From: | Doug Roberts |
Title: | APOLLO-14 ASTRONAUT SEARCHES FOR THE TRUTH |
Source: | FLORIDA TODAY |
Date: | January 12, 1996 |
With the 25th anniversary of Apollo-14 coming up, the sixth man to walk on the
moon hopes to swing the spotlight onto a more contemporary agenda -- pressing
for the declassification of government records on unidentified flying objects.
If his suspicions are true, former astronaut Edgar Mitchell says the lid of
secrecy engages nothing less than "criminal culpability".
Mitchell, 65, returned to the Space Coast recently to do location shots for an
"NBC Dateline" retrospective on the Apollo 14 adventure.
At the highlight of that mission -- Jan. 31-Feb. 9, 1971 -- Mitchell and Alan
Shepard spent 33 hours roving the desolate lunar hills of Fra Mauro.
It was there that Mitchell first courted an avant-garde reputation by
conducting off-the-clock mental telepathy experiments by transmitting symbolic
images to an acquaintance in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell left the
astronaut corps and founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences in an effort to
integrate various scientific disciplines into the study of human consciousness.
Mitchell's upcoming book, "The Way of Explorers", will address the latest
research upon its release in April. Perhaps because of the imminent publicity,
Mitchell found himself invited to a private meeting of former
government/military officials hoping to recruit his visibility for their most
peculiar campaign.
"These were people who, in their official capacity, had an opprtunity in the
course of their duties to have ET (extraterrestrial) contact," Mitchell says.
"The purpose of the meeting was not to convince anybody else of their stories,
but to get people released from their security oaths with regard to these
phenomena. Given who they were, and their credentials, I have to tell you it
pushed my confidence level up five notches."
Taking a break from the NBC taping, the MIT-educated former Navy captain
relaxed at the Villa Roma restaurant in Rockledge and rolled his own imported
tobacco. He expressed his "total disbelief" in a recent U.S. Air Force report
attributing the alleged crash of an ET spacecraft in New Mexico in 1947 to a
classified military balloon.
Last summer, the General Accounting Office announced the failure of its
18-month effort to acquire the dispensation records of the debris
from that celebrated event. In 1994, the Air Force admitted that it initially
lied about the wreckage in order to conceal a balloon-based
nuclear-monitoring system called Project Mogul. But -- unable to produce the
paperwork on the retrieval in question -- USAF officials based their case on
circumstantial arguments.
...
"I am convinced there is a small body of valid (UFO) information, and that
there is a body of information 10 times as big that is total disinformation put
out by the source to confuse the whole issue," says Mitchell.
"The information is now held primarily by a body of semi- or quasi-private
organizations that have kinda spun off from the military intelligence
organizations of the past. Just like we build a rocket through a private
contractor, there have been private groups involved with this issue for a
number of years because they have the expertise.
"The dangerous part is, they're still operating under a black budget, which has
been estimated at over $30 billion a year. And nobody knows what goes into
black budgets. The prime requisite is security first and everything else
second. Imagine an organization that has a black budget, an unquestioned source
of funds, reports to no one, and has this exotic technology that they can keep
to themselves and play with."
...
Mitchell, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, and some 20,000 Americans have
signed the Roswell Declaration, a grass-roots petition calling for an executive
order to release UFO documents to the public. Mitchell, however, stresses he
has no first-hand knowledge of the existence of recovered ET artifacts. And
during his Apollo-era training, the subject of UFOs never arose.
"NASA at that time was so sure there were no such things, there was no
discussion of it," he says. "I would say, however, that if there was knowledge
of ET contact existing within the government, and we were sent into space blind
and dumb to such information, I think it it a case of criminal culpability."
"To send us up there? Into a what-if scenario? If the evidence is real, and we
were led to believe no such thing was possible? To me, that's criminal."