Apollo Astronaut Chats About UFO, Alien Belief

EM: Lights. Just a few years ago. Three humongous craft flew over Phoenix, very slowly in the middle of the night that clearly were not -- I happened to be on the phone with people out there when that happened and have had pictures of it -- clearly those were not, to those of us who know aviation and spacecraft, clearly those were not local stuff, home-grown stuff.

IK: So you're saying the incidences are becoming more prevalent among the general public? People are having their own sightings?

EM: Just several weeks ago, this so-called incident at Stephenville, in Stephenville, Texas. Another one. And naturally a lot of discounting and unfortunately the press, the giggle factor got up and the press tended to ignore it, but the fact of the matter is this is the real stuff we're dealing with. We're not alone in the universe. And it has nothing to do with NASA. As far as I know it has to do with what's going on and has been going on for a long time.

IK: As a man of science and engineering, how did you make this leap from doing what you needed to do to be an astronaut to what you're doing today?

EM: Because I was told by people who were utterly sworn to secrecy under severe penalty if they talked and because I'd been to the moon, because I was a local resident of Roswell when the so-called Roswell incident took place, some of them thought I was a safe person to tell before they passed on so that the knowledge didn't die. There are others like me, people out here who have done an enormous amount of investigation who have seen through the facade and seen through the cover-up and can talk chapter and verse, better than I can. We know it's real.

IK: Can you describe what changed you after you were in space? How did that happen?

EM: Well I've got a research foundation that has been working on that problem for 37 years.

I was coming back from the moon after completing a successful mission on the moon. My job was being responsible for the lunar spacecraft for the lunar surface activities. So on the way home, my successful job had been mostly completed and we were just coming home. We still had experiments and work to do, but the big stuff was done.

We were orientated such and rotating in order to keep the thermal balance of the spacecraft so that every two minutes you could see the Earth, the moon, the sun and a 360-degree panorama of the heavens came through the window every two minutes. That's powerful stuff, particularly since it's space. Without the atmosphere to block, the stars don't twinkle, and there's 10 times as many as you could possibly see on Earth because of the lack of interference and it's much closer to what you could see through the Hubble Telescope these days, with those pictures and I hope you've looked at some of those: it's overwhelming -- and I realized as that happened, because I do have a PhD from MIT and I studied astronomy at Harvard and MIT and knew that molecules of matter in my body and in the spacecraft and in my partners' bodies were made in some ancient generation of stars. That's where matter is created.

Suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual and I had never had this experience. It was accompanied by bliss, an ecstasy I had never experienced.

Later -- and I'm making this long story short -- with some discovery and some help from scientists at Rice University in Houston, I discovered in ancient transcripts that this type of experience -- a transformational, transcendental experience where you see things as you perceive them but experience them viscerally and emotionally as one, as a part of it -- is called samadhi. In doing more research, I found that it has taken place in every culture on Earth. The political and cultural expression of that turns out to be religion.

The experience is the same -- a heady, overwhelming experience. But when it gets politicized, put into the culture, those things get lost on the people who had the experience and it becomes something else. So that's what it was: a deep, deep cultural experience that is in the culture of our civilization in hundreds of places.

IK: Is that what the Noetic Institute is for? To bring this consciousness ...

EM: I'm trying to use the tools of science to understand precisely these types of knowledge.

IK: Wow, that's quite a calling.

EM: That's exactly what I've spent the last 35 years doing.

IK: What's the tie-in between this pursuit and your experiences with understanding that there are other life forms that have come to Earth?

EM: Well it's just an extension of the cosmology of what's this whole universe about and what are we about and coming to the conclusion that we are not alone. That's some of the most important knowledge that we could discover.

Got something to say? E-mail your questions, comments or concerns to discoveryspace@discovery.com. Your words may appear on Discovery Space.

MORE EXPERTS