It couldn’t have been easy to be the first crew flying to the moon after the Apollo 13 near-disaster.  Flying to the same exact destination on the moon, no less.  But if anyone was up to it, it was the crew of the Apollo 14. Commander Alan Shepherd, one of the crew, was already a space veteran: the second person – and the first American in space, mere weeks after the Russian Yuri Gagarin. Another member of the crew, Stuart Roosa, had logged several thousand hours flying experimental aircrafts for the Air Force before joining the team.

On this day, January 31,  in 1971, Shephard, Roosa and another astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, who ended up spending nine hours on the moon’s surface conducting experiments, blasted off to the moon.

After their retirement from NASA, the three crewmen lived fairly quiet lives, though Mitchell did achieve something of a notoriety among the UFO believers. Mitchell consistently maintained his opinion that UFOs were real, and the government had suppressed evidence of them. In a 2008 interview with a British publication, Mitchell said he sincerely believed the supposed UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico was real, and the highest levels of American government knew about it.