The Nine

Gods from space

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 Nine

Without a doubt, Star Trek is one of the most influential entertainment franchises in history. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and others are iconic characters, recognized around the world. What you may not know, however, is that through series creator Gene Roddenberry the starship Enterprise is linked to CIA mind control experiments, a group of “aliens” who claim to be the creators of humanity, and, believe it or not, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

During World War 2, a man named Andrija Puharich, the son of immigrants from the Balkans, attended Northwestern University outside Chicago where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1942 and his M.D. in 1947. Through an invitation from a well-off family friend, who’d married into the Borden dairy family, Puharich found himself in Maine in early 1948, where he established a research institute to pursue his interest in parapsychology, the Round Table Foundation of Electrobiology, usually shortened to the Round Table.^[1]

An early member of the Puharich Round Table was Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, a book about his experiences with mescaline (and the book that inspired rock singer Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors). Puharich financed his research with gifts from donors, one of whom was Henry Wallace, who’d been vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wallace, a 32nd degree Freemason, is the man who persuaded Roosevelt to add the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States—the pyramid and the all-seeing eye—to the dollar bill.^[2]

This book isn’t big enough to hold a full account of what Puharich was up to for the U.S. Army in the 1950s, but the upshot is that he was apparently researching parapsychology and chemical substances that might stimulate the human mind to reach into realities beyond those we can normally perceive with our natural senses. And at one of his gatherings in Maine, on New Year’s Eve in 1952, Puharich and his Round Table, working with a Hindu channeler named Dr. D. G. Vinod, conducted a seance that apparently made contact with something calling itself The Nine.^[3]Thus began a truly breathtaking chapter in America’s mostly hidden programs that searched for ways to weaponize the occult.

Some months later, on June 27, 1953, the night of the full moon, Puhar­ich gathered around him what was to be a core group of the Round Table Foundation for another session with Vinod. The membership of this group of nine members—á la The Nine—is illuminating. Henry Jackson, Georgia Jackson, Alice Bouverie, Marcella Du Pont, Carl Betz, Vonnie Beck, Arthur Young, Ruth Young, and Andrija Puharich. Dr. Vinod acted as the medium.

Imagine the Fellowship of the Ring, with government funding and a security classification that was, well, “cosmic.”^[4]

This group included old money—very old money. The Du Pont name is obvious, but some of the others were no less prominent. Alice Bouverie was an Astor—a descendent of John Jacob Astor and the daughter of Col. John Jacob Astor IV, who built the Astoria Hotel and went down with the Titanic. Arthur Young was the designer of the Bell helicopter; his wife had been born Ruth Forbes. Yes, the Forbes magazine Forbes. And Carl Betz was an actor at the beginning of his career in 1953 who later enjoyed success in Hollywood, best known as Donna Reed’s television husband from 1958 to 1966 on The Donna Reed Show.

Ruth’s previous marriage had been to another old money family that traced its roots back to the early days of the American colonies, George Lyman Paine. Their son, Michael Paine, married a woman named Ruth Hyde, and in 1963, Michael and Ruth Paine became friends with a young couple newly arrived from Russia, Lee and Marina Oswald.

Yes, that Lee Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald. The man officially blamed for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

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It sounds too outlandish to be true—almost like the setup up to a joke: A Du Pont, an Astor, and a Forbes/Paine walk into a seance, and it turns out to be a psychic research group funded by the United States government. Which begs the question: Who or what were they talking to? And what was the monkey-god doing there?

Dr. Vinod sat on the floor, the nine members of the group in a circle around him, with a copper plate on his lap, prayer beads in his hands, and a small statue of “Hanoum,” a Hindu god that the author believes to be Hanuman, the Monkey King. If this is so, it is interesting in that Hanuman was a human being, a minister, before becoming divine due to his devotion and courage. The half-human, half-divine image is one that becomes more important and more obvious as this study progresses. Another important aspect of Hanuman is his depiction in much Indian art as holding an entire mountain in one hand (and a club in the other). When—in the Ramayana and during the battle of Rama and Ravana—Lakshmana was mortally wounded, Hanuman raced to a mountain covered with different healing herbs. Not knowing which one Lakshmana required, Hanuman simply brought the entire mountain. Hanu­man—as well as his fellow monkey-men, the Vanaras of southern India—is often shown with his hand in front of his mouth, signifying “silence” as well as obedience, in much the same way western occultists depict Harpocrates. In this sense, replete with silence, obedience, a club, and a mountain of herbs, Hanuman might easily have been the patron saint of MK-ULTRA.^[5]

What an interesting coincidence—if you’re a coincidence theorist. Speaking of “coincidences,” remember that Aleister Crowley believed his holy text The Book of the Law was dictated to him by Aiwass, the messenger of Hoor-Paar-Kraat—Harpocrates, the Greek god of silence and secrets.

Anyway, The Nine contacted Puharich’s group and declared that they wanted the Round Table to lead a spiritual renewal on Earth. Eventually, they revealed that they were highly advanced extraterrestrials orbiting the planet in a giant, invisible spacecraft.

Consider that the group assembled that night included highly intelligent, very successful people. These were not stereotypical “alien abductees” mocked by the corporate media as unsophisticated hicks from backwoods Appalachia or the rural South. Puharich later wrote, “We took every known precaution against fraud, and the staff and I became thoroughly convinced that we were dealing with some kind of an extraordinary extraterrestrial intelligence.”^[6] In other words, if contact with The Nine was a hoax, it fooled some very smart and respectable people.

On the other hand, the decades-long career of Andrija Puharich suggests that it may also have been a case of “leading the witnesses,” in a sense. He appears to have been a seeker who, like Fox Mulder in The X-Files, really wanted to believe.

But it was more than that. The Nine declared, “God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God.”^[7]

So, they claimed to be extraterrestrial and divine. And while the Round Table was hearing from The Nine, Aleister Crowley’s acolyte and personal secretary Kenneth Grant was developing his occult system based on an ET god from Sirius.

Dr. Vinod returned to India a short time later and contact with The Nine was interrupted for more than fifteen years. Then, in 1971, Puharich discovered Israeli psychic Uri Geller.

Geller, best known for his alleged power to bend silverware with his mind, became for a time the new link to The Nine. Through Geller, The Nine informed Puharich that his life’s mission was “to alert the world to an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine.”^[8]

Well, that didn’t happen. And Geller decided to move on in 1973, so Puharich had to find someone else to bridge the gap between Earth and the giant, invisible craft that had allegedly been orbiting the earth for at least twenty years by that point. He eventually connected with former race car driver Sir John Whitmore and Florida psychic Phyllis Schlemmer, who became the authorized spokesperson for their contact within The Nine, who finally identified himself as “Tom.”^[9]

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 Stanford Research Institute and at least one prominent political figure who was a personal friend of President Gerald Ford.^[10]

Also a member of Lab Nine in 1974 and ‘75 was Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who reportedly wrote a screenplay based on The Nine. Some suggest that concepts from the channeling sessions Roddenberry attended surfaced in the early Star Trek movies and in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9. The latter series featured a prominent subplot in which the commander of the space station Deep Space 9, Starfleet officer Benjamin Sisko, was chosen as the Emissary of an alien race worshiped as gods, called the Prophets, by the people of planet Bajor. The Prophets reveal potential futures to the Bajorans through orbs, which cause visions in those selected for the experience.

An emissary from (the) Deep Space Nine? Sound familiar?

It should. In fact, there are many parallels between the role of Commander Sisko as the Emissary and the mission The Nine purportedly planned for Uri Geller and the other members of Andrija Puharich’s Lab Nine.

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^[1] Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces—The Nine: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Walterville, Oregon: TrineDay, 2005), Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 7603-7604.

^[2] Terry Melanson, “The All-Seeing Eye, The President, The Secretary and The Guru.” Conspiracy Archive, July 2001. http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/All_Seeing_Eye.htm, retrieved 2/8/24.

^[3] Levenda (2005), op. cit., Kindle Locations 7734-7737.

^[4] Ibid., Kindle Locations 7765-7769.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Andrea Puharich, Uri; a Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 18.

^[7] Wes Penre, “Plan Nine from Outer Space.” Fortean Times 126, 1999. Republished at UriGeller.com: https://www.urigeller.com/plan-nine-outer-space/. Retrieved 2/8/24.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Ibid.