Former man on the moon Dr. Edgar Mitchell found himself in the news today regarding remarks he made on the British radio program Kerrang! about believing in alien beings – and the long-rumored UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

In the wake of that flap, the American astronaut set the record straight in an interview with Lisa Bonnice, host of BlogTalkRadio’s ShapeShifting, saying that though there was indeed a cover-up at Rosewell, NASA knew nothing about it – at least not to his knowledge.

Here’s the full transcript of Mitchell’s discussion:

LISA BONNICE: Dr. Mitchell, thank you for joining me today.

EDGAR MITCHELL: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.

LB: As we were mentioning before the show started, you really stirred up a hornet’s nest, strangely enough, and like you said, you’ve been saying this for years.

EM: I don’t know what really got things stirred up, perhaps it was the Larry King show. I don’t know.

LB: Could be. But basically people are freaking out that you were aware of several UFO visits.

EM: That’s not quite right. You use that in the plural. I was talking about the Roswell incident, the Roswell visitation primarily, but there have been many others that have been reported that I have no personal awareness of but that was the one that I was really talking about.

LB: So the interview has been a little misquoted. But you actually have information about the Roswell incident?

EM: Yes and my information comes from what I call “the old timers,” because I grew up in the Roswell area and when I went to the moon, some of the old timers from that period, some locals, and others military and intelligence people, who were under rather severe oaths to not reveal any of this and kind of wanted to get their conscience clear and off their chests before they passed on, selected me and said, independently – this wasn’t a group effort – independently that maybe I might be a safe person to tell their story to. And all of them confirmed, and what I’m saying is they confirmed the Roswell incident was a real incident and they in some way had some part in it that they wanted to talk about.

LB: What is it that they told you?

EM: Well, that the crash of an alien spacecraft in the Roswell area was a real event and much of the lore, I can’t say all of the lore, but much of the fact that dead bodies were recovered and live ones were recovered, that they were not of this world, was the story. And of course it was reported in the Roswell Daily Record one day and promptly denied the next day and a cover story of a weather balloon, and that was pure nonsense. That was a cover-up.

LB: Why do you suppose, I mean there’s all kinds of reasons over the years, but you’re in the inner circle. Why do you actually think they did the cover-up? Do you think it’s because they thought we’re just not sophisticated enough yet? Maybe mankind wasn’t ready?

EM: Well, the best story, I believe, is simply because this is right in the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was starting to get under way, there was great suspicion of anything having to do with protecting the skies and advanced technology. Also, the U.S. Army Air Corps had just been separated to become an independent service called the Air Force. The intelligence service of World War II, the OSS, had disbanded to become the modern CIA, and so President Truman at that point really was on the horns of a dilemma.

Here the Air Force is charged with presumably protecting the skies and the advanced technologies of our nation and the intelligence services didn’t really know what to do with an alien spacecraft and didn’t know whether they were hostile or otherwise, and didn’t want the Soviets to get involved with that, or know about it, so the easiest thing to do was lie about it, cover it up and have it classified and deny that it happened. And that’s what has happened and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don’t know, that President Truman then elected a committee of very high level military and civilian academicians and people and formed the Military and Joint Intelligence Committee.

Abbreviated MAJIC or “Majic 12,” that’s what it was called, and gave them power to manage this so-called alien presence or crash or whatever they were going to do. And they passed a very secretive bill that gave authority, perhaps too much authority, and over the last 60 years since that incident, things have been continuously covered up, lied about, hidden, and people have not been able to get in to that – including Barry Goldwater when he was a presidential candidate – tried to crack into it and get the information out and was denied. President Ford later tried to get some information out and was denied.

President Carter, had his own experience and said he had seen UFOs and tried to find out more and couldn’t get it and never mentioned it again. President Clinton, Ambassador Hubbell tried to get information and was denied. So this has been well covered up for years starting with the fact that perhaps here was an alien craft in our skies, not knowing whether it was hostile or friendly.

LB: So do you think that now, 60 years later, we’re finally ready to start believing this? Because, my God, the skepticism, I don’t know how anybody can think that we are the only life in this incredibly huge universe.

EM: Well that’s a good place to start. Are we alone in the universe? And of course science has not been able to prove that we are or that we are not. But we’ve been looking, of course, for habitable planets throughout our galaxy and star systems close enough to be observable and coming slowly to the conclusion that yes there are inhabitable planets out there. But that’s a long way from saying we’ve been visited. It’s only this type of incident with some very serious research people that have been doing this for years, and I’m not one of them, I’m kind of a Johnny Come Lately to it, that know the answers well or better than I do.

LB: The interviews are quoted as saying that you say sources at NASA who had contact with aliens…

EM: That is totally false.

LB: Then let’s clear that up.

EM: Yes, please do. That is not correct. Because I have talked with government people about it, and military people about it, that was a misquote.

LB: Good. I’m glad to clear that one up. Have you seen the reports? The articles that are going around?

EM: I’ve seen some of them. They’ve been floating into my computer all day long.

LB: Is there anything else in these articles that you would like to use as an opportunity to say “OK, they misquoted me”?

EM: I would have to look at them individually, but that’s one that, to my knowledge, has nothing to do with NASA.

LB: One of these quotes said that whoever did describe these beings said they resembled “little people who look strange to us.”

EM: Well, we’ve all seen the pictures of the so-called aliens – “little grays.” I have no first-hand evidence that that’s true, but I do accept the fact that those seem to be the prevalent story.

LB: That does seem to be what the majority of people who say they’ve seen them agree upon. Now another one, this one I can see makes so much sense that our technology is not nearly as sophisticated and if they had been hostile we would have been gone by now.

EM: Well, if they proved to be hostile, and wanted to do so, they probably could. But there’s utterly no evidence that they really are hostile.

LB: Like you said, if they were, and they were more sophisticated than we are, then what are we doing still sitting here?

EM: The craft they they’ve seen are basically are smaller crafts, they’re not warships or anything. And most of the UFO sitings, you know hundreds of military pilots were told to shut up about it, and airline pilots and police officers at night and people who have seen real crafts and I’m not talking about Venus or Mars or a star or planet but who have seen a real craft, they’re generally not described as anything like any of ours.

LB: You mentioned in the beginning that they actually found in the Roswell case live beings. Did anyone tell you what happened with that?

EM: That’s what I understand. Apparently that individual did survive for some time, as far as I know. But I can’t go further than that because I don’t know any more.

LB: What do you think of NASA’s statement that “Dr.Mitchell is a great American but we don’t share his opinions”?

EM: I can understand if they think I was attributing anything to the NASA organization, or deriving anything from the NASA organization, they can certainly say that. And it’s true because none of my experience or what I said relates to NASA at all.

LB: You were only in the astronaut program for a fairly short period of time.

EM: For seven years, that’s true.

LB: This is just fascinating information and I’m really glad that it’s really kind of bubbling up even though it might be making your life a little crazy right now. I really do believe mankind has reached a point in its evolution to where finding out this is real isn’t going to make us all freak out.

EM: I totally agree with that. It’s about time and if indeed, as we now believe, we’re not alone in the universe and there are other species and intelligent species throughout the universe, and the universe is much bigger than we thought it was, this is good knowledge. It’s important knowledge.

LB: It really is. We’re out of time so quickly, it went so fast. Are there any last statements you’d like to make that we haven’t talked about?

EM: Well, I think the only thing that people should understand is that our star system has a finite lifetime and we’ve got to continue our space exploration. We only have a couple more billion years to be on the planet. We don’t have to rush it but eventually we have to be off this planet if we want to survive as a species.