I first met moonwalker Edgar Mitchell in late 1995, at a restaurant in the back yard of Kennedy Space Center, which was getting ready to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Apollo 14. Given how NASA types tended to treat UFO questions like warlocks and unicorns, De Void was unprepared for Mitchell’s receptivity. No, he insisted, he hadn’t seen evidence of UFOs during his off-planet adventures. “NASA at that time was so sure there were no such things, there was no discussion of it." But he added this: "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 is a case of criminal culpability."

Criminal culpability. Whoa. Thus began a long conversation with one of the old astronaut corps’ unique thinkers. This was a guy who, after admitting he conducted ESP experiments on the moon in 1971, took a lot of crap from colleagues – and he didn’t care. He went onto formalize his curiosity about human consciousness by founding the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which went on to publish papers on everything from meditation to the “Physical effects of collective attention at Burning Man 2013.”

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