After two years and ten deaths the only solid facts of the joke's nature was that it was a one-liner question. A non-English speaking agent counted the words (seven) and noted a question mark. At that point, the researchers recommended destroying the paper but the military, once armed, could never relinquish a weapon.
The “brown box” era of the project began in 1953 or '54 and was mostly custodial with some research into the writer's earlier documents but no human testing. Noting that all the victims smiled without laughter, some researchers felt that it couldn't be a joke but perhaps a conundrum that overloaded the mind. The fact that it was a question seemed to rule out the possibility of some type of toxic truism. In the late '60s, the project was briefly revived when it was tested on people with various brain injuries. Again, if comprehended it was fatal. Survivors could neither explain nor reproduce anything coherent. Since then the Killing Joke Project has been mothballed but the joke itself still has not been destroyed and is rumored to exist deep within the CIA archived in its original brown box. | ||
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