Simon (1980) on Netflix

Plot summary

Five scientists at a think tank called the Institute for Advanced Concepts have a large budget and a history of manufacturing national panics. Their plan is to make one man believe he came from another planet and to turn him into a media spectacle. Doris, their talking computer, runs a nationwide search and settles on Simon Mendelssohn, a psychology professor given up at birth who is at work on an isolation tank experiment. Simon is brought to the institute and shut into a tank. He stays submerged a long time and emerges weakened, acting out the whole course of evolution, from the first cell to modern humanity. In that state, the scientists plant a suggestion that his mother was an alien spaceship and that he was built as a machine rather than born.