Mitchell's interests include consciousness and paranormal phenomena. During the Apollo 14 flight he conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth.[3] In early 1973, he founded the nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to conduct and sponsor research into areas that mainstream science has found unproductive, including consciousness research and psychic events.
Mitchell says that a teenage remote healer who lives in Vancouver and uses the pseudonym Adam Dreamhealer, helped heal him of kidney cancer at a distance. Mitchell said that while he never had a biopsy (the definitive test for cancer), "I had a sonogram and MRI that was consistent with renal carcinoma." Adam worked (distantly) on Mitchell from December of 2003 until June of 2004, when the "irregularity was gone and we haven't seen it since."[4]
Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is "90 per cent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets"[5] and that UFOs have been the "subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and to create confusion so the truth doesn't come out."[6] In 2004 he told the St. Petersburg Times that a "cabal of insiders" inside the US Government were studying recovered alien bodies, and that this group had stopped briefing US Presidents after John F. Kennedy.[7] He has said, that "We all know that UFOs are real, now the question is, where they come from."[8]
On July 23, 2008 Edgar Mitchell was interviewed on Kerrang Radio. Mitchell claimed the Roswell crash was real and that Aliens have contacted humans several times but that governments have hidden the truth for 60 years stating, "'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." In reply, a spokesman for NASA stated, "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 opinions on this issue."[9] [10]
Edgar Mitchell is one of the astronauts featured in the documentary In the Shadow of the Moon.
As well as academic papers,[11] Mitchell has written two books: Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (ISBN 0-399-11342-8) and The Way of the Explorer (ISBN 1-57270-019-X). In The Way of the Explorer, Mitchell proposed a dyadic model of reality.[12]
He is currently the Advisory Board Chairman of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, co-founded by Dr. Carol Rosin[13] and is a member of INREES.
