The other day I did a quick post about Edgar Mitchell’s radio interview in which he claimed to have direct knowledge about UFO cover ups.

Well, he’s elaborated, clarified and expanded on his initial statements in this interview with the Discovery channel.

Now, while I am fairly sure that life is a ubiquitous phenomena in the the universe, I’ve always been skeptical about the idea that we’ve been visited by alien astronauts in the recent past.  However, I’ve got no doubt that if there was one the government would try to cover it up.

First some bits from the Discovery channel and then some of my thoughts.

EM: My major knowledge comes from what I call the old-timers, people who were at Roswell and subsequent who wanted to clear the things up and tell somebody credible even though they were under severe threats and things — this was back in the Roswell days. Having gone to the moon and being a local citizen out in the Roswell area some of them thought I would be a safe choice to tell their story to, which they did. Even though the government put real clamps on everybody, it got out anyhow.

Subsequent to that, I did take my story to the Pentagon — not NASA, but the Pentagon — and asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told them my story and what I know and eventually had that confirmed by the admiral that I spoke with, that indeed what I was saying was true.

IK: You mean what had been told to you was true?

EM: Yup, in other words. There was a UFO crash. There was an alien spacecraft. This gentleman tried his damndest to get me in and like so many others in the administration over the last 60 years, since JFK’s time, was unable to. He was told ‘Admiral, you don’t have a need to know, and therefore go get lost,’ essentially.

…

IK: Why do you think the government hasn’t acknowledged that there is life outside of Earth? I thought that was sort of the point of NASA.

EM: Well most people in government don’t know. The government is highly compartmentalized. You could work next door to somebody for 30 years not knowing what they’re doing in certain areas. The whole point of all of this … goes back to World War II. This Roswell incident took place right at the aftermath of World War II when the U.S. Army Air Corps was split off and became the Air Force and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which was the intelligence service of World War II, was disbanded and eventually became the CIA. At that point the Cold War was just starting to move under way and we were at odds with the Soviets.

The Air Force was brand new and supposedly in control of the skies and didn’t know what they were doing, and the CIA didn’t know what they were doing, so Pres. Truman was in a big problem here: Here people were telling him there were aliens around and nobody knew if they were hostile or what they were and what was he going to do about it?

So he formed a committee, a very high-level military and academic and intelligent people — politically powerful people — and said ‘You guys work on this.’ And that was called … the MAJIC 12. And they did pass a National Security Act, or so I’m told, under highly classified auspices, that gave this committee virtually unlimited power to deal with this issue, which they have done for the last 60 years, slowly excluding everybody — including presidents.

You may remember that Pres. Clinton tried to send (Webster) Hubbell to find out about this at Wright Patterson. He got rejected. And Barry Goldwater, back in the ’60s when he was getting ready to run for the presidency and who was a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve tried to get information about it. He got rejected. And I’m told that Jerry Ford tried to do some finding out and he got rejected.

Jimmy Carter announced his observation of UFOs, but that never went anywhere so obviously he made no progress. Only in recent years has the public interest become acute enough and enough stories leaked out so that people are starting to believe that it’s all real. And the fact of the matter is, it is.

So, there is another part of this interview that I found even more interesting. In the second half, Mitchell, speaks a bit about how his understanding of Astrobiology and his personal experiences in space deeply changes how he thought about the role of life in the universe. He say:

I was coming back from the moon after completing a successful mission on the moon. My job was being responsible for the lunar spacecraft for the lunar surface activities. So on the way home, my successful job had been mostly completed and we were just coming home. We still had experiments and work to do, but the big stuff was done.

We were orientated such and rotating in order to keep the thermal balance of the spacecraft so that every two minutes you could see the Earth, the moon, the sun and a 360-degree panorama of the heavens came through the window every two minutes. That’s powerful stuff, particularly since it’s space. Without the atmosphere to block, the stars don’t twinkle, and there’s 10 times as many as you could possibly see on Earth because of the lack of interference and it’s much closer to what you could see through the Hubble Telescope these days, with those pictures and I hope you’ve looked at some of those: it’s overwhelming — and I realized as that happened, because I do have a PhD from MIT and I studied astronomy at Harvard and MIT and knew that molecules of matter in my body and in the spacecraft and in my partners’ bodies were made in some ancient generation of stars. That’s where matter is created.

Suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual and I had never had this experience. It was accompanied by bliss, an ecstasy I had never experienced.

…

IK: What’s the tie-in between this pursuit and your experiences with understanding that there are other life forms that have come to Earth?

EM: Well it’s just an extension of the cosmology of what’s this whole universe about and what are we about and coming to the conclusion that we are not alone. That’s some of the most important knowledge that we could discover.

As I said above, I have no doubt that life is a fundamental component of the universe and that life, in many forms, is abundant in the universe. This understanding mostly comes from studying Astrobiology, which attempts to study life in the context of the universe.

There are two important discovers that are relevant here. One, the discovery of, extremophiles, organisms that survive and thrive in terrestrial environments in which it was previously believed that live could not exist. For example, there are organisms that live at the freezing-cold depths of the ocean, under extreme pressure, in complete darkness, by drawing their energy directly from the earths core via hydrothermal vents. Two, the discovery of molecules that are fundamental to life, like amino acids (the building block of life), in space and on meteorites. Add to this the discovery of water on mars and predictions that we will are likely discover Endolith in the permafrost of Mars and extremophiles living on the thermals jets in the frozen over oceans of Europa and it becomes increasingly likely that life is in fact abundant in the universe.

Okay, given that extraterrestrial life is an increasing, if not completely, rational belief, the notion that we have in fact been visited becomes (ever-so-slightly) more believable.

Now, let’s imagine that there was an encounter in 1947. It’s very likely it would have been covered up as Mitchells says . Remember, 1947, is pre-sputnik and pre-moon walk and there was no conceptual framework onto which people could assimilate this information.  I doubt people would have believed the truth if they had been told it.

Then over the next 60 years, as those involved in various stages of the cover up age, stop feeling pressured by the “powers that be” and begin to see that scientists outside their cabal are building the scientific case for alien life (Astrobiology) they tell their stories to guys like Mitchell who are increasingly likely to understand the situation and speak up.

It seems to me that the greater our understanding of Astrobiology becomes the more we hear high profile people speak up about aliens.

I think we are beginning to approach the point where it would be clear to those involved in sustaining the conspiracy (if there is one) that the only reason to keep it going is for it’s own sake. That is, we are approaching, the point where it would no longer be necessary to keep this information from the public because there is scientific framework onto which people can now assimilate the news of alien astronauts.

I suppose what all this has gotten me thinking is this: with every event that makes it is less crazy to believe in alien life it becomes less nesscary to sustane a cover-up (if there is one) about alien life.

I would not be surprised if, within the next twenty years, a conspiracy (if there is one) is revealed.

Someone assure me I’m not a wing-nut.