The Council of Nine: How a Channeled "Space Intelligence" Seeded the Disclosure Age

Start with the disclaimer, because the rest of the story does not work without it: there is no physical evidence that the Council of Nine exists or ever existed. Everything that follows is channeling — trance speech, séance lineage, contactee narrative. Treat it the way you would treat a foundational myth, not a field report. The reason it belongs in the file is not that the Nine are real. It is that a remarkable number of the ideas the modern disclosure conversation treats as native were, demonstrably, hatched in this séance circle first.

The man and the estate

Andrija Puharich was a Northwestern-trained physician and inventor with somewhere around fifty patents to his name, including early hearing-aid work. He was also convinced the paranormal could be put on a laboratory bench. In 1948 he founded the Round Table Foundation on a 65-acre estate at Glen Cove, Maine — a scientific commune for studying, as he put it, the “physico-chemical basis” of psychic phenomena. Real talents passed through: the celebrated Irish medium Eileen Garrett, the Dutch clairvoyant Peter Hurkos. Regional newspapers covered it; it was, for a few years, a genuine psychic epicenter on Penobscot Bay.

That is the documented frame. What happened inside it is, necessarily, reported mostly by Puharich himself.

December 1952: the Nine introduce themselves

In December 1952, Puharich gathered a small group around the Hindu scholar Dr. D.G. Vinod, who fell into trance and began to speak for entities calling themselves “the Nine Principles.” Their opening pitch was not modest. As the material has it: “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God.”

It is worth being precise about what is and isn’t documented here. That the sessions happened is attested. What the entities said rests almost entirely on Puharich’s account — there is no independent transcript of the 1952 room. And the now-famous identification of the Nine with the Great Ennead of Heliopolis — the nine creator-gods of ancient Egyptian religion, with their spokesman “Tom” claiming to be the god Atum — is a later overlay, articulated across decades of subsequent channeling, not something the first session delivered. The Egyptian costume was added in the fitting room.

Geller, “Spectra,” and the long relay

Puharich’s next chapter is the famous one. In 1971 he met Uri Geller in Tel Aviv and became his champion, publishing Uri (1974) — a book the scientific community shredded. In it, Puharich claimed Geller was a receiver for an intelligence sometimes called “Spectra,” described as super-intelligent computers in space, issuing warnings. Whether “Spectra” and “the Nine” are the same intelligence is something the material asserts about itself — it is not independently documented, and the two are routinely conflated.

The relay continued. The deep-trance medium Phyllis Schlemmer became the long-running channel for “Tom” and the Nine, and the sessions were eventually compiled into The Only Planet of Choice (1993) — roughly twenty years of “briefings from deep space.” It is in this corpus that “Tom” delivers the Atum/Ennead identification verbatim, and it is in this corpus that the strangest name in the story appears in the attendee list.

Gene Roddenberry was actually in the room

This is where rigor matters most, because the internet has inflated it into nonsense. So, carefully:

What is documented. Gene Roddenberry — creator of Star Trek — participated in the Nine sessions at Puharich’s later operation (“Lab Nine,” in Ossining, New York), funded in part by Sir John Whitmore, in 1974–75. He is named in the 1975 transcripts inside The Only Planet of Choice itself. He went on to write an unproduced screenplay, titled “The Nine,” fictionalizing the experience; when the circle asked for changes, his assistant Jon Povill reworked it. The script was never made.

What is legend. That the Nine “shaped Star Trek.” They did not, and the dates make it impossible: the original series aired in 1966, eight years before Roddenberry ever sat in a Nine session. Claims that the Nine seeded The Next Generation, or that Deep Space Nine’s wormhole “Prophets” are the Council of Nine, are fan pattern-matching, not history. The honest, documented sentence is the smaller and stranger one: the most influential science-fiction creator of the century attended a channeling circle that believed it was in contact with the Egyptian gods, and wrote a movie about it that nobody ever saw.

Why it is a real bridge

Set the supernatural claims aside entirely and the Council of Nine is still historically important, because of what it is made of and what came after it. It is the hinge where nineteenth-century Spiritualism — the séance, the trance medium, the “control” speaking through an entranced body — gets re-skinned for the space age. The control is no longer Garrett’s spirit-guide “Uvani”; it is a cosmic council from the stars. Swap the vocabulary and you have, decades early, the entire template the later contactee and “the phenomenon” milieu would run on:

• cosmic overseers who have watched humanity since antiquity,
• an ancient-astronaut frame in which the old gods were the visitors,
• an imminent “return” or turning point,
• and a research circle mixing scientists, psychics, and well-connected money.

This is the thesis of the one genuinely scholarly book on the subject, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy (1999) — and notably, even they refuse to vouch for the entities, conceding the Nine “may or may not be real” and that channelling “might simply come from the subconscious.” Their argument is not that the gods are back. It is that a self-reinforcing belief campaign, seeded here, has been quietly scripting expectations ever since.

The skeptic’s verdict, kept in front

None of this requires the Nine to be anything but human. Martin Gardner pointed out that no qualified fraud expert ever observed Puharich’s wonders under controls; the psychologist David Marks dismantled the Geller claims. Trance speech is something the human mind produces — out of suggestion, expectation, and the deep cultural memory of every séance that came before. The most likely reading is the deflationary one: the Council of Nine is a subconscious production, dressed by a brilliant, credulous man in the most impressive costume available — Egyptian gods, alien computers, a cosmic mandate.

But notice what that deflationary reading does not dissolve. The ideas got out. They moved from a Maine estate into the bloodstream of New Age and UFO culture and never left. You do not have to believe a word the Nine said to see the thing that actually matters here: long before “disclosure” had a hashtag, the script was being written in a darkened room — and at least one of the writers went on to teach the whole planet what a starship was supposed to look like.