Moondust (8 page)

After the return, Mitchell stuck around for another year, then left NASA to form his IONS research institute. He had found the Moon a welcoming place and had no trouble integrating it into the human story, or his own. To him, “the stillness seemed to convey that the landscape itself had been patiently awaiting our arrival for millions of years.” There's a mystic edge to this observation, yet for the thirty-three hours that he spent on the surface, during which he and Shepard collected ninety-four pounds of rock, he felt constant frustration at being too busy to stop and simply look around, take in the feeling of being there. He also felt a powerful angst at leaving, knowing as he did that he would never return, and, once back, became worried by his irritation with the question “What did it feel like to walk on the Moon?” Unlike most of his colleagues, he decided that the problem was not with the questioners, but with himself and the anguish
he felt at being unable to recall the feeling of being there. Eventually, he got two friends to regress him under hypnosis, after which he felt sure that something significant had happened to him on the flight – that the epiphany provided no less than a window on the Universe; a clue as to its structure and our connection to it. He realized that the tightly focussed training regime of the fighter pilot and astronaut is at odds with that required of a modern-day shaman, which was how he was beginning to see himself.

Mitchell originally conceived the Institute of Noetic Sciences as “more a state of mind than a place” and began by running it with his new girlfriend, Anita Rettig, whom he married in 1974, adopting her two children into the bargain – for his first marriage to Louise Randall became one of many to collapse soon after a Moonwalker's return to Earth. Mitchell is hard on himself about this, blaming the anxiety and absence enforced by his career, multiplied by his own self-absorption, for a failure to understand his wife's unhappiness. While his dream had been drifting into view, he confesses, “there were never any guarantees, and for a mother and her children, the lifestyle meant friends and playmates left behind” as the family was dragged from base to base. At any rate, the crises came fast. In the beginning, influential people wanted to meet and be associated with an Apollo astronaut, but the Moondust gradually fell away and the businessman who had agreed to back IONS withdrew, leaving the dream in ruins. Nevertheless, money did arrive in fits and starts: on one occasion, according to Mitchell, a hippy girl in a VW camper van arrived with $25,000, dropped it off and puttered into the sunset without even leaving a name. Soon they were able to initiate research into paranormal phenomena like extrasensory perception (ESP), and the health benefits of acupuncture and meditation, which was still considered pretty “farout” stuff in the 1970s. At the same time, Mitchell was forced to engage in another struggle, fighting a drift toward both mysticism and his own deification within the organization. He even felt compelled to shave off the beard he'd grown at one stage, in order that he might look less biblical.

On the more far-out fringes of the organization, it had been
noticed that the number of Moonwalkers, twelve, corresponded with the number of Jesus' disciples. Things were getting weird down here in Florida and, by the decade's end, with his creation slipping away from him and five kids to put through college, he began to distance himself from IONS. In 1982, he was removed as chairman.

Last night, a brilliant sunset flared over the Gulf of Mexico and when it had finally burnt itself out, a vast Moon hung above the glassy water in its place. Years of living in a city where the sky is seldom clear mean that I still have to force myself to look up most nights, but this night the sky wouldn't be ignored: there she was, a soapy white, with delicate traces of blue and the enigmatic shadows which so enchanted Galileo when he became the first person to view them through a telescope in 1609. His findings caused a sensation when he published them the following year, but it wasn't until a generation later that the Moon's features were given the lyrical names that we still use today. To Giovanni Battista Riccioli, preparing his lunar atlas in 1651, the shadows looked like seas, and so we have the Sea of Tranquillity, Ocean of Storms, Lake of Dreams, Bay of Rainbows …
Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, Lacus Somniorum, Sinus Iridum.
Someone called them the poetry of the Moon, which rides an ellipse around the Earth, but doesn't spin, always presenting the same face, keeping the other one hidden. Thus, the “dark side” doesn't exist: there's only a meteor-battered “far” side, sometimes dark, sometimes light when it's facing the sun – where, to this day, no one has trodden. Like the moons of other planets, our Moon has a proper name, too. She's called Luna.

What
does
it feel like to stand there? How extraordinary to think that only nine people on Earth right now could know the answer. And that one of them is so close by.

Always that peculiar mix of apprehension and excitement at walking into a roomful of people I don't know.

It's a light, warm Friday morning and the airy common
room being used to greet and register “Seeding Spirit in Action” delegates is buzzing. Afterwards, I'll try to recall who was there and mostly am left with a milky impression of Indian prints and open-neck shirts and smiles which bob about the room at varying heights, like bees tending flowers on a hedgerow. Nice people. On white Formica tables lie books and magazines and lots of leaflets with affirmative headings like “Celebrate” and “Yes!” and “We are explorers …” – the latter being a slick number decorated with beautiful people and butterflies and photos of IONS's new “international campus,” which sits on 200 picturesque acres just north of San Francisco, because things have looked up in the past decade.

A flyer catches my eye. It says:

MEET the MAN!
Reception with
Dr. Edgar Mitchell
Founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences
Fundraiser for IONS
Saturday 5 PM, Fox Hall

I pick one up and the woman behind the table beams. “Oh, yes, you've gotta come and meet Edgar. Such a special man. He smokes roll-ups, you know.”

What?

And suddenly he's here.

Did I expect a fanfare and a shaft of light? No. I'm not sure what I expected. What I
hadn't
anticipated was this sense of disorientation, which will turn out to be common among people seeing the lunar astronauts for the first time, and in this instant I understand how strange my project is. The undertaking we associate Mitchell and his tiny cadre with may have ended abruptly thirty years ago, but it has never been equalled since – in fact, with every passing year it has come to seem more eccentric and incredible. Science has advanced and technology leapt forward at a dizzying rate, but in this one domain, Deep Space,
their
domain, there has been … nothing. So while the world has changed, we have changed, the pictures and deeds of the Moonwalkers
have remained ever present, yet frozen definitively in the imagination as they were then, making sight of them as they are now a shock. It's like Dorian Grey in reverse: they have a real age and a Moon age and your first impulse is to stamp your feet and cry, “How dare you be
old
!” Thinking about this reaction later, I flush with embarrassment.

For the man in front of me
is
old. He's seventy-one, about five foot nine, with still-dark short hair, ruddy skin and a very modest paunch. He's wearing khaki trousers and a dark green, logoless, vaguely eastern-cut short-sleeve shirt and has entered with an attractive, Latin-looking woman of roughly his Moon age, who turns out to be his current partner, Anna. His wire-rimmed spectacles and the curiously unmemorable parameters of his face are familiar, but the creeping estrangement of flesh from bone means that I wouldn't have recognized him in the street. He moves easily, but there's nothing commanding in his stance and he doesn't seem to waste words or emotion as IONS officials slowly note his presence and move to greet him, which they do warmly. There's a hesitancy in his smile, a sense of containment about him. In these moments, he looks shy.

And yet the instant he stands at the front of a lecture room, looks up and starts to speak, the years fall away like ice from a rising Saturn rocket. Today is given to five “pre-conference institutes,” which run concurrently between 10 AM and 4 PM and boast bewildering titles like “Awakening the Voice Within,” “Conscious Circle Work: Transforming the Media” and “Spirit in Action” – a facilitator for which, I can't help noticing, is a twenty-eight-year-old named Ocean. But the last, “Frontiers in Consciousness Studies with Edgar Mitchell,” is the one for me and five minutes into it I'm already reeling at the breadth of his experience, which runs way beyond anything that would have been available to (or inflicted upon) my generation.

He talks about the current “crisis of civilization” and our “rapid descent toward some new equilibrium,” then leaps back to his early career landing jet fighters on aircraft carriers, which sounds like the most terrifying occupation on Earth, thence to Sputnik, “which changed everything – up to then, we really didn't know what was out there.” His voice is deep, with the assumed
authority of a police chief briefing his team of detectives.
Okay, the Meaning of Existence has been terrorizing the community for 200,000 years and it's time to nail the bastard. Now, be careful out there
… He describes the dire warnings there'd been about what space might do to the human body and the marvel of finding that the body set about adapting almost immediately. Looking back, he is struck and a little charmed by America's naïveté at the time, as reflected in the movies of the late 1950s, with their space invaders and omniscient scientists and parents wringing hands over the relatively innocent rebellion of their teenagers. Prior to the 1950s, there was no such thing as a teenager.

There was also the joy of finding that the eye was so much more powerful without an atmosphere to cloud it. He thinks this was one of the reasons why lunar astronauts found the return journey so moving, with the Earth in their sights. Only twenty-four people have ever left Earth orbit and seen her from the perspective of Deep Space – all American and all between the Christmases of 1968 and 1972. The difference between near and far is enormous: the orbital astronaut experiences the planet as huge and majestic, while from afar it is tiny, beautiful, and shockingly alone. In a rare instance of candor, Neil Armstrong once remarked that while on the Moon, he became aware that he could blot out the Earth with his thumb and when someone asked whether this made him feel really big, he replied, “No, it made me feel really, really small.” Which brings us to the “epiphany.”

Edgar Mitchell was already interested in the paranormal, after being introduced to it by friends at MIT. It was a voguish field at the time, perhaps as a result of the questioning of convention that came with the Sixties, which fed a broader interest in Eastern mysticism and alternative readings of reality. So it was in the universities and on TV, but it never cut much ice at NASA, which is why there was embarrassment when word leaked out that
Apollo 14
astronaut Edgar Mitchell had conducted a private experiment into it on the way to and from the Moon, “transmitting” mental images of randomly chosen shapes to four people back on Earth at prearranged times. Unfortunately, his accomplices
had failed to take account of a slight delay in the launch, so were out of sync with his attempted projections. In what looks a little like rationalization, the astronaut claims that the results were still significant, as the other subjects' guesses were far wider of the mark than would be statistically expected, suggesting to him a subconscious knowledge that something was wrong. Whatever the case, Mitchell was betrayed by one of his collaborators and word leaked to the media shortly after splashdown. Another independent-minded Apollo astronaut assures me that, had commander Shepard known of Mitchell's intentions beforehand, the younger man would certainly never have flown – not on any mission. But Ed kept it wholly to himself. No one at NASA had the vaguest notion that this hippy stuff was going on right under their noses. Curiously, Deke Slayton claims to have been more open-minded. “I thought it was worth a look,” he says. “Hell, NASA doesn't know everything.”

The epiphany led Mitchell to ask, “What was causing this exhilaration every time I looked out of the window?” It seemed that nothing in conventional science or religion could explain it in a way that satisfied him, but that nearly all religions had
talked about it.
Mainstream science, with its conventional view of mind and body as separate entities occupying distinct realms (the world of spirit versus the world of matter), is incomplete, while religion acknowledges the “transcendent experience,” but misinterprets it. It occurred to him that “God is something like a universal consciousness manifest in each individual, and the route to divine reality and to a more satisfying human, material reality is through human consciousness.” In time, he saw the kind of epiphany he had as “a latent event in every individual.”

Now, if all that's a bit heavy, consider this. For the drive south, to get me into the mood of the period, I'd popped into a record store and bought a CD which I hadn't heard in a number of years.
The Psychedelic Sound of the 13th Floor Elevators
had been released in 1966, the year Ed Mitchell entered the Astronaut Corps, and, to my great amusement, the sleeve notes began with the words: “Since Aristotle, man has organized his knowledge vertically in separate unrelated groups – science, religion, sex, relaxation, work, etc….” This, they go on to contend, is a
bad thing. Of course, the Elevators' prescribed remedy for this conceptual downer was truckloads of LSD, with the result that these natives of Austin were not loved by the Texan authorities and eventually fell apart when their most iconic member, singer-guitarist Roky Erickson, was committed to a mental institution after one trip too many. All of which leads me to two thoughts: first, that while Ed Mitchell might have been working in a vacuum in space, he wasn't back here on Earth – his ideas were not mainstream, but they were around; and second, that the more he talks about his epiphany, the more it sounds to me like that ancient tribal ritual known in Britain as “knocking back a tab of ecstasy.” Could his euphoria have been the result of a simple chemical process, the ecstatic release of serotonin in an overexcited brain?