The Council of Nine

The Council of Nine ("The Nine") is a channeled intelligence claiming to be a collective of cosmic beings, identified with the nine gods of Egypt's Heliopolitan Ennead, who communicated for decades through mediums associated with physician-inventor Andrija Puharich. As a lore institution, the Nine sit at the strange junction of channeling religion, intelligence-adjacent research circles, and television.

The transmissions began in 1952-53, when Puharich's circle at his Round Table Foundation in Maine recorded the Indian scholar Dr. D.G. Vinod channeling "the Nine Principles." The thread resumed through the 1970s: Puharich worked with Uri Geller (whose alleged source, "Spectra," was folded into the mythology), then with medium Phyllis Schlemmer, whose sessions as "Tom" of the Nine ran for over 20 years and became the 1993 book The Only Planet of Choice, the tradition's scripture. Puharich's "Lab Nine" compound in Ossining hosted the scene until arson and collapse in the late 1970s.

In the transmissions, the Nine announce themselves as humanity's ancient supervisors, promising mass landings and civilizational instruction, standard channeling fare elevated by its audience: Puharich's circle intersected serious money and research, including figures adjacent to the SRI psychic work (Puharich introduced Geller to SRI, where Puthoff and Targ tested him). Culturally, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry spent time with Schlemmer's circle in 1974-75, and Nine-flavored concepts are widely argued (loosely) to echo in his later work, most visibly Deep Space Nine's prophets-in-the-wormhole architecture, a claim tracing to the circle's own accounts.

Puharich, Schlemmer, financier-participants including Sir John Whitmore, and the mediums; investigators Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince mapped the network in The Stargate Conspiracy (1999).

The tradition persists at low ebb through the book and successor channelers; its historical interest, the documented braid of psychics, spooks-adjacent researchers, and entertainment, keeps growing.

Picknett and Prince argued the Nine functioned as a decades-long belief experiment with intelligence-community touchpoints, noting Puharich's Army-adjacent past; skeptics need no conspiracy, seeing one impresario's mediums recycling Theosophy through Egypt. Ufology's serious wing treats the Nine as contamination: channeling that colonized the same social ground as early remote viewing, muddying both records. All camps agree the network was real; only the Nine themselves left no evidence.