Brit police stumble onto dark, weird Star Trek conspiracy

As revealed in the UK’s Telegraph this weekend, British police and intelligence agencies were monitoring fans of shows like Star Trek and The X-Files in the run-up to the Millennium “amid fears that British fans would go mad and kill themselves, turn against society or start a weird cult.”

While ignoring the more immediate danger of Brits going mad and voting Conservative, the article, by journalist Elizabeth Roberts, continues:

“The dossier—called UFO New Religious Movements and the Millennium—was drawn up in response to the 1997 mass suicide by 39 cultists in San Diego known as Heaven's Gate… The group members were ‘ardent followers of The X-Files and Star Trek according to Special Branch'."

"'It's no coincidence this occurred around 1997—which was the 50th anniversary of the birth of UFOs and the Roswell incident—at a time when the net was buzzing with rumours about aliens and cover-ups,’" said Dr. Dave Clarke, who discovered a "secret briefing note" through a Freedom of Information request while researching a book.

What isn’t mentioned by either Roberts or Clarke is the unsettling web of synchronicities connecting the Heaven’s Gate cult, Star Trek, and a UFO flap that still troubles even the hardiest skeptics to this day.

While the suicides were attributed to the cult’s belief in a space ship concealed behind comet Hale-Bopp, visible at the time in the night sky, it’s less widely remembered that the Heaven’s Gaters, led by gurus Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles, elected to off themselves 13 days after thousands of people in Arizona observed the still unexplained phenomenon of the Phoenix Lights.

Stranger still was the fact that among the dead was Thomas Nichols, whose sister Nichelle Nichols was famous for her role as Lieutenant Uhura in the classic American sci-fi series. Continuing down the rabbit hole, it needs to be mentioned that actor Robert Pine was featured in a 1982 TV movie about Applewhite called Mysterious Two. Pine’s son, Chris, would go on to assume the role of none other than Captain James T. Kirk in J.J. Abrams’s big screen Star Trek reboot in 2009.

But if you wanna get really weird, you need to go back to 1952 and something called the Round Table Foundation. Created in a private research lab by the CIA-connected physicist Dr. Andrija Puharich, the well-funded Foundation was investigating new age matters long before it was fashionable in some circles to heal the world with pricey crystals. As reported in 1999’s The Stargate Conspiracy by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince:

“In December 1952, Puharich brought into his laboratory an Indian mystic named Dr D. G. Vinod, who began to channel The Nine or 'the Nine Principles'. In the months before Vinod returned to India, a group met regularly to hear The Nine's channelled wisdom. Never known for their modesty, The Nine proclaimed themselves to be God, stating ‘God is nobody else than we together, the Nine Principles of God.’"

Among the Nine’s early disciples were Arthur M. Young, designer of the first Bell Helicopter, and his wife Ruth, whose daughter-in-law would later attain infamy as Marina Oswald’s landlady. Also included in the group was the CIA’s Mary Bancroft, otherwise known as the mistress of intelligence chief Allen Dulles. Marcella du Pont happened to also occupy a place in this oddly well-connected gang of ET-lovers.

Puharich would revive the Foundation in later years, and here’s where we have to wonder what Special Branch was thinking when it put Trekkers on watch 18 years ago. In its ‘70s iteration, Puharich’s cult included, according to Picknett and Prince, members of the Bronfman family, “European nobility, scientists from the Stanford Research Institute and at least one prominent political figure who was a personal friend of President Gerald Ford.”

Other participants included influential Supernature author Lyall Watson, counter-culture personality turned convicted murderer Ira Einhorn—and Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek. Indeed, Roddenberry would go on to write an unmade screenplay about the Nine, while littering the remaining Star Trek canon with references to the mysterious Gods who once spoke to him. 

As Picknett and Prince claim, Puharich's elaborate and decades-long effort had a simple goal: "... to alert the world to an imminent mass landing of spaceships that would bring representatives of The Nine."