In the original series episode
Metamorphosis (TOS), the shuttle
Galileo is forced to land on
Gamma Canaris N, where the crew meets Zefram Cochrane. Cochrane, played by
Glenn Corbett of
Route 66 fame, is a genuine future celebrity, a native of
Alpha Centauri and inventor of the
warp drive. At age 87, Cochrane disappeared in a ship, claiming he wanted to die in
outer space, but here he was, one hundred and fifty years later, in perfect health and decades younger. His life and youth have been sustained by
The Companion, the alien "cloud creature" that forced the shuttle to land. The Companion is madly in love with Cochrane, so when one of the shuttle’s passengers, Assistant
Federation Commissioner
Nancy Hedford, dies, the Companion enters her body. The happy couple lives out a normal human lifespan on the planet.
In the film
Star Trek: First Contact, the
USS Enterprise travels centuries back in time and the crew meets Zefram Cochrane. Here he is a native of
Earth played by
James Cromwell, who looks nothing like Corbett. Cochrane is a drunk who must be "encouraged" to take his warp powered ship for a spin. Much to his distaste, the Enterprise crew fawns over Cochrane, who is a legend to them. I wonder if anyone bothered to tell him that he’d be mating with an alien cloud creature a couple of centuries later.
On
Star Trek: The Next Generation, the term "
millicochranes" is used to measure
subspace distortion.