Ask an Amateur Scientist
: Edgar Mitchell



By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

Dr. Edgar Mitchell is better than you or me.  He worked his way up through the Navy, strapped himself into flying machines that would make our stomachs collapse on themselves, jellify, and exit through the closest available orifice. While launching himself off aircraft carriers, he earned a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics.  He went on to become a NASA astronaut, because he was just that good.  For Apollo 14, with the near-deadly disaster of the last moon mission fresh on his mind, he swallowed his fear and piloted the lunar module to the surface of that shiny disc we only see in the night sky.  He shares the record with Alan Shepard for the longest moonwalk on record.  And then he strapped himself back into a flying explosive device and came home alive.

For all this, he will forever be an American hero and, yes, better than you or me.

But he’s also kind of an idiot.

II. The Findings

I’m not going to try and dispute Edgar Mitchell’s claims here.  Most of them are so vague and non-evidence-based, that there’s no point.  Just like he can’t prove they’re true, there’s no way to prove absolutely that they’re false.  But I will lay them out for you, if only to show how even what seem like the highest authorities on a subject can be completely, embarrassingly wrong when they let reason fly out the airlock.

As you’ve probably heard, Mitchell’s been making the news lately by claiming that not only have extraterrestrials been visiting the Earth, but that the world’s governments both know about it and are covering it up.  Because he’s a NASA astronaut who walked on the moon (seriously, don’t ever let that not be amazing) and is better than us, he’s become the new feather in the tinfoil cap of UFO nuts across the globe.  If anybody knows the truth about E.T., it’s him.  After all, he flew in space!  He’s better than us, dammit!

You hear these kinds of arguments from authority all the time.  People who believe evil trolls from the drug companies are trying to poison our drinking supply with fluoride are often quick to drool on about this or that Nobel Prize winner who backs up their claims.  People who believe in magical healing powers (chiropractors, for instance) point to this or that scientist who performed a positive experiment.  But no matter who makes a point, it still has to hold up to scrutiny.  The scientific facts don’t support the poisonous fluoride hypothesis any more than they support chiropractic.  But one advantage both of those crazy ideas have over UFO fever is that they’re mostly verifiable.  They’ve been proven false because they don’t hold up to repeated and rigorous testing.  Edgar Mitchell, on the other hand, can say he heard about secret briefings and clandestine alien coverups all he wants, but there’s no way of knowing whether he’s just pulling this stuff out of his fecal matter ejection node.

Despite the fact that Mitchell’s UFO paranoia is currently making the news rounds, they’re anything but new.  He’s been talking about this stuff for years.  In 1996, he gave an interview to Dateline NBC (this was before they were in the predator catching business, so I’m assuming this interview wasn’t awkwardly conducted on stools around the island of some suburban kitchen) where he claimed, among other things, that he’d met with “officials” from other countries who had had personal encounters with aliens, that aliens had helped the U.S. Military develop certain “sonic engineering” technologies, that the government was taking part in a massive disinformation campaign to confuse the public about extraterrestrials, and that all evidence of these activities has been classified.  That last bit’s the important part.  This is the linchpin of any good conspiracy theory.  After all, the complete lack of any evidence is just proof that the conspiracy is real.  Of course there are no videos or photos of aliens making out with J.F.K. (you know he totally would have hit that), because the Men in Black gather them all up and feed them to the monster that convinced Will Smith to star in I Am Legend.  Just like there’s no evidence that George W. Bush masterminded the 9/11 attacks, because he’s such an ingenious master of planning and manipulation.  (See how ridiculous you sound, Ron Paul rEVOLutionaries?)

In the wise words of Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  And in the wise words of some other guy, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Still, without any evidence to back up his claims, there’s no reason to believe anything Edgar Mitchell says besides “I walked on the moon for over nine hours straight” and “I’m better than you.”  Putting aside the total implausibility of this vast conspiracy of silence (our government can’t negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so how could it possibly negotiate with extraterrestrials?), there’s just nothing here to go on besides Mitchell’s word.  He says we’re on the verge of a breakthrough.  The smoking gun evidence will be revealed very soon.  When Disclosure happens, all the skeptics will be sorry (yes, they capitalize “Disclosure”, because they’re nuts).  But UFO freaks have been saying this stuff for nearly half a century now.  You can stop holding your breath.

III. The Conclusion

There are other reasons to be a little skeptical of Edgar Mitchell’s claims.  As I said before, he’s not the most scientifically minded guy around, despite his doctorate.  While he was in space, he conducted psychic experiments with friends on Earth to see if they could exchange thoughts.  No word on whether anything came of those experiments, but I imagine Houston got pretty frustrated when he wouldn’t use the radio.  But the simple fact that he would seriously do such a thing tells us a lot about the guy.  Every single rigorous and repeated test of psychic ability has come up negative.  James Randi has a million dollars waiting for anyone who can prove otherwise.  But Mitchell kept on keeping on with his ridiculous beliefs.  In the early ’70s, he established the Institute of Noetic Sciences to conduct more studies into things that don’t exist.  To paraphrase Dr. Steven Novella, if your institute has to add a modifier to “sciences”, chances are it has nothing to do with science.

Mitchell also claims that a psychic Canadian teenager who calls himself Adam Dreamhealer helped telepathically cure him of kidney cancer in 2004, even though Mitchell never had a biopsy showing he had kidney cancer in the first place.  The man is a true believer, and he’s clearly not all there.

Still, he’s better than you or me.  By a lot.  The moon, man.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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