A new and intense phase began when Tom started to show a rather autocratic streak, expelling what he called ‘negatives’ — such as Watson and a neurosurgeon called Norman Shealey — from the circle. (Shealey, now a well-known holistic therapist, had been trained at ARE.) With anyone who was likely to ask awkward questions out of the way, Puharich was appointed as director of the group and Whitmore was ‘advised’ to hand over as much of his considerable fortune as was necessary to further the work as a gesture of his ‘faith’. They were impressed and supremely motivated with a sense of personal destiny, of being the chosen ones whose purpose was to spread the word to at least 75 per cent of the world of the mass landing of representatives of the Nine due to take place in 1976. That was the task set by the Nine.
The number of people associated with Lab Nine at Ossining grew, but the identities of many of its members were concealed in the literature by pseudonyms. It is known that they included SRI physicists and at least one prominent figure who was a personal friend of President Gerald Ford.
38
One famous name very much part of the Lab Nine scene in the mid-1970s was Gene Roddenberry, creator of
Star Trek.
39
It is unclear how much Roddenberry was influenced by the Nine. His involvement began in 1974, several years after the original
Star Trek
TV series finished, but around the time that he was developing ideas for the first of the series of movies. It is said that some of the concepts in the first of these,
Star Trek:
The Motion Picture (1979), came from the Nine, and that they influenced some of the characters, concepts and storylines of the
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and
Deep Space Nine
TV series. (For example, a character named Vinod appeared in an episode of
Deep Space Nine
called ‘Paradise’.) It is known that in 1974 Whitmore commissioned Roddenberry to write a film script based on the Lab Nine events, called simply
The Nine.
Although the movie did not materialise during Roddenberry’s lifetime, in 1995 the Hollywood industry newspapers reported that Jon Povill — producer of the TV series
Sliders
- was planning to make
The Nine
at last.
40
Puharich, Whitmore and Schlemmer eagerly undertook ‘missions’ on behalf of the Nine, mainly travelling around Middle Eastern and other trouble spots meditating for peace, although they were often suspected of being spies. (Perhaps this is not surprising. On one trip, in November to December 1974, they travelled from Helsinki to Warsaw, Poland, where they set up their own radio receiver. This, according to Puharich, was to facilitate experiments in contacting Tom — perhaps something of a slur on Schlemmer’s mediumistic talents? Even if the purpose of the radio was as innocent — if rather unusual — as Puharich claimed, its use by American citizens in an Eastern Bloc country during the Cold War seems almost criminally naive. Later in the same trip they attempted to enter Moscow, but were turned away at the airport because they had no visas).
41
While these prime movers were away, the ‘second-in-command’ back in the United States was James Hurtak, who had been appointed ‘spiritual leader’ by the Nine,
42
and whose own extraterrestrial channelled material agreed with many of their pronouncements. One particular similarity was the idea that the civilisation of Altea had created Atlantis, and after a great catastrophe the survivors had influenced the emergence of the civilisations of Egypt and Central and South America.
In 1975 Puharich and Whitmore commissioned British writer Stuart Holroyd to write an account of the group, as Prelude to the
Landing on Planet Earth
(1977). The paperback edition was re-titled
Briefings for the Landing on Planet Earth,
which calls to mind Hoagland’s insistence on calling his United Nations lecture a briefing. At this time, other people were also channelling the Nine. One particularly influential channeller was Englishwoman Jenny O’Connor, who was introduced by Sir John Whitmore to the influential avant garde Esalen Institute in California, where — incredibly — the Nine actually gave seminars through her.
43
Another group came from a background of paranormal research. In 1976, after reading Puharich’s biography of Geller,
Uri,
former airline pilot Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert went to Ossining to meet him, then accompanied him to Mexico to study the psychic healer Pachita in 1977 and 1978. Elkins and Rueckert, who ran a Kentucky-based group with James Allen McCarty, were already deeply committed to the concept of alien intervention by the time they met Puharich. Elkins began in the mid-1950s as a UFO investigator, then in 1962 turned his attention to extraterrestrial ‘contactees’, at which time Carla Rueckert began work with him. They founded a group called L/L Research in 1970, specifically to study such phenomena. After their Mexican trip with Puharich, Rueckert began to channel another emissary from the Nine, a group entity called Ra. Significantly, the third member of the trio, James Allen McCarty, who joined L/L Research in 1980, had already worked closely with a group in Oregon who had claimed to channel the same entity as Edgar Cayce.
44
Elkins committed suicide in 1984, and the extraterrestrial communications ended, although L/L Research continues to promote the spiritual teachings of Ra, who spoke of a body called the Council of Saturn, based somewhere in its rings, which protects the Earth and keeps it in a kind of quarantine. From a session on 25 January 1981, Ra explained (with very proper godlike disdain for mere earthly grammar and syntax):
In number, the Council that sits in constant session, though varying in its members of balancing, which takes place, what you would call irregularly, is nine. That is the Session Council. To back up this Council, there are twenty-four entities which offer their services as requested. These entities faithfully watch and have been called Guardians.
45
Tom also speaks of twenty-four entities who represent the twenty-four civilisations and work with the Nine. Hurtak similarly writes about the Council of Twenty-Four in his
The Keys of Enoch.
Ra was then asked if this was the same Council of Nine with whom Puharich and another channeller named Mark Probert
46
were in contact and - we do not have to hold our breath here - he replied, yes, that was so.
47
Ra also said that Earth was inhabited by beings from Mars, which is a slightly different version of the Earth — Mars connection. As usual, Atlantis and Egypt also feature prominently in this scenario, with Ra declaring that he himself had built the Great Pyramid.
In 1978 Puharich’s house at Ossining was burned down in a mysterious arson attack, and he disappeared to Mexico for a while to study the ‘psychic surgeon’ Pachita. When he returned, in 1980, he seemed to have no more contact with the Council of Nine. He died in January 1995 after falling down the stairs in the South Carolina house lent to him by one of his rich patrons, Joshua Reynolds III.
The Council of Nine, through Schlemmer and other ‘transceivers’, continued to thrive without their one-time mentor. The Schlemmer — Whitmore group, with its wealthy backers and ever-expanding circle of devotees, continues to meet regularly to this day. In 1992, a compilation of the collected wisdom of Tom,
The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space
was published, carrying a front-cover endorsement by James Hurtak. It soon became a runaway New Age bestseller. It was originally edited down by Palden Jenkins from countless hours of transcripts of Schlemmer’s channelling since 1974, interspersed with questions from the sitters (who included David Percy
48
and Gene Roddenberry). A second edition was hastily re-edited two years later, this time by Mary Bennett (who also edited Myers and Percy’s
Two-Thirds).
Meanwhile Hurtak’s own
The Keys of Enoch
has continued to sell widely. While based on the ‘Keys’ allegedly programmed into him by Enoch himself in 1973, the book includes material about the Council of Nine, although Hurtak claims that the revelations come from an even higher source to which the Nine are merely subordinate. The Nine in this scheme of things are the intelligences that govern one solar system only — ours. Hurtak’s version is even grander in scope and implications than Schlemmer’s. In his system the Council of Nine may govern our solar system and ‘level of existence’, but there are yet higher authorities, the most supreme being the ‘70 Brotherhoods of the Great White Brotherhood‘, also called the ‘Hierarchy’.
David Myers’ and David Percy’s novelised form of the same myth,
Two-Thirds,
was published in 1993. Although it does not mention the Council of Nine by name, it describes the same cosmic system of civilisations and higher, discarnate intelligences who guide them and were responsible for the genetic engineering that created the human race.
Two-Thirds
concentrates on the story of the Altean race and its influence on Earth. The role of the Nine is taken by entities rather curiously called ‘Essenes’ (usually without the definite article), who communicate with the Alteans by telepathy, explaining how they built the Cydonian monuments, the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx at Giza, and how they implemented the genetic modification of the emerging human species. (Essenes’s connection with the first-century Jewish sect of the same name is implicit.) The whole book was channelled from the Nine by David Myers, who clairaudiently hears Tom’s voice in his head, rather than channelling in an altered state, like Bobby Home or Phyllis Schlemmer.
Hearing voices and speaking the words of extraterrestrials is not an activity that most people admire and respect, although channelling is hugely popular in New Age circles, where it is actively encouraged. Most of the outpourings that allegedly come from spirit guides, great names from history or deceased relatives are at best regurgitated thoughts and memories from the unconscious mind of the medium or channeller, and at worst they are simply made up on the spot. The words of the Nine deserve closer scrutiny because they are surprisingly consistent — as if coming from the same source — even when emanating from different channellers with no knowledge of each other. So who exactly are the Nine, or rather, who do they claim to be?
A momentous revelation
Their precise identity was revealed in September 1974 in a channelling session with Schlemmer, in response to the question by Gene Roddenberry: ‘To whom am I talking? Do you have a name?’ Tom replied:
As you know, I am the spokesman for the Nine. But I also have another position, which I have with you in the project. I will try to give you names so you can then understand in what you work and who we are. I may not pronounce who I am in a manner which you would understand because of the problem in the Being’s [his name for Schlemmer] brain, but I will explain so that the Doctor [Puharich] perhaps will understand. I am Tom, but I am also Harmarkus [Harmarchis], I am also Harenkur, I am also known as Turn and I am known as Atum.
49
The next day, following up the name Harmarchis, Puharich asked: ‘How did the Egyptians come to build and name the Sphinx after you?’ Tom replied:
You have found the secret. [A pause for ‘consultation’.] The true knowledge of that will be related to you another time. But I will say briefly to you concerning the Sphinx: I am the beginning. I am the end. I am the emissary. But the original time that 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.
50
‘Tom’ claims to be Atum, the ancient Egyptian creator god of whom the Sphinx was created as a living image (Sheshep-ankh Atum), the head of the Great Ennead of Nine gods, which the ancient Egyptians regarded as ‘Nine that are One’. Tom has also said: ‘We are the Univers’, which again accurately reflects the old Heliopolitan belief. Interestingly, the entity whom Carla Rueckert channelled claimed to be Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god, who is another form of Atum. (The major clue was in the Nine’s name from the start: the English word Ennead — group of nine - is used as a translation of the ancient Egyptian
psit,
which literally means the number ‘nine’. The Egyptians themselves actually referred to the Heliopolitan gods as
‘the
Nine’.) The Nine also claim to be the Elohim — the gods - of the Old Testament, and the Aeons of Gnosticism. Another very significant piece of information was added by Jenny O’Connor, when the Nine gave seminars through her at the Esalen Institute in the late 1970s. Although there are few available records about what the Nine taught there, it is known that they divulged that they came from Sirius.
51
Tom himself — allegedly the god Atum - is emphatic about the importance of the monuments of Giza, in particular the Great Pyramid, but he has refused repeatedly to be drawn on its purpose, saying only that this will be revealed when the landing has happened. However, when asked by Puharich if there were undiscovered chambers in the Great Pyramid, he replied, ‘To a degree,’ adding, ‘The entrance is from the Sphinx’
52
— confirmation of the Council of Nine’s own belief in passages under the Sphinx. This is proof, if any were needed, that the Nine share an interest in the events at Giza discussed in Chapter 1.
There is another link between the Nine and conspiracies surrounding Giza. We have noticed the term ‘Altea’ throughout various strands of this investigation. Wherever it crops up lurks the shadowy influence of the Nine. The rumours that began to circulate in Egypt in 1997 - apparently originating in Egyptian government circles - specified that Joseph Schor’s team had found the Hall of Records, housing information that told how Atum had ‘descended from the skies’ and including records written in ‘Altean’. Although this appears to be part of some kind of misinformation programme, the use of the term Altean and the emphasis on Atum - suggesting that he was an extraterrestrial - clearly relate to the teachings of the Council of Nine. Yet this rumour seems to have originated within the Egyptian government. Do the Nine have friends in high places even beyond the confines of the West? And is it a coincidence that one of the names given to Atlantis by Edgar Cayce was Alta?