I stroll in late to find two women whom I’d guess to be in their early fifties banging drums and hauling some of the 200-odd attendees to the front of the hall for a Dance of Universal Peace. I try to slink down the side wall inconspicuously, but it’s no use – I am a sitting duck by virtue of my lateness, doomed to spend the next half hour twirling around in a big circle with several dozen people whom I don’t know, chanting “I am sunlight/I am shining,” and if in the end I learn to enjoy it by imagining that I am on my way home from Woodstock, I also can’t help noticing that Edgar Mitchell remains anchored to his seat as if stapled to it by Zeus himself. Before the weekend is out, I will have pretended to be a singing tree at an “Embracing the Circle” workshop, and panicked when a faith healer asked, “To what god do you pray?” and an image of the former Conservative Secretary of State for Health Virginia Bottomley popped into my head (what the …?). I will have listened to a young hippy tell a story which ends “if it’s possible that talking to fruit flies can bring peace, imagine what it could do for people” (audience members nod sagely), been “presenced” by Tibetan singing bowls, and had conversations about paranormal experiences that a few magic mushrooms might have rendered intelligible, but probably wouldn’t have. Yet I will also have met many bright, warm and well-informed people: people who were young adults when Edgar Mitchell went to the Moon and watched his journey from the perspective of a counterculture which they’ve never abandoned or broken faith with. There are left-field scientists and academics, humanitarian and civil rights activists and every complexion of New Ager. To find an astronaut, let alone a Moonwalker, keeping this kind of far-out company strikes me as extraordinary. That I never once see Mitchell patronize, dismiss or condescend to even the more dippy elements seems even more so.
After the dancing, a nice talk on the pre-European history of Florida gives way to a valedictory address by the outgoing IONS president Wink Franklin, who turns out to be an engaging and witty character and spends the first five minutes ribbing Edgar about the lunar-hoax theory. He’s joking, obviously, but this will turn out to be a real issue for the Moonwalkers, because over the past three decades it has become the most widely believed conspiracy theory of them all, holding that the Apollo astronauts never left Earth orbit and that the landings were filmed in a studio in the Nevada desert. A hard-core cadre of writers and film-makers are behind most of the more seductive claims and as yet I have no notion of how closely they will follow my own journey, but they will – right to the end. Franklin grins as he says: “I’m sure many of you have heard Edgar tell his story about going to the Moon many years ago, and I guess some of you might even have believed it …”
And we all laugh, even Mitchell, then move on to other business, and at the end of an evening in which I find delight and disbelief in equal measure, I’ll be marvelling at the fact that what I appear to have found in IONS is the place where Apollo and the counterculture it shadowed actually meet. In my wildest dreams it had never occurred to me that they would.
The next morning, I find Edgar sitting on a tree-shaded bench outside the common room-cum-“noetic café” in the middle of the campus. A Marlboro Light is pinched Artful Dodger–style between his thumb and forefinger and amusement must show on my face, because he looks momentarily disconcerted, then takes a big drag and stubs it out. Most of the astronauts smoked back in the day, but while most, like the rest of us, have since given up, Ed’s hung in there. I don’t know why this should seem pleasing, but it does.
Everyone else is at gatherings or workshops and we’re alone with the stillness of the morning. We begin by talking about the epiphany, which continues to hold such power for him. The feeling was one of bliss, almost like being in love, he says, lamenting the fact that in English we have words for anger, happiness, sadness, frustration, but not for this overwhelming sensation which has been at the root of all religion.
We spend a long time talking about Quantum Holography and this appealing idea that the information of the whole exists in every constituent part; that a little piece, a tiny particle, might contain all the information pertaining to everything that exists or has ever existed, if in diluted form. The conversation ranges across history and philosophy, different cultures and religions, and while he doesn’t “Believe” in any conventional sense, there’s an infectious sacredness to the way in which he speaks of the cosmos. Again I am reminded of William Blake, who used to have ecstatic “visions” and spoke of seeing “the world in a grain of sand.” Mitchell knows about Blake, saying, “lots of artists and writers have spoken about it, in lots of cultures,” and repeating his theory that it happens “when the brain is in resonance with the fundamental stuff of the Universe.” Then we’re back on the zero-point field, where he tells me that there is no space and no time and it sounds like he’s describing science fiction. Indeed, I will talk to scientists who tell me that he is, but I’m not sure how much I care, because his conception of the Universe strikes me as rather beautiful, almost a work of art in itself. Pressed on this issue, he admits that: “We haven’t proved anything yet, just proposed an explanation for a lot of things we’ve written off because we couldn’t make sense of them.”
He speaks quietly, with the measured urgency of Captain Kirk addressing his Star Log and I quickly learn that he doesn’t do small talk, becoming awkward and tongue-tied if you try to make him. He confesses that his family used to tease him about being so serious and he knows himself well enough to be able to joke about this. When I callowly wonder why he signed up to fly combat in the pointless American engagement in Korea, noting that it’s hard to imagine an Ed Mitchell of my generation having done that, he is patient with me: he looks pensive for a moment, then describes a reality that hasn’t touched my charmed life. He was drafted.
“I was gonna have to go to war, and I’d been flying since I was young, so I chose to do my service as a pilot, which is how I got where I was. The fact is, I didn’t plan a military career. And it was only when Sputnik went up that we got involved in the Space Race. Becoming an astronaut is something that happened.”
His childhood is instructive to this, because Mitchell’s mother was a devout Southern Baptist with a strong antiwar bent, who hoped that her eldest child and only son, born in September 1930, might grow into either a preacher or a musician. Ranching the plains of west Texas, the family had managed to prosper through the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, but been hit hard when the wheat crop failed one year, necessitating a move to a little clapboard house with outside plumbing in New Mexico where the men drove spikes on the Santa Fe Railroad. Before long, they had moved again, prophetically it seems, to Roswell, New Mexico, where Mitchell senior gradually built up a cattle farm. In fact, cattle was in the family, for his grandfather was known abroad as “Bull Mitchell” on account of his trading skills and Edgar recalls other ranchers travelling to Argentina or Brazil and sending back postcards addressed only to “Bull Mitchell, New Mexico,” which would find him with no trouble.
That Edgar Mitchell lived in Roswell is bizarre in several respects. On the way to school, he walked past the house of Robert Goddard, the mad-scientist father of American rocketry, about whom the neighbourhood kids wove swathes of Boo Radley–style mythology and whom the media of the day ridiculed as a fantasist for his dream of riding into the stars. He also saw the luminous glow from early nuclear weapons tests at the White Sands Proving Grounds and, in 1951, heard the rumours that an alien spacecraft had crashed just outside the city limits, to be spirited away, along with its pilots, by the paranoid authorities – a story which regained currency in the 1990s, when a film purporting to show one of the dead aliens being dissected achieved widespread notoriety. The film was a hoax, but this unremarkable southwestern town remains a mecca for UFO believers from around the world.
Mitchell got a job washing planes at the local airport and was flying solo by the age of fourteen. He felt a special relationship with the machines, as though they became part of his own body when he cli
mbed inside the cockpit womb, and went on to become an exceptional pilot, savouring the “sense of freedom” and “release from the Earth” that control of a plane gave him. No one in his family had much formal education, but he won a place at Carnegie Mellon University, where he went to study engineering in 1948, met his first wife, Louise, and when money was tight worked midnight shifts cleaning slag from blast furnaces at a steel mill. A stint in the Navy took him to Korea, after which he came home to train as a test pilot. He used his analytic skills to help develop delivery systems for nuclear bombs and was all right with this, he says, so long as he obeyed Albert Speer’s dictum and buried his mind in detail and problem solving. Nevertheless, the implications of what he was doing disturbed him and he began looking for something that he could open his imagination to, and eventually saw a way forward with the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and the Space Race in 1957.
He began to study aeronautical engineering, Russian, and Einsteinian physics. He still went to church, but felt himself becoming an agnostic, while also coming to recognize the influence of his mother’s hellfire fundamentalism on his thought; but by the age of thirty-six, a Navy pilot with a wife and two children who had been pushed and pulled around the country in the service of his career, he felt that he had “managed to place myself rather precisely at a critical juncture in the history of humankind.”
He wrote to NASA, but for the longest time the phone refused to ring.
Then, in the spring of 1966, the call from Deke Slayton, head of the Astronaut Corps, finally came. This fourth intake of astronauts was sarcastically dubbed the “Original Nineteen” and they understood themselves to have little chance of flying on Apollo. In deference to this apparent fact, Mitchell’s private ambition was to command the first crewed mission to Mars, but even as early as 1970, it was clear that there would be no such mission. He applied himself anyway and with surprises springing up everywhere as far as the lunar crews went, he got his chance. Slayton remembers him as “one of the smarter guys in the astronaut office.” Just how smart, Slayton and the others hadn’t yet understood.
He tells me that while the people he worked with at NASA were grateful for Kennedy and the political machinations that led to Apollo, few of them went to the Moon in order to beat the Russians. As far as most were concerned, he says, “We were going ’cos we wanted to go.”
I like the way he uses the profoundly un-NASA epithet “lovely” to describe the people attending this conference, and then again in reference to the benefactors (“very lovely people”) who eventually showed up with help. He tells me that some wealthy people have now “bought into the dream,” but he doesn’t ever seem to have been much concerned with acquiring money for himself: he thinks this might be because of his background, where money was never abundant. Even so, it must have been disorientating to suddenly find himself surrounded by former flower children and liberals. Could he even understand what they were saying?
“Yeah.” He smiles. “The transition from a structured military environment to a public environment was quite a transition for me. One thing about the military is that you trust what people say to you, because that’s necessary and lives depend upon it. And in public life” – he shakes his head and laughs ruefully – “that’s not true at all! So I had my lunch stolen quite a few times by trusting and believing people I should not have. But I learned not to be quite so naïve.”
He didn’t experience the “comedown” that some of the other Moonwalkers did?
“No, I tend to think that what I’ve done in the thirty years since is more important than going to the Moon. The Moon – okay, that was powerful, it’s history, groundbreaking stuff of the twentieth century. But for me personally, I think pioneering what I’ve done here with noetics will in the long run be a more important advancement.”
Strange, I observe: Charlie Duke says the same thing about his church work. Ed’s eyes light up.
“See, the point is, Jim Irwin, Charlie Duke, myself and others had the same experience, I think. But you express it in terms of your own belief system, your own experience and your training. And me being more of a philosopher and scientist, I looked beyond the easy explanation of religion. Alan Bean – a lovely fella – he expressed his in his artwork. And even the ones who haven’t shown outward signs of change” – he leans forward and jabs a finger at the space just beyond my right elbow – “that doesn’t mean they didn’t feel it, too.”
Test pilots, he goes on to note with a smirk, “have never been noted for introspection or spontaneous eloquent expression,” but he does believe that “it’s significant that many of the men pioneering space flight began to express more openly a more subtle side of their personalities after returning home.” Even Shepard loosened and a LM deputy programme manager is also on record as saying that the lunar astronauts did change; became less outgoing, more pensive. Wouldn’t their training as test pilots, with its emphasis on self-control, have militated against being affected by what was happening around them? Mitchell thinks this is a misconception, saying:
“My experience taught me to open up my emotions, or at least to become more aware, to become more sensitive to what’s going on in the body. It’s quite true that in that business you have to learn to manage your emotions. But of course, that’s what the mystic disciplines are about, too. That’s what’s taught by the Tibetan Buddhists – and I greatly admire their scholarship … it is about learning to manage your emotions.”
We talk about family and the huge divorce rate in the Astronaut Corps. At the beginning of the Sixties, marital breakdown still came with shame; worse, NASA considered it bad for the image of the programme and it was made clear that divorces would cost flights. Yet even NASA couldn’t resist the social revolution that was ushered in by the contraceptive pill. By the end of the 1970s, the divorce rate would be five times what it had been in 1961, with the highest rates in the nation settling on the Cape Kennedy area of Florida. Mitchell attributes this phenomenon more to the “devotion to duty that was required just to get the job done” than to the spiritual upheavals that followed the trip – though I will come to doubt this view. He shrugs meekly when I press him on his own progress through three marriages, saying, “I don’t really know how to answer that question. It’s just life …” A chortle rises from somewhere deep as he admits of his six children that: “No, none of them have been eager to go my way … they recognize that Dad’s kind of a unique character.”
We chatter for a while about Richard Nixon, who was president at the time Apollo 14 flew and is becoming a figure of some fascination for me, then spend a long time discussing Wernher von Braun. It transpires that prior to his flight, Mitchell spent a week sharing a house with the rocket scientist and Arthur C. Clarke, who was by then regarded as one of the most influential futurist thinkers on the planet, because for that brief period scifi was seen as something more than escapism. Mitchell calls it “a powerful experience, which profoundly affected my thinking and my determination to persevere,” and yet I’m still surprised by the grim determination with which he defends the ex-Nazi, concluding that “I have great respect and great caring for the man.” This also draws me back to a surprise in yesterday’s seminar, after Mitchell had finished speaking and thrown the floor open, providing the cue for a few male believers in chinos and sports jackets to trade phrases to see whose was the longest (“phase conjugate adaptive resonating” won by a nose), and an elderly woman with flame-orange hair to ask about reincarnation, then a young hippy chick with long blonde hair to enthuse about the mysterious crop circles she’d seen in England the previous summer, while I wondered whether to raise my hand and reveal that I’d made one of those once with a couple of crop-circle hoaxers – a beautiful, complex, 180-foot formation which took us about four hours to lay down in the dead of night using wooden boards and rope, in a field that turned out to belong to a hugely famous British composer of musicals.
In his response Mitchell pointed out that his theories do not su
pport postmortem consciousness (“consciousness does not survive: only the information does”) and to my relief, he was noncommittal on aliens and crop circles. At that juncture, however, another woman had raised the subject of UFOs, at which Mitchell smiled conspiratorially and claimed to know “old-timers who were around at the time of Roswell and when there were so many sightings – high government and NASA officials – who insist that there’s been a cover-up.” He added that “My confidence in that statement has risen to the high ninety per cents.” Now I ask if he will reveal what he knows or thinks he knows about UFOs?
“Oh, I revealed everything I know yesterday,” he says. “I don’t know more than that. I’ve had no personal experience with UFOs. I’ve talked with many of the people in the system and I’ve observed and kept up with the literature … but I know there is hidden material. I know there is cover-up material. And breaking that out is important, but so far we haven’t been able to break the code. We haven’t been able to get to the people involved. And it’s something beyond this government. Even our presidents in the United States don’t have access to this. Or somehow they’re hushed.”
Why?
“I don’t know why, and it’s the same as in science; the Belgians are more open, the Russians are more open, but we’ve never been able to crack it open in this country. And to me it threatens our entire system of democracy. There is a power structure that has control of some information that is not accessible to the public.”
I don’t know what to make of this. Wink Franklin was joking about the Moon-hoax thing, wasn’t he? It seems interesting to me that Ed Mitchell sees conspiracies in space, just like the hoax theorists.
“Yes, Wink was teasing me. But you’re right, we do get a lot of stuff about the landings having been faked. And I’m not sure how much people really believe it, or whether it’s a mark of disgust with the government, or whether it’s just people trying to get fifteen minutes of fame in selling a story. Who knows?”