Henry K. Puharich, Army physician, medical researcher with legitimate patents in hearing aids, founded the Round Table Foundation at Glen Cove, Maine, in 1948: Faraday cages, ESP experiments, and psilocybin sessions with Aldous Huxley among the visitors. The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity appeared in 1959. In 1971 he brought Uri Geller to the US and into SRI's Targ-Puthoff tests, and in Uri (1974) he published the channeled doctrine of The Nine, nine cosmic intelligences he said he had first contacted at a 1952 seance through the Indian medium Vinod. The estate went bankrupt in 1957, its papers later burned by the Bible school that bought it.
The Nine's doctrine, transmitted through Vinod in 1952, claimed mankind had been under guidance by nine principles since before recorded history, and the subsequent career of the claim is the strange part: the Lab Nine circle overlapped the Stargate milieu, Star Trek's Deep Space Nine naming is rumored to nod at it, and the same nine-entity cosmology reappears in dozens of later channelings. Whether The Nine were intelligence, intelligence operation, or group trance, the seance produced the era's most durable contact myth from a single evening in Maine.
The claim: Puharich is the connective tissue between the legitimate and the deniable, an Army medical researcher whose parapsychology career maps precisely onto the CIA's known interest window, his mushrooms preceding MKUltra's, his Geller arriving at SRI just as the Agency contracted Targ and Puthoff, his Nine providing the theological wrapper for whatever the programs were actually testing. Verdict: the overlaps are documented, the direction of the arrows is not. The archive files him beside Webb's node-not-network observation: the persistent pattern of a credentialed physician, a channeled cosmology, and an intelligence-adjacent research budget sharing one address in Maine is either the century's best coincidence or its most honest org chart.
If The Nine spoke through a seance in 1952, why did every intelligence-adjacent psychic of the next thirty years orbit their channeler?