Gene Roddenberry

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry (August 19, 1921 — October 24, 1991) was an American screenwriter, producer, and creator of the *Star Trek* science fiction franchise (1966). As a WWII veteran and former US Army Air Corps pilot, he developed Star Trek as a vision of a peaceful, cooperative humanity in space. What is less well known: in 1974 and 1975, Roddenberry attended a series of channeling sessions at Dr. Andrija Puharich's estate in Ossining, New York. The medium was Phyllis Schlemmer, who claimed to receive messages from entities calling themselves the **'Council of Nine'** — the Egyptian Ennead, the nine gods of Heliopolis, who claimed responsibility for directing human civilization throughout all of recorded history. Roddenberry took notes. These notes fed into the cosmology of *Star Trek: The Next Generation*, which he developed and produced in the late 1980s. The **Q Continuum** — omnipotent beings who judge humanity and put it to the test — bears the architectural fingerprint of the Council of Nine sessions. Schlemmer published the session material in 1993 in *'The Only Planet of Choice'*. Roddenberry's involvement is documented in the biographical literature (Jeffrey Kripal, *Mutants and Mystics*).