The Nine: who — or what — were they?

On the last evening of 1952, in a converted farmhouse in Glen Cove, Maine, a group of well-connected Americans sat around a man in a trance and heard a voice introduce itself. The voice said it was one of nine. It had, it said, been in contact with humanity before.

What followed is one of the strangest documented threads in twentieth-century fringe history — and it is genuinely documented, which is what makes it worth the time. The people involved were real, wealthy and in several cases distinguished. The sessions were recorded and transcribed. The books were published by mainstream houses. A television creator whose name you know was commissioned to write a screenplay about it and delivered a draft.

None of that makes the Nine what they said they were. It does mean the story can be followed rather than merely asserted, which is unusual here. This piece maps the whole thread; each section links to a longer investigation of that part.

The room in Maine

The Round Table Foundation was a research body set up by Andrija Puharich, a medical doctor with an interest in the physical basis of paranormal phenomena. It operated from Glen Cove, Maine, and was funded by a notably moneyed circle — among them Alice Astor Bouverie, Marcella du Pont, the helicopter engineer Arthur Young and the congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton.

In late 1952 Puharich brought in Dr D. G. Vinod, an Indian scholar then travelling in the United States. On 31 December, Vinod entered a trance state and spoke in a voice not his own. The communicators identified themselves as the Nine, or the Nine Principles. Sessions continued into the following year until Vinod returned to India.

Nine of what?

Puharich came to associate the communicators with the Ennead of Heliopolis — the nine gods of Egyptian cosmology, headed by Atum. It is a striking identification, and it is worth asking whether it was volunteered by the Nine or supplied by Puharich, a well-read man who would have known the Ennead perfectly well.

A separate and frequently confused thread is the Nine Unknown Men, an alleged ancient Indian society guarding forbidden knowledge. That idea has a traceable origin, and it is not ancient India.

The people it reached

Over four decades the Nine appear around a small, connected cast. Puharich is the constant. In 1971 he travelled to Israel and met Uri Geller, then a young stage performer; his 1974 book about Geller frames the phenomena in terms continuous with the Maine sessions. In the mid-1970s the medium Phyllis Schlemmer became the principal channel, and the group gathered at Puharich’s estate at Ossining, New York, under the name Lab Nine.

In 1975 Lab Nine commissioned Gene Roddenberry — six years after the original Star Trek had been cancelled, and at a low point in his career — to write a film about them. He spent time at Ossining interviewing psychics and delivered a screenplay titled The Nine. Lab Nine asked for a rewrite.

Why it is worth taking seriously as history

Not because the Nine were who they said. Because the episode sits at a junction of things that are usually studied apart: post-war American parapsychology, serious money, intelligence-adjacent research interests, the 1970s psychic boom, and the entertainment industry that turned all of it into stories.

Puharich himself is the reason the thread keeps touching institutions. He had worked on military-funded research, he had genuine medical credentials, and he moved comfortably between laboratories and living rooms. Whatever was happening in those sessions, the people in the room were not fringe outsiders.

The threads we follow from here

Each of these is examined on its own page: the first session on New Year’s Eve 1952 and exactly what the record says about it; D. G. Vinod, the man at the beginning and the one most written out of the story; Andrija Puharich’s career and how a credentialled researcher arrived here; the Egyptian Ennead and whether the Nine predate 1952; the Nine Unknown Men and where that idea actually comes from; the Vril Society and what German records do and do not support; Uri Geller and the Nine’s return in the 1970s; Phyllis Schlemmer and The Only Planet of Choice; Gene Roddenberry’s commission and screenplay; the Star Trek question; and finally what survives of all of it once the unsupported parts are set aside.

The short version, stated up front so nobody has to read eleven pieces to get it: something happened in that room, a great deal was built on top of it, and the two are much easier to tell apart than most accounts allow.