Field note. Specimen has entered a vertical metal chamber roughly the volume of a burial pod and pressed a small illuminated circle with one digit.
Upon entry, all behavior ceases. This is the notable finding. Prior to entering, the specimens spoke, gestured, emitted the barking sound associated with amusement. Inside the chamber, they fall silent. They rotate their bodies to face a single wall, the wall containing the door, and stare at it. Some tilt the skull upward toward a display of ascending numbers and track it, as though the count were a predator they must not lose sight of.
They do not look at one another. Six specimens, contained together, close enough to exchange heat, and every ocular organ is aimed at the seam of the door or the glowing rectangle above it. When two of them accidentally align their gaze, both retract it instantly, as if scalded.
They will fold their limbs inward. They will study the small glowing device in their hand with sudden, total scholarly intensity, though I have observed the same device produce no such reverence in open air.
Duration of ordeal: approximately eleven seconds. The door parts. The paralysis lifts at once. Speech resumes, faces reanimate, the barking returns, as though a switch external to the body had been thrown.
Preliminary conclusion: the humans have constructed a device that transports the body upward and the spirit nowhere. For eleven seconds they agree, collectively and without instruction, to pretend the others are not there. I had catalogued their species as pathologically warm. I now suspect the warmth is optional, and that they keep, in every tall structure they build, a small closing room in which to practice its absence.