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An Apollo 14 Astronaut Was A Hardcore UFO Conspiracy Theorist
NASA
Edgar Mitchell -- Doctor of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT, accomplished pilot, and later an astronaut -- was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, as part of the Apollo 14 mission. (You know the one -- it's when Alan Shepard whacked a few golf balls from the lunar surface and probably accidentally bashed out a window of the Justice League's Watchtower satellite). That's about the last person you'd expect to be overflowing with more alien conspiracy theories than a Roswell gift shop, but Mitchell had a pocketful of goddamned moon rocks to pelt at anyone who spouted off at him about failed expectations.
NASA
He kept them after overcoming the initial disappointment of them not being made of cheese.
Mitchell was absolutely convinced that we are not alone in the Universe. But plenty of people would own up to that belief -- considering the staggering number of galaxies, stars, and planets that we know to exist, that's called playing the odds. Mitchell, however, took it one step further. He was an avid devourer of UFO sightings and any and all speculation of alien activity. Furthermore, he was 100-percent convinced that the sheer volume of such reports was concrete evidence that not only have we been visited on multiple occasions by otherworldly tourists, but also that the fact that said visitations were not common public knowledge indicated a government cover-up on a massive scale.
Slap a multi-million-dollar spacesuit on Fox Mulder, and you've got yourself a pretty good approximation of Edgar Mitchell. Except replace the crippling obsession with uncovering evidence with a crippling reliance on batshit supposition.
Phil Konstantin / Wiki Commons
It's less "I want to believe" and more "Fuck you, I will believe."
Oh, and in case you're thinking all this came about in his later, more senile years: Even back in 1971, while riding a fiery trail of human ingenuity to the Moon, Mitchell conducted a set of unsanctioned experiments with ESP. Basically, he came up with a series of random numbers and thought them real hard toward Earth, while his cohorts back home tried to pick up his think-signals. (You have to admit, if he had gotten results, it'd have been a much bigger discovery than anything we found on the Moon.)
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