When Anita Mitchell married Navy test pilot and Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973, she knew she'd be dealing with fame and would need an upgraded wardrobe, but her Midwest upbringing kept her grounded.
“I thought I was out of my comfort zone a bit at the time—or a lot of the time,“ she told The Epoch Times, ”but at least I had some awareness.”
Her husband, whose spaceflight assignments included Apollo 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 14, was the sixth man to walk on the moon.
Anita Mitchell was just 24 years old and working at Disney when she met 35-year-old Edgar Mitchell in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
“We hit it off. I had questions and he liked that,” Anita Mitchell said while discussing her memoir “You Don’t Look Like an Astronaut’s Wife!”
Edgar Mitchell is known for spending 33 hours and 31 minutes on the Moon with fellow astronaut Alan Shepard, which Mitchell said led her husband to question the origins of consciousness and to launch the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Novato, California, to explore the unexplained.
Shepard was the first American to go up in space and the only one of the seven Mercury astronauts who walked on the Moon. The other six Mercury astronauts were Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Walter Schirra, Virgil Grissom, Scott Carpenter, and Donald Slayton.
“Ed always believed in God but once he'd gone to the Moon and started to look at consciousness, God and consciousness to him was the same thing,” Mitchell said. “They’re both ongoing.”
In her book, she shares fascinating stories about her life as Mrs. Edgar Mitchell.
For example, when the Mitchells were on the receiving line at various events, people would often remark that she did not look like an astronaut’s wife.
“That always made me laugh,” she said. “I had no idea what that meant, but I thought it was very funny. We’ve all wondered what an astronaut’s wife is supposed to look like.”
While she was raised in a small town in Ohio, Edgar Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas, and raised near Roswell, New Mexico, where a reported UFO sighting in 1947 had captured America’s imagination.
Despite being from different parts of the country, the couple had something in common. They were both interested in sixth-sense abilities like telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.
“I knew he had done [Extra Sensory Perception] ESP experiments on the moon, and about a month before I met him, someone gave me a book about psychic phenomena out of the blue,” she said. “I read it and was fascinated with it.”
One of the memories Anita Mitchell recalls in her book is about meeting self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, whom her husband brought to the United States from Israel because of his alleged ability to bend spoons with his mind.
Currently, Geller runs the Uri Geller Museum in Tel Aviv, where some of the bent objects are stored.
“Ed studied him with several physicists and scientists at the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, which is one of the world’s finest think tanks,” she said. “I got to watch!”
The Mitchells met President Gerald Ford on two or three occasions and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. A highlight of their marriage was meeting John “Duke” Wayne, the actor who had starred in many Westerns, including “The Cowboys,” “The Train Robbers,” and “The Shootist.”
“He came to Ed’s birthday party that a friend of ours in Beverly Hills hosted,” the author said. “We didn’t have phones to take pictures back then. Duke Wayne was a huge supporter of both America as well as the space program.”
Edgar Mitchell was also a UFO enthusiast, she said.
“Ed was always interested in UFO phenomena,” she added. “All the astronauts were interested in what they saw in space. Mercury 7 astronaut Gordy Cooper chased a UFO in a jet and said there was nothing he knew of that could go that fast or that high.”
The Mitchells divorced in 1984. He died in 2016.
