailing him, Mr Podesta was working for Hillary Clinton during what became her unsuccessful bid for the White House.

Evidently, Mr Podesta was talking to Mrs Clinton about his favourite topic, because she told reporters that she would work to declassify the same files that Mr Podesta had failed to secure – meaning, Mr Podesta was ready for another attempt to end the secrecy. (There is no question that there is huge secrecy about this entire subject: the argument is about what it is that's being kept secret.)

As we know, Mrs Clinton didn't become President, so John Podesta didn't get to pursue his crusade to free the files. Dr Mitchell died in February 2016, while the prospect of a Trump presidency still seemed even more far-fetched than the idea that little green men regularly visit this planet for nefarious purposes.

So how did Edgar Mitchell (pictured walking on the Moon, above left) become so firmly convinced that beings from a parallel universe were interfering in Earthly affairs? The answer to that one takes us down some interesting avenues.

Who was Edgar Mitchell?

EDGAR DEAN MITCHELL was born on 17th September 1930, in Hereford, Texas. His family moved when he was very young, in an attempt to escape that decade's Great Depression. This had unexpected consequences, because the city where they finally settled was Roswell, New Mexico.

In his 2014 mini-autobiography "Earthrise", Dr Mitchell recounts how his childhood years in Roswell were filled with star-gazing and the cinematic adventures of Buck Rogers, all of which contributed to his growing fascination with outer space. An impressive panoramic photograph of our galaxy, the Milky Way, taken at ground level in New Mexico, is seen above. The young Edgar Mitchell must have gazed up at this awe-inspiring sight on countless occasions.

Among his neighbours was a man the townspeople referred to only as “the mad scientist.”

As an adult, Dr Mitchell learned that this was Dr Robert Goddard (pictured right), the founding father of American rocket development. Dr Goddard (1882-1945) had been predicting a lunar rocket since his breakthrough experiments in the 1920s.

On 16^th July 1945, the 14-year-old Edgar Mitchell was preparing for bed, when he saw “a bright flash in the sky that seemed to come up near the distant Capitan mountains [...it] could be seen for miles and miles, and I remember it so vividly.”

The official story that was put out at the time, to explain this dazzling light, was that a munitions dump had exploded.

A few years later, young Edgar learned that he had in fact witnessed the first test of a US secret weapon - the atomic bomb - some 100 miles to the west of Roswell, on the Alamogordo military range (pictured left).

These were formative experiences that would affect anyone, but the decisive incident in Dr Mitchell's journey into official secrets and personal discovery took place in his neighbourhood in 1947. He later recalled:

On July 8, 1947, the local paper, the Roswell Daily Record, came out with a headline that shook up the entire town.

Like most teenagers, I was naturally curious about the whole thing and wanted to know all about it. Tons of questions raced through my mind. Was it an alien spacecraft? If so, were the extraterrestrials (ETs) friendly? What would the ETs look like? If there were ETs on the crashed craft, what happened to them?

As we all know, the following day the incident was dismissed as the crash of a weather balloon, and life in Roswell returned to sleepy normality until the “Roswell Incident” was rediscovered by ufologists several decades later. By 2014, Dr Mitchell's perspective on the Roswell Incident was:

I've been curious about extraterrestrials since I was a teen, when I read in the local paper about the so-called flying saucer that crashed on a ranch near Roswell. Although I didn't give the event a lot of thought at the time, I'm sure the Roswell Incident ignited my curiosity about ETs, and was part of the reason I became a space explorer. Over time I have come to accept the idea that there is life beyond Earth, and I feel very comfortable with this belief.

Still, whether or not Dr Mitchell was intrigued by the legend of the Roswell Incident while growing up, that rumour-shrouded event would be a very shaky foundation for confidently asserting many years later that extraterrestrials were definitely visiting Earth and deliberately interfering in human history. So how did Dr Mitchell become so convinced on this particular point?

The Visions of Dr Mitchell

IN 1996, DR MITCHELL WROTE ABOUT his fears for the future of humanity, specifying “nuclear apocalypse and/or total economic collapse” as things that concerned him (and they are precisely the two spectres that stalked his childhood and adolescence). But barring such catastrophes, Dr Mitchell believed that “there are certainties that lie in our distant future.” He explained:

Earth is our cradle, not our final destiny. The Universe itself is our larger home. And without doubt, we will meet other species along the way, if we haven't already, who, like ourselves, have begun to explore the cosmos.^{(Emphasis supplied)}

Dr Mitchell added:

I've had no personal encounters with UFOs, although I wish I had so that I could speak from firsthand experience. I have, however, met with credible professionals within two governments who have testified to their own firsthand experiences with “close encounters” during their official duties. A wealth of classified information on the subject resides in military and intelligence files, which, in my opinion, should be released to the public.^{(Emphasis supplied)}

And it is that little disclosure of Dr Mitchell's that turns out to be the key that unlocks most of this mystery. It's a mystery that will take us far into "inner space" as well as into outer space. If you thought Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was fantasy, in a few days' time you'll learn how all these threads tie together, in part two of this story.

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