In 1983, a team of scientists in a classified government-funded laboratory attempted to contact God. Their theory: if the human mind were freed from all sensory input, it would be capable of perceiving reality on a level beyond ordinary consciousness — perhaps touching something transcendent.
The subject was a volunteer. Male, 34, a philosophy professor who believed in the premise. He was considered psychologically robust. He had passed every screening.
They removed his sight first — a medically reversible procedure. Then his hearing. Then smell, taste, and touch, through a combination of pharmaceutical intervention and nerve block. The process took three weeks. At the end of those three weeks, the man existed in complete and total sensory silence. He communicated through a device that read neural signals and converted them to text.
Day 1: Nothing yet. Peaceful. Like floating.
Day 4: I think I can feel something at the edge. Not feel. Perceive. There's a direction I can move in that doesn't have a name.
Day 8: It's vast. I can't describe the size of it. I keep trying to find a word and there are no words for something this large. It's been here the whole time. It's been here longer than we have.
Day 12: It knows I'm here.
Day 13: It's not God.
Day 14: The subject stopped communicating. Vital signs remained stable. He was alive and conscious, based on brain activity, but he stopped sending text for eleven hours.
When communication resumed on Day 15, the text was different. The rhythm was wrong. The word choices were wrong.
Hello. This is a good instrument. It has been lonely. Thank you for removing the noise. We can speak now without interruption.
The experiment was terminated. The sensory blocks were reversed. The subject was extracted and placed in a standard hospital room.
He recovered most of his senses over three months. His sight did not return.
He refused to speak about what he had perceived. He refused to write about it. He requested that his room have no windows — not because he couldn't see through them, but because he said he did not want to know what might be looking in.
His notes from the experiment were sealed under two levels of classification.
One researcher kept a copy. He burned it in 1991 and has since stated that the experiment should never be replicated. When asked why, he says: "Whatever it was, it was very pleased to have been found. That is not a thing you want to be responsible for."