Jane and Rob observed hands and a badge disappearing during the black-cloth experiment, and Jane spontaneously narrated a seventeenth-century female persona.

The historical event cannot be observed again, but a pre-registered reconstruction with approximately 160 participants could orthogonally manipulate illumination, fixation duration, and expectancy suggestions, measuring eye movements, target detection, and subjective disappearance while using an independent camera to record whether the targets remain present. Each participant would attend two sessions, and the project would take approximately nine months. For the persona narrative, separately recruit approximately 100 people with similar experiences, first seal their specific statements, and then have historians who are unaware of the experiencers’ identities match them against previously sampled seventeenth-century archival records and decoy records, controlling for exposure to public information, generic descriptions, and multiple matching. This would take approximately 18 months. The two experiments would separately test the visual phenomena and the accuracy of historical information.

Visual Fading Under Low Illumination and Expectancy: A Pre-registered Multimethod Study

If independent instruments also recorded objects disappearing after occlusion, movement, and equipment failure had been excluded, this would challenge the explanation that “perceptual disappearance does not imply disappearance of an external object.”

Giovanni B. Caputo，University of Urbino; University of Hertfordshire, The Embodied Mind Research Group; University of Virginia School of Medicine, Division of Perceptual Studies

The black cloth, hands, badge, and historical period of the persona provide clues for designing a reconstruction, but without lighting parameters, independent records, or historical information sealed in advance, they cannot yield a unique explanation.

untested refers to independent verification of this historical case; visual experiences and persona narratives may genuinely occur, but they do not warrant inferring that objects physically disappeared or that the persona was an actual historical person.