Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  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.