The Apollo space missions are one of humanity’s crowning achievements, pushing technological boundaries to successfully put men on the moon. It’s telling of just how difficult, dangerous and expensive these missions were that, even after a half-century of progress, mankind still hasn’t repeated it.
Everyone knows the stories of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins and Apollo 11. However, we’re guessing you probably don’t know about the subversive telepathy experiments conducted aboard Apollo 14 without NASA’s permission.
These were conducted by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk upon the surface of the moon. He was the Lunar Module pilot of Apollo 14 and spent nine hours working on the lunar surface alongside Alan Shepard. But, while on the mission, Mitchell also conducted a secret parapsychological experiment in ESP, hoping to transmit a message with his mind from outer space to Earth:
As Mitchell explained, he’d long been “bothered” by the contradictions between science and religion, which led him to be curious about “unexplained phenomena” like telepathy:
“When the chance to go to the moon came up, it re-raised the questions about what kind of world we live in, because nobody had been outside the atmosphere. I had been reading the literature for several years and had become convinced. Science says [ESP] can’t work but laboratory experiments show that it does.”
Mitchell’s experiment took place during the space flight’s”rest periods”. While heading to and from the moon, he’d think of specific symbols for 15 seconds at a time in the hopes of them being mentally received by four selected “receivers” on Earth:
“I did this when I was ready to go to sleep at night. We had sleeping bag hammocks that we would put underneath the couches. Two of us would go to sleep in a hammock while the other one would be on watch. I would do the experiment before going into my sleeping bag.”
Mitchell’s space psychic test produced 51 correct guesses out of 200 by his two best receivers, which proved to him that telepathic transmissions from space were possible. He said the results were “far exceeding anything expected” and propelled him to create The Institute of Noetic Studios, whose mission is to “reveal the interconnected nature of reality through scientific exploration and personal discovery.”
“Wernher was very intrigued by it”
NASA was apparently surprisingly chill with this unsanctioned space experiment. But, according to Mitchell, the only major person to take a serious interest was Nazi rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, by then instrumental to America’s rocket development:
“Wernher was very intrigued by it and was very supportive. He wanted me to do a survey of NASA installations to see if there was any place that would be useful and appropriate for us to do some more of this work, to further these studies in a deeper way.”
Mitchell would go on to develop his ideas into his “quantum hologram” theory:
“Any physical object of macroscopic size, molecular and above, emits quanta of energy and absorbs quanta of energy. The quanta emitted from every object we’ve discovered carries information about the physical. The quantum hologram is this informational structure about a physical object and it is non-local, which means it is not space-time restricted.”
Mitchell goes on to explain that “everything we do as physical beings is recorded in the ephemeral quantum holographic record”. So that’s nice!
