edgar-mitchell

Into the Vacuum 77
project, the results of which they didn’t know. And there was nothing I, or
anyone, could do.
One morning during the first week of quarantine, Al and I were at the
breakfast table when he came across an article in the stack of newspapers
entitled, “Astronaut Does ESP Experiment on Moon Flight.” He chuckled
as he read, certain it was an absurdity dreamt up by some creative reporter,
and leaned over the table to tell me about it. He then buckled with
laughter. After an awkward silence, I told him that I had in fact done it.
He looked up, nonplused. But a moment later I thought I saw another
glint of laughter spark in his eye, as he silently returned his attention to his
breakfast plate. The subject was never brought up again.
The results of the experiment were dramatic, but they had to be properly
understood. When viewed through the prism of statistical probability,
they were profound—therefore, more striking to the professional than the
man on the street. In many ways they revealed the processes at work. But
the press seemed interested only in the headline: Astronaut Does ESP
Experiment on Moon Flight. Misinformation abounded. Somehow word
got out that the experiment turned out to be negative or without significance,
when in reality the results were completely in keeping with the
thousands of experiments conducted both before and after our flight in
laboratories around the world. It appeared that even great distances of
hundreds of thousands of miles did not alter this mysterious means of
communication.
The results of our in-flight effort suggested that there was some kind
of communication being achieved during the experiment that wasn’t
through the conduit of conventional transmission. When we compared my
four sets of data (two on days outbound to the moon, and two returning)
with the six data sets of the individuals here on Earth, we saw we’d achieved
what is known as a “psi missing” result for the days I actually did the experiment,
and precisely “chance” results for the other days. 2 The psi missing
statistics were such that there was but a 1-in-3,000 probability that the
results were a random happening.
Psi missing is a well-documented occurrence in parapsychology normally
associated with the state of one’s belief. Dr. Gertrude Schmidler
thoroughly investigated such events many years earlier, and coined the
term the “sheep/goat effect”—sheep being those individuals who achieved
positive scores well above chance results, and believed that they could;
goats being individuals who didn’t believe they could achieve any results,
but do so nevertheless by scoring significantly below chance. If one were to
guess at the results of a series of coin tosses, for example, and correctly
guessed 75 out of 100, or missed 75 out of 100, then both would be equally