Rich Americans Funded a Maine Mansion Where Nine Alien Gods Chose Nine People

At 9 p.m. on New Year's Eve in 1952, an Indian philosopher named D. G. Vinod stretched out inside a test chamber wrapped in copper mesh in a large estate in coastal Maine, and started speaking in a slow, deliberate voice that did not sound like his own.

The man who had placed him there was Andrija Puharich, a Chicago physician, then 30, who thought the brain functioned like a wireless set, able to send and pick up signals. He had leased the property, shielded one room from outside electrical interference to test his theory, and named the effort the Roundtable Foundation of Electrobiology. What he had created, with backing from some of the country's wealthiest households, was a lab to examine whether thought could travel where radio could not.

The initial contribution came from Alice Astor Bouverie, an heiress whose father, the wealthiest passenger aboard the Titanic, died when the liner sank in 1912, leaving her both vast wealth and a deep interest in life after death. More patrons followed: company owners, society women, and political figures, including Henry Wallace, who had served as vice president under Franklin Roosevelt. Many held company directorships, advised the White House, and kept some ties to the wartime OSS, forerunner of the CIA.

Vinod had already won Puharich's confidence by holding his right ring finger for a full minute while whistling softly, then recounting hidden details from his past with precision. That night, in the screened chamber, the speech identified itself as the Ennead, invoking the nine deities once honored at ancient Heliopolis. Puharich kept a recording. The speaker claimed those beings were not legend but tangible, extraterrestrial intelligences from a craft observing Earth, directing the cosmos and nudging human events through quiet influence rather than wonders.

The following summer, on June 27, 1953, beneath a full moon, Puharich assembled nine participants at the estate, with each seat standing for one of the Nine gods. Eight were affluent and well connected. Puharich himself occupied the ninth seat, while Vinod was placed at the center. Around midnight, the voice spoke again, telling those present they had a task to remake human society, loyal to something far older and stronger than any church or state. Then nine bits of cotton yarn materialized on the floorboards a short distance from Vinod, one for every guest, resembling the holy cord given to Brahmin initiates in Hindu tradition. Each person collected one and agreed.

Puharich remained skeptical until a letter from Lougheed reached him a month after he returned home from Mexico, about three years after the 1953 session. While in Mexico, he had encountered a Michigan couple, Charles Lougheed and his spouse, who described themselves as in contact with beings from space. They told him about a youthful Arizonan, George Hunt Williamson, with no ties to Puharich or Maine who had never heard of his foundation. Yet Williamson, they wrote, had picked up a matching message from the same Nine during those same winter evenings in the early 1950s, down to a physics formula involving Einstein and Lorentz. Puharich recognized it from Vinod's session. To him, it meant one broadcast had reached two distant receivers unknown to each other. From then on, he devoted his remaining years to obeying what he had heard in that chamber.