Gene Roddenberry Based Star Trek on Secret US Navy Space Fleet

By DR. Michael Salla

September 8 marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Star Trek science fiction series that began in 1966. There is significant evidence that its creator, Gene Roddenberry, did not simply come up with the idea of Star Trek on his own.
Instead he was encouraged to create the series based on classified information surrounding the development of a secret U.S. Navy space fleet that would build a broad extraterrestrial alliance. This led Roddenberry to come up with the idea of a United Federation of Planets, with its military headquarters in San Francisco.

Roddenberry began developing ideas for a science fiction show after one of his series had bombed in 1964:

The only reason Roddenberry created Star Trek, at least initially, was to sell another series to a network. He was, if not desperate, anxious… He had just failed with The Lieutenant, for Norman Felton’s Arena Productions … No one was clamoring for another series from Roddenberry, or even his scripts. His agent suggested he come up with a space series… This may have led to what The Outer Limits historians insist are the accurate — if generally unknown — accounts of Roddenberry hanging out at times on the set of The Outer Limits. When I learned this, it wasn’t hard to imagine that series creator, and executive producer, Leslie Stevens … was someone that Roddenberry may have sought to emulate.

This account is confirmed by Tom Seldon, one of the production assistants of The Outer Limits:

Star Trek was in fact an outgrowth of The Outer Limits. Gene Roddenberry watched our dailies all the time and took a lot of phone calls from our screening room. He was spurring his imagination and checking on the incredible quality control we had. I wondered why he was there but he was there more often than not during the time he was coming up with Star Trek.

The following firmly suggests that Roddenberry and Stevens had reached a business arrangement for the planned sci-fi series, Star Trek:

Bearing in mind that Roddenberry was contracted to a rival studio and a rival network, the odds are essentially slim to none that the two men didn’t have some kind of business arrangement, whether in writing or not.

If Stevens and Roddenberry had indeed developed a business arrangement for the new Star Trek series, this is where Stevens background becomes critical in understanding the nature of their arrangement. Stevens was the son of a U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Leslie Stevens who died in 1956.....

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