Edgar Dean Mitchell (September 17, 1930 – February 4, 2016) was a U.S. Navy officer, aeronautical engineer, and NASA astronaut who served as the lunar module pilot for Apollo 14 in February 1971, becoming the sixth human being to walk on the Moon. He held a doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT and flew in the U.S. Navy for 16 years before joining NASA.

Following his return from the Moon, Mitchell became increasingly interested in questions of consciousness, the nature of reality, and extraterrestrial intelligence. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in 1973, a research organization dedicated to exploring the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. Mitchell described experiencing a profound epiphany during his return from the Moon in which he felt a sense of interconnectedness between all things.

In his post-NASA years, Mitchell became one of the most prominent credentialed figures to assert that UAP represent extraterrestrial technology and that the U.S. government has concealed knowledge of this. He stated in multiple interviews that he had been briefed by individuals with inside knowledge of government crash retrieval programs and that Roswell involved genuine recovered non-human craft and bodies. He claimed that his high security clearance contacts in the intelligence community had confirmed the reality of extraterrestrial visitation.

Mitchell's credentials as an Apollo astronaut with MIT doctorate gave his statements unusual public weight, though critics noted that he had not personally witnessed UAP or been officially briefed on such programs during his military or NASA career, and that his claims relied on second-hand sources he never publicly identified.