Edgar Mitchell, a former NASA astronaut who walked on the moon in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 crew and later spoke strongly about his beliefs in UFOs and the supernatural, died Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 85.

All told, Mitchell logged impressive extra-Earth totals: more than nine days in space; 33 hours, 31 minutes on the moon; and 9 hours, 17 minutes outside of the module, standing, walking and conducting experiments on the lunar surface. News of his death came Friday, 45 years to the day that Apollo 14 touched down on the moon.

Mitchell often spoke of his return journey back to Earth with a profound sense of awe, wonder and togetherness and said he was inspired to investigate body-mind interactions, extrasensory perception and alleged alien encounters. "You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it," Mitchell once said.

"From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" Mitchell was born in Hereford, Texas, grew up in Artesia, New Mexico, and began his career in the Navy, where he logged more than 5,000 hours of flight time, including 2,000 hours in jets, according to NASA.

He was the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 and the lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, the first human mission back to the moon since the near-disaster of Apollo 13.

Mitchell became the sixth person in human history to walk on the moon, where he and Alan Shepard collected nearly 100 pounds of samples to bring back to Earth. The mission was also the first to use color TV on the moon, according to NASA.

But perhaps more intriguing than his experience with the Apollo mission were his beliefs and statements made after he came back to Earth. "I had a non-local feeling that there is something here I don't understand, even though I know about galactic formation, how the stars and elements were formed and so on," he said in an interview with Cabinet Magazine.