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"I think we'll see our government having a totally different approach really to the UFO situation, or extraterrestrials, whatever you want to call it. I think the pressure that comes to bear on the government from whatever reason they withhold information is certainly getting more and more and more, so I would like to think that they're going to release all the information." In fact, in 1996, NASA announced Project Origins. Its goal is to search for inhabitable (inhabited?) planets orbiting nearby stars. At the highlight of his mission (January 31—February 9, 1971), Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell became the sixth man to walk on the moon and spent 33 hours roving the lunar hills of Fra Mauro with fellow astronaut Alan Shepard. At the age of 65, with the 25th anniversary of Apollo 14 coming up, Mitchell returned to Florida to shoot a segment for Dateline NBC about his experience. In the episode, which aired in April 1996, Mitchell was asked about his beliefs regarding the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. He responded: "T have no firsthand experience, but I have had the opportunity to meet with people from three countries who in the course of their official duties claim to have had personal firsthand encounter experiences . . . with extraterrestrials. . . ." I'm convinced there's life throughout the universe. It's eo 1 1 100 with just a question of how developed...." During the interview he also stated that he believes that the United States government covered up the evidence surrounding a case of an alleged UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. In a separate interview in January 1996, Mitchell was asked about the evidence for UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors. He said: "I am convinced there is a small body of valid [UFO] information and that there is a body of information, ten times as big, that is total disinformation put out by the source to confuse the whole issue.... The information is now held primarily by a body of semi- or quasi-private organizations that have kind of spun off from the military intelligence organizations of the past... . The dangerous part is, they're still operating under a black budget, which has been estimated at over $30 billion a year. And nobody knows what goes into black budgets. The prime requisite is security first and everything else second. Imagine an organization that has a black budget, an unquestioned source of funds, reports to no one, and has this exotic technology that they can keep to themselves and play with." In addition to these revelations by Ed Mitchell, he was one of the high-profile individuals who accompanied the CSETI team in April 1997 and revealed his knowledge of UFOs at the closed congressional briefing. 18 ED MITCHELL APOLLO 11 For many years, unconfirmed reports of UFO sightings by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil