In 1976, inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, an American physician named Andrija Puharich set up a tape recorder and conducted a channelling session. The recordings still exist. The voice coming through the medium claimed to be the Sphinx.
The provenance sounds the kind one would discount on principle. Stay with the detail for a moment. The claims were specific. The Sphinx, said the voice, predated dynastic Egypt by tens of thousands of years. The Great Pyramid was begun around 9,000 BC, completed over six thousand years, and built jointly by four civilisations from elsewhere in the cosmos. Stonehenge, the voice added, came from the same source.
The transcripts were eventually published. The book, “The Only Planet of Choice”, appeared in 1992 under the names of the medium Phyllis Schlemmer and the British editor Palden Jenkins. The voice was named Tom. He spoke as the appointed spokesman for a body of nine principles overseeing the universe, working through twenty-four physical civilisations in other dimensions.
The trail leads back further than 1976.
N.B. This post was inspired by the conversation between Jesse Michels and Greg Mallozi on the American Alchemy podcast. I recommend you listen to the entire conversation.
The 1952 origin
In December 1952, at a parapsychology lab on the Maine coast called the Round Table Foundation, an Indian academic named Dr Dhundiraj Govind Vinod fell into trance on his first night at the property. A voice unlike his own began speaking fluent English. “We are not personalities as you think of personalities,” went the transcript. “We are more like laws or principles of the universe.” Vinod was a friend of Gandhi, a professor at the University of Bombay, and had himself previously formulated nine postulates on extrasensory perception.
The lab was run by Andrija Puharich. Funding came from the US Army, Navy, CIA, and old-money patrons including the Astors and DuPonts. On New Year’s Eve 1952, nine people convened for a session now treated as the founding moment of the modern Nine narrative. Among them: the inventor of the Bell helicopter Arthur M. Young, his wife Ruth Forbes Paine Young, and Alice Bouverie of the Astor family. Sessions ran through 1953 and into 1954, generating thousands of pages of transcript.
Vinod returned to India in 1954. The contact appeared to lapse.
Who Tom claims to be
When the contact resumed two decades later, the voice gave a more layered self-description than Vinod had recorded. Asked his name, Tom answered: “I am Tom, I am the spokesman for the Council of Nine. In truth I am Tehuti. I am also Hamarkos, I am also Herenkar, I am known as Thomas, and I am known as Atum.”
The names form a coherent Egyptian identity. Atum is the Egyptian creator god, the source of the name Tom. Tehuti is the older name of Thoth, the god of writing, mathematics, music, and astronomy. Hamarkos is the original name of the Sphinx, meaning Lord of the Horizon, embodying the day, the evening, and the noon-day sun. The Council of Nine, on this account, are the original Egyptian Ennead: Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The same nine principles, said Tom, were known to the Hebrew tradition as the Elohim.
Tom placed his original presence on Earth at 34,000 years ago. He insisted he was not God. The Nine, he said, were nine principles which together expressed the oneness called God, but no single one of them was the supreme principle. A familiar idea in Hindu and esoteric traditions, less familiar in the Abrahamic ones.
The claims about ancient sites
Across the sessions documented in “The Only Planet of Choice”, Tom returns repeatedly to the planet’s sacred geography. The Sphinx, on his account, was named after him, and predates dynastic Egypt by 26,000 years. The Sphinx, not the Great Pyramid, was the founding monument of Egypt. The Pyramid itself functioned for cell regeneration and as an energy channel between Earth and the four founding civilisations.
The four civilisations are named Hoova, Ashan, Altea, and Myrex. Of these, Hoova is described as the source of the Hebrew lineage, with Jehovah as the head of Hoova rather than as a supreme creator. Altea ran the Atlantean seeding, which on Tom’s account covered modern Greece to the eastern United States and operated for some 12,000 to 17,000 years before its destruction around 9,000 BC. Survivors of Atlantis, Tom adds, became dolphins. Ashan brought the arts, music, and literature. Myrex appears more rarely.
Stonehenge receives one line in the manuscript. Asked about the Pyramids, Tom adds: “Stonehenge also came from the civilisations.” No further elaboration is given. For an audience already acquainted with the alignments and astronomical sophistication of the British megalithic record, the brevity of the claim sits oddly with its scope.
The pyramids, on Tom’s account, channel energy upward and bring energy from the four civilisations into the Earth. The chambers within them serve as rejuvenation rooms, preserving cells. Khufu, the pharaoh associated with the Great Pyramid in standard Egyptology, did not build the structure. He inherited a far older monument and finally understood what he had inherited. Tom dates Khufu to 6,257 BC, four thousand years earlier than the conventional chronology.
The cosmology behind the claims
The twenty-four civilisations are described as physical beings in other dimensions, organised in twelve complementary pairs. Each is what Tom calls a soul-tribe, a kind of space-nation united in collective consciousness. Their work on Earth runs along four main channels: physical landings to teach or influence, genetic seeding into humanity, incarnation of individual souls through human parents, and psycho-spiritual influence on receptive individuals.
Earth occupies a peculiar place in this picture. Tom describes Earth as the only physical environment in the universe where individual free will is fully active. Other civilisations, even when highly evolved, operate as collective consciousness. Earth was set up to teach the balance of physical and spiritual, but souls become trapped in the density of materialism, die, fail to evolve, and recycle back into the same conditions. Tom called Earth a bottleneck. The energy which should rise back into the wider universe stays plugged in the bottle.
This explains the sustained interest of the twenty-four civilisations. The success or failure of the Earth experiment, on this view, has consequences far beyond the planet. The Hebrew lineage was one focused intervention, with Hoova reseeding Earth three times. The mission of Jesus the Nazarene, Tom said, was sent by Hoova. The Hebrews represent a microcosm of the wider planetary situation, which is why, in chapter after chapter, the book returns to the question of Israel as a working out of larger forces.
The thread forward
The contact returned in 1971 through Uri Geller, after Puharich travelled to Israel and hypnotically regressed him. The Nine reappeared, identifying themselves as Spectra, later named as one of the twenty-four civilisations. Puharich brought Geller to the United States and made his Ossining estate north of New York into a working laboratory called Lab Nine.
In early 1974, the Florida psychic Phyllis Schlemmer brought a distressed client to Puharich for help. During the session, Schlemmer herself went into trance. Puharich recognised the voice immediately. Tom and the Nine had returned, and would speak through Schlemmer for the next two decades. Sir John Whitmore, a former Formula 1 driver and pioneer of British coaching education, joined the working group as the third partner. Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame attended sessions at Lab Nine and wrote an unproduced screenplay called “The Nine”. The British author Stuart Holroyd published two early accounts of the work in 1977 and 1979 under the titles “Prelude to the Landing on Planet Earth” and “Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth”.
The titles point to one of the stranger episodes in the sequence. Tom had spoken from 1974 onwards of an imminent landing of the twenty-four civilisations, scheduled for 1976. The landing did not happen. Asked why in 1979, Tom answered that humanity was not ready. Any unannounced arrival, even when benevolent in intent, risked being interpreted as invasion and provoking nuclear retaliation. The civilisations, he said, would only land openly when humanity had reached the consciousness to receive them as long-lost cousins rather than as captors. The landing was indefinitely deferred.
The August 1987 Harmonic Convergence was later described by Tom as the moment Earth shifted from neutral into gear one. Schlemmer and Palden Jenkins published “The Only Planet of Choice” in 1992. Puharich died in January 1995 after falling down stairs at his home in North Carolina. He was 76. Five weeks later the Mexican parapsychologist Jacobo Grinberg, connected to the same network, vanished without trace. The same year, the US government publicly closed its Stargate remote viewing programme.
What to take from any of this
The provenance is troubling on plain inspection. Puharich was deeply embedded in MK-Ultra. The Round Table Foundation took intelligence funding. Schlemmer in old age admitted Puharich routinely subjected her to an unexplained transmission device. Geller has spoken openly about the hypnosis and mushroom experiments performed on him. The pattern of hypnotic induction, Faraday cages, and extremely low frequency transmission research running in parallel with the channelling sessions suggests at minimum the channels were being studied as instruments of something quite other than pure cosmic communication.
None of this disposes of the content. Tom himself warned repeatedly throughout the sessions about channels being co-opted by negative forces without their own knowledge. The cosmological reading and the operational reading sit together in the same source material, and the book does not flinch from either.
What stays useful for anyone working with sacred sites is the substance of the claims, set aside from the strangeness of the messengers. The Sphinx as a structure dating to deep prehistory aligns with Robert Schoch’s water-erosion arguments and the older speculations of John Anthony West. The Great Pyramid as a device for energy channelling sits within a long tradition of esoteric Egyptology. Stonehenge as off-world in origin is the kind of claim demanding either dismissal or further study, with no comfortable middle position. The Atlantean account, with survivors becoming dolphins, would in another century have been dismissed as fantasy. After fifty years of cetacean intelligence research, the claim sits less easily on the discard pile.
Tom offered one piece of practical instruction repeated throughout the book. Daily meditation, minimum nine minutes, ideally eighteen, undertaken quietly and without ego, with twelve committed people sufficient to shift the planet. The instruction is unspectacular. The claim around what the practice connects you to is anything but.