The Stargate Conspiracy (25 page)

Myers and Percy are co-authors of a highly idiosyncratic, 600-page tome with the enigmatic title of
Two-Thirds
(1993). It relates, in novel form, the history of the galaxy according to these beings. It tells how colonists from a distant planet — Altea — arrived in our solar system some 1.6 million years ago. They first colonised Mars (which they made habitable with their advanced technology) and built the Cydonia complex. Many generations later they came to Earth, where they genetically modified the indigenous beings, eventually creating hybrids who became the human race. Acting under instructions from their own higher intelligences, the Alteans built Avebury as an analogue of the Cydonia complex, as well as the pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza. Although told in the form of fiction, Myers and Percy claim on the cover of their book:
‘Two-Thirds
is
the key
to the understanding of our history and is, in fact, non-fiction.’

The book includes an extensive section of photographs and graphics illustrating the Message of Cydonia and its ‘terrestrial connections’, as well as ‘transtime crop glyphs’. Other key elements in Myers and Percy’s philosophy is the concept of hyperdimensionality and the technology that could be inspired by the Message of Cydonia. It is no coincidence that these are precisely the main points of Hoagland’s crusade: he acquired them from Myers and Percy in the late 1980s.

Although Hoagland is undoubtedly fully aware of the source of Myers and Percy’s ‘insights’, he is (perhaps understandably) reluctant to mention it in his books and lectures. David Percy, in his lectures on the same subject in Britain, never mentions the source of his wisdom, although he was once forced to do so in public. After his lecture to the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1995, at which we were present, he was challenged by UFO researcher John Rimmer to reveal the origins of his information, and admitted that it was, in fact, partly derived from telepathic contact with the Nine. Recently, Percy has admitted being a member of the main circle of ‘contactees’.
¹

James Hurtak also claims to have been in touch with the same extraterrestrial source of wisdom since 1973, shortly before championing the connection between the Elysium pyramids and those of Egypt. He is less reticent about acknowledging the Nine, even writing a book called
The Keys of Enoch
(also known as
The Book of Knowledge,
first published in 1977) which embodies the spiritual teachings he claims he was chosen to receive. Hurtak has told two different versions of this: in
The Keys of Enoch
he tells how the Old Testament prophet Enoch appeared in his room on the night of 2 — 3 January 1973.
²
But in 1977 he told one of the world’s most respected UFO researchers, Jacques Vallée, that, driving through the Californian desert on the same night, a bright light hovered over his car and a beam of light ‘programmed’ him with the ‘Keys’ that form the basis of his teaching.
³

Hurtak’s work, like that of Myers and Percy, describes a system based on a hierarchy of intelligences that rule the universe, and explains how they have intervened throughout the history of the Earth. Atlantis and the ‘message’ of ancient Egypt also play a major role in Hurtak’s philosophy. The Keys of Enoch is a much more self-consciously religious work than
Two-Thirds. Subtitled A Teaching Given on Seven Levels To Be Read and Visualized In Preparation for the Brotherhood of Light To be Delivered for the Quickening of the “People of Light”,
it even looks like a Bible, with the Hebrew for Yahweh — YHWH — embossed in gold on its white-and-gold cover, and its text displayed in two columns and divided into short numbered verses. This book evidently believes itself to be very holy, very sacred, taking itself extremely seriously indeed. The sixty-four ‘Keys’ of spiritual wisdom, covering all aspects of ethics and history, are presented in resounding quasi-Biblical language, although it is virtually impenetrable. For example:

Despite the fact that Hurtak has been promoting these beliefs since 1973, becoming a New Age guru par excellence, he has managed with astounding success to keep this side of his life completely separate even from the promotion of his other unconventional ideas, such as his belief in the Face on Mars. For example, when Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby quote from his book
The Face on Mars
(co-written with Brian Crowley), they make no mention of his status as a New Age mystic and leader.
⁵
In fact, elsewhere Hancock and Bauval describe him as a specialist in remote sensing.
⁶
Boris Said, who is now making films about Egypt and other ancient civilisations based on Hurtak’s ideas, describes him as his film company’s ‘scientific consultant.’
⁷

What these admirers omit is the fact that Hurtak has been actively - and successfully — promoting what is effectively a new religion over the last quarter of a century. (This omission is odd, since we know that Bauval at least is familiar with
The Keys of Enoch.
⁸
)
Not only has Hurtak established a particularly firm grip on the New Age, but his revelatory teachings have attracted a highly influential body of followers that includes multimillionaires and senior politicians. One of his disciples described him to us as ‘almost the Messiah’.

It is also curious that — as the two main proponents of the Mars — Earth connection — Hurtak and Hoagland should completely ignore one another, even when discussing each other’s work. For example, Hoagland manages to elaborate on the Elysium pyramids in
The Monuments of Mars
without mentioning Hurtak even once, despite the fact that he was the first person ever to talk about them publicly. The compliment is returned: in Hurtak’s
The Face on Mars,
Hoagland’s name is completely absent, even when discussing the City and the Fortress, features that he discovered and named. And the two men have other connections, most significantly perhaps being their links with SRI International, both having worked closely with Lambert Dolphin Jr.

Surely it is too much of a coincidence that the two major proponents of the Mars-Earth theory in the last twenty-five years should be involved with the same group of alleged extraterrestrial intelligences - the Council of Nine? This is a somewhat disturbing scenario: between them, these men have great influence, a wide variety of contacts, and many disciples, culled from New Age, intellectual, scientific and political circles, even the intelligence community. Yet they and their many followers clearly believe that they are in contact with the Nine, either directly or indirectly. So who or what are the Council of Nine?

The Council of Nine are not some recent channelling fad. The story began almost 50 years ago thanks entirely to the work of one man whose name has already appeared in this investigation. He was Dr Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller’s mentor and the ultimate
eminence gris,
whose disturbing talent for creating belief systems has - we were to discover — helped to shape events in the last years of the twentieth century, and may well even mould the way we think after the Millennium.

This American doctor, born in Chicago of Yugoslavian parents in 1918, was a reasonably successful inventor of medical gadgets such as improved deaf aids. But that was only part of his life, his more public face. He was also known as a brave pioneer in the ‘Cinderella science’ of parapsychology, or — as many have come to view it - the study of the hitherto unplumbed powers of the human mind.

From 1948 until 1958 Puharich ran a private paranormal research centre called the Round Table Foundation in Glen Cove, Maine, carrying out experiments with several famous psychics such as the Irish medium Eileen Garrett and the Dutch clairvoyant Peter Hurkos (Pieter van der Hirk). In 1952 he took an Indian mystic, Dr D.G. Vinod, to the laboratory, although apparently not so much to test his abilities as to listen to his teachings, which came by what is now known as ‘channelling’: more or less identical to old-fashioned trance mediumship, in which the medium becomes a conduit for various discarnate spirits.

The first of these sessions took place on 31 December 1952. Vinod entered the trance state and at exactly 9pm, spoke. His first words were, portentously: ‘We are Nine Principles and Forces.’ One of the ‘Nine’, who identified himself only as ‘M’ (a second communicator, ‘R’, also appeared over the next few months), furnished some extremely detailed scientific information concerning a variant of the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation equation (relating to energy, mass and the speed of light).
⁹

Puharich worked with Vinod for a month, then had to return to service with the US Army, which kept him away from the Round Table Foundation for several months, returning later in 1953. A final seminal session with Vinod occurred on 27 June that year, when a circle of nine people, led by Puharich, gathered to listen to the disembodied nonhuman intelligences known as the Nine. Two of the ‘sitters’ on that momentous occasion were the philosopher and inventor Arthur M. Young and his wife Ruth, who also have key roles in this curious scenario. Another sitter was Alice Bouverie (née Astor), daughter of the founder of the Astoria Hotel in New York. Already the message was percolating through to the upper echelons of American society.
¹⁰

The Nine presented themselves as a kind of collective intelligence or gestalt, consisting of nine entities or aspects that together made up a whole. Puharich said that the Nine are ‘directly related to Man’s concept of God’, and that ‘the controllers of the Universe operate under the direction of the Nine. Between the controllers and the untold numbers of planetary civilizations are the messengers.’
¹¹
The Nine themselves - speaking through Dr Vinod - said: ‘God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God. There is no God other than what we are together.’
¹²
The group disbanded when Vinod returned to India. That, however, was by no means the end of the Nine.

As far as outsiders can ascertain, the Nine - when speaking through Vinod - never identified themselves as extraterrestrials, but that was to change. Three years later Puharich and Arthur Young went to Mexico with Peter Hurkos to use the Dutch psychic’s powers to locate certain artefacts at the ancient site of Acámbaro.
¹³
In the Hôtel de Paris they met an American couple, Dr Charles Laughead and his wife Lillian, who were working with a young man who claimed to be in telepathic contact with various alien races. Shortly after his return to the United States, Puharich received a letter from Laughead - a copy of which they sent to Young - giving communications from the extraterrestrials. And this referred to the Nine, giving the correct date for their first contact via Dr Vinod as well as the same information about the Lorentz-Einstein Transformation.
¹⁴
This appeared to be exciting independent corroboration of the Nine’s existence, and confirmation of their ability to make contact with people other than Dr Vinod. (Perhaps significantly, Laughead’s letter was signed ‘yours fraternally’.)

Over the next twenty years, Puharich devoted himself to more general parapsychological and medical research. He set up a company, the Intelectron Corporation, to market his many patented medical inventions. On the parapsychological side, apart from testing various psychics, he made a special, in-depth study of shamanism. He was particularly interested in shamanic techniques for altering states of consciousness, including the use of various hallucinogenic plants and ‘sacred’ mushrooms. Never one to stand on the sidelines, Puharich threw himself into these studies, even being initiated into the mysteries of Hawaiian shamanism, emerging as a fully fledged kahuna. At least as significant - in the light of what was to come - was his personal training in hypnosis to the level of master hypnotist, at which stage are revealed such mysteries as the ‘instant command technique’ so often used, and arguably abused, by stage hypnotists. Out of this admirably ‘hands-on’ research he wrote two books,
The Sacred Mushroom
(1959) and
Beyond Telepathy
(1962).

Throughout the 1960s, Puharich investigated the extraordinary ‘psychic surgeon’ of Brazil known as Arigó (José Pedro de Freitas), whose trance states led to some highly unorthodox treatments of the sick, who flocked to his door by the thousand and, in many cases, were inexplicably cured. Puharich found Arigó’s work and psychic abilities genuine, though this was to be overshadowed by his discovery of a new, excitingly paranormal, talent from another part of the world.

In 1970 a stage act by the young Israeli Uri Geller was causing a stir in the nightclubs of Israel and had already attracted the interest of the Israeli authorities. Through an Israeli Army officer, Itzhak Bentov, Geller came to the attention of Puharich,
¹⁵
who had spent some time in Tel Aviv earlier in 1970, training Israelis in the workings of his medical devices, especially one for the ‘electrostimulation’ of hearing for the deaf. Puharich returned to Israel to meet Geller to evaluate him as a potential subject for further testing. The rest is history - although some of it was, until now, secret history.

In November, Puharich carried out a more detailed study of Geller - this time with Itzhak Bentov, who was present when Puharich hypnotised the young Israeli in an attempt to discover the source of his powers. Writer Stuart Holroyd later (rather worryingly) described hypnosis as ‘a routine procedure in Puharich’s investigation of psychics’,
¹⁶
which raises some ethical questions about his methods. The altered state of consciousness known as hypnosis is by no means fully understood, but it is well known that entranced subjects are notoriously eager to please their hypnotists by creating fantasies that comply with his or her own predilections or agendas. Hypnotist and subject can soon become partners in a strange and wild dance in which sometimes one person leads and sometimes the other, although it is usually the hypnotist who calls the tune.