Mitchell's blue lights

The archive holds two tellings, both from NewsNation and both resting on Edgar Mitchell. In the first, Mitchell privately told a man referred to as "the spaceman" that Apollo 14 was followed out and back by unknown craft with blue lights, that he photographed them and that there was a presence on the Moon. He gave "treason" as the reason he stayed silent in public. The second telling has the blue lights structured and keeping the mission under surveillance, and points to NASA frame AS14-66-9301: one archive version, it says, shows a pair of blue orbs in the black sky while another shows an irregular cutout in the same place.

What is on the record

One claimant and one video, and no documents. Mitchell is the source in both tellings but the words are relayed by someone else.

Outside the archive's holdings AS14-66-9301 is a real Hasselblad frame from the first moonwalk showing Mitchell beside the television camera. Different scans of it circulate, and a blue mark in one scan and not another is the kind of thing scanning and processing produce. Mitchell said many times that he believed in visitation, and as often that his belief came from people he had talked to and not from anything he saw on his flight. The private version is the opposite of his public one, and the archive has found no record of it in his own words.

Why it sits where it does

A relayed single account is still a single account, which is L0. What followed Apollo 14, if anything, is not resolved here.