He tells of a man who showed up with a camera crew purporting to be from a well-known documentary TV channel, only for the interviewer to wait until the camera was rolling, then slam a Bible on the table and drawl: “Put your right hand on that and swear you went to the Moon!” It turned out they were making a film about the Great Moon Hoax, and for a glorious instant, I picture Ed engaging them in an earnest debate about the precise nature of the God to which he was being asked to swear. That would have cleared the house. Instead, he politely showed them the door. Charlie Duke got angry when he talked about the conspiracy theorists, I tell him. He smiles broadly.
“Well, I just discard ’em. I try not to let anything make me angry for very long. If I get that feeling, I try to get rid of it.”
We return to his interest in paranormal phenomena and now he springs something that’s harder to dismiss lightly. He mentions that in September last year he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Doctors were ready to operate, but it’s an unpleasant operation which he hoped to avoid, so he gave himself a few months to try some alternatives. Detox had some effect and he found a nutrient which helped, but was then controversially pulled off the shelves by the FDA. The PSA value in his blood, a measure of the tumour’s activity, began to rise again, until one day, at an IONS board meeting, someone suggested they do a “healing.” By which they meant faith healing.
Mitchell had never done this before and invested no hope in it. But as he tells it, the ritual lasted for twenty minutes and “felt like being plugged into a twelve-volt battery.” For four days, he felt off balance: “Something Wow had happened.” Then he came back down and at his next medical examination, conducted with new, more sensitive equipment, he was told that there was no cancer activity.
“Naturally, my emotional mind was pretty overwhelmed,” he says quietly. “But my science mind was saying ‘I’m not sure I really believe this … ’”
Yet he’s still here. A year from now, we’ll be talking on the phone and exchanging e-mails, and he’ll tell me that he thinks the important factor is intentionality – the focus of different wills on one object or goal. During moments of high attention on the OJ Simpson trial, he claims, the random-number generators in Las Vegas casinos began to go off-random. The question he asks is: does our attention, our focus, create “negentropy” (the opposite of entropy), that is, order, in the natural world? If so, the Universe can be said to be conscious.
It strikes me that these are the types of things I used to hear clubbers and drug evangelists like Timothy Leary saying after taking ecstasy and DMT in the early 1990s at the time of the Acid House craze, and again I wonder whether the epiphany could have been a chemical thing, originating within the brain rather than the Universe. Later, I will e-mail Mitchell this thought, and ask whether he has ever experimented with meditation or hallucinogens – because to me the precise nature of his epiphany is important to everything that follows from here. He tells me:
“I think it has something to do with chemical reactions, [but] it appears to me – and this is going beyond what I describe in The Way of the Explorer – that these transcendent experiences have to do with a resonance of the brain and body with the external world. And it appears that the more the brain and body get in resonance with their environment, the more likely one is to have this type of experience. That is what – in my opinion – the transcendent experience is really all about.”
Addressing the question directly, he further explains:
“And, yes, Andrew, I have been a longtime meditator – since the spaceflight. It helps reproduce the samadhi state experienced on the spaceflight and more. I have tried a bit of psychedelics experimentally, not extensively.”
Then he adds, drolly:
“I recommend the path of meditation.”
I’ve also wondered whether this urge to reconcile science and religion might be as much about closing the gap between two sides of himself, the educated über-rationalist and the reeling mystic his mother sought to raise. He once admitted to still harbouring “a secret fear of God,” thanks to being brought up with a strong sense that “the potential for damnation lay in the spoken word, even perhaps in thought.” Could this have been what drew him to both of those things in adult life: danger? Were they his sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll? He cocks his head to one side. This is a new idea, to which he seems unable to find a response, so I change tack. Does he still harbour a secret fear of God, even though his rational mind doesn’t “Believe” anymore? This time the answer is firm.
“No.”
It’s gone now?
“Yeah. It took years, though. When I came back to doing the work I do now, there was only one assumption: that we live in a natural Universe, not a supernatural Universe. Therefore it’s knowable. And if it’s knowable, science ought to be able to figure it out. That has been my credo for thirty years, and the more we dig, the more it appears to be correct.”
Mitchell casts his eyes to the sky and absentmindedly pushes his dentures forward with his tongue, then pulls them out and contemplates them for a moment. I stifle a smile, but find something moving in the tableau. His mind is so young that it’s easy to forget his roots in a time when all Americans didn’t have perfect teeth. He suddenly wakes up to what he’s doing and crams the dentures back into his mouth, just in time to see a woman who claims to run a “holographic consciousness cruise” business barreling toward him with some ethereal “machine” she wants him to try. I watch him try and fail to wriggle out of this: in his time Edgar Mitchell has defied gravity, death and ridicule, but a determined New Age matron is something else entirely. I just have time to note that some of his former colleagues, most specifically Buzz Aldrin and John Young, actively campaign for a return to the Moon, with all the expense and energy that would require, and to ask what he thinks.
“Well. We started, so I think we probably should go back to the Moon in order to gain more extraterrestrial experience, before we start the long voyages to Mars and the outer planets – which we’re gonna do eventually. So there’s something to be gained by going back to the Moon. Experience and additional knowledge, making it more routine to go into space than it is now. This is still not like flying an airliner across the country.”
As I hear it right now, Aldrin’s argument is that it can be commercially exploited, while Young seems to consider it necessary for our survival as a species. Something along the lines of “We’ve screwed up this planet, so we’d better get some others.” At this, Mitchell’s brow knits and his expression becomes uncharacteristically stern.
“That’s not the answer. No. We’ve got to solve the problems on this planet; then we’re more ready to go. We can take something good with us instead of our brand of insanity. When I go to Mars and look back at this tiny little dot, it’s utterly stupid to say, ‘I came from the United States. Or France. Or the Republic of China.’ And we’re not ready to do that yet.”
I’ll see Edgar a little later at the fund-raiser advertised on that leaflet, where a short introductory video detailing his exploits with Apollo 14 will be accompanied by – sigh – Also Sprach Zarathustra and he will give a talk, then move through the room looking a little lost, until the outgoing Anna arrives to hold his hand. She clearly adores him. I inquire after the efficacy of the “machine” he was presented with at the end of our interview, but he just smiles. Later still at the grand finale, a big plenary meeting, Mitchell speaks urgently and with passion as he addresses the question, “What is the global crisis teaching us?” while I try to take notes but struggle to keep up.
He begins with George W. Bush and the reaction to 9/11, declaiming:
“We have fundamentalists inside and outside our system, who are equally dogmatic and certain that they are right. I understand that terrorists need to be stopped, but I, for one, am appalled that we have to resort to killing to do it. That’s not where the solution lies. It doesn’t advance us or our problems and it’s being used as a screen for other measures, like drilling
in wildernesses and eroding civil rights.”
At the root of terrorism and much global conflict is the grossly unequal distribution of income throughout the world – and this is increasing, he contends, rising to a climax.
“So if we want to understand about corporate greed, we must first look in the mirror. The sane lesson appears to be that the solution has to start here.”
He taps his head.
“How can we correct all this? Our approach begins with high-mindedness, with finding a deeper mind, realizing that we are one, that we are children of nature. I urge you to take these thoughts away with you.”
A deafening ovation follows, which I join in with, still unsure of how seriously to take Mitchell’s ideas, knowing that I’ll be leaving here with more questions than I brought. Within months, however, the cyber journal Wired will be dedicating a whole issue to the theme of God versus Science, in which eminent scientists and thinkers note that the more we learn, the less contradictory these previously warring faiths appear to be – that indeed they may turn out to be one and the same … just as Ed’s been saying for three decades. Not long after that, Scientific American magazine will be devoting its first cover to Quantum Holography.
Even then, I will have no clear idea of whether Mitchell is right or wrong, but that assessment doesn’t much concern me as I pack my bags for the drive north to Orlando. The lesson I’ll take from my IONS experience is that the Moonwalkers aren’t going to be the straitlaced military men I’d expected – and by extension, I already see my own journey spinning off the imagined tracks. How typical or atypical Mitchell’s feelings about his lunar sojourn are, I don’t yet know, but he has provided a benchmark against which to set the experiences of the others. The weekend has felt like a bridge to another time and place. Now I’m ready to cross it.
3
Then There’s Buzz Aldrin!
(He Can Go to The Moon, But He can’t Make Coffee)
What was it like, spinning into that inky night, answerable only to the stars and silhouettes of hills crouching in a near distance that might as well have been infinity? And on the journey home, how the night must have sparkled and the spirit flown. Intoxication. No cares. Peace … joy …
Trouble is, today I can hardly remember any of it and I feel – not to put too fine a point on this – like shit. Come to that, the place looks no better than I do this morning. Everything they say about Las Vegas is true. Already, I’ve had $350 stolen from my room, almost walked into some mini drug-gang turf war and stayed up drinking ten-dollar margaritas with a gaggle of friendly hookers at Bellagio, where I’d actually gone to sit and read a book about space suits: by the end of the evening the barman, who was a ski instructor in winter and thus looked to have stumbled upon a way of life that could only be improved upon if it included an annual fortnight standing in for George Clooney, was my hermano. But now it’s morning and from my $29.95-a-night thirteenth-floor room at The Sahara, all I can see is building sites and crematorium-grade dust covering a world that has turned greyer and more nondescript than it would have been possible to imagine twelve hours ago. They say that in the Fifties you could see A-bomb-test mushroom clouds from the Strip. Was the Moon a little like Vegas in the morning? You wouldn’t bet against it.
Through the sore head, a question that is being asked all over town as the veil lifts on this scrabby Saturday: how did I get here? It’s no surprise to find that lunar astronauts pass this way, because back in the glamour days, when the boys were still test pilots and stationed in the desert and life was all about – as Tom Wolfe had it – “Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving,” this throbbing oasis was their playground. Yet I’ve come in search of one astronaut in particular and when I heard where he could be found, my first reaction was surprise, closely followed by amusement, bemusement, curiosity. This afternoon, I’ll make my way to a hotel a few blocks back from the Strip, where I expect to find Richard Gordon, the Command Module pilot from everybody’s favourite mission – Apollo 12, the second to land and most joyous of them all – signing autographs at a Star Trek convention.
Unlike Edgar Mitchell, Dick Gordon is one of the boys. You won’t find a person in the programme with a bad word to say about him. He was a record-setting pilot, a selfless astronaut and a nice guy. He was the second man, after Mike Collins, to not land on the Moon, and they say that he’s never once complained about that, at least not in public, but I do wonder how it feels to have gone so tantalizingly close and been denied the one small step.
Flying four months after Apollo 11, in November 1969, the Apollo 12 crew of Gordon, commander Pete Conrad and Lunar Module pilot Alan Bean loved each other, really loved each other, like brothers. They drove matching gold Corvettes, which Conrad had got them a deal on, and they always gave the impression that while what they were doing was important and dangerous, it was also fabulous. And fun. Even thirty years after, an acquaintance who spent time with them just before Conrad’s freak death on that motorcycle describes the closeness of soul mates. Some had expected that Apollo 12 would be the first mission to land on the Moon and there must be a little part of everyone involved that wishes gap-toothed, wiseass, supersmart Pete Conrad could have been the first human to set foot on it and that his modest and engaging crew, who carried none of the darkness we’ll find in Apollo 11, could have been our eyes and ears there. Still, where Armstrong got to be the first one to stand on another celestial body, Conrad has the more loveable distinction of being the first to fall over on one. By all accounts, he was one of a kind.
Gordon and Conrad had roomed together when they were flying carriers in the Navy. They’d also been in space before, aboard Gemini 11 in September 1966, during which Gordon became the fourth American to walk in space, an experience which, under favourable circumstances, seems as moving as any an astronaut can have, like being born a second time. That wasn’t Gordon’s experience, though. During his walk (Extra Vehicular Activity, or EVA, in NASA-speak), he had some tasks to perform, one of which was to attach a tether to an Agena rocket with which he and Conrad had rendezvoused and docked. Unfortunately, no one had foreseen that in the weightless conditions, he would have no way of clinging to the Agena in order to accomplish this and by the time he had done it, he was blinded by sweat and close to incoherent with exhaustion. Conrad feared that Gordon hadn’t strength left to make it back and the unwritten rule was that in such an event, he would have to cut his friend adrift and come home bitterly, wretchedly, alone. Through an immense act of will, Gordon got close enough to the Gemini for the other man to haul him in, but it was a close-run thing. Conrad later said that of all the situations he faced in space, this was the one that scared him most.
Then there was the lightning incident during the launch of Apollo 12, in which the Saturn rocket was hit twice, turning the cockpit into a casino of warning lights and alarms, as the electrical system went off-line. Many people think that the craft launched into an angry sky because President Richard Nixon, feeling confident after the success of 11 that 12 wouldn’t blow up and embarrass him, had flown to the Cape to watch. But the crew kept their cool (Conrad’s pulse rate didn’t even rise) and Bean found an obscure switch that reset the power supply. Disaster had been averted – perhaps: Houston would remain concerned that the Command Module parachute-release mechanism had been damaged. After much discussion, it was decided to continue to the Moon anyway. If the parachutes didn’t open before splashdown on the way back, the crew were mince-meat wherever they’d been or not been in the meantime. Let the lunar landing be a last cigarette before the cosmic firing squad.
The chutes worked, obviously, but there’s no sign of Dick Gordon yet.
I’ve just entered the autograph area, which reminds me of a particularly austere primary school Christmas fair. Formica tables hug the walls and corral in the centre of the rectangular room, all festooned with 8×10-inch photos of actors playing space cowboys and Indians. I stand and take in the scene and – as so often around actors – gradually begi
n to feel a kind of terror. Some of these roles were going to be big breaks, but what I see here are bad breaks, squandered opportunities, illusion, delusion … failed expectation. And I’m not sure whether the fear is theirs or mine, but for a moment it feels like the precise negative expression of that peace Edgar Mitchell claims to have found on his journey, and I feel plugged into it, much as he did.
A hand thrusts toward me. I look into a confident smile that I don’t recognize, then down at snaps of a swarthy man in a Reynolds Wrap space suit. Major Don West, the curly-haired mate from Lost in Space. Real name Mark Goddard. He was on TV every day through my childhood.
“Hi – how’re you doing?”
Unable to find an honest answer, I nod and move on to a bad guy from Babylon 5, who reeks of alcohol and hits on the woman standing next to me, prompting us both to move on to the next table, where another serial sci-fi villain starts to tell us about his painful divorce from his actress wife and the difficulty of paying child support since 9/11 knocked the bottom out of the WASP malefactor market. After that, the small queue in front of Denise Crosby (Lt. Tasha Yar in The Next Generation and granddaughter of Bing) is not without attraction, but I keep moving until finally there is a white table tucked away on its own, reflecting the white wall and white ceiling, on which sits a small piece of card, folded into a V and bearing the Magic Marker legend: “Dick Gordon.”
But he’s not there.
Disquieted, I retreat to the main hall, where Star Trek celebrities are facing the fans. The promoters of this event, Slanted Fedora Entertainment, are one of two main organizations who take these shows on the road, like a travelling circus. Their rivals staged a spectacular convention in Vegas recently, which hit ticket sales for this one. As a result, Fedora decided to throw open the doors of the exquisitely anonymous Alexis Park Hotel and treat the event as a party, to which the world is invited. Needless to say, the world as such hasn’t come: there are a lot of young people who look like merchandise sellers on a Marilyn Manson tour; others are dressed as characters from the perplexing array of Star Trek spin-offs. Some carry clipboards and notebooks, moving between the “dealer room” and the autograph chamber with a pious gleam in their eyes.