The 12 Moonwalkers: Where Are They Now?

Alan Shepard

Ten years after becoming the first American to journey into space, Alan Shepard logged another extraterrestrial milestone – he became the fifth person to walk on the moon.

In February 1971, at age 47, Shepard reached the moon with the Apollo 14 mission. He hadn't flown anything since he rocketed 116 miles above Florida in 1961.

At the end of the second moonwalk, the avid golfer carried out a different kind of scientific experiment: he pulled out a makeshift golf club and whacked two golf balls. One landed in a nearby crater. The other, he said, traveled "miles and miles and miles."

"All of us wanted to think of something which would demonstrate – especially to young people – the lack of atmosphere and the difference of gravity," he said in a 1991 interview with the American Academy of Achievement. Shepard wanted to show that with only one-sixth the gravitational pull of Earth, the ball would travel six times as far.

But he didn't see the moon as just a giant golf course.

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"The first time really seeing it in the black sky, the blue planet all by itself up there. That was an emotional moment. Some of the emotion was a result of having successfully arrived, a little sense of relief, but I think all of us, in our own ways, have expressed the same kind of feeling," Shepard said in 1991.

"Maybe if people had a chance to see this, they wouldn't be so parochial, they wouldn't be so interested in their own particular territories," he said. "To me and, I think, to all of us, it was a realization that our world is finite, it is small, it is fragile, and we need to start thinking about how to take care of it."

After Apollo 14, he reprised his role as chief of the Astronaut Office (a position he held before the mission) and remained in that administrative role until retiring to a corporate position in Houston in 1974.

In 1984, he joined other astronauts in founding the Mercury Seven Foundation to raise money for scholarships for science and engineering college students. In 1995, it was renamed the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation and he was president and chairman until 1997.

After a long illness, said to be leukemia, he died in July 1998.

In the 1979 book "The Right Stuff," author Tom Wolfe said he had two sides, "the Icy Commander and Smilin' Al,'' but also that he but he ''set a standard of coolness and competence that would be hard to top.''

Edgar Mitchell

One of the more controversial moonwalkers, in the years after his 1971 journey to the moon, Edgar Mitchell has made headlines for arguing that alien visits to Earth have been covered up by governments for more than 60 years.

"I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real," Mitchell said on Britain's Kerrang Radio in July 2008.

"It has been covered up by governments for quite some time now," added Mitchell, who grew up in Roswell, N.M., the location of the controversial 1947 incident (or perhaps non-incident) in which some believe the U.S. military covered up the crash scene of an alien spacecraft.

The Apollo 14 astronaut was the sixth man to walk on the moon but retired from NASA the following year.

In 1973, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to sponsor research into the nature of consciousness. He published "Psychic Exploration" in 1974.

He traces his interest in consciousness back to his moments on the moon.

"There was a vague feeling that something was different. That my life had gotten very disturbing, very distressing at a subconscious level," he said in an interview with Chaikin. "What I do remember is the awesome experience [on the trip back from the moon] of recognizing the universe was not simply random happenstance … That there was something more operating than just chance… I've assiduously spent the last fifteen years figuring out what was true."

In April, the 78-year-old spoke at the National Press Club in Washington after the X-Conference, a convention of UFO researchers and activists.

"We are being visited," he said, according to the U.K.'s Guardian. "It is now time to put away this embargo of truth about the alien presence. I call upon our government to open up ... and become a part of this planetary community that is now trying to take our proper role as a spacefaring civilization."