Apollo 14 Astronaut Insists Extraterrestrials Have Made Contact With Earth

According to a story in the U.K.'s Daily Mail, former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, admitted in a recent radio interview that he knows for sure that the Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and have been doing so since the 1940s. He claims that every time the aliens have made contact, the United States government has done everything it can to cover it up. He cites his position at NASA as evidence for the authenticity of his claims.

"'I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,' Dr. Mitchell said. 'It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.'"

"'I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited,' Mitchell continued. 'Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit.'"

A recording of the interview with Kerrang! host Nick Margerrison can be found here.

The producer of the radio program contacted NASA to get their opinion, and received this response:

"NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe. Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinion on this issue. Thanks for the opportunity to comment."

Keep in mind that The Daily News is not known as the most reputable news organization, and I cannot independently verify the recording of the interview. Even if if turns out Dr. Mitchell did really say these things, he does not provide any evidence for them. Even the testimony of a former astronaut and man of science cannot be taken by itself. Dr. Mitchell does not reference any documentation, all he offers is here say.

In addition to the lack of evidence, Dr. Mitchell's founding of the Institute for Noetic Sciences in 1973 does not make it easy for his story to be believed. Noetic sciences are defined thus, and rather questionably, on the Institute's website:

"Noetic sciences are explorations into the nature and potentials of consciousness using multiple ways of knowing—including intuition, feeling, reason, and the senses. Noetic sciences explore the "inner cosmos" of the mind (consciousness, soul, spirit) and how it relates to the "outer cosmos" of the physical world."

I don't want anyone reading this to think that I'm completely riding Dr. Mitchell off as a crackpot. Hell, this whole story may turn out to be a hoax. But, if he did really say all those things about aliens, all it really proves is that no human is immune to delusion. And if he's telling the truth? Great. I'd love to find out once and for all that Earth has in fact been visited by extraterrestrials. But, what one wants and what the evidence bears out are two separate things. Until Dr. Mitchell offers some hard, verifiable evidence for what he claims, even the testimony of an American hero must be called into question.

Not Alien Abductees, Call Them Cryptomnesiacs

It seems I have been hearing quite a bit about UFOs and alien abductions lately. CNN's Larry King Live has devoted two whole hour-long shows in the last two weeks to UFO hunters and debating the "truth" about what happened in Roswell, NM in 1947. There was a recent article in Scientific American telling the story of a scientist who's working on a "real flying saucer" (I wrote about it here), and now I find this.

It's a story on the io9 blog about a 1993 report, which was published in Skeptical Inquirer. The report, written by professor of sociology at Rutgers University Ted Goertzel, calls into question the findings of a 1992 report that found 3.7 million Americans suffer from "alien abduction syndrome."

The original report, the one on which Goertzel wrote his, offered five experiences that might suggest one was abducted by aliens. But since there have never been any scientifically confirmed cases of alien abduction, I am at a loss as to how these five experiences were chosen. The descriptions of the experiences were as follows:

1. "Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room."
2. "Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why or where you had been."
3. "Feeling that you were actually flying through the air although you didn't know why or how."
4. "Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them."
5. "Finding puzzling scars on your body and neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them."

If a participant in the study claimed to recognize four or more of these experiences, he or she would qualify as an "abductee." Again, how the researchers were able to come to such a conclusion based upon what amount to assumptions about what a "real" alien abduction feels like, I do not know.

In an attempt to remedy methodological and logical deficiencies in the original report, Goertzel tasked one of his research methods classes at Rutgers with redesigning the study.

"Our questionnaire included the same items which they believed were indicators of UFO abduction, but added other items designed to place their items in a broader psychological context."

Goertzel's class conducted interviews with 697 residents of Southwestern New Jersey. They found that 3.7% of the residents interview were considered "abductees" by the standards set down by the original study. The 18 other questions designed to gain a more in-depth psychological picture of the respondents asked about beliefs in government conspiracies, astrology and the respondents' ease of trusting others.

The addition of the new questions revealed the "alien abduction syndrome" for what it truly was, a psychological phenomenon known as cryptomnesia.

"Psychologist Robert Baker (1992: 78) states that this phenomenon of 'seeing complex visual images in one's head that you cannot remember ever having seen before or...suddenly hearing voices from unknown and unrecollected sources is not only a much more common occurrence than is generally known but is also one of the more interesting and intriguing anomalies in the field of 'normal' human behavior.'"

"To investigate the cryptomnesia phenomenon, Goertzel mapped out the correlation between the various survey responses and the reports of unusual personal experiences. People who believe that high government officials were involved in the Kennedy assassination, for example, had a 21% correlation with those supposed 'abductees.' There was a 20% correlation between 'abductees' and those who think the Air Force is hiding evidence of flying saucers. But the most overlap occurred with two separate groups of survey respondents: Those who admitted to feeling that others were conspiring against them, and those who said they enjoyed 'reading books about UFOs and other strange phenomena.'"

Further analysis by Goertzel suggested that cryptomnesia was rooted in a lack of trusting relationships. The ability to trust others, such as friends or neighbors, was one of the deeper psychological aspects Goertzel's revised study sought to explore.

"The path analysis suggests that cryptomnesia is rooted in a lack of trusting relationships. This problem may have its origins in early childhood, but it continues into adult life with a lessened feeling of trust of friends and neighbors. This lack of trust leads to feelings of anomie and anxiety which make the individual more likely to construct false memories out of information stored in the unconscious mind. People who think in this way are susceptible to belief in conspiracy theories since these theories help them to make sense of an otherwise incoherent world."

Goertzel cautions that his study is hardly comprehensive. He has not done the psychological case studies necessary to prove the conclusions made in his analysis. All his study does, Goertzel writes, is "...provide a more plausible interpretation of the data than the UFO abduction hypothesis." In this case, Goertzel has shown more scientific integrity than the authors of the original study. For one think, he didn't claim that 3.7% of Southwestern New Jersey residents are cryptomnesiacs.

Why do some people feel the need to complicate an incredibly interesting psychological phenomenon such as cryptomnesia with useless nonsense about alien abductions? The same can be said for sleep paralysis, which is a documented condition whose symptoms are incredibly similar to those described by alleged alien abductees; indeed a condition which can account for three of the five experiences described in the original study. When did the wonders of the labyrinthine human mind get replaced by myths?