Phyllis Schlemmer and The Only Planet of Choice
The book that carried the Nine to a general audience in 1993. It is the most complete statement of what the Nine are supposed to have said — and reading it closely is the fastest way to see what kind of claim this is.
Photo by Veronika Andrews on Pexels
If the 1952 sessions are the origin of the Nine, The Only Planet of Choice is where most people actually meet them. Published in 1993, compiled by Phyllis Schlemmer with the editor Palden Jenkins, it is the fullest published account of the material, and it sold well enough to put the Nine in front of an audience that had never heard of Glen Cove.
What is documented
Schlemmer worked as a medium and became the principal channel for the Nine material from the mid-1970s, in the period when Puharich’s group operated from Ossining, New York. The book presents transcripts of sessions, organised thematically, with a principal communicator called Tom.
Tom is identified in the material with Atum — the head of the Egyptian Ennead. That identification is the direct link back to Puharich’s framing of the 1952 sessions, and it is stated plainly rather than hinted at.
What was claimed
The content is a cosmology. Earth is described as uniquely significant — the "planet of choice" of the title, where free will operates in a way it does not elsewhere. There is material on human origins, on the purpose of the species, and on what the Nine want from the people receiving it.
There are also statements about world events and the near future. This matters more than the metaphysics, because it is the only part that can be checked.
What was added later
Very little needed adding. Unlike most of this cluster, the book is not a case of later writers embellishing — the claims are large and explicit on the page.
What has accumulated since is the surrounding apparatus: the presentation of the book as continuous with, and confirmed by, the 1952 sessions. That continuity runs entirely through Puharich, who was present at both ends of it. There is no independent line from Vinod’s transcripts to Schlemmer’s.
What remains unexplained
The sincerity question, which is the interesting one. There is no evidence that Schlemmer was cynically fabricating, and a good deal of the behaviour of everyone involved is hard to square with deliberate fraud — fraudsters do not usually work this hard for this long for this little.
Trance mediumship remains an unexplained human capacity in the narrow sense that we have no complete account of what produces it. That is a real open question in psychology. It is a much smaller question than the one the book asks the reader to answer.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
How much of the 1970s Ossining material remains unpublished?
The book is a selection. What was left out, and on what grounds, would tell you a great deal about how it was assembled.
- 02
Did any of the forward-looking statements resolve in a checkable way?
A serious retrospective audit of the predictions has never, as far as we can establish, been published — by believers or by critics.
Be the first to comment
See also
Everything this piece touches
Person
Andrija Puharich
Physician and parapsychologist; the constant figure across forty years of the Nine.
Topic
the Nine
Intelligences that announced themselves at a Maine research foundation on 31 December 1952.
Person
D. G. Vinod
Indian scholar through whom the first Nine sessions came, in December 1952.
Topic
Ennead
The nine gods of Heliopolis, headed by Atum. Attested across the Egyptian record.
Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
The Only Planet of Choice: Essential Briefings from Deep Space
Phyllis V. Schlemmer and Palden Jenkins, Gateway Books · 1 Jan 1993 · no public copy located
Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller
Andrija Puharich, Anchor Press/Doubleday · 1 Jan 1974 · no public copy located
The Stargate Conspiracy
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, Little, Brown · 1 Jan 1999 · no public copy located
Related
Consciousness
Terminal lucidity: when a destroyed brain briefly works again
People with advanced dementia sometimes become clear, coherent and recognisably themselves shortly before death. It is documented in the medical literature, it happens, and nobody can currently explain it.
Consciousness
Ian Stevenson: forty years collecting children who remember other lives
A university psychiatrist spent his career documenting cases of young children who described a previous life, and checking whether the person they described had existed. He assembled over two thousand. The methodology is the argument.
Near Death Experiences
Pam Reynolds: the most-cited near-death case, and what it turns on
In 1991 a woman undergoing brain surgery under extraordinary conditions reported observing the operation. The surgical circumstances were unusually well documented. Whether she was unconscious at the time she perceived what she described is the whole argument.
Near Death Experiences
Near-death experiences: what the clinical research has established
Millions of people report a consistent set of experiences during cardiac arrest. That consistency is a real finding. What it means is where the argument starts, and hospital studies have been running for thirty years.
0 comments