1969

[The following notes were found in the briefcase left behind by Dr. Goddard and later recovered in his home after his death during a search for a suicide note. None was ever found.]

My work has made me famous but my secrets will drive me to insanity.

Working in the field of experimental physics we were examining the psi-fields given off by differing types of thought processes when we were contacted by the Medical Council who asked us to examine the likely reason for inaccuracies in their weighing mechanisms. They suspected their suppliers had given them a raw deal - a job lot of patient scales from the Far East, but we were unconvinced.

It turned out that they noted that patients who died on an operating table typically weighed fractionally less after the operation than before, even taking into account blood and tissue loss. This concerned them as they said (worryingly) that this was a good way to see if surgical tools had been left inside a patient by mistake. I always thought they counted the inventory in and out, but it all goes to show you.

Anyway, it seems that they were losing 0.67% of the patient every time they died. So we measured the scales and calibrated them and it turned out that they were working perfectly, and we told them as much. At first they didn’t believe us so we monitored the weight of patients on the table and were amazed to find that all patients who died under the anaesthetic lost the same percentage weight at the same time after death. In an effort to maintain rigour we ran sensor tests in the room and were equally amazed to find that the loss of weight was contemporaneous with a burst of electromagnetic radiation in the room which dissipated inside about two minutes. Stranger yet was the fact that patients who died and then recovered after long periods caused a fluxing field of radiation to appear from nowhere and for their weight to return to its initial reading again.

We had no idea what this was. We followed the radiation and found that it was not absorbed or reflected, but that it simply seemed to leave. We knew this to be impossible and so left it to the mathematicians who produced a model that showed the only way it could simply disappear would be for it to enter some parallel dimension which they described as being perpendicular to all dimensions in our own. This was something of a revelation to everyone, and one which took us entirely by surprise. Not only is there some kind of physical loss after death, but the resultant loss of mass is converted to energy which them simply evaporates into the air at right angles to everything else.

By now the story was becoming obvious. We had discovered the root of the human soul and could monitor it leaving – and in some cases returning to – the human body. We were not keen to jump to this conclusion but could find no other explanation. Our work led to research made by colleagues in Switzerland which confirmed post-death experiences and managed to time them exactly alongside the leakage of the radiation. They also trapped the radiation and prevented it from leaking (which took an inordinate amount of energy) and reported that the post-death experiences were attenuated - at the cost of the patient’s sanity, sometimes. This, coupled with the first-hand experience of the patients gave us the basis for our joint paper.

The paper was published and we were all feted with having proven that there is some form of life after death.

We changed the world. Suicide rates happily went up – death cults and strange organizations persuaded children from their parents and took them to places their parents would never go, culminating in their own mass murders; religions took on a new meaning, no longer relying on mere faith; people’s living philosophies changed because they knew they were going to live forever – they either gave up the rat race or delved into it in the knowledge of an eternal reward. People were kinder and gentler, aside from those who would kill themselves in the name of their gods, they instead finding greater strength in the sure knowledge that their god was watching them and waiting with great rewards. Others simply refused to believe in it, citing either a conspiracy or errant findings. Either way, we found ourselves in demand and famous.

People wanted to know about their souls. We had to write books on the subject to stay ahead of the supposition that found its way into the popular media. Experimental processes carried out by other researchers showed that some animals had a soul too; cats, parrots, horses and large insects did; dogs, sheep and cattle did not. That troubled an awful lot of people.

But there was a much bigger problem.

We found that there were two different energy dissipation patterns but had not given it thought until we came across Fash Allister. Fash was a Kenyan runner who had been badly injured in a rail accident and who had expired in hospital in Lodwar. He recovered but was found rambling and incoherent when he came back to consciousness. He made it quite plain by his words that he had been straight to a place he could not bear the thought of returning to. It took him weeks to get over it and even after therapy he was still imbalanced at having seen something that he ought never to have seen.

To cut a very long story short, it transpired that he had a ‘left’ dissipation pattern as opposed to the much, much less common ‘right’ pattern. More research. More first hand accounts. More mad people produced. It seems that people can usually never remember their post-death experiences in any detail other than lights, tunnels and some idea of hands reaching for them. Those who could remember in better detail all had one thing in common – autism. It would appear that there is some sort of ‘undoing’ process which saves the near-dead from remembering their experiences. Autistics seem to have a natural resistance to this process and have the ability to remember just what it is like. Few of them have really recovered. Most of them speak of the usual light and tunnel, but they think it’s the onward rush of doom and that the hands they feel reach for them are claws that are trying to tear them to pieces. They tell us that it must be Hell. We tend to agree.

From this came the revelation that marked us all; that there is a Heaven and there is a Hell. Left patterns mean that you go to Hell and right patterns mean that you go to Heaven.

At the same time, some American research showed that a ninety-one percent accuracy hit could be made on determining a person’s dissipation pattern by examining their DNA. To us, this meant that if your genetic material could almost certainly predict whether or not you were bound for heaven or hell then there was no such thing as redemption or salvation.

The deeply worrying thing that we found, though, was the proportion of ‘right’ patterns to ‘left’ patterns. This, plus DNA sampling, revealed quite clearly that ninety-nine point seven percent of all people ended up going to hell. No matter what.

I know that I am. I also know that all of my colleagues (those who would submit to the test, anyway) are going there too. And what awaits us? Experimentation with autistics being placed in near-death states has shown that Hell is quite different to what we imagine it to be – it’s different for everyone. It’s what we absolutely don’t want it to be. It is our worst fears realised and our nightmares made flesh. Whatever it is that drives us mad with fear is what we will find in hell. Some have reported the usual issues of rats or monsters or darkness or closed spaces. Others have reported much more ordinary things. One devout woman reportedly came back to tell us that in hell there was no god and that the very absence of her personal deity made life unbearable.

This brought up on other issue that we always found to be problematic; nothing of our work or that of our associates ever mentioned the name of God, or any other divine being you may name. Some took this to mean that there is a God but we could not find it because of His mysterious ways. However, one very articulate autistic from New South Wales phrased it the best way, in our opinion – so much that we wrote it down and had his words memorised. David Drewer said ‘…it’s all just a matter of passage – of traveling from one place to another and arriving. God has no more to do with this than He has to do with you traveling from Melbourne to Sydney on the train. He’s there if you really want him to be there, but there is nothing to say that he’s there or not.’ Frankly, we preferred it if there were no God there at all. Even the Christians among those working on this project conceded that their faith would be destroyed if they found that God’s plan for us was as capricious – or as malevolent - as it appeared, as much as if they had found evidence that there were no God at all. They never really reconciled this and it cost us the services of many a good man and woman, many of whom never recovered from this shock to the core of their daily lives.

We had our run-ins with the ecclesiastical authorities from time to time. Some came to us in a state of outright hostility and told us that we were simultaneously making it all up and treading on the feet of the Lord, two things which we could not reconcile at all. Others came to us as though we had kissed the face of Jesus Himself and had had a homely chat with Him over tea and cake. We never treated any of these people as inferiors or placed ourselves or our work above their beliefs, yet we either made enemies of them or destroyed their lives in the process. We were always at the greatest of pains to say that we were only explaining the mechanisms behind death, not the adventure of death itself – no more than when someone like William Harvey explained how our blood circulates he explained the purpose of life; he just opened our eyes to the procedures behind it. But we may as well have been talking to ourselves. Most people’s first thoughts were of their own private beliefs, and whether they were right all along or not. It transpires that people are not really interested in the truth at all, but in simply reinforcing their own prejudices by picking at the frames of whatever extant arguments can be used to serve their needs. I always found this attitude depressing; for all we claim to have the lion’s share of the planet’s intellect, it sometimes seems that this mental power is used to think up more and more preposterous nonsense for others to believe. The more we did, the more we spoke with people, the more willfully ignorant individuals we spoke to. Perhaps this give the great reason behind this awful design; we are actually a failed experiment and God has left us to pursue a better creation design elsewhere. Perhaps heaven and hell are just the principles he left behind to mop up the debris that we call humanity – his way of saying he was sorry to the rest of the universe.

We know much of hell, but less of heaven. In fact we have yet to find an autistic who is going to heaven, so that remains something we can guess at. Most of us who know about this field of study have a strong feeling that it is all that we want it to be – the very antithesis of hell. But that is just a guess.

We have looked at the bones of the dead and the great and the good and have found that every Pope has gone to hell, along with nearly every saint and every sinner. The few who have made it to heaven are largely unknowns to us all; people who lived their lives as ordinary people and found themselves somewhere where they want to be. The rest of us end up living lives in eternal torture.

There are still questions to be answered. How long do we remain in hell? Or have we only glimpsed what some sort of purgatory is like? Why does hell exist at all? Is it because we have all been bad and not followed rules laid down to us by a supreme being so complex that what it wants simply cannot be understood by our tiny minds and hence we fail at every turn? Or is it because this is all we are and that suffering is we have to look forward to?

We have tried to alter the dissipation pattern of some people, but the results have been dreadful. In most cases they simply die on the table without the pattern being affected. Others, we find, cannot be revived no matter how shallow their dip into death actually is. Those who are revived are inevitably returned to us in a completely insane condition, mostly violent and working on only animal instincts. We have had to kill most of them.

I am now sixty-three years of age and growing older by the day, marching on to a grave that I know cannot and will not hold me. In ten or twenty years I will have to face an eternity of falling from tall buildings and to try to somehow endure it, knowing that it’s impossible. My wife, children, grandchildren and dearest friends will all know their own secret fears forever, living through the worst things that they can ever know or imagine.

My work has made me famous but my secrets will drive me to insanity.

[Document ends]