"Nine He gave to Mortal Men,
proud and great,
and so ensnared them.
Long ago they fell under the domination of the One...
Shadows under His great Shadow,
His most terrible servants."
"Apparently Parsons...or somebody is producing a Moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."
- Alistair Crowley, 1947.
"The [Babalon] Working began in 1945-46, a few months before Crowley's death in 1947, and just prior to the wave of unexplained aerial phenomena now recalled as the 'Great Flying Saucer Flap'... Parsons opened a door and something flew in.
"A Gateway for the Great Old Ones has already been established -- and opened -- by members of the O.T.O. who are en rapport with this entity [Lam, an extra- terrestrial being whom Crowley supposedly contacted while in America in 1919]."
-Kenneth Grant, O.T.O.
Henry Jackson
Georgia Jackson
Alice Bouverie
Marcella Du Pont
Carl Betz
Vonnie Beck
Arthur Young
Ruth Young
and Andrija Puharich.
http://runesoup.com/2012/05/the-seance-that-changed-america/
"...Ruth Paine admitted that at one point Lee Harvey Oswald was considering going to Philadelphia. As soon as she mentions Philadelphia, Allen Dulles chimes in and opined that it was presumably to find work, to which Ruth replied in the affirmative.
This is what is known as 'leading the witness.'
Philadelphia, of course, is where Arthur and Ruth Young lived, and Ruth had a habit of going up there every year in the summer... as she did in the summer of 1963. Did Arthur Young invite the young Marine defector to his wooded estate in Paoli?"
Peter Levenda,
Sinister Forces, pg. 268
"Ira Einhorn, Puharich's close associate in the 1970s, told us recently that, although Puharich had worked for the CIA during the 1950s, he was no longer doing so twenty years later.
However, the evidence points very much in the other direction. Puharich's relationship with intelligence agencies almost certainly did not end in the 1950s.
Uri Geller told us at a meeting in his home near Reading in England in 1998 that: 'The CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel.'
Jack Sarfatti goes further, claiming: 'Puharich was Geller's case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.'
And according to James Hurtak, via his Academy For Further Sciences, Puharich 'worked with the US intelligence community.'
By implication this was during the early 1970s when he, Hurtak, was also working with him."
The Stargate Conspiracy, pg. 206
From Deep Space to the Nine |
How Gene Roddenberry was hired to prepare Earth for an alien invasion
What would you do if you were asked to write a movie preparing mankind for the arrival of a race of godlike alien beings? David Sutton examines on of the strangest episodes in the life of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
By 1975, no one could deny that Gene Roddenberry – B17 pilot during WWII, commercial aviator, Los Angeles cop, television writer and creator of Star Trek – had enjoyed a varied career, but in May of that year it took a turn for the strange when he was approached with an unusual proposition by a wealthy Englishman called Sir John Whitmore.
Whitmore explained that he had sought out Roddenberry on behalf of an organisation calling itself Lab Nine. His proposal was that the TV producer and writer should pen a film screenplay based on the group’s research into the paranormal and its belief that Earth was soon to be visited by extraterrestrial beings traveling in spacecraft; Roddenberry, in other words, was to prepare the ground for the aliens’ arrival by writing a movie script that would prime the human race for first contact.
Lab Nine was, in fact, the direct descendent of the Round Table Foundation, an organisation set up in Glen Cove, Maine, in 1948 by MD, inventor, and paranormal researcher Dr Andrija Puharich (with, some claim, backing from the US military and/or intelligence agencies) to study telepathy, ESP and related phenomena;
the celebrated psychics Peter Hurkos and Eileen Garrett, for instance, passed through the Foundation’s doors, as did an Indian medium by the name of Dr Vinod, who promptly went into a trance and began to channel messages from mysterious entities calling themselves ‘The Nine Principles and Forces’.
Vinod had no memory of the messages, and soon returned to India, but Puharich continued to receive communications from ‘The Nine’, initially via flying saucer cultists Charles and Lillian Laughead, [1] and later from none other than Uri Geller, who Puharich had met in 1971 and helped catapult to international fame.
According to Puharich, in his bizarre biography Geller, he began hypnotising his young Israeli protégé only to discover that he was channeling an extraterrestrial intelligence called Spectra, a hawk-headed super computer entity aboard a spacecraft. Puharich suspected a connection to The Nine, which Spectra confirmed, claiming that it was they who had ‘programmed’ Geller with his remarkable powers when he was a three-year-old child. Puharich, by now convinced that Geller was himself an ET, planned to use the Israeli’s psychic powers to help bring The Nine’s message to the world and prepare humanity for the imminent arrival of their spacecraft. [2]
When Geller, presumably sensing that things were about to get a little too strange, backed off, Puharich wasted no time in finding others who could get in touch with the
space entities, eventually lighting on the unlikely team of former racing driver and business coach Sir John Whitmore, Florida healer and psychic Phyllis Schlemmer and the pseudonymous ‘Bobby Horne’, a cook from Daytona who became the new channeller of the extra terrestrial communications. ‘Horne’ burnt out quickly; he became suicidal and fled after suspecting that he had become the victim of cosmic jokers. From this point on, Schlemmer became the group’s official channeller and the ‘voice’ of The Nine.
By now the circle had a home – Lab Nine, a 15-acre estate in Ossining, New York, where prominent visitors from the worlds of science, politics and business were greeted in some style; those spending time there included, allegedly, various Stanford Research Institute scientists, Supernature author Lyall Watson, [3] quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti and counterculture icon (and soon to be wanted murderer) Ira Einhorn (see FT166:24–25).
Gene Roddenberry’s name was added to this heady mix when the residents of Lab Nine decided that they needed some PR in advance of the landings, now scheduled for 1976 (like most such deadlines, it would become something of a moveable feast). Roddenberry, though, was perhaps a misguided choice – an avowed humanist with a deep mistrust of all organised religions as well as a hard-line sceptic when it came to tales of UFOs and alien visitors. He did, though, have an interest in altered states of consciousness. [4] Psi phenomena in particular fascinated him, although in a 1968 letter to SF legend John W Campbell, who’d alerted Roddenberry to some particularly outrageous claims of something that sounds remarkably like an experiment in deadly remote viewing, Roddenberry wrote:
“I do believe we have something loosely and incorrectly tagged a ‘sixth sense’ and I do believe there exist such things as clairvoyance and psychokinesis. But as for a guy killing Japanese beetles from 500 miles away just by looking at a picture of the field, in fact doing it so selectively he can kill them off one leaf and leave them alive on another, my life experience adds up to a belief that this is impossible. In other words, I’ve read and seen enough examples and read enough documented reports concerning instances of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis to indicate that we do indeed have latent abilities in these areas which we do not yet understand or really know how to use. Those instances which do happen are largely haphazard or the ‘power’ ebbs and flows to a point where it is rarely controllable enough to produce any long-term or meaningful results on a scientifically controlled test.” [5]
IN ADVANCE OF THE LANDINGS
What Lab Nine presumably saw in Roddenberry was a man who had already, through the growing popularity of the then defunct Star Trek, opened a vast number of minds to the possible existence of extra terrestrial life, superior non-human beings and a future for mankind among the stars. Star Trek’s Federation, after all, represented a dream of space brotherhood beyond even the wildest dreams of the contactee movement and the emergent channellers of the New Age. What the Lab Nine crowd seem rather to have missed is that one of Star Trek’s major themes is that humankind would rather stand alone and on its own two feet than be guided by anyone (or anything) describing itself as a God – the theme of more Star Trek stories than one cares to count.
UFO religions have often floated the idea – from the Aetherians’ belief in an alien Jesus to the Raelians’ reinterpretation of the Biblical Elohim – that the entities mankind once believed to be Gods or prophets were in fact alien races who visited us long ago and steered humanity’s destiny – a concept subsequently popularised by the books of Erich von Däniken (and an army of imitators) with their ancient astronauts
mistaken for deities.
Of course, anyone who’d bothered watching a Star Trek episode such as Who Mourns for Adonais? (in which an ancient Greek ‘god’ expecting human worship is sent packing by an indignant Captain Kirk) would quickly have realised that Roddenberry’s response to any returning alien ‘God’ would most likely be a “Thanks, but no thanks – we’re managing quite well without you”. [6]
Another, often connected, strand in many UFO cults – and one dating back to the first era of contactees – is that the space brothers have been keeping a watchful eye on us, waiting for the right moment to announce their presence and usher in a wider interstellar community in which all Earth’s problems – war, poverty, bigotry and environmental degradation – will be solved by superior alien technologies and an evolved spirituality. While Star Trek had presented a 23rd-century future in which this was indeed the case on Earth, it was presented as the achievement of a species that had finally ‘grown up’ and solved those problems for itself, with no help from beyond the stars (although later incarnations of Trek would explore the impact of ‘first contact’ with the Vulcans).
Roddenberry, then, was a strange choice for an alien ambassador; but necessity makes strange bedfellows. Despite Paramount finally giving serious thought to reviving Star Trek – Roddenberry was developing ideas for what would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture – he was in need of funds.
He accepted Whitmore’s proposal – and a ,000 contract for a first draft screenplay to be based on his experiences with the Lab Nine circle and their otherworldly masters.
WELCOME TO LAB NINE
Despite his philosophical and temperamental unsuitability for the job, Roddenberry revealed a surprisingly open-minded approach to the question of non-human entities like The Nine in his early correspondence with Whitmore:
“I do not reject the possibility that other forms of intelligence can be in contact with humanity or with certain humans. Nor do I reject the possibility that another life form or forms might even live among us. It would seem to me rather extra ordinary if this were the only place in the Universe in which intelligent life happened to occur. Neither do we know the real nature of time and whether it and space are always linear and constant.
“On the other hand, I’ve never seen any proof, or at least anything I recognise as proof, that other intelligent life forms exist, or are or have been in contact with us. Nor have I ever seen anything I recognise as proof that other laws of physics exist.” [7]
‘Proof’ was clearly what was required to penetrate Roddenberry’s sceptical defences,
and get him on-message, so Whitmore arranged an expenses-paid tour of a number of parapsychology departments and research facilities across the country to observe scientific investigation of the paranormal at first hand. And Roddenberry was invited to spend time both at Whitmore’s home in England and at Lab Nine itself while he spent the autumn of 1975 working on the draft screenplay.
On his visits to the Ossining compound,the still sceptical writer witnessed spoonbending (still a popular pastime, despite Geller’s defection), saw Puharich receiving cryptic Hebrew messages through his wrist watch and finally, on numerous occasions, made contact with The Nine through channel Phyllis Schlemmer.
As with most such pronouncements, those that came through Schlemmer – speaking as The Nine’s usual spokesperson ‘Tom’ – were marked by what Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince have described as “all the usual New Age ingredients… grandiose statements, shaky grammar and unprovable predictions”. [8]
In response to Roddenberry’s surprisingly tactful questioning [9] ‘Tom’ revealed that a mass landing of the “Twenty-Four civilizations” would happen in due course but that great pains would be taken to avoid creating panic (“This is of great importance, for if there were panic, humans may then attempt to end their own life, and also the lives of their families and neighbors, which would not serve any purpose”.) [10]
There were hints that Earth governments know of the alien presence but have hidden this knowledge from the people who now needed to be informed (“We do not come to control, we do not come to hold in bondage, we will come with love and patience and understanding – but since there is the denial of our existence, how can those of Planet Earth accept that the civilizations of Altea, Hoova, Ashan, and the rest of the Twenty-Four mean well?”).
Roddenberry was worried that, no matter how peaceful their intentions, the aliens’ arrival would be greeted in many quarters as a threat. Fortunately, the aliens had clearly seen The Day the Earth Stood Stilland had developed non-lethal methods to deal with such a scenario. (“If an Altean were to appear at an entrance of his vehicle, and were stepping onto Planet Earth, and if there were a group that attempted to destroy that Altean, he has only to hold out his hand in an upright manner, and not in great extension, to bring calmness, and also to render them into a state in which they would not have the desire to harm, and would put down their weapons. Hoovids would operate in a different manner: if they were in the same situation, and they came out and raised their arms, those humans with weapons would become totally
stationary for a period of time.”)
Perhaps with half an eye on Star Trek’s future revival, Roddenberry showed a good deal of curiosity about the alien space craft, their methods of propulsion and their physical (or not) nature. Tom wouldn’t be pinned down on this one, though, merely talking about the space equivalents of aircraft carriers, V-shaped space ships and craft that not only look like spinning tops but are propelled by a method that “resembles the reversal of a spinning top”, a splendidly naïve notion that Roddenberry accepted with seemingly good grace.
One of Roddenberry’s most awkward questions – and an entirely understandable one after sitting through hours of this sort of stuff – went as follows: “I do have some difficulties in understanding why, if you are in the minds of humans at times, and your representatives have visited Earth, and you have a knowledge of human affairs… I find it difficult to understand how you have difficulty speaking with us, and understanding our basic colloquial English? Could you help me with that?” The answer, predictably enough, is that pure telepaths like The Nine tend to struggle a bit when reduced to the impoverished and bludgeon-like medium of the English language.
As well as these revelations of future plans, Tom on occasion ventured backwards through time – quite possibly to butter up The Nine’s chosen PR man – and produced tales of Roddenberry’s previous incarnations, which included the grandson of Moses, the father of St Peter and – if one is navigating correctly through the syntactical maze of these alien pronouncements – possibly even the god Jupiter. Roddenberry, as he’d often suspected himself, was a special person: “We are aware and we know that you know that you in truth are of a special one. And we say this to you with all of the love and all of the know ledge that you have of great love for this of the planet Earth, and of understanding. You know within that of your heart, that you have been of a benefit, and that you have been inspired. Yes.”
Even in the face of such cosmic flattery – no doubt intended to appeal to a man who was well on the way to creating his own legend – Roddenberry still had problems. As he told ‘Tom’, while he was attracted to the Lab Nine circle he was aware that: “I must not be pulled in too far until my story is written, because I must still retain some perspective.”
SECOND GENESIS
Roddenberry’s completed draft screenplay was dated 29 December 1979. It has never been published, but based on the account given in Joel Engel’s biography, it appears to have been a fascinating, bizarrely autobiographical work, mixing Roddenberry’s experiences at Lab Nine with his compulsive womanising, escalating marital problems and his worries over the ever-growing success enjoyed by the defunct Star Trek, a success that had eluded him ever since.
The protagonist is one Jim MacNorth, the creator of a cancelled but still popular SF show called ‘Time Zone’ who now lives off convention appearance fees and the adulation of fans whose worship he knows he doesn’t deserve. With the studio showing interest in reviving the property as a movie, MacNorth is approached by a mysterious Englishman representing a group called Second Genesis and hired to write a screenplay about the group’s paranormal research.
After travelling the country to observe research into telepathy, auras, faith healing and theoretical physics, MacNorth – whose own awakening powers reveal to him that his wife is planning a divorce – ends up at the Second Genesis headquarters in Pennsylvania, where not only does he make contact with The Nine through a channeller, learning that human kind was one of their early, failed, experiments – but his erectile dysfunction is cured by an aura healer.
He learns that the screenplay he is to write will help prepare humanity for the ‘landings’ of The Nine’s representatives, which will take place one year from the release of the film.
In the end, MacNorth is reconciled with his wife and writes the screenplay; he remains sceptical about the reality of paranormal phenomena, but says that his life has never the less been transformed by these “lovely crazies at a Pennsylvania commune. What they made me believe is far larger and far lovelier. I believe I know that all life is One, that we’re all part of a wondrous, eternal miracle that we’ve yet to fully comprehend.”
THE GOD THING
Whether Roddenberry, like MacNorth, was transformed by his experiences with Puharich, Schlemmer and company, we’ll never know – although some of his later pronouncements on religious matters do diverge from his earlier sceptical humanism towards more mystical “I am God” type statements that might have derived in part from his time in Ossining. [11]
The immediate upshot, though, was the Lab Nine group’s rejection of the screenplay. They asked for a rewrite, which Roddenberry was contractually obliged to deliver, and gave him another ,000. This time, clearly having had more than enough of The Nine, he farmed the work out to his assist ant Jon Povill, who produced a script in which the sceptical MacNorth/Roddenberry character becomes overwhelmed with fears that he is in fact setting up human kind for an impending alien invasion, has a nervous break down and enters his own ‘Time Zone’ (read Star Trek) universe – which, he discovers, was not so much his own creation as an inspiration emanating from the ‘real’ extra terrestrials. [12]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this wasn’t quite what Lab Nine were looking for either, and by some point in 1976 the project seems to have been dead in the water – although there are a couple of curious postscripts to the entire strange episode. The first script Roddenberry wrote in 1975 for the proposed Star Trek motion picture was entitled The God Thing and concerned an enormously powerful, but malfunctioning, machine entity travelling toward Earth to ‘save’ humanity. Actor William Shatner recalled the climax of the script as follows:
“As the drama builds and we finally approach the craft, the alien presence manifests itself on board the Enterprise in the form of a humanoid probe, which quickly begins shape-shifting while preaching about having traveled to Earth many times, always in a noble effort to lay down the law of the Cosmos. Its final image is that of Jesus Christ. ‘You must help me!’ the probe repeats, now bleeding from hands, feet and forehead. Kirk refuses, at which point the probe begins exhausting the last of its energy in
a last-ditch violent rampage, commanding the Enterprise crew to provide the assistance it needs in order to survive.” [13]
It’s hard to say whether this vision of God as a malfunctioning spacecraft emerged from Roddenberry’s hostility to Christianity and delight in baiting the studios, from his anxieties about The Nine, or both (especially as some accounts suggest the script was written before Roddenberry even met Whitmore), but the vast organic/mechanical entity which is more Great Deceiver than Messiah seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Puharich’s Spectra, and its promises of saving human kind from its own excesses are certainly close to those being channelled through Lab Nine. [14]
When, in 1979, the franchise finally did indeed return – in the form of the massively over-budget behemoth that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture – there was perhaps still a reflection of Roddenberry’s real thoughts on his Ossining odyssey in its epic tale (a kind of inversion ofThe God Thing derived from an Alan Dean Foster story originally entitled In Thy Image) of a vast and mysterious entity possessed of God-like powers and on a direct course for Earth. V’ger – as the being calls itself – turns out to be a long-lost (and alien-modified) Voyagerspace probe returning to Earth after centuries to seek its ‘Creator’… only to find that there is no God here, just us humans.
Roddenberry’s adventures with Lab Nine, then, were translated into a series of bizarre spiritual autobiographies, a hall of mirrors in which art imitated life imitating art, and in which the (Star Trek) Creator’s ambivalent relationship to his Creation – not to mention his followers – became increasingly problematic. There was, for Roddenberry, to be no saviour from beyond the stars.
He died in 1991, having seen the triumphant return of Star Trek to TV screens with the hugely popular The Next Generation series and, despite all that is now known of the man’s many and glaring imperfections, will no doubt continue to be revered as ‘The Great Bird of the Galaxy’. To add to his legend, a small sample of his ashes was launched into space to orbit the Earth for six years before burning up on re-entry.
Puharich followed in 1995, possibly attaining the next level but leaving a controversial legacy for conspiracy buffs, psychonauts and paranormal researchers to argue about for years to come. Sir John Westmore is still a sought-after business coach, working with high profile companies and writing books such as Coaching for Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose.
Phyllis Schlemmer continues to work with The Nine, having publishedThe Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space in 1993. Her website claims that Roddenberry’s contact with The Nine was part of his research for Star Trek!
And out there in the infinite loneliness of cyber space, like a long-lost probe waiting for a signal to return home, is a web page containing these words:
“This page is a seed.
It will, sometime soon, grow into the home
for all information pertaining to
THE NINE
A Major Motion Picture from a screenplay by
Gene Roddenberry and Jon Povill.”
NOTES
1 The Laugheads’ story is a fascinating one in its own right. This pair of outwardly respectable saucer cultists (Charles was a Michigan doctor, he and his wife both former missionaries) were involved with both George Adamski and Dorothy Martin, the Chicago prophet whose failed predictions of the world’s end in 1954 formed the basis for the 1956 book sociological study When Prophecy Fails. Jerome Clark tells some of the story in “When Prophecy Failed”, FT117:47.
2 Uri Geller & Guy Lyon Playfair, The Geller Effect, Jonathan Cape, 1986, pp269-270. Guy Lyon Playfair thinks the best explanation for Geller’s apparent channelling of The Nine is ‘doctrinal compliance’, “an important feature of the symbiotic relationship […] whereby patients produce what they believe the doctor, analyst or hypnotist expects”. In the Puharich/Geller relationship, the young Israeli’s interests and fantasies concerning space travel and other civilizations interacted with the researcher’s developing beliefs about The Nine to produce (through the fertile medium of the hypnotic trance) the bizarre account given in Puharich’s 1974 book Geller.
3 Watson was apparently offered the chance to become both joint channeller and the group’s official biographer; like Geller before him he probably saw this as a bad career move and turned it down. In 1975, Puharich and Whitmore instead commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (1977); along with the commission of the Roddenberry screen play it clearly represents part of a PR blitz on behalf of Lab Nine’s ET chums. See Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy, Little, Brown and Company, 1999, pp176- 178 and “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, FT126:34-39.
4 Roddenberry’s interest, according to his secretary Susan Sackett, dated to a childhood ‘out of body’ experience. See Joel Engel, Gene Roddenberry, The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek, Virgin Books, 1995, p167.
5 Letter to John W Campbell, 3 December 1968, quoted in David Alexander, Star Trek Creator, Boxtree Books, 1994, p 345.
6 Also the theme of Robert Silverberg’s 1957 story ‘Godling, Go Home!’.
7 Letter to John Whitmore, 2 April 1975, quoted in Alexander, p 416.
8 Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, ‘Plan Nine from Outer Space’, FT126:34.
9 “…his questions indicated that he was at least agnostic on the possibility on their existence; either that or he was respectful of his hosts’ and employers’ uncommon beliefs and practices. In the communications, which were taped for posterity, his tone of voice is unfailingly polite and engaged. If he was in fact feigning interest just to pick up some quick money, he demonstrated enviable skills as an actor.” Engel, p162.
10 Of course, those waiting for the saucers have sometimes chosen to end their own lives not from fear but a desire to leave behind their human bodies and actually enter the alien spacecraft en route for pastures new; strangely, one of the participants in the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 26 March 1997 (FT99:4, 32; 100:4, 35–41) was 58-year-old Thomas Nichols, brother of Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols (Lt Uhura). The group’s bricolage-like belief system drew on everything from Christianity to contactee lore and, according to many reports, a belief in the reality of the (surely incompatible) fictional worlds of Star Trek and The X-Files.
11 Yvonne Fern’s Inside the Mind of Gene Roddenberry (Harper-Collins, 1995), based on a series of conversations toward the end of Roddenberry’s life, reveals a curious, deeply flawed, guru-like figure whose constantly repeated mantra was “I am Star Trek” – a man as identified with, and possibly trapped by, his creation as MacNorth is by ‘Time Zone’; as hostile to organized religion as ever but increasingly certain that his own belief in the future in his head could lead humanity to the next level.
Susan Sackett stated that Roddenberry’s “spiritual beliefs were extant, although they were revised frequently. When I first discussed this with him, he believed in what he called the ‘All’, the life force of the Universe. Occasionally he referred to this concept as ‘God’, although it was clear that his was not the Judæo-Christian god concept in any shape or form.” Susan Sackett, Inside Trek: My Secret Life With Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Hawk Publishing, 2002, p38.
12 Povill put it this way: “Ultimately, the story became ‘what if Rod Serling wakes up one day and finds himself in The Twilight Zone for real?’ This is, ‘What if Gene Roddenberry wakes up one day and finds himself in touch with extraterrestrials, and he can’t deal with it?’” Quoted in Engel, p166. Povill went on to work on the projected but never made Star Trek Phase II series and to act as associate producer on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
13 William Shatner (With Chris Kreski), Star Trek Movie Memories, Harper-Collins, p37. The script impressed Shatner but he “couldn’t imagine Paramount or any other studio agreeing to make such a controversial, perhaps even blasphemous film… for the first time in history God was gonna be the bad guy.”
14 See www.well.com/~sjroby/godthing.html for more on the mysterious fate of The God Thing, which Roddenberry spent years desultorily turning into a still unpublished novel.
Plan Nine From Outer Space
One New Age channelling cult, above all the rest, has had a huge - very disturbing influence on hundreds of thousands of devotees worldwide. Known as 'The Nine', its disciples include cutting edge scientists, multi-millionaire industrialists and leading politicians.
This exclusive extract based on The Startgate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince looks at the sinister origins of The Nine -
In December 1952, Puharich brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr D G Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or ‘the Nine Principles’. In the months before Vinod returned to India, a group met regularly to hear The Nine’s channelled wisdom. Never known for their modesty, The Nine proclaimed themselves to be God, stating "God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God."
Three years later, there appeared to be independent confirmation of their existence. In Mexico, Puharich and Young met Charles and Lillian Laughead, former Christian missionaries who were by then prominent in the burgeoning UFO contactee movement. (For a description of their involvement in the Dorothy Martin circle, see Jerome Clark’s ‘When Prophecy Failed’ in FT117.) Back in the States a few weeks later, Puharich received a letter from the Laugheads containing messages received by their group’s channeller. This message also claimed to come from the Nine Principles, even – amazingly – including references to the earlier communications transmitted through Dr Vinod. Could The Nine possibly be for real?
One New Age channelling cult, above all the rest, has had a huge - very disturbing influence on hundreds of thousands of devotees worldwide. Known as 'The Nine', its disciples include cutting edge scientists, multi-millionaire industrialists and leading politicians.
This exclusive extract based on The Startgate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince looks at the sinister origins of The Nine -
"I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time I was on the Planet Earth was 34,000 of your years ago. I am the balance. And when I say "I" - I mean because I am an emissary for The Nine. It is not I , but it is the group…We are nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are one."
| The declaration above is typical of the channelled pronouncements of the Council of Nine – or just ‘The Nine’. They contain all the usual New Age ingredients of grandiose statements, shaky grammar and unprovable predictions. But unlike all the other channelling cults, that of The Nine has serious clout. Perhaps the reason for this is that they claim to be the Ennead, or the nine major gods of ancient Egypt (see panel). Or could there be another reason, one that owes more to The X-Files than the Pyramid Texts? Although The Nine may appear to be quintessentially a modern phenomenon, our research uncovered its truly astonishing pedigree. In fact, the story begins nearly 50 years ago, in a private research laboratory in Glen Cove, Maine, called the Round Table Foundation, run by a medical doctor named Andrija Puharich (also known as Henry K Puharich).Set up in 1948 to research the paranormal, among the noted psychics studied at the Foundation were the famous Irish medium Eileen Garrett and the Dutch clairvoyant Peter Hurkos (Pieter van de Hirk).Prominent members included the influential philosopher and inventor Arthur M Young and the socialite Alice Bouverie (née Astor). |
In December 1952, Puharich brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr D G Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or ‘the Nine Principles’. In the months before Vinod returned to India, a group met regularly to hear The Nine’s channelled wisdom. Never known for their modesty, The Nine proclaimed themselves to be God, stating "God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God."
Three years later, there appeared to be independent confirmation of their existence. In Mexico, Puharich and Young met Charles and Lillian Laughead, former Christian missionaries who were by then prominent in the burgeoning UFO contactee movement. (For a description of their involvement in the Dorothy Martin circle, see Jerome Clark’s ‘When Prophecy Failed’ in FT117.) Back in the States a few weeks later, Puharich received a letter from the Laugheads containing messages received by their group’s channeller. This message also claimed to come from the Nine Principles, even – amazingly – including references to the earlier communications transmitted through Dr Vinod. Could The Nine possibly be for real?
Perhaps the answer is embedded in the career of Puharich himself. After disbanding the Round Table Foundation in 1958, he worked for 10 years as an inventor of medical devices and achieved international recognition as a parapsychologist, most famously studying the Brazilian psychic surgeon, Arigo (José Pedro de Freitas). But all that was to pale into insignificance because, in 1971, Puharich discovered Uri Geller.
At their first meetings in Tel Aviv in 1971, Puharich hypnotised Geller in an attempt to find out where his abilities came from. As a result, the young Israeli started to channel ‘Spectra’ – an entity which claimed to be a conscious super-computer aboard a spaceship. However, Puharich suggested to him that there might be a connection with the Nine Principles, and Spectra readily agreed that there was. The Nine claimed that they had programmed Geller with his powers as a young child.
Through Geller, The Nine alerted Puharich to his life’s mission, which was to use Geller’s talents to alert the world to an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine. However, Geller – by now an international psychic superstar – bowed out in 1973 and has resolutely turned his back on The Nine ever since. Puharich had to find other channels.
He joined up with aristocratic former racing driver Sir John Whitmore and Florida-based psychic and healer Phyllis Schlemmer. They found a new channeller – a Daytona cook known to history only by the pseudonym ‘Bobby Horne’ – who lived to regret his dealings with The Nine. Driven to the brink of suicide by their constant demands, he too dropped out of the scene – his despair being dismissed by Whitmore as "signs of instability". After this, Phyllis Schlemmer was appointed the authorised spokesperson for the entity – known simply as ‘Tom’ – who represented The Nine
Puharich, Whitmore and Schlemmer then set up Lab Nine at Puharich’s estate in Ossining, New York. The Nine’s disciples included multi-millionaire businessmen (many hiding behind pseudonyms and including members of Canada’s richest family, the Bronfmans), European nobility, scientists from the Stamford Research Institute and at least one prominent political figure who was a personal friend of President Gerald Ford.
We also know that Lyall Watson (then the darling of the alternative scene because of his seminal 1973 book Supernature) was involved, as was the influential counter-culture guru Ira Einhorn – and Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.
| The key to predicting eclipses is noticing that they occur in cycles, or at more or less regular intervals. The Sun goes round the sky once a year; the Moon once a month. This means that, every month, the Moon ‘overtakes’ the sun. This happens at the New Moon, and this is when solar eclipses occur. But, of course, we don’t get an eclipse every New Moon. This is because the Moon has an elliptical orbit: sometimes it passes above the Sun when it overtakes it, sometimes below. But the Moon’s elliptical orbit has its own cycle: it returns to the same place it started from every 18 years or so. Thus – if seen from the same place on Earth – an eclipse will be followed by another one just over 18 years later. |
Roddenberry was part of that circle in 1974 and 1975, and even produced the screenplay for a movie about The Nine. How much he was influenced by them is unknown, although it is said that some of their concepts found their way into the early Star Trek movies, and The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (what a giveaway!) series.
(There is a character named ‘Vinod’ in one Deep Space Nine episode.) Another key player in Lab Nine was Dr James J Hurtak, who was appointed Puharich’s second-in-command by The Nine. In fact, Hurtak had been independently channelling The Nine since 1973.
Puharich and Whitmore commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write an account of their adventures, which appeared in 1977 as Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth (retitled Briefings for the Landing on Planet Earth in paperback)
In this extraordinary book the true identity of the Nine – and of Tom – was finally revealed. Far from being the chummy character that his rather avuncular name suggests, Tom is actually Atum, the creator-god of the ancient Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, and Uncle Tom with his eight mates are none other than the Great Ennead of Heliopolis,
| But even with such impressive contacts, all was not well with Puharich. Lab Nine broke up in 1978 after a series of mysterious events that culminated in an arson attack on the Ossining estate, and he fled to Mexico, claiming that he was being persecuted by the CIA. He returned to the USA two years later, and appears to have played no further part in The Nine story. He died in 1995 after falling down the stairs in his South Carolina home. However, The Nine continued. Not only did Schlemmer and Whitmore continue their mission, but Dr Hurtak has also moved on. He has become a major player in the unfolding millennial drama currently being played out at Giza, but perhaps more importantly he has established himself as a New Age guru par excellence, travelling the world giving workshops on his book of channelled revelations from The Nine, The Keys of Enoch. Written and laid out in classic Biblical style, its darkly apocalyptic vision has huge numbers of influential devotees.This we find very worrying. |  |
Another Nine channel – an Englishwoman named Jenny O’Connor – was introduced to the avant garde Esalen Institute in San Francisco by Sir John Whitmore. She and The Nine became so influential there that they held seminars and – unbelievably – were actually listed on the Institute’s staff, even successfully ordering the sacking of its chief finance officer and the reorganisation of its entire management structure..
This should concern us, because many influential people attended The Nine’s Esalen seminars, including Russians who were part of the Institute’s Soviet Exchange programme. Some of these later rose to prominence in the Gorbachev regime and were instrumental in the downfall of Communism. (The Esalen Institute now runs the US branch of the Gorbachev Foundation.)
The Nine are very much still with us. One of their recent channels, who is also in contact with Tom, is the American writer David M Myers. He is co-author with Britain’s David S Percy of that extraordinary tome Two-Thirds, a history of the galaxy and the human race according to Myer’s otherwordly contacts (who clearly have no sense of the absurd). Percy – best known as a champion of the ‘Face on Mars’ and the ‘hoaxing’ of the Apollo moon landings – was at one time part of the Schlemmer circle.
Among the other major proponents of the ‘monuments’ of Mars and their alleged connection with ancient Egypt is none other than Dr James Hurtak – The Nine’s great prophet – who has promoted this idea since as long ago as 1973. Richard C Hoagland – familiar to FT readers as another unrepentant ‘Mars Face’ enthusiast – is also clearly under The Nine’s spell. David Myers and David Percy were, respectively, American and European Director of Operations for Hoagland’s Mars Mission. In fact, his interpretation of the ‘monuments’ of Mars comes directly from The Nine. Flake though he may appear (increasingly in these hallowed pages), but his influence over huge swathes of the hungrier mystery seekers is undeniable. This is the man who addresses rapt audiences at the United Nations.
But it is in the New Age channelling circuit that The Nine have truly come into their own. In any other circles their true agenda would no doubt have been rumbled long ago, but this is the New Age. Anything The Nine say must be sweetness and light, right? But an objective reading of their divine pronouncements reveal the first stirrings of something very nasty in Paradise.
Their words appeared in 1992 as the book The Only Planet of Choice, credited to ‘transceiver’ Schlemmer and edited by Mary Bennett (a one-time member of the Schlemmer circle who also edited Myers and Percy’s Two-Thirds). This has had an unprecedented influence over the New Age. According to Palden Jenkins (editor of an earlier edition of Only Planet) more and more New Age channelling groups are ‘realising’ that the real source of their wisdom is The Nine.
In fact, we have discerned what amounts to a campaign by The Nine – or their adherents – to ‘take over’ the New Age. It would be a mistake to underestimate the economic or even political potential of this vast subculture – rich pickings indeed.
But The Nine’s influence does not extend merely to New Age channelling circles. Andrija Puharich, James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland have all lectured at the United Nations in New York. And individuals connected with The Nine are also known to have influence with Vice-President Al Gore.
Of course, if The Nine really are the ancient gods of Egypt, then surely there could be fewer more significant events than their return. One may be justified in thinking that the more leading politicians who fall under their influence the better; but are they really the ancient Ennead of Egypt? Can it be that they have actually returned to sort us all out, scattering love and enlightenment from their high moral ground?
Tom, in The Only Planet of Choice, chooses his words carefully as he explains that all the races of the Earth were seeded from space-gods – except one, the "indigenous race", the blacks. He is very careful to urge us not to make an issue out of this. After all, it’s not the black race’s fault that they have no divine spark like the rest of us.
| But The Nine’s influence does not extend merely to New Age channelling circles. Andrija Puharich, James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland have all lectured at the United Nations in New York. And individuals connected with The Nine are also known to have influence with Vice-President Al Gore. Of course, if The Nine really are the ancient gods of Egypt, then surely there could be fewer more significant events than their return. One may be justified in thinking that the more leading politicians who fall under their influence the better; but are they really the ancient Ennead of Egypt? Can it be that they have actually returned to sort us all out, scattering love and enlightenment from their high moral ground? |  |
Tom, in The Only Planet of Choice, chooses his words carefully as he explains that all the races of the Earth were seeded from space-gods – except one, the "indigenous race", the blacks. He is very careful to urge us not to make an issue out of this. After all, it’s not the black race’s fault that they have no divine spark like the rest of us.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the history of The Nine is its relationship to the career of Andrija Puharich.
Recent research has revealed Puharich to have a distinctly sinister side. As an Army doctor in the 1950s, he was deeply involved with the CIA’s notorious MKULTRA mind control project (see panel). He – together with the infamous Dr Sidney Gottlieb – experimented with a variety of techniques to change or induce actual thought processes… even to creating the impression of voices in the head. These techniques included the use of drugs, hypnosis and beaming radio signals directly into the subject’s brain. And, significantly, he was engaged in this work at exactly the same time that The Nine made their first appearance at the Round Table Foundation.
The Foundation itself is now known to have been largely funded by the Pentagon as a front for its medical and parapsychological research. Puharich was still working for the CIA in the early 1970s, when he brought Uri Geller out of Israel.
Puharich’s use of hypnosis is particularly interesting in The Nine circle. In the case of Uri Geller and Bobby Horne, he first hypnotised them and then suggested that they were in touch with The Nine – and lo, they were! Ira Einhorn – a close associate of Puharich’s during the 1970s – confirmed to us that he believed that Puharich was "humanly directing" The Nine communications.
The evidence we have gathered strongly suggests that Tom and his fellow gods originated, not in the stars, but behind closed doors as part of a CIA mind control experiment. And what happened to that experiment? Now with hundreds of thousands of devotees, some in very high places, can The Nine be deemed a success? Of course, that depends very much on what the CIA had in mind. With their subtle racist propaganda, perhaps the flaky New Age Nine should worry the hell out of us.
A fully annotated version of this article appears in Fortean Times 126
©John Brown Publishing / Fortean Times 99
