Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell openly admitted after returning to Earth that he had conducted an unauthorized ESP experiment during his historic moon mission.
But his former wife, Anita Mitchell, has now revealed the story behind the clandestine test, including the scientists who helped arrange it, the staggering odds Mitchell privately attached to its results and how it changed the course of his life.
Mitchell, the lunar module pilot and sixth person to walk on the moon, attempted to transmit symbols mentally across hundreds of thousands of miles to four receivers on Earth in February 1971.
The experiment was conducted during four rest periods aboard the Apollo 14 spacecraft without NASA’s knowledge or approval.
The receivers on Earth separately recorded which symbols they believed Mitchell was concentrating on, with the two highest-scoring participants identifying 51 out of 200 correctly.
Anita told the Daily Mail that Edgar believed the odds against the result occurring randomly were ‘two billion to one.’
The results convinced Edgar that something extraordinary had crossed the void between Apollo 14 and Earth.Â
‘I never doubted it,’ Anita said.Â
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot for the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission, stands by the deployed US flag on the lunar surface in 1971
His former wife, Anita Mitchell, told the Daily Mail that he conducted a secret ESP experiment on the moon, which he said was successful
Her memoir, You Don’t Look Like An Astronaut’s Wife, reveals how the strange experiment helped transform one of America’s most celebrated astronauts into a determined investigator of consciousness and paranormal phenomena.
Anita married Mitchell after Apollo 14, and the couple later divorced in 1984.
Although she was not married to him at the time of the mission, she said the experiment remained an important part of his life and reflected an interest in ESP that began before he traveled to the moon.
‘He had a group of scientists that he had worked with before he went to the moon, and they had set up the ESP experiment,’ Anita said.
‘So he had tipped his toe into that even before he flew.’
Mitchell discussed the experiment publicly several times before his death in 2016, but Anita’s account provides a more personal view of the people who encouraged him and the significance he privately assigned to the results.
The astronaut later explained that he had spent years reading about ESP and wanted to discover whether a supposed connection between two minds would weaken across the enormous distance between Apollo 14 and Earth.
The idea took shape approximately three weeks before the mission, when research physicists interested in psychic phenomena suggested that the flight offered an unprecedented opportunity.
Mitchell, the lunar module pilot and sixth person to walk on the moon, attempted to transmit a series of symbols mentally to four receivers on Earth during his missionÂ
No one had previously attempted such a test across hundreds of thousands of miles, according to Mitchell.
The astronaut originally planned to conduct six sessions but found enough free time for only four, each lasting no more than 20 minutes.
At a June 1971 news conference in Durham, North Carolina, Mitchell said the experiment involved a deck of 25 cards containing five traditional symbols: stars, crosses, waves, squares and circles.
He randomized the order of the deck before launch to create a sequence and then concentrated on the symbols during his rest periods in space.
The four participants on Earth attempted to receive the mental messages and separately recorded which symbols they believed Mitchell was sending.
No physical signal was detected or transmitted through Apollo 14’s communications equipment.
Instead, the experiment tested whether information could pass directly between minds through ESP.
Mitchell did not strictly define the alleged phenomenon as telepathy or precognition, referring to it more broadly as extra-sensory perception.
He had told the four receivers that he would attempt the experiment on six predetermined occasions, but the demands of the mission left him able to complete only four sessions.
Edgar Mitchell died in 2016 after become the sixth man to walk on the moon
The identities of the participants were initially withheld. Mitchell said he selected the four during a ‘dinner table’ conversation but declined to name them publicly.
Chicago-area psychic Olof Jonsson later claimed that he had been one of the receivers.
NASA confirmed after Apollo 14 that Mitchell had conducted the experiment during his scheduled rest periods but emphasized that it was a personal project performed without the agency’s sanction.
The answers recorded on Earth were compared with Mitchell’s chosen symbols following the mission.
The two highest-scoring receivers produced a combined 51 correct answers from 200 guesses.
Mitchell said random chance would have generated approximately 40 correct answers.
Anita said the question people most frequently asked was whether the experiment had succeeded.
She said Edgar believed that question could be answered only through statistics, and that he calculated the odds against the result occurring by chance at two billion to one.
The Daily Mail could not independently establish how he reached that figure, and it should not be interpreted as scientifically verified evidence that ESP occurred.
Mitchell’s own public comments in 1971 were notably more restrained than the private assessment Anita recalled.
‘This is an acceptable significant result in the other sciences, but parapsychology is more conservative and considers such odds as only suggestive or extra chance performance,’ he said at the time.
He asserted that the experiment had produced results ‘far exceeding anything expected,’ while acknowledging that they were scientifically only ‘moderately significant.’
Mitchell traveled to Durham to analyze the findings with Dr J.B. Rhine, who headed the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man and was a prominent investigator of alleged psychic phenomena.
He said he had been interested in ESP for a long time and intended to conduct similar experiments in the future.
‘We’re much too uninformed, unknowledgeable in this mechanism of telepathy or ESP. to project its uses, but I think once we start to understand what the mechanism is, then we can start talking about uses,’ Mitchell said.
The test did not establish the existence of ESP as scientific fact, but Mitchell remained convinced that its results deserved further investigation.
Anita said his experiences during Apollo 14 made him increasingly receptive to possibilities outside conventional science.
A photograph of Edgar standing beside a US flag on the lunar surface became one of the most iconic images of the Apollo program.
Behind that image was a highly trained astronaut who was growing fascinated by questions about consciousness, the human mind and humanity’s place in the universe.
Anita said her former husband excelled in mathematics and approached those questions with the seriousness of a scientist.
‘He was smart in calculus and at all that stuff. But there was a sense about him: he was a very serious guy,’ she said.
After returning from the moon, Edgar founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to investigate consciousness and phenomena including meditation and self-healing.
Anita said prominent figures connected to America’s space program shared some of his interest in unexplained phenomena.
She cited Wernher von Braun, the rocket pioneer who oversaw development of the Saturn V that carried the Apollo astronauts toward the moon.
‘Wernher von Braun was a very close friend of Ed’s, and Dr von Braun was very, very interested in dreams, dream exploration,’ she said.
‘He was our main speaker at the first fundraiser the Noetic Institute ever had. He was our house guest. What a lovely man!’
Mitchell grew up near Roswell, New Mexico, which became synonymous with allegations that an alien spacecraft crashed in the area in 1947.
Anita referred to it as the place ‘where the alien was found,’ although no conclusive evidence has established that an extraterrestrial craft crashed there.
She said Edgar believed people should remain open to investigating ideas that fell outside what they had been taught.
‘It wasn’t what we were taught in school, that belief structure, but Ed believed we should open our minds and at least try to explore other things,’ she said.
Anita’s own outlook changed during their marriage as she met researchers and figures associated with psychic phenomena.
She recalled watching Uri Geller perform seemingly impossible feats, including an incident in which he allegedly found a trinket she had lost buried inside a dish of ice cream brought to him by a waitress.
Edgar also believed that humanity would eventually need to establish itself beyond Earth.
‘He was very much a believer in us going to other planets – he said we needed to do that because the Earth would be a ball of fire eventually,’ Anita said.
‘He wasn’t a doomsayer, but he always felt we ought to have another planet that we could inhabit.’
For Edgar, Apollo 14 had raised questions that went beyond whether humans could reach another world.
His private experiment asked whether the human mind could cross the immense distance between Earth and space without relying on any conventional means of communication.
Its results failed to prove that such a connection existed, but they helped push the moonwalker toward a lifelong search for answers beyond the boundaries of accepted science.
Anita hopes her memoir captures that willingness to question established beliefs while documenting the extraordinary life surrounding America’s race to the moon.
‘It’s about as authentic as it could be,’ she said. ‘I hope I did a good job with it. I hope people walk away laughing.’
