What Science and Spirituality Look Like from Outer Space
I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. . . . I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!
—Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression
Present systems for getting from Earth’s surface to low-Earth orbit are so fantastically expensive that merely launching the 1,000 tons or so of spacecraft and equipment a Mars mission would require could be accomplished only by cutting health-care benefits, education spending or other important programs—or by raising taxes. Absent some remarkable discovery, astronauts, geologists and biologists once on Mars could do little more than analyze rocks and feel awestruck beholding the sky of another world.
—Gregg Easterbrook, “Why We Shouldn’t Go To Mars”
For Edgar Mitchell, a journey to the moon and back was a family trip. And the path home made the biggest impression on him. The Apollo spacecraft was in barbecue mode, a slow rotation, like a backyard rotisserie, designed to make sure the sun didn’t overheat one side of the craft. And for the first time in many days, Mitchell had some time to sit and think, to enjoy some sense of accomplishment and look out the window. The long struggle of learning and training necessary to reach the moon was behind him. Now, the lunar surface was behind him, too.
Astronauts, like professional athletes, enjoy their greatest, most public accomplishments early in life. Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, was forty years old. At the time, he didn’t know what was next. But just outside his spacecraft window laid the work that would sustain him throughout the rest of his life.
As the craft rotated, Mitchell’s view shifted. He saw the Earth, the moon, the sun, and a vast field of stars, in a panorama that repeated itself every hour, with the slow roll of his spacecraft. From here, as he looked down on Earth, he could recognize seas and continents. He could identify countries and cities. He knew that his younger brother, in the Air Force, worked somewhere on the small peninsula of Southeast Asia, flying missions in Vietnam. Mitchell had flown missions of his own, in the Korean War. Thinking of this, and staring out his capsule window, he reflected on how violent life on Earth is, despite the planet’s peaceful blue and white appearance. He looked again, shifting his point of focus from the Earth to the inestimable star field of which the Earth is just a part. And then, something happened.
Mitchell would spend the rest of his life trying to understand the implications. But suddenly, everything he thought he knew seemed grossly wrong.
He had, many years earlier, set aside the religious views with which he had been raised, considering them the leftover attempts of prescientific people to understand their existence. But the vision of reality that had come to occupy his mind since then, a purely scientific view, was also now shattered by what he saw. The idea that every star, every planet, every object in the cosmos, was separate and distinct had worked just fine for him. The Newtonian model of a predictable, physical universe had, in fact, provided the framework for a science that shot him into space and back. But looking out at the cosmos from space, he did not so much understand a new vision of reality as feel it.
He felt the Earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars. He felt his own relationship to all these things. He even felt the blackness in between them. The borders of flesh and bone disappeared. He felt the sensational tremors of his own being extending out into space. Forget distinctions between continents and countries. Edgar Mitchell now felt there were no boundaries between our bodies and the celestial bodies. He felt no distinction between himself and the nothing of black space. He suddenly experienced life—with no distinctions at all.
Our existence, he suddenly believed, is the product of an intelligent evolution—more grand than religion or science has described. This is the source of us. And we remain connected to that source. Mitchell felt this in what he describes as “an ecstasy of unity.”
In his talks, and in his books, and in the articles written about him, Mitchell usually just speaks of this first epiphany. But when I met with him, at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, he explained that he moved in and out of this state for three days. “I went into that state maybe two or three times an hour,” Mitchell said. “When it continued to happen all the way back, when every time I would look out the window I would be having a repeat of all this, I did wonder, ‘What is happening to me? What the hell is going on here?’ ”
When he landed, Mitchell undertook research in philosophy, religion, and science to try and understand what he had experienced. By the time I met him, he was forty years down that road. And in person, he proved as serenely confident as that history might suggest. He lives in a well-kept, ranch-style home in a fairly secluded section of West Palm Beach. His closest neighbors are palm trees and open fields. He was nearing eighty when I met him. And except for a stiff gait, he seemed to be in tremendous shape for someone so close to octogenarian status. He was tall and lean. His grip hurt when he shook my hand.
He led me into an office, taking great delight in a pair of dogs that gathered at his feet when he sat down. He motioned me to sit across from him, a large tray of sliced-up vegetables and hot tea arranged on a table between us. I was a bit relieved at the warm reception. He had seemed rather wary of me when I first started making arrangements to visit. But as he explained over the course of a couple of days, experience has taught him to be careful.
He has been ambushed by moon-landing deniers—the small cadre of people who believe the entire Apollo space program was a massive hoax perpetrated on the American taxpayer and the people of the world. There is even a video of a feisty, seventy-something Mitchell ordering a denier out of his house. In the video, as the man bends over to pick up some papers, Mitchell forgets for a moment all about any ecstasies of unity—and knees him in the ass.
Mitchell is also the target of criticism from the skeptical community, who consider him an astronaut who never really came back to Earth. It is easy to see why. His post-Apollo studies led him into Eastern religious practices, mental telepathy, psychokinesis, meditation, and New Age healing. In the past decade, he also publicly endorsed the idea that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth. (He saw nothing of alien life in his work for NASA, he claimed, but military officials had since assured him of E.T.s’ existence.)
Mitchell pronounces himself at peace with the skeptical community. He is playing, he says, for far bigger stakes than the whim of the moment. But from an outsider’s perspective, Mitchell is perhaps not well known enough for his longest-running life’s work—his explorations into the extremes of human consciousness.
During the course of my research, in fact, novelist Dan Brown released The Lost Symbol. Like The Da Vinci Code before it, the book is a potboiler in which the great mysteries of religion are connected by means of a vast conspiracy to the workings of government and the potential downfall of humankind. Brown incorporated research findings from the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in his plot.
IONS is, quite literally, Mitchell’s brainchild. Mitchell founded IONS in 1973, just two years after he returned from space, as a means of further investigating the insights he received aboard Apollo 14. He chose the word noetic, which comes from the Greek word for “intuitive knowing”—because it captured the full-bodied epiphany he had in space. Knowledge occurred to him in an instant, he felt, and since then he has endeavored to use the means of science and logic to verify what he learned. With this as the organization’s original marching order, IONS has investigated the more controversial corners of consciousness, looking for evidence of the unity Mitchell experienced.
In his novel, however, Brown writes that they found so much more: “[IONS] work had begun using modern science to answer ancient philosophical questions: Does anyone hear our prayers? Is there life after death? Do humans have souls? Incredibly, [IONS] answered all these questions. . . Scientifically. Conclusively.”
The truth is, of course, that IONS’s mandate isn’t supernatural; and no one has answered these questions—scientifically, conclusively. Directors at IONS are the first to admit it. Still, the publicity IONS received in the wake of Brown’s book was welcome and overwhelming—including lengthy treatments on the Discovery channel, Dateline, and NPR. Hits at the IONS web site jumped 1,200 percent. Membership rolls and donations spiked. Book sales for IONS’s current, leading lights took off, too. But Mitchell himself received virtually no publicity. He remains involved at IONS. He is listed as chairman emeritus and founder. And staff members there tell me his experience in that Apollo capsule remains foundational for them. But the institute that searches for unity has established a separate existence from the man who brought it into being.
Mitchell himself seemed fine with that state of affairs when I met him. But he expressed no thought of simply disappearing himself into the cloak of old age, relative anonymity, and death. “A psychic I trust,” he told me, “predicted I will live to be 109 years old.”
He fixed me, then, with a wry, gentle smile—the prediction seeming, perhaps, a little too good to be true, even to Edgar Mitchell. Maybe another three decades of life even strikes him as an embarrassment of treasure for one man. After all, his story already encompasses a vast swath of American history, reaching all the way from the dust of the Earth to the dust of the moon—and ultimately into the heart of what it means to be human.
MITCHELL’S GREAT GRANDPARENTS, ON his father’s side, wanted to start a new life after the Civil War. They traveled west in the 1870s, by covered wagon, with a few head of cattle. Railroads were not yet complete across the South and West. The automobile and the electric light were yet to be invented. The airplane was a fantasy. Yet in less than one hundred years, their great-grandchild would stand on the moon.
“I often tell people about that history,” Mitchell explained, “so they can set the accomplishment of landing on the moon in perspective.”
Mitchell’s journey to the moon and back was the culmination, in his mind, of his family’s trip west. But it also spoke to something grander than that. “I see it as an evolutionary step for man,” says Mitchell, “from the water, to the trees, to land and out into space.”
He even finds a mirror for his own epiphany of an interconnectedness among all things in his father’s experience of running the family farm. Many nights as a child, after his family moved to Roswell, New Mexico, Mitchell heard his father rouse himself from bed in the middle of the night. As he grew up, he began to accompany him.
“One of the cows is sick,” the old man would say. Or, “She’s having trouble birthing. I have to help her.”
Mitchell’s dad was close to the animals in his care. They had names. And so Mitchell and his dad would climb into a pickup truck, turn on the headlights, engine idling low, and start rolling slowly over their property. Mitchell says his father never seemed to search for the animal in need of aid. Instead, he drove straight to it, across several acres, his headlights carving out a small sliver of light in the deep country dark. And sure enough, the animal needed his help. Mitchell never questioned how this was possible. Neither did his father. But in the wake of his experience aboard the Apollo, he decided his father was so connected to the animals in his charge that he knew precisely which bush to look under to find the heifer having trouble giving birth.
“Nature, I think, was my father’s religion—his way of getting in touch with all that,” Mitchell said. “My mother and grandmother, on the other hand, were very religious in a more literal sense.”
Mitchell attended church with his mother, for a time. These were Baptist ceremonies, and the call to confession, so dramatic, made an impression on him. So did his mother, who wanted him to be an artist or a musician. But Roswell, New Mexico, was not so remote a place then as it seems today. In scientific terms, in fact, Roswell was an epicenter. And it was toward science that Mitchell felt himself pulled.
Each day, as Mitchell walked the white gravel road to school, he passed the home of America’s first rocket scientist, Robert Goddard. Many years later, Roswell would be the source of many rumors and tales surrounding the purported existence of aliens. But in these days, other rumors emanated from Goddard’s country home: That he moved to Roswell because he was asked to leave Massachusetts; that he required the isolation of Roswell to continue his top secret work; that strange machinery filled his home; and that Goddard conducted dangerous experiments, contraptions he brought out sometimes at night—and used to ignite the heavens.
Mitchell saw no evidence of any of this. But the mere presence of so eminent a scientist fired his imagination. And farm life gave him a firm grounding in the principles of engineering. The timetables to be met and the little available money didn’t allow for repairmen to be called every time a piece of machinery broke down. So Mitchell learned, like his father before him, how every machine worked. He enjoyed it, so much, that at thirteen years old he sought and acquired a part-time job washing airplanes—the better to be near bigger, grander machines.
The mechanics and pilots there took a shine to Mitchell. They taught him how the planes were put together. And as he proved his intellect and maturity, they even taught him how to fly. At fourteen years old, he climbed into an airplane cockpit and flew all by himself. “I knew what it meant to be truly free,” says Mitchell. “Released from the bonds of the Earth.”
Edgar Mitchell wasn’t going to be an artist; instead he embarked on a lifelong course of scientific education. He attended Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, cleaning slag from the steel furnaces when money ran short. He graduated in 1952 with a bachelor of science degree in industrial management and enlisted in the Navy, knowing that volunteering would better enable him to choose his own path. He wanted to fly, and after the necessary training found himself piloting a jet in the Pacific theater.
By this time in his life, Mitchell had become a true devotee of science. Organized religion was, to his mind, merely an artifact. Religious texts were documents left behind by people who lacked the tools or knowledge to grasp life as it truly is. Mitchell earned a master of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He earned a doctor of science degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But instead of using all that knowledge in the interests of academic research, he took work as a test pilot.
Occasionally, the death of a colleague announced itself with a puff of black smoke on the horizon. But Mitchell learned to steel himself, mentally, against the risks. “I had to accept that whatever will be, will be,” Mitchell told me. “I could only focus on the things I could control.”
He already knew he wanted to be a part of NASA. And he considered his thirteen years of professional flying to be his apprenticeship, his training, for that prestigious institution. He made sure they were aware of his interest in joining them. And in 1966, the phone call finally came, opening Mitchell’s path from the Earth to outer space.
IF EDGAR MITCHELL WAS the only astronaut so moved by the view of Earth from space, we could dismiss him. But Mitchell’s experience is typical.
The astronauts talked about it among themselves, initially. “You say to yourself ‘[Down there] is humanity, love, feeling and thought’ ” said astronaut Eugene Cernan. “You wonder, if you could get everyone in the world up there, wouldn’t they have a different feeling?”
From space, as Mitchell experienced, only natural borders stand out. The lines we see on the map depicting mountains and oceans are all rendered, in brilliant color. But the thick black lines that divide nations are nowhere to be seen. “I think the view from 100,000 miles could be invaluable in getting people together to work out joint solutions,” writes astronaut Michael Collins, “by causing them to realize the planet we share unites us in a way far more basic and far more important than differences in skin color or religion or economic system.”
Astronaut Joseph Allen, a doctor in physics, mirrored another aspect of Mitchell’s experience. “For several hundred years we have had a certain image of the Earth,” he said. “Now an intellectual understanding is being replaced by an intuitive, emotional understanding.”
The space program provided photos of our planet as a lonely round sphere, sitting improbably in a dense black field. Those images are now widely credited with fomenting the modern environmental movement and garnering funding for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “With all the arguments, pro and con, for going to the moon,” said Allen, “no one suggested we should do it to look at the Earth. But that may in fact be the most important reason.”
The sense of unity Mitchell describes clearly manifests in astronauts as a desire to protect the Earth—and see beyond national borders. Former Republican Senator Jake Garn was aboard a 1985 space flight in his capacity as chairman of the committee overseeing NASA’s funding. He felt all political borders melt away. And flying over Third World countries, he wondered why the governments of the Earth had not mobilized to feed every hungry child on the planet. “Why does this have to be?” he said, in 1986, when the Cold War was still running hot. “[Looking at the Earth from space], you realize that the Russians, the Nicaraguans, the Canadians, the Filipinos—it doesn’t matter where they’re from—all they want to do is raise their kids and educate them, just as we do.”
For a time the stories astronauts told and the pictures they sent back to Earth seemed a gathering force for social and political change. Astronaut Rusty Schweickart founded the Association of Space Explorers, a group comprised of the handful of individuals from thirty-four countries privileged enough to have seen the Earth from space. He hoped their unity, across borders, would send a message about the kind of evolutionary shift he thought possible. In Schweickart’s view, spaceflight might lead to a planet bound by its common humanity, not identification with a particular flag.
Author Frank White, to whom I am deeply indebted, interviewed thirty astronauts about the life-altering view from space. He dubbed the phenomenon the “overview effect” and wrote about it in a book of the same name. He found many astronauts had switched career paths and made new, surprising decisions after their trips into space. His book details several fundamental shifts in their thinking, all redolent of Mitchell’s “ecstasy of unity” and the idea of intuitive knowing.
Astronauts, he found, don’t just understand intellectually that political, religious, and cultural boundaries are purely human-made constructs. Once in space, they viscerally feel it; and they place their own self-images into a far larger framework. The astronaut Schweickart, for instance, said that he understood himself as the “sensing element for man.” Just as an individual’s fingers reach out and trace the contours of some object, he was, he realized, taking in data that would be relayed to all humankind.
White also found the astronauts, like Mitchell, reframed their view of the Earth. In what he calls “the Copernican perspective,” the Earth is seen as just a part in the whole of the solar system. And more broadly, the Earth and its solar system are felt and understood as a mere part in the whole of the universe.
Any momentum for change brought about by these insights, however, quickly stalled. The American space program has gone through a long down period, as taxpayers urged government to spend their money on more practical, Earthbound issues. But there are perhaps other, more intriguing reasons that this country lost its taste for space.
The majority of us are so content with the worldviews we’ve established for ourselves that we can be gifted with some profound insight, from someone else, and summarily forget, dismiss, or denigrate it. This is understandable. We are busy people, with busy lives. Reframing our understanding of the world ’cause Rusty Schweickart said so, or because we got some pretty pictures from space, is not something we’re likely to do. So whatever energy for change the space program produced naturally dissipated itself in the hustle of our days. Further, scientists have made no move to study the overview effect. And this, too, is understandable. Scientists are conditioned to disregard anecdotal stories—and so we’re stuck in a merciless Catch–22: until we get repeated studies of the overview effect, quantifying its impact on the astronauts who experienced it, we’re unlikely to see any studies at all.
The astronauts themselves are painfully aware of the problem, comparing their collective experience to one drop of dye in the vast, vast sea of human endeavor. From an educational perspective, it seems, what the astronauts are confronted with is the gulf that lies between direct experience and what I call the “mere knowledge” that comes from other forms of learning. Reading about how to hit a baseball, in short, is no substitute for going outside and taking some swings. So you or I can claim to empathize with the astronauts and imagine how the trips into space altered their worldviews; and scientists and philosophers can claim an intellectual grasp of everything a Rusty Schweickart says. But none of us experienced it, none of us felt it—and felt, in turn, the experience become a part of who we are.
The astronauts themselves trained for months and years before they went into space. They knew every detail of the craft they would occupy and the instruments under their control. They were prepped, too, about what they could expect to see beyond their spacecraft. And after the space program began in earnest, they even had photographs of the Earth, hung in inky blackness, like a pendant on black velvet. But in the end, seeing our home planet from space—not in a photograph, but with their own eyes—proved to be transformative, like standing upon a territory after seeing it represented by the lines and shadings of a map. There was, they told Frank White again and again, no comparison between the indirect experience they had of space travel and being there.
As the sensing element for man, then, they were tasked with telling us about an experience that had altered their worldviews and shifted their self-images. But we, their audience, had no real frame of reference. We got the EPA and Earth Day out of the deal. But we also got the BP oil spill and climate change, just the same.
In light of the experiential chasm between them and us, some have claimed the astronauts’ descriptions are somehow not evocative enough—that we should instead send poets into space. But reading over the accounts given by the explorers themselves, I often find them so moving that I think a talent like the poet Maya Angelou’s could make a difference, but probably not a dent, in our own naturally thick skulls.
Mitchell’s own rendering of what he likes to call his a-ha moment, his epiphany, is remarkably vivid: “Billions of years ago, the molecules of my body, of [my fellow astronauts’ bodies], of this spacecraft, of the world I had come from and was now returning to, were manufactured in the furnace of an ancient generation of stars like those surrounding us. This suddenly meant something different. It was now poignant and personal, not just intellectual theorizing. Our presence here, outside the domain of our home planet, was not rooted in an accident of nature, nor the capricious political whim of a technological civilization. It was rather an extension of the same universal process that evolved our molecules.”
Mitchell is sometimes seen as a party of one. Other astronauts found the experience affected them spiritually, but only he publicly used the view from space as a gateway to exploring the paranormal. White, in speaking to as many astronauts as he could, however, ultimately concluded that it was Mitchell’s dedication to the overview effect that truly set him apart.
“When we talk about the astronauts and their experiences, most of them were changed in some way,” White told me. “But I don’t know of anyone who has, to the degree Edgar has, taken the experience itself, and spent their life trying to work through the implications of it. Edgar has relived it so many times, in so many ways. He has written about it, thought about it, spoken about it, again and again. He founded IONS to try and understand it. He just keeps working through the implications of it. And what impresses me is the rigor with which he has done it.”
Mitchell puts it all more succinctly: “I’ve endeavored to follow the path the experience suggested,” he says, “to see where it leads.”
BECAUSE IT WAS HIS own consciousness that provided Mitchell the sense of being one with all creation, and because no one has defined the mechanism that makes consciousness possible, Mitchell felt his course was clear. It was toward the riddle of consciousness that he would first look for evidence of the unity he felt. Forty years later, he is still endeavoring to mine those same depths—sometimes in a manner dangerous to his reputation.
Shortly after his return, in the early 1970s, he struck up a relationship with the famous Israeli psychic Uri Geller. Mitchell stood by as Geller took part in a series of experiments at the Stanford Research Institute, experiments in which Geller purportedly read minds, viewed remote images with his “mind’s eye,” and attempted to bend spoons, psychically. I write that he “attempted” to bend spoons because Mitchell is the first to point out that, under strictly controlled conditions, Geller failed to bend any spoons at all. But reading minds? Remote viewing?
“Yes,” says Mitchell. “He did that.”
Today, the Internet is filled with claims and counterclaims about Geller—that he is a con man, a magician, a genuine psychic, or some combination of them all. I spoke to Geller on the phone and exchanged emails with him and found him to be difficult at best. “Uri,” I said, by way of introduction, “I’m one of those people who would perhaps like to believe but find myself unable—”
“I don’t give a damn what you believe,” he hollered at me over the phone, his first words since Hello, Steve. “Why should I care what you believe, or if you’re too stubborn to believe in anything at all? I don’t care. I’m way past trying to prove anything to anyone!”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down, Uri,” I said.
By this time, we had already exchanged emails in which I had assured him that the thesis of my book did not require me to make fun of Edgar Mitchell—the exact opposite, really. I was advocating we not make fun of anyone. Reminding Geller of this, I calmed him down enough that he went into one of his time-tested rants thanking the skeptical community. “They made me very wealthy,” he said. “They brought me more attention, for free, than I could have paid the greatest advertising firm on Madison Avenue to get.”
In the end, I felt like Geller taught me nothing at all, sharing only platitudes about Mitchell, who, for his part, merely smiles at the more colorful aspects of Geller’s act. Mitchell’s exact position on Geller is a bit complicated: he agrees with the Stanford Research Institute’s conclusion that Geller’s metal-bending ability could not be proven scientifically; but he also believes, on a personal level, that Geller bent spoons by means of psychic power. He saw him do it too many times, he said, under conditions he found stringent enough to constitute that kind of personal proof. Perhaps, he suggested to me, the conditions under which he failed to perform were . . . too rigorous, impeding Geller’s ability.
If you listen closely, of course, you can hear the skeptics laughing. But Mitchell has never embarrassed himself in the manner Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did, as recounted in chapter 1. The world-famous psychologist, Kübler-Ross, was forced to abandon the psychic she’d hired to work at her institute. But Mitchell has never publicly aligned himself with any particular mystic for any great length of time. And even his position on Geller allows him an intellectual out: he considers the psychic’s claims of metal-bending ability scientifically unproven. Still, the range of personal, strange experiences Mitchell has claimed runs long: he spent much of the 1970s meeting with a variety of healers and psychics. Most failed to impress him. But a few did.
The most compelling experience he reports relates to his mother, and it’s easy to see why he finds it telling: the little drama that played out between them, if true, illuminates a nexus point among the paranormal, belief, disbelief, and consciousness.
Mitchell’s mother had been losing her eyesight for years, due to glaucoma, and was legally blind without her glasses. Just beginning his explorations into the claims of healers, Mitchell decided to introduce his mother to a man named Norbu Chen. A Buddhist and self-proclaimed Tibetan shaman, Chen agreed to try and heal Mitchell’s mother and restore her eyesight.
The three gathered in a quiet hotel room. Chen sang a strange mantra, passing his hands slowly over the head of Mitchell’s mother and pausing at her eyes. The whole process lasted just a few minutes. Nothing happened immediately, but the next morning, at 6:00 A.M., Mitchell’s mother came rushing to his room. “Son,” she said, “I can see!”
She then proceeded to read for Mitchell, unaided, from the Bible. Then she made a show of tossing her glasses on to the hotel room floor—and breaking them with the heel of her foot.
Mitchell relates this story, and many other odd tales, in his book The Way of the Explorer. “I am not,” he writes, “by this account nor with any other anecdotal story, attempting to convince the doubtful. That can only happen when the open-minded skeptic sets out for himself or herself to view (or better, to experience) such peculiar phenomena (at least peculiar to the western mind).”
Chen’s healing of his mother, he concludes, “wasn’t science, but as far as I was concerned, it indicated where I personally needed to probe more thoroughly.”
Remarkably, according to Mitchell, his mother went about her daily routine for several days after this healing without her glasses. Her vision was restored. Then Mitchell’s phone rang. His mother wanted to know if Chen was a Christian. She herself had remained a fundamentalist, so Mitchell wanted to keep the truth from her. But being a good son, he couldn’t lie to his mom.
He could hear the disappointment in her voice. And within hours, her eyesight deteriorated. She needed thick eyeglasses again to see at all. For Mitchell, this was another anecdotal story that spoke to the power of a person’s belief system to effect not only what information they would accept as valid but their own health. It was a story that spoke to the power of consciousness.
What Mitchell and his mother may have encountered is a particularly dramatic example of the placebo effect. The belief we’re being healed is often enough to successfully diminish symptoms like pain or the breathing difficulties associated with asthma. It is usually stated that the placebo effect seems to have no power over the illnesses that underlie our symptoms. But researchers have demonstrated an increased interest in seeing just how far the placebo effect, or belief, can take healing. There are occasional reports of impressively dramatic effects, including the well-documented, curious case of a cancer victim.
In the Journal of Projective Techniques, it was reported, a Mr. Wright was in the end stages of cancer. His body was riddled with tumors. His lungs were filled with fluid. He needed an oxygen mask to breathe. His doctor was about to go home for the weekend, expecting his patient to be dead by the time he returned on Monday. But Wright heard that his doctor was conducting research on a new cancer drug called Krebiozen. He begged to receive the treatment, and his doctor relented.
Two days later, Wright’s tumors shrank by half. He was the only one who seemed to be benefiting from the introduction of Krebiozen. But his doctor didn’t tell him that, and he continued injections for the following ten days. Wright went home healthy.
Two months later, however, Wright heard a report that the drug was, thus far, proving ineffective. He immediately fell ill, his tumors returning. His doctor, seizing on the placebo effect, lied to him. He told Wright they had a newer, double-strength version of the drug that he believed would get results. In reality, he injected Wright only with sterile water. But again, Wright’s tumors disappeared and he returned to his normal life. Unfortunately, he later saw continued newspaper coverage describing the dramatically unsuccessful tests on Krebiozen. He immediately got sick again, was admitted to the hospital, and died.
IONS became Mitchell’s scientific arm for attempting to understand such happenings. And IONS’s Remission Project, in fact, documented 3,500 cases of diseases suddenly and inexplicably retreating, culled from eight hundred journals, written in twenty different languages. To medical science, such cases have always been viewed as happy curiosities. To Mitchell and the scientific staff at IONS, they suggest a whole course of research into the power of mind and consciousness. And while an entire book could be written probing the pros and cons of their work, allow me to summarize it concisely: IONS has uncovered the same sort of contentious evidence for mental telepathy that has been found in research labs all over the world—a so-called psi effect that appears so small as to be without practical application, but so interesting, scientifically, that it may speak to the unity of mind and matter Mitchell felt aboard his spaceship.
Their findings are, of course, not embraced by the larger scientific community. And until they are, nothing figures to change. The skeptics will cry, like policemen guarding a murder scene, There is nothing to see here, please go about your business! But I like IONS, if only for the incredible conclusion it could provide to the story of Edgar Mitchell. Because if (or when) this shift ever happens, if this small psi effect is ever accepted, it might mean that Edgar Mitchell will be remembered not so much for his walk on the moon, but for his experience on the ride back. He will be remembered, most fondly, for what he accomplished after he hung up his spacesuit.
In Seattle, when I was researching my chapter on telepathy, I asked the statistician Jessica Utts what she thinks the most promising field is for those who do believe in psi. “If there is one test that might really convince the majority of scientists,” I asked her, “what would it be?”
We were gathered in a small hotel ballroom, at a conference of parapsychologists. And in response, Utts nodded across the room at Dean Radin, the leading researcher at IONS, who sipped a cocktail and laughed with colleagues as we talked. “I think it’s the precognition work Dean is doing,” she said.
Radin has written extensively about a number of experiments, conducted by himself and other researchers, demonstrating that a measurable physiological effect can be observed in the moments before a subject is exposed to emotional stimuli. Given the long-running debate over psi and his own involvement in it, hearing that his institute might hold the inside track on settling things might be seen as a point of pride for Mitchell. But the truth is, he seems blithely unconcerned with whether or not IONS’s findings are embraced any time soon. This may in part be due to the meditative practice he has maintained ever since his capsule ride.
Mitchell’s experience of unity is in fact something meditators can feel just by engaging in regular practice on their living room floors. But Mitchell’s come-what-may attitude about the skeptics also reminded me of what he said about learning to live with the danger of being a test pilot. In looking into the paranormal, Mitchell seems to have adopted the same philosophical stance he did when he strapped himself into an experimental plane. “It would be nice for our work to be accepted,” he said. “But the workings of science, of what knowledge is embraced and what is rejected, are sociological. That’s not something I can control.”
Predicted to live to the ripe old age of 109, Mitchell seems content to let the wheels of science grind slowly on. In the meantime, he keeps working. And he has developed what he calls a “dyadic” model of the universe. A dyad is a group of two—separate but one. I listened to him talk about his idea for a long time, and readers with an interest in the subject should consult my Notes and Sources. But as it relates to this book, I like his model mostly as a metaphor, for the germ of a worldview that might be worth clinging to: men and women, Republicans and Democrats, believers and unbelievers, sports fans and non-sports fans, musicians and engineers, dyads, separate but one, all trapped on the same dusty rock, acknowledging our differences but understanding we’re all connected, on a planet without borders, a planet that looks awfully improbable, awfully fragile, from the point of view of science—or the more dramatic view from a spacecraft.
When he finished describing his model of reality, Mitchell stood. “There is something I want you to see,” he said.
He walked over to a closet in the hallway outside his office and came back holding a large plastic bag. When he was still some distance away, I wondered if he was going to display samples of moon rock and moon dust—an astronaut’s pirated booty. But as he drew near I realized that the bag was filled with bent spoons. “I got these,” he said, “during my visits with children, in the ’70s, mostly in San Francisco and California.”
I removed some of the spoons from the bag. A couple were bent at right angles. Others were twisted into curlicues, the bowl end of the spoon wrapped around the shaft in tight spirals. In the wake of the publicity he received for his work with Uri Geller, he explained, he received phone calls from mothers around the country who claimed that their kids had begun bending spoons like the Israeli psychic. He visited some of those nearest to him, on the west coast, to judge for himself.
“Go ahead,” Mitchell told me. “Try to bend one.”
I thought he wanted me to bend one of the spoons just by thinking about it, and I looked at him quizzically.
“With your hand,” he advised.
I held the shaft of the spoon in one hand and tried bending the bowl end, with all my might, with the other. I pushed. I pulled. I strained. But I couldn’t bend it.
“How did you get these?” I asked. And over the next few minutes, I questioned Mitchell, trying to figure out how the children had duped him.
He came in, he said, to a child’s home. And he brought his own spoons with him. He sat down on the couch and asked the child to sit next to him. Then, holding a spoon upright in his hand and never letting go, he allowed the child to rub the spoon with one finger. After a few minutes the spoon seemed to go soft and pliable, like rubber. And the child simply bent it, quickly, and with no more effort than it takes to fold a straw. The spoon never left Mitchell’s hand. But when the child stopped and Mitchell tried bending it himself, it was again hardened steel. He couldn’t move it. He carried out this same, nonscientific experiment a dozen times or more, finding children who seemed to mimic Geller’s abilities.
After Mitchell told me this story and put the spoons away, we parted for the day. But before I left, I felt compelled to make a kind of confession.
“I have to tell you,” I said. “I respect you, but . . . you do realize: I just can’t believe those spoons were bent by people using their minds.”
Mitchell smiled at me gently. “Yes,” he said. “I realize that.”
Then he walked me to the large lawn in front of his house and watched me get in my car, his hands in his pockets, his face still smiling, his dogs dancing in circles at his feet.
As I pulled away, I watched him diminish in the rearview mirror, until he was just a dot of humanity on a spheroid planet, in an elliptical solar system, in a sweet spot known scientifically as the galactic habitable zone of the Milky Way.
MITCHELL’S STORY IS NOT yet over, not only because he is still lecturing and writing, but because we as a society have not yet processed the meaning or implications of space travel.
We may yet get our chance.
The experience of all the astronauts who have ventured into space, and White’s book on the subject, have inspired the formation of the Overview Institute. The institute is headed up by David Beaver, a magician, who might best be described as a lifelong student and Renaissance man.
His bio includes studies in nuclear engineering, physics, the sociology of perception, and the philosophy of science. When I spoke to him, he said that in addition to promoting the overview effect, he is also putting together a virtual reality stage show, completing a book on the cognitive science of magic, and consulting with the growing space tourism industry.
The combination of the Overview Institute and space tourism could in fact be exactly what it takes to reframe our understanding of Edgar Mitchell—and space travel. Virgin Galactic is booking civilian flights into space right now. Flights aboard a specially designed, carbon-composite spaceship—which boasts greater strength and far lighter weight than a standard airplane—are scheduled to begin, at the time of this writing, in 2012.
The company’s sales pitch never mentions the overview effect by name. But most of its narrative is built around the view: the look of Earth from space is something seen in “countless images,” according to Virgin Galactic’s promotional material, “but the reality is so much more beautiful and provokes emotions that are strong but hard to define. The blue map, curving into the black distance is familiar but has none of the usual marked boundaries. The incredibly narrow ribbon of atmosphere looks worryingly fragile. What you are looking at is the source of everything it means to be human, and it is home. . . . Later that evening, sitting with your astronaut wings, you know that life will never quite be the same again.”
This description is both spot on and probably a bit tame. But that is to be expected. Telling people, as Edgar Mitchell has, that “your flesh and bone will melt away as you feel yourself become one with the universe!” is probably not the best way to sell tickets. Telling people that astronauts are profoundly affected, usually for the rest of their lives, and that some change their vocations altogether, also qualifies as a tad too intense for a marketing handout. But Beaver’s contention is that the tourism industry—and the rest of us—need to be prepared.
“I think what’s kept the overview effect from having a larger impact on society, is that so few people have experienced it,” Beaver told me. “And those people are generally one small part of society. They are space explorers. When more people are going into space, from various walks of life, change is going to start happening, really fast.”
This sounds a bit dramatic. But is that because the power of the overview effect is overstated? Or because, when we listen to this story, we don’t have ears that are prepared, in the least, to really hear it? This is the question—and the answer may be that we don’t fully understand what travel into space will mean for us; that in fact we can’t understand it until it happens.
Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also a part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. “If fish could think at our level of intelligence,” White said, “back before humanity existed, and some fish were starting to venture up on land, a lot of them would be saying, just as we do now about space: ‘Why would we want to go there? What’s the point?’ And they’d have literally no idea of what venturing onto land was going to mean.”
The move from water to land, according to White, is a kind of mirror in history—a pane of glass for us to stare through and understand that our next shift, from Earth to space, will be equally important. But what species has ever understood its own evolutionary future?
Because we are more intelligent than the fish, because we have developed the scientific method, because we can create art and films that provoke our imaginations, we of course have a better opportunity than a trout to understand what’s next for us. But there is abundant evidence that we don’t even understand what is happening right now.
The space tourism industry has long been plagued by a phenomenon known as “the giggle factor.” In short, when people hear an idea that is profoundly disturbing—like the destructive effects of climate change—or scientifically challenging—like the idea of microscopic life once was—we giggle. And in the case of space tourism, we giggle because the idea seems too far-out—too remote from our experience. Our natural hubris, it seems, is most clearly captured in our automatic inclination to laugh at information we don’t understand.
The implications of this for the paranormal are obviously great. Yes, some people want to embrace every New Age idea. But others laugh, just as automatically, before even considering what they’re laughing at. “In my conversations with people in the aerospace industry,” Beaver told me, “they expected they would announce flights into space—and that would be that. People would start calling for reservations. But it wasn’t like that, and they realized the ‘giggle factor’ was to blame. They needed to do more work, just convincing people this is real.”
That work has since been done, and what Richard Branson is selling through Virgin Galactic is real. We as a species just had (and some still have) a hard time believing it. Branson’s newly designed craft have been making successful test flights, and industry observers believe that even the most far-out plans—like Bob Bigelow’s idea to sell $8-million weekends in a space hotel—are when, not if, propositions. Branson even has competition, from the likes of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Branson has been working with no less a visionary than Burt Rutan, whose ideas can be found in the ever-so-practical unmanned drones currently hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Check the clips covering the progression of the aerospace industry, and it appears that circa 2005 everyone involved adopted the same mantra: “The giggle factor is gone,” as a means of overcoming the public’s doubts.
When it comes to perception, perhaps just saying it can really make it so. People are now booking flights with Virgin. But according to Beaver, aerospace insiders aren’t taking any chances. They are now loath to say too much about the overview effect, for fear of reigniting our mirth. And they probably aren’t wrong.
My favorite example of the skepticism that greets the overview effect is a 2007 article in Wired magazine, covering the Overview Institute’s first conference. “Scratch a Space Nut,” reads the unwieldy headline, “Find a Starry-Eyed Hippie.”
I think, in the end, this is the conundrum of Edgar Mitchell. He helped usher in what appears to be the next step in human evolution: from land to space. But he can only be viewed through the glasses we’re grinding today. Too much of what he has involved himself in provokes our laughter—from mental telepathy, to shamanistic healers, to the overview effect itself. But where he has landed is more nuanced than all that.
“There is a strict idealism,” he told me, “which is where the New Agers are at, which says that essentially there is no matter or that matter is irrelevant. And then there is extreme scientific reductionism, which tends to dominate science, and says that consciousness is epiphenomenal—a kind of illusion produced by materialistic processes. I say somewhere there is reality in all this. And our task is to find it. But both of these, the New Age way of looking at things, and the strictly materialistic way, are wrong. It’s a more inclusive view of reality that I’m after.”
Mitchell’s journey, then, goes both in and out—as deeply into ourselves as we can go, as deeply into and as far from scientific dogma as we can get, as far out into space as we’ve dared. And he has paid a price.
The most poignant conversation I had about Edgar Mitchell was with Dr. Marilyn Schlitz. The current president of IONS, Schlitz has known Mitchell for close to twenty years. And I was frankly a bit afraid to share my final observation with her. “Edgar struck me,” I said, “as lonely.”
Schlitz was quiet for a couple of seconds before she responded, long enough for me to wonder if she was offended on Mitchell’s behalf. But then she spoke: “I think Edgar is lonely,” she said, and from there she painted a portrait of Mitchell, suggesting history will judge him, as it judges all things, far more accurately than the present can.
“He grew up on a farm,” she observed, “and he has great respect for his family history. But he traveled to the moon and back. His experience of life is so unique. You have to consider: Even his fellow astronauts, there is a fraternity there that means a lot to Edgar. They had the same experience as him. But they didn’t pursue it the way he did: So there isn’t anyone on Earth he can look at, and feel that sense of total, shared experience. There isn’t anyone on Earth who really understands him.”