Irene Klotz: Hi Dr. Mitchell
Edgar Mitchell: Just a minute ... I'm
sorry. My dog jumped in my lap and
knocked over my coffee cup. It's OK. Go
ahead.
IK: What's your dog's name?
EM: Oh, that's Cutie (Q.T.?)
IK: Cutie?
EM: Yup, I've got two of them and right
now they're telling me that it's their
suppertime and I must come in and fix
their supper ... at least that's what
they want.
IK: Well first of all thanks very
much for making a little time. I wanted
to ask you if there was anything about
the radio interview you did that was
different from what you've said in the
past.
EM: No, there's nothing different.
Several of (the
reports of the interview) that I've
seen come around have some flaws in them.
Some of the reports pushed it or spun it
incorrectly. NASA had nothing to do with
anything I've done. I wasn't briefed by
NASA. There haven't been any sightings
as a result of my flight service there,
so if that part of it comes out on
anything you've seen it is just totally
wrong.
IK: Yes, I did want to clarify that.
EM: My major knowledge comes from what I
call the old-timers, people who were at
Roswell and subsequent who wanted to
clear the things up and tell somebody
credible even though they were under
severe threats and things -- this was
back in the Roswell days. Having gone to
the moon and being a local citizen out
in the Roswell area some of them thought
I would be a safe choice to tell their
story to, which they did. Even though
the government put real clamps on
everybody, it got out anyhow.
Subsequent to that, I did take my story
to the Pentagon -- not NASA, but the
Pentagon -- and asked for a meeting with
the Intelligence Committee of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told
them my story and what I know and
eventually had that confirmed by the
admiral that I spoke with, that indeed
what I was saying was true.
IK: You mean what had been told to
you was true?
EM: Yup, in other words. There was a
UFO crash. There was an alien
spacecraft. This gentleman tried his
damndest to get me in and like so many
others in the administration over the
last 60 years, since JFK's time, was
unable to. He was told 'Admiral, you
don't have a need to know, and therefore
go get lost,' essentially.
IK: Have you ever come out and said
who this person was who briefed you?
EM: No, I have not.
IK: Would you at some point?
EM: No, it is out and around but I don't
feel like I have the liberty to do that.
IK: When did you have your meeting at
the Pentagon?
EM: It was in the late '90s in
Washington when I was there working with
The Disclosure Project, trying to
get all those opened up with another
Naval officer by the name of Will Miller
and Steven Greer, who you probably heard
of. Steven and I don't really work on
this anymore together, but we did at
that point and getting to the Pentagon
and seeing what we could do there to try
to get this opened up.
IK: Why do you think the government
hasn't acknowledged that there is life
outside of Earth? I thought that was
sort of the point of NASA.
EM: Well most people in government don't
know. The government is highly
compartmentalized. You could work next
door to somebody for 30 years not
knowing what they're doing in certain
areas. The whole point of all of this
... goes back to World War II. This
Roswell incident took place right at the
aftermath of World War II when the U.S.
Army Air Corps was split off and became
the Air Force and the OSS (Office of
Strategic Services), which was the
intelligence service of World War II,
was disbanded and eventually became the
CIA. At that point the Cold War was just
starting to move under way and we were
at odds with the Soviets.
The Air Force was brand new and
supposedly in control of the skies and
didn't know what they were doing, and
the CIA didn't know what they were doing,
so Pres. Truman was in a big problem
here: Here people were telling him there
were
aliens around and nobody knew if
they were hostile or what they were and
what was he going to do about it?
So he formed a committee, a very high-level
military and academic and intelligent
people -- politically powerful people --
and said 'You guys work on this.' And
that was called ... the MAJIC 12. And
they did pass a National Security Act,
or so I'm told, under highly classified
auspices, that gave this committee
virtually unlimited power to deal with
this issue, which they have done for the
last 60 years, slowly excluding
everybody -- including presidents.
You may remember that Pres. Clinton
tried to send (Webster) Hubbell to find
out about this at Wright Patterson. He
got rejected. And Barry Goldwater, back
in the '60s when he was getting ready to
run for the presidency and who was a
brigadier general in the Air Force
Reserve tried to get information about
it. He got rejected. And I'm told that
Jerry Ford tried to do some finding out
and he got rejected.
Jimmy Carter announced his observation
of UFOs, but that never went anywhere so
obviously he made no progress. Only in
recent years has the public interest
become acute enough and enough stories
leaked out so that people are starting
to believe that it's all real. And the
fact of the matter is, it is.
They're still around and there's a lot
of stuff going on.
Are you aware of the so-called Phoenix
Lights Incident? That wasn't our stuff.
IK: I'm sorry. Can you say that again?
EM: Lights. Just a few years ago. Three
humongous craft flew over Phoenix,
very slowly in the middle of the night
that clearly were not -- I happened to
be on the phone with people out there
when that happened and have had pictures
of it -- clearly those were not, to
those of us who know aviation and
spacecraft, clearly those were not local
stuff, home-grown stuff.
IK: So you're saying the incidences
are becoming more prevalent among the
general public? People are having their
own sightings?
EM: Just several weeks ago, this
so-called incident at Stephenville, in
Stephenville, Texas. Another one. And
naturally a lot of discounting and
unfortunately the press, the giggle
factor got up and the press tended to
ignore it, but the fact of the matter is
this is the real stuff we're dealing
with. We're not alone in the universe.
And it has nothing to do with NASA. As
far as I know it has to do with what's
going on and has been going on for a
long time.
IK: As a man of science and
engineering, how did you make this leap
from doing what you needed to do to be
an astronaut to what you're doing today?
EM: Because I was told by people who
were utterly sworn to secrecy under
severe penalty if they talked and
because I'd been to the moon, because I
was a local resident of Roswell when the
so-called
Roswell incident took place, some of
them thought I was a safe person to tell
before they passed on so that the
knowledge didn't die. There are others
like me, people out here who have done
an enormous amount of investigation who
have seen through the facade and seen
through the cover-up and can talk
chapter and verse, better than I can. We
know it's real.
IK: Can you describe what changed you
after you were in space? How did that
happen?
EM: Well I've got a research foundation
that has been working on that problem
for 37 years.
I was coming back from the moon after
completing a
successful mission on the moon. My
job was being responsible for the lunar
spacecraft for the lunar surface
activities. So on the way home, my
successful job had been mostly completed
and we were just coming home. We still
had experiments and work to do, but the
big stuff was done.
We were orientated such and rotating in
order to keep the thermal balance of the
spacecraft so that every two minutes you
could see the Earth, the moon, the sun
and a 360-degree panorama of the heavens
came through the window every two
minutes. That's powerful stuff,
particularly since it's space. Without
the atmosphere to block, the stars don't
twinkle, and there's 10 times as many as
you could possibly see on Earth because
of the lack of interference and it's
much closer to what you could see
through the Hubble Telescope these days,
with those pictures and I hope you've
looked at some of those: it's
overwhelming -- and I realized as that
happened, because I do have a PhD from
MIT and I studied astronomy at Harvard
and MIT and knew that molecules of
matter in my body and in the spacecraft
and in my partners' bodies were made in
some ancient generation of stars. That's
where matter is created.
Suddenly I realized that the molecules
in my body were created in an ancient
generation of stars and suddenly that
became personal and visceral, not
intellectual and I had never had this
experience. It was accompanied by bliss,
an ecstasy I had never experienced.
Later -- and I'm making this long story
short -- with some discovery and some
help from scientists at Rice University
in Houston, I discovered in ancient
transcripts that this type of experience
-- a transformational, transcendental
experience where you see things as you
perceive them but experience them
viscerally and emotionally as one, as a
part of it -- is called samadhi. In
doing more research, I found that it has
taken place in every culture on Earth.
The political and cultural expression of
that turns out to be religion.
The experience is the same -- a heady,
overwhelming experience. But when it
gets politicized, put into the culture,
those things get lost on the people who
had the experience and it becomes
something else. So that's what it was: a
deep, deep cultural experience that is
in the culture of our civilization in
hundreds of places.
IK: Is that what the Noetic Institute
is for? To bring this consciousness ...
EM: I'm trying to use the tools of
science to understand precisely these
types of knowledge.
IK: Wow, that's quite a calling.
EM: That's exactly what I've spent the
last 35 years doing.
IK: What's the tie-in between this
pursuit and your experiences with
understanding that there are other life
forms that have come to Earth?
EM: Well it's just an extension of the
cosmology of what's this whole universe
about and what are we about and coming
to the conclusion that we are not alone.
That's some of the most important
knowledge that we could discover.
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