Home / On the Record / Mitchell 2008

• 23 July 2008Broadcast date
• Kerrang RadioUK national rock-and-talk
• Nick MargerrisonInterviewer
• Apollo 14Mitchell's Moon-landing mission, Feb 1971

The Statement

The central line that the international press carried, recorded on the broadcast tape.

Make no mistake, Roswell happened. I've seen secret files which show the government knew about it, but decided not to tell the public.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Kerrang Radio, 23 July 2008

The Witness

Edgar Dean Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas in 1930. He earned a Bachelor of Science in industrial management from Carnegie Mellon University in 1952, served as a US Navy aviator from 1953, completed a Master of Science in aeronautical engineering at the US Naval Postgraduate School in 1961, and earned a Doctor of Science in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. He was selected as an astronaut in NASA Group 5 in April 1966. He served as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 and Apollo 16, and as prime lunar module pilot for Apollo 14, which landed in the Fra Mauro formation on 5 February 1971. He walked on the Moon with Commander Alan Shepard. The flight made Mitchell the sixth human to set foot on the Moon's surface.

Mitchell retired from NASA and the US Navy in October 1972 at the rank of captain. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California in 1973 to support scientific research into consciousness, perception, and the human-environment interface. His work after Apollo 14 was substantially preoccupied with the cognitive and spiritual implications of the lunar mission, an experience he characterised as a samadhi-like recognition of human interconnection with the cosmos. He spoke publicly on UFO and contact questions from the late 1990s onwards and repeated the substance of the 2008 Kerrang Radio position in multiple subsequent interviews through to his death in West Palm Beach, Florida on 4 February 2016 at the age of 85.

What Was Said

The Kerrang Radio interview was broadcast as part of the station's regular afternoon programming and was not framed as a special-event UFO interview. Margerrison asked Mitchell about Roswell directly in the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the July 1947 incident. Mitchell's reply, recorded verbatim on the broadcast tape, included the central line that the international press would carry, plus a number of substantive elaborations:

"There's not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I'm totally sure we are not alone." On the existence of UAP contact: "Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe. They have been coming here for a long time." On the institutional management of the question: "Their (the aliens') visits, the visits, are well-documented and known about, by the powers that be, and there has been a continuous attempt to keep that knowledge from the public for over 60 years."

Mitchell told Margerrison that his sources for the Roswell information were "old timers" he had spoken to from the Roswell area who had been involved in the recovery and subsequent secrecy regime. He did not name them. He framed his own willingness to speak publicly in terms of the obligation he felt towards the people who had spoken to him under conditions of suppression. The full broadcast remains available in audio archives held by Kerrang Radio and by secondary holdings in the UFO documentary literature.

Aftermath

Reuters distributed the story within hours of the broadcast. The Daily Telegraph, The Times of London, The Guardian, and NBC News in the United States all carried the story by 25 July 2008. NASA's perfunctory public statement noted that "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." Mitchell did not retract any portion of the interview.

Mitchell continued making similar statements through the remaining seven and a half years of his life. He participated in the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington DC in 2013. He gave further interviews to the Bloomberg, Mirror, and various US outlets through to early 2016. The Kerrang Radio interview remains the most concise and best-corroborated public statement of his position, captured on broadcast tape, witnessed by the radio audience, and reproduced verbatim in international press the following day.

Source and Provenance

From the Archive

• Mitchell's line on the On the Record page
• Roswell, the case Mitchell addressed
• Gordon Cooper to the United Nations
• Paul Hellyer at the University of Toronto