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Held his finger and whistled
Finding Vinod
Vinod then spent the next hour describing private events from Puharich's life in perfect detail. The Roundtable was in business.
New Year's Eve trance
On New Year's Eve 1952, Vinod lay down inside the testing room. At 9:00 he started talking, and it was Vinod's voice, but the words weren't his. They came slow and deliberate, nothing like his normal speech, and Puharich recorded all of it. The voice described itself as nine principles and forces, personalities if you will.
The Great Ennead
It named itself the Great Ennead, the nine gods of Heliopolis worshiped in Egypt for 3,000 years before Christ. It claimed to be real and physical, alien minds on a spacecraft watching Earth, and it claimed to guide all of human history through influence. A person met someone at the right time, a door opened, a decision looked ordinary until years later when the pattern became visible.
Vinod came out of the trance with no memory of what happened. Puharich had dozens of pages of notes, including physics equations that made no sense to him.
How have psychologists explained trance mediums?
In 1900, the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy published a study of a medium named Helene Smith, who spoke in what she said was the language of Mars. Flournoy found that the language followed French grammar and vocabulary patterns. He proposed that forgotten memories and imagination could surface as a separate voice. His book was titled From India to the Planet Mars.
Why was Heliopolis central to Egyptian religion?
Heliopolis, called Iunu in ancient Egypt, stood in what is now a suburb of Cairo and was the main center of sun worship. Its priests taught that the sun god Atum-Ra created the first gods from the waters of chaos. The family they described, starting with Atum, grew into nine gods known as the Ennead. Today the only visible remnant at the site is an obelisk raised by the pharaoh Senusret I.
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