|
Davick Services - Where Texas history is
preserved and shared
|
|||||||||||||||||
| Famous People from Deaf Smith County Texas | |||||||||||||||||
| Edgar Mitchell | |||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||
|
Born September 17, 1930 in Hereford Texas, Edgar Mitchell was the
sixth, and one of only 12 people to walk on the Moon. Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas. He came from a ranching family that moved to New Mexico during the Depression and considered Artesia, New Mexico (near Roswell) as his hometown. He first learned to fly at 13 and was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. Mitchell received a B.S. degree in industrial management from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1952. That same year, he entered the U.S. Navy and completed basic training at San Diego Recruit Depot. While on active duty in the Navy, he earned a second bachelor's degree in aeronautics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1961 and an Sc.D. degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964. NASA
selected Mitchell as an astronaut in 1966. He served on the support
crew for Apollo 9 and as backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10. He
worked in the lunar module simulator at the Johnson Space Center
during Apollo 13, developing procedures that helped bring the crew
of the crippled spacecraft home. He was a member of the Apollo 14
mission and went to the moon with' Alan Shepard' and Stuart Roosa.
They completed two EVAs or moonwalks totaling 33 hours on the moon
and walked over 500 meters pulling a shopping cart full of tools and
lunar samples.On June 29, 2011, the federal government of the United States filed a lawsuit against Mitchell in the United States district court in Miami, Florida after discovering that he placed a camera used on Apollo 14 for auction at the auction house Bonhams. The litigation requested the camera be returned to NASA. Mitchell's position was that NASA had given him the camera as a gift upon the completion of the Apollo 14 mission. Bonhams withdrew the camera from auction. In October 2011, attorneys representing the government and Mitchell reached a settlement agreement, and Mitchell agreed to return the camera to NASA, which in turn would donate it for display at the National Air and Space Museum. The following year Congress enacted H.R. 4158, confirming full ownership rights of artifacts to astronauts on Apollo (and Mercury and Gemini) space missions. Mitchell publicly expressed his opinions that he was "90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets". Dateline NBC conducted an interview with Mitchell on April 19, 1996, during which he discussed meeting with officials from three countries who claimed
to have had personal encounters with extraterrestrials. He offered
his opinion that the evidence for such "alien" contact was "very
strong" and "classified" by governments, who were covering up
visitations and the existence of alien beings' bodies in places such
as Roswell, New Mexico. He further claimed that UFOs had provided
"sonic engineering secrets" that were helpful to the U.S.
government. Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer, discusses his
journey into mysticism and space.
In 2004, he told the St. Petersburg
Times that a "cabal of insiders" in the U.S. government were
studying recovered alien bodies, and that this group had stopped
briefing U.S. Presidents after John F. Kennedy. He said, "We all
know that UFOs are real; now the question is where they come from." In October 2016, hacked emails released by WikiLeaks revealed that a representative of Mitchell had asked John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, for a meeting to discuss publication of Mitchell's firm Quantrek's research into "how zero-point energy from aliens could save the planet from global warming. Dr. Mitchell died under hospice care in West Palm Beach, Florida, on February 4, 2016, at the age of 85. His death occurred on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing. He was the last surviving member of the Apollo 14 crew. . . . for more like this please see Mysterious Texas |
|||||||||||||||||
|