The estate of Gene Roddenberry uncovered a treasure trove of 200 5.25-inch floppy disks in the years after the Star Trek creator’s death. But uncovering what was on them wasn’t as simple as grabbing the TRS-80 out of the attic, since Roddenberry used custom-programmed rigs for much of his early word processing. This week data recovery service DriveSavers finally unlocked the disks. So what’s on them? New episodes of Star Trek: TOS? Roddenberry’s Star Wars fanfic? Or could we finally catch a peek at Gene Roddenberry’s occult screenplay, The Nine?

Lost Star Trek Episodes?

So far DriverSavers and Roddenberry’s estate are being cagey as to exactly what’s contained on the 200 floppy disks. Mike Cobb, of DriveSavers, said, “Documents… Lots of documents.”

Cobb also referenced the upcoming 50th anniversary of Star Trek. “2016 just happens to be the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek, anything could happen, the world will have to wait and see.”

But more exciting than potential lost episodes of Star Trek would be the publication of a script Roddenberry wrote for a mysterious organization known as Lab-9, which was connected to an occult research group known as The Round Table Foundation.

While the Round Table Foundation’s main claim to fame was the discovery of psychic fraud Uri Geller, it was a hotspot of early psychic research and brought in attention and money from both the military and a compact clique of rich socialites and inventors, including helicopter pioneer Arthur Young.

Their strangest “discovery,” by far, was of the mysterious Council of Nine. Depending on your inclination the Council of Nine was either an invisible alien ship orbiting the Earth, an ancient satellite/Artifical Intelligence containing personalities associated with the Egyptian pantheon, or a spiritual nine-part Godhead akin to the Christian Trinity.

Closely linked with both legitimate, if overly-credulous, psychic researchers like Andrija Puharich and total whackadoos, the Council of Nine became an unwieldy catch-all for a number of occult movements.

Star Trek vs. The Council of Nine

This is when Gene Roddenberry arrived on the scene. Asked by the Lab-9 research group to sit in on seances that made contact with the mysterious space entity, Gene Roddenberry allegedly completed two drafts of a science fiction script introducing the world to the Council of Nine.

As near as I can determine, those scripts have never been publicly available.

Occult enthusiasts claim Roddenberry’s script “The Nine” influenced everything from the characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation to the premise of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. These claims rely on deep reads of symbolism and archetypes, more typical of Room 237 theories or synchromystic analysis than any obvious and direct influence between Roddenberry’s “The Nine” script and later works.

Still, should “The Nine” screenplay become publicly available we could finally determine how much this strange occult saga influenced later Star Treks.

Sure, it’d be interesting if Gene Roddenberry’s unlocked floppy disk archive turns up lost Star Trek material. But I’ll be crossing my fingers for more insight into one of the strangest occult sagas of the past 100 years.