Mitchell's ESP test

Somewhere between the Earth and the Moon in early 1971, in his own time aboard the Apollo 14 spacecraft, Edgar Mitchell concentrated on sequences of card symbols in the style of J. B. Rhine's tests and tried to transmit them to colleagues on Earth. Nothing was sighted; the page records an experiment. The archive's two tellings, both from Jesse Michels, call it the first psychic experiment in space, say the results were reportedly better than chance and add that on the way home Mitchell had what they describe as a religious-like conversion experience.

What is on the record

A single claimant on a single video, and no documents. The tellings retell Mitchell's own account rather than check it independently.

Outside the archive's holdings the experiment has a paper trail of the ordinary kind. Mitchell wrote it up as "An ESP Test from Apollo 14" in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1971 and described it in interviews for the rest of his life. NASA did not authorise it. Sceptics have gone through the scoring and disagree with him about what better than chance means, and that disagreement is the whole of the matter. It belongs in the archive as context: Mitchell became the best-known former astronaut to argue for visitation, and this is where that turn began.

Why it sits where it does

L0, a single account, though single-source in an unusual way: the source is the experimenter and he published. What the test showed is not resolved here.