First expedition

“I felt as if I could do anything as long as I did not mind being watched.”
—a First expedition member in Annihilation.

The First expedition was the first of many missions coordinated by the Southern Reach to explore Area X via a team of human researchers. It consisted of twenty-five members, including Lowry, and began roughly two years after the Event. They set up the base camp perimeter and provided a rough map of the area. Unlike some of the later expeditions, the team was allowed to carry modern technology, including walkie-talkies and video cameras.

Official Southern Reach reports and interviews of the expedition's members reported "nothing unusual in Area X, just pristine, empty wilderness". Other effects, such as feelings of both extreme freedom and being under surveillance, as well as euphoria and sexual desire were mentioned. In Authority, however, Control's viewing of the original footage recorded during the mission reveals that the First Expedition suffered a much darker experience. Stills and reports were relatively more accessible to employees, but access to the tape was highly restricted, leading to it becoming "darkly legendary within the Southern Reach".

Members

• Lowry, as the team anthropologist and military expert.
• A woman, the expedition leader
• Twenty-three other unnamed members.

Video Tape

The cameras carried by the expedition members provided footage consisting of over 150 clips, ranging between ten seconds and two minutes, collected into a single video tape. Employees with access to it were advised to watch in sessions of, at most, one hour, though most were unable to reach that time limit. The only place to watch the tape was a cramped, tall viewing room inside the Southern Reach, which required high clearance to be accessed. It contained a big, U-shaped white console, an old television, a low black marble table with buttons and joysticks to manipulate the tapes and a set of four black leather chairs. In the same room was a series of twenty-four gold plaques as a memorial to all but one member, possibly Lowry.

Early clips

The start of the tape consists of clips from the expedition leader’s video journal, at dusk, recorded near a campfire, reporting the expeditions progress. Then there are seven entries, each lasting four or five seconds, showing empty night shots with no contrast. Later fragments indicate the expedition spread out from base camp in waves, showing footage of the members joking amongst each other. Then, footage of the expedition finding a line of military trucks and tanks, in a state of decay much more advanced than would be expected from the two years since the Event (Control notes that by the time of the Fourth expedition, they were already gone). These last clips are punctuated by "the disruption of transmissions on the walkie-talkies issued to the expedition members, more and more queries of “Come in” and “Are you there” followed by static."

The rest of the early clips span the rest of the first day and start of the second:

“(...) by now the disruption had spread, so that queries via walkie-talkie had become verbal miscues and misunderstandings. Listener and listened-to had begun to be colonized by some outside force but had not yet realized it. Or, at least, not voiced concerns for the camera. Control chose not to rewind these instances. They sent a prickling shiver across the back of his neck, gave him a faint sensation of nausea, increased the destabilizing sense of vertigo and claustrophobia.”
—Control in Authority.

Lowry's twenty second clip

At the second day of the expedition, the team had split up, Lowry's group resting near the Abandonded Village. The clip, recorded by a panicked and hyperventilating Lowry, shows the expedition leader and her doppelgänger, indistinguishable from each other, stood at opposite sides of a table, both pleading to the other members to “Get her to stop!". Other voices can be heard off camera, speaking urgently. At one point, the two women in frame stop shouting and stare into the camera with a fearful expression.

Although the video initially apears to be shot at dusk, the lack of light is not natural, instead appearing to come from "something so incredibly large that its edges were well beyond the camera’s lens." The last second of footage sees the background behind the women shifting continuously.

Beach clip

“Lowry in front of the camera this time, goofing off on the beach the next morning, and whoever was behind the camera laughing. No mention of the expedition leader. No sign of her on any of the subsequent video footage, he knew. No explanation from Lowry. It was as if she had been erased from their memories, or as if they had all suffered some vast, unimaginable trauma while off-camera that night. But the dissolution continued despite their seeming happiness and ease. For Lowry was saying words that had no meaning and the person holding the camera responded as if she could understand him, her own speech not yet deformed. (...) The screaming had gone on and on toward the end. The one holding the camera hadn’t seemed human. Wake up, he had pleaded with the members of the first expedition as he watched. Wake up and understand what is happening to you. But they never did. They couldn’t.”
—Control in Authority.

"Unassigned" last clip

The clip seems to belong near the end of the expedition, by which time Lowry was the only one left alive, injured and halfway back to the border. However, it shows the following:

“(...) for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse. Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again. With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm. An all-consuming joy.”
— in Authority.