Edgar Dean "Ed" Mitchell (September 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016) was a United States Navy officer and aviator, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, ufologist, and NASA astronaut.

Before becoming an astronaut, Mitchell earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Management from Carnegie Institute of Technology and entered the United States Navy in 1952.

After being commissioned through the Officer Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island, he served as a Naval Aviator.

Naval Postgraduate School and three years later earned his doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

[2] He had three siblings: Joyce Alyene, who died in her infancy in 1933, Sandra Jo (1934–1988) and Jay Neely "Coach" (1937–2013), who was a member of the inaugural graduating class of the United States Air Force Academy in 1959, and a pilot with the United States Air Force (USAF), achieving the rank of colonel.

[7] That same year, he entered the United States Navy and completed basic training at San Diego Recruit Depot.

Naval Postgraduate School in 1961 and a Doctor of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964.

In May 1953, after completing instruction at the Officer Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island, Mitchell was commissioned an Ensign.

Following the completion of his graduate studies, Mitchell served as Chief, Project Management Division of the Navy Field Office for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory from 1964 to 1965.

[12] Immediately thereafter, he founded Edgar D. Mitchell & Associates of Monterey, California, a "commercial organization promoting ecologically-pure products and services designed to alleviate planetary problems.

[25] Journalist Annie Jacobsen has asserted that Mitchell's Mind Science Institute (a Los Angeles, California-based organization ultimately subsumed by the Institute of Noetic Sciences) was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a surreptitious conduit for payments to Andrija Puharich and Uri Geller while the latter was evaluated by an SRI International research group (led by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ) in 1972.

Although Bush demurred (citing post-Watergate investigations of the intelligence community), he suggested the pursuit of military sponsorship, leading to the formation of the Stargate Project in 1978.

[17][28] Mitchell's heretofore undisclosed experimentation with LSD was reported by writer David Jay Brown in The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality (2013).

[17] In one excerpt from that, he talked about how he was drawn to the space program:[17] After Kennedy announced the moon program, that's what I wanted, because it was the bear going over the mountain to see what he could see, and what could you learn, and I've been devoted to that, to exploration, education, and discovery since my earliest years, and that's what kept me going.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.

Mitchell claimed that a teenage remote healer living in Vancouver and using the pseudonym "Adam Dreamhealer" helped him heal kidney cancer from a distance.

[32] 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".

[33] 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.

[34] 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.

[40] In 2015, Mitchell said in an interview with the Daily Mirror that extraterrestrials "had been attempting to keep us from going to war [with Russia] and help create peace on Earth."

Mitchell was one of the initial supporters of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, which would be a first step towards a "world parliament".

[44] Mitchell died under hospice care in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the age of 85, on February 4, 2016,[11][45] the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing.

[16] Mitchell was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; the Society of Experimental Test Pilots; Sigma Xi; Sigma Gamma Tau, New York Academy of Sciences; The Explorers Club; World Futures Society; International Platform Association; and he was also an honorary member of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

[49] He was the subject of a chapter of Chris Wright's book No More Worlds to Conquer, which asks how people who are famed for one moment moved on with their life.