At last Antares was on the Moon. It hadn’t crashed. It also hadn’t landed on level ground, so it tilted to one side. The unsettling feeling that the craft might tip over was not something Mitchell could allow his mind to linger on. Before the astronauts could leave Antares and step onto the Moon’s surface they had four hours of duties to perform. They consulted their checklists, performed their tasks, and sent status reports to Houston. Mitchell affixed a 16mm camera, the Maurer data acquisition camera, to his side of the module and pointed it out the window to record terrain and engineering data for future missions. After completing the work on their checklists, the astronauts began procedures to open the hatch.
Finally the time had come. Alan Shepard went first, Ed Mitchell right behind. As he made his way down the ladder, he heard Houston say, “Okay, Ed, we can see you coming down.” A camera mounted on the lower part of the module was recording their descent and broadcasting the images back on Earth. Mitchell jumped past the last step and landed on the surface. “I stepped over a few craters that were filled with dust,” he later recalled. “Then I looked up at the sky. It was inky black without a star in sight, and I couldn’t see the Earth at all.” He stood for a moment, gazing “at this amazing new place.” Then he got to work.
Looking around, Mitchell realized they were in the middle of a large boulder field. “It covers perhaps as much as a square mile,” Shepard told Houston as they began the first of two four-and-a-half-hour excursions on the lunar surface. They erected a flag and assembled TV equipment. They set up a miniature thermonuclear station designed to power monitoring equipment for years to come. They took photographs and shot film. Then they rested inside the module and prepared for the second excursion, to their target: Cone Crater.
For their journey the astronauts would take with them three ancient tools: a wheelbarrow in which to carry things; a gnomon to check and measure shadows; and a map with which to navigate. Mitchell carried the map. They took turns dragging the wheelbarrow across the lunar surface, which reminded Mitchell of a tractor moving through a plowed field. They set down the gnomon and photographed its shadows. They took samples and trudged on. Then, back in Houston, a devastating realization emerged: “They aren’t where they think they are.” They were on the Moon, and they were lost.
Scientists and engineers in Houston calculated, then recalculated, and then concurred. The astronauts were overestimating the rate of their progress by as much as a factor of two. Disagreements followed. Mitchell and Shepard had entirely different interpretations of where they were in relation to Cone Crater. They argued. Then Houston piped in, to try to help problem-solve. Mitchell expressed his anger with the geologists. This was their fault, he said; they were far too preoccupied with rocks. While the astronauts endeavored to determine their location, back in Houston the engineers drew their own conclusions. “They think they have completed a little under half their journey,” said one scientist, when in reality they had completed “only about a third.”
Mitchell told Houston that the bubble of his space suit was distorting his vision. He said his perception was off and was messing with his ability to accurately process information. There were “craters hidden behind other craters,” he said. As he struggled to get his bearings, he reported seeing car-sized boulders on a rim. His primary problem in navigation was the surprising roughness of the terrain, he said. Everything looked closer than it was.
Mitchell summoned his astronaut training and focused his attention on the task at hand, he later recalled. Keep moving, he told himself. Gaze out, not in.
At Johnson Space Center scientists and technicians examined charts and Moon maps.
On the Moon, Shepard was having as difficult a time as Mitchell was. “There’s hardly a level spot anywhere,” Shepard said. He lost his footing and fell. Mitchell hurried to his side and helped him to his feet.
“One or both of them is breathing heavily,” Houston noted.
Mitchell eyed a boulder. “Strange,” he noted aloud. Embedded in the boulders Mitchell reported seeing huge chunks of glass. He began to perspire. Frustration affects physiology, and Mitchell’s metabolism rose to a rate higher than it had been at any time on this journey. “I’m going on medium cooling,” he told Houston, adjusting the cooling system on his portable life support system. His heart rate rose to 100 beats per minute. Houston told both astronauts to sit down.
“Why don’t we pull up beside this big crater,” Mitchell said to Shepard. “Take a break, get the map, and see if we can’t find out exactly where we are?”
They rested; Mitchell consulted his map. Finally the two men stood up, having agreed to make another go at it.
“I think I know where we are,” Mitchell said.
In Houston, the flight surgeon noted that Shepard’s heart was now beating at 120 beats per minute.
“Putting the map away,” Mitchell said.
The astronauts resumed walking. The grade was getting steeper. Shepard sounded winded. Mitchell took photographs with a Hasselblad Electric Data Camera, with its specially designed lens and glass plate that placed reference crosses on each image to help determine distance and height. Shepard’s heart rate rose to 150 beats per minute; Mitchell’s slowed to 115, then raced back up to 128. The flight surgeon instructed the men to stop and rest again.
“Our positions are all in doubt now,” Mitchell said.
“Perhaps you can think with us, if you want,” Shepard suggested to Houston.
“Distance became plastic,” Mitchell later recalled, enhanced by the “unreal clarity of the airless scene.” He ordered his mind to stay focused. “Now that we were on the lunar surface, our estimates in distance were in error by one hundred percent, as objects typically appeared one-half as far away as they really were,” he later said.
Pause; regroup; keep moving, in that order, Mitchell told himself. Get to Cone Crater. That is the goal. Then came the moment: Shepard suggested they turn around. Mitchell considered what was being said. Shepard was older and wiser. Ten years earlier, in 1961, he had become the first American in space. Now, age forty-seven, he struggled for breath as he labored across the surface of the Moon. “No. Let’s keep going around this crater,” Mitchell insisted.
“We can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater,” he told Houston. That was the goal. They could not come all this way without getting to the target. Ed Mitchell was not prepared to fail. Houston gave them permission to leave their wheelbarrow behind. They were given a thirty-minute extension to reach the rim.
His breathing labored, Mitchell said, “Let’s take a look at the map.” More bad news. He realized he was looking at a very distinct map marker, and that it was a landmark he thought they had already passed. “This was terribly, terribly frustrating,” Mitchell recalled.
On Earth, a decision was made. This was it, the turning point. The final call. Turn back now, Houston said.
The astronauts turned around. They saw Antares in the distance, slightly tipped. “We kangaroo-hopped our way back down the slope, taking giant leaps through the void that is the lunar atmosphere,” Mitchell recalled. Shepard took his famous golf shot. Mitchell performed a javelin throw. After spending four hours and thirty-five minutes on the lunar surface and setting a new distance-traveled record (of approximately 9,000 feet), the astronauts arrived at Antares and climbed inside. They stowed their lunar samples and prepared for takeoff. With the push of a computer key Antares blasted off the Moon. After approximately one hour and forty-seven minutes they succeeded in rendezvousing with Stu Roosa in the Kitty Hawk command module.
On the way back to Earth his disappointment was profound, Mitchell recalled. They had come all this way and failed to get to the target. Peering out the spacecraft window, Mitchell stared down at planet Earth. He thought about his family. He thought about his country. He thought about his life in the military and the current war in Vietnam. And he became overwhelmed with a thought he’d never considered before. “Particular scientific facts about stellar
evolution took on a new significance,” Mitchell explained, stellar evolution being the birth of stars, when time began. “This was not religious or mystical, but something else,” he said. Sitting there in the command module, he experienced what he later described as a “flash of understanding. Its full meaning somehow obscured.” It was “silent and authoritative,” he recalled in 2015. But with simple clarity, he said, he understood one universal truth: “Man is connected to other men through consciousness.” That was the link between inner space and outer space. He felt a peacefulness he had never experienced before. Later he would identify this feeling as “savikalpa samadhi,” a term from ancient Sanskrit that means perfect oneness with the universe. Mitchell looked over at his fellow astronauts, wondering whether they were experiencing this too.
Time passed. Mitchell pulled out his five Zener cards and twice repeated his mind-to-mind telepathy tests with the two physicians and the psychic Olaf Johnson in Chicago. These were tests that all parties had agreed to keep secret. He couldn’t wait to get home.
After the astronauts landed they were quarantined for ten days. One morning during breakfast Shepard was reading the newspaper when a headline caught his eye: “Astronaut does ESP experiment on Moon flight,” it read. “Al Shepard doubled over with laughter,” Mitchell recalled. Shepard showed the article to Mitchell and made a comment about how journalists had no shame, how they were willing to fabricate stories just to sell newspapers. There was an awkward moment of silence, remembered Mitchell. Then he told Shepard, “I did it.” Someone from his small group must have leaked the story.
Shepard looked nonplussed, Mitchell remembered. “He silently returned his attention to his breakfast plate. The subject was never brought up again.”
Around the world, Mitchell’s ESP experiments became a kind of running joke. The headline in Maariv, Israel’s leading newspaper, read, “Captain Edgar D. Mitchell, the Uri Geller of the Astronauts.”
It did not take long for the press to get hold of the data from Mitchell’s outer space ESP tests. Out of 200 attempts to communicate telepathically, the psychic in Chicago got 51 correct hits, roughly the same as chance would predict. When Mitchell tried to defend the failure as a product of timing—he said his astronaut workload delayed his telepathic transmission time by roughly one hour—skeptics had a field day. But the world’s ridicule did not matter to Ed Mitchell. He was a changed man. For six months after his return from the Moon he honored his obligations to NASA, shaking hands with prime ministers and presidents, kings, congressmen, and high school students. But his worldview had shifted. He redirected his focus toward an understanding of what consciousness was. “The topic of consciousness,” he said, “is as vast as the cosmos and as close to us as sleep.” The reason he’d performed ESP tests in space was because “Telepathy demonstrated that there is an information linkage between people that goes beyond the laws of science as they are presently understood.” From now on, he was interested only in pursuing “subjects that purport to examine or explain man’s purpose” on this Earth. “Man’s attempt to understand himself and the nature of the universe,” he declared, “is the ultimate frontier.”
His thoughts about society took a negative turn. “I began thinking that there was something wrong with ideas such as nation and state. From this viewpoint it is only logical to make war on other countries and on the countryside,” he said. There had to be another way. “The denial of the nonmaterial aspect of life, its sacred participation in the miracle of existence,” he wrote, “this leaves people with no source of meaning and direction” in life. Ed Mitchell had gone to the Moon and come back—and he was profoundly disappointed by what he returned to. “The resulting view may be stated thus: I am simply a prisoner,” he said. The only hope for happiness was to seek a higher understanding of consciousness. This was his new quest.
Mitchell began spending all his time with people who shared his ideas about consciousness and mental telepathy. He made new colleagues and friends. He left NASA. He divorced his wife. In November 1971, at a convention in Houston, he met Andrija Puharich. The two men became fast friends. Puharich interested Mitchell in a research idea. He had recently traveled to Israel, Puharich said, where he’d tested a young man named Uri Geller who had extraordinary mental powers. Not only was Geller telepathic, Puharich reported, he had psychokinetic abilities that allowed him to stop and start watches, and to bend metal with his mind.
Puharich was preparing to bring Uri Geller to America, he said, to be studied in a laboratory here. Perhaps Ed Mitchell wanted to collaborate on a Geller project with him? Mitchell needed no time to think about the proposition. The answer, he told Puharich, was yes. The Apollo astronaut was on board.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Physicist and the Psychic
Inside a laboratory at the Northern California think tank Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a young physicist named Harold (“Hal”) Puthoff sat down to write a letter. It was March 1972. Puthoff was an expert in quantum electronics and electron beam devices. At age thirty-five he was a bit of a prodigy, having already coauthored the university physics textbook Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, published twenty-three papers, given fourteen national symposium lectures, and registered two patents, one for a tunable infrared laser. The letter Puthoff was writing was addressed to a New York City man named Grover Cleveland “Cleve” Backster, a former CIA analyst whose area of expertise was detecting deception. This letter would alter the course of Hal Puthoff’s life.
Puthoff was on a quest to answer one of physics’ great unsolved questions. “I was interested in questions like ‘What is life?’ but also in questions like ‘Why is life?’ Was physical theory as we knew it capable of describing life processes?” Puthoff explained in 2015. Cleve Backster had recently performed an experiment that Puthoff thought might point him in an interesting new direction on this quest. “I wanted to obtain a small grant for some research in quantum biology,” Puthoff recalled.
In 1972, Puthoff was a rising star at SRI, the second largest Defense Department research institute in the country after RAND Corporation, and located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Founded in 1946, SRI performed a broad spectrum of scientific research with an annual operating budget of $70 million (roughly $400 million in 2017). Of its staff of 2,600, more than 400 had PhDs. Puthoff was slight in build, thoughtful and soft spoken. Because he often appeared in the lab with baggy circles under his eyes, some colleagues described him as a Mick Jagger look-alike but with a larger derriere.
Before working as a laser scientist Hal Puthoff had worked for U.S. Navy intelligence. As a young lieutenant in the Naval Reserve he was loaned out to the NSA to work on a classified code-breaking program called Project Lightning involving ultra-high-speed supercomputers. Top-secret work was interesting, Puthoff found, but he decided that a traditional career in the military was not for him. He began focusing on quantum physics, on esoteric concepts including quantum entanglement, zero-point energy, and how quantum theory might account for biological life processes—hence the question, Why is life?
The year 1972 was a unique time to be an American physicist with links to the Defense Department. The 1950s hard-science approach to defense problems was beginning to thaw. “In the aftermath of World War II, science became swept up in a wave of technology,” says Puthoff. “Everything was about mechanization, about apparatus-based, inanimate physics. In general, any kind of philosophizing about physics dropped away,” he recalls. “Most scientists followed the Feynman dictum ‘Shut up and calculate.’” In the late 1960s metaphysics—with its interest in abstract concepts such as knowing, being, identity, cause, time, and space—began to make a comeback. “Physicists began thinking about life processes again,” Puthoff says. Questions about biology, or what Puthoff calls “animate physics,” were back on the chalkboard. Physicists like Puthoff began to ask the age-old question, Where does human energy come from?
“Quantum physics has yet to explain basic life forces in biological
systems,” Puthoff says, “starting with, Why does a cell divide? I wondered, are there fields and forces involved that we are not seeing in regular physics?” He began searching the literature coming out of the world’s top research labs. This led him to the work of Yakov Terletsky, chairman of theoretical physics at Moscow University and winner of the Laureate of the State Prize, and Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia University. Both men were working on hypotheses involving a subatomic particle called a tachyon. In America, scientists had recently proven the existence of numerous previously unknown subatomic particles, including the neutrino, the muon, and the quark. “The tachyon is proposed to be superluminal, faster-than-light but not forbidden by quantum physics,” says Puthoff. “I wondered, could it be—maybe—that in the tachyon flow, that was where there was the extra field?” That field, or force, physics can’t see. It was in pursuit of the elusive and theoretical tachyon that Puthoff sat down to write his letter to Cleve Backster.
Backster was not a scientist. He was a deception researcher and interrogation expert, a man rooted in the intelligence community, where he had worked for more than twenty-five years. He had earned his stripes in World War II, in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, where he conducted narco-interrogations of enemy forces, early attempts to get POWs to reveal military secrets using so-called truth serums. After the war Backster joined the CIA, where he cofounded the Agency’s polygraph program.