Edgar Mitchell walked on the Moon on 5 February 1971 as Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 14. On the return flight, looking back at Earth, he experienced what he later described as a profound shift in consciousness, a recognition of interconnectedness that altered the direction of his life. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in 1973 to study consciousness. In 2015, at the age of 84, he co-founded the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiencers to apply systematic research to a population that had been studied anecdotally but never surveyed comprehensively: people who report contact with non-human intelligence.
Mitchell died on 4 February 2016, seven months after FREE’s incorporation. The foundation he set in motion produced the most extensive academic survey of the experiencer population ever conducted.
The Survey
FREE’s Experiencer Research Study ran in three phases. Phase 1 (102 response items) was completed by 3,256 participants. Phase 2 (434 response items) was completed by 1,919 of those same participants. Phase 3 added 70 open-ended qualitative questions. Across all phases, approximately 705 questions were administered. Over 4,200 individuals from more than 100 countries responded. Participation required conscious recollection only; no hypnotic regression was used. All responses were anonymous.
The findings contradicted the dominant cultural narrative. Only 5 per cent of respondents characterised their contact experiences as mainly negative. Over 66 per cent characterised them as mainly positive. Twenty-nine per cent were neutral. Seventy-seven per cent reported seeing “an intelligently controlled craft that was not man made.” Sixty-two per cent stated other witnesses were present. Fifty-seven per cent reported physically observing a non-human intelligence. Sixty-eight per cent reported contact but were not “abducted.” Eighty-four per cent stated they did not want their contact experience to end. Seventy-four per cent said the experience changed their life in a positive way.
The findings were published in “Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence” (2018), an 820-page volume with fifteen chapters by sixteen authors.
The Framework
FREE’s research was grounded in the Quantum Hologram Theory of Consciousness, developed by Mitchell and Dr Rudy Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Schild, who has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers in astrophysics and serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology, served as FREE’s executive director and principal investigator. The theory proposes that consciousness operates through quantum holographic principles that may explain both anomalous experiences and the nature of reality itself.
The research committee was co-chaired by Rey Hernandez (a former New School for Social Research adjunct professor with graduate work at Cornell and UC Berkeley) and Dr Jon Klimo. Eleven PhD-level researchers contributed to the programme. Mary Rodwell, an Australian researcher and counsellor specialising in contact experiences, was the fourth co-founder.
In 2019, FREE was succeeded by the Consciousness and Contact Research Institute (CCRI), directed by Hernandez. The original FREE website and research data remain publicly accessible. Hernandez subsequently published a four-volume series, “A Greater Reality: The New Paradigm of Nonlocal Consciousness, the Paranormal and the Contact Modalities.”
Mitchell received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, three NASA Group Achievement Awards, and was inducted into the Space Hall of Fame (1979) and the Astronaut Hall of Fame (1998). He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.
Related: CUFOS | The Sol Foundation | Mindset / Ontological Shock
