Bob stood there in his parent’s den in utter disbelief – a state of mind that is quickly transformed into frustration and soon afterwards becomes a torrent of anger that is being intensely directed toward his startled parents. Both of his parents are emphatically insisting that they cannot see the black translucent sphere he says he is holding up in front of their faces. All his parents can see is their usually very normal, predictable and mild mannered son, wildly waving this little cardboard box around exclaiming that it was not a little cardboard box. Bob was so beside himself that he actually began to scream at his parents that he was holding a black translucent sphere that he had found just earlier that morning on the side of the road. “Dam it! There is NO box!!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
Bob left his folks’ place in a storm. He also left behind two extremely hurt, worried, confused and bewildered parents. They had questions. Their only answer – drugs. It had to be drugs! Their wonderful son had obviously recently become a drug addict. That was the only answer that made any sense to them. They were devastated.
While Bob is sitting in his chair in his living room at home, he is sitting there stuck in an emotional turbulence of the like he has never before experienced. He has just encountered a break in reality of a magnitude that he is unable to deal with. For fifty-one years Bob has been his parent’s son. In all of this time there have been only occasional disagreements that have arose between them. Never! Never, has there been anything happen between him and his parents like what just happened this morning. He has questions? His only answer – Alzheimer’s disease. It must be something like that. His wonderful mom and dad must have been simultaneously stricken with Alzheimer’s disease! That was the only answer that made any sense to him. He was devastated.
Slowly emerging out of his emotional whirlwind, Bob made a decision. When his friend arrived he wasn’t going to say anything at all about the object. He had it sitting right there in the middle of the coffee table in plain sight. He was going to wait and see if his friend would notice it.
When Bob’s friend arrived he had someone with him. Bob knew this guy but he was more of a friend of Bob’s friend than of his. Having this other person show up though was a welcome surprise for Bob. Now he had two “guinea pigs,” to test out on his object that was, by the minute, becoming increasingly more mysterious.
As Bob asked if his company wanted something to drink, he indicated for them to take a seat on the overstuffed quasi cows hide sofa positioned directly across from his rich solid red heavily poly-urethaned mahogany coffee table. With his head stuck inside the frig trying to locate the two beers that had been in there for months (Bob’s not much of a drinker), his friend yelled out, “Hey Bob! What in the hell is this?” A huge smile breaks across Bob’s face.
Walking back into the living room carrying the two ice-cold long necks, Bob sees that his friend, looking very puzzled, is holding the sphere. The other friend, though, is just watching TV as if there is nothing at all unusual taking place. It is quickly discovered that only Bob and his best friend can see the object. Their other friend cannot see anything! He’s not even seeing the little cardboard box that his parent’s claimed that he was holding. Instead, this guy thinks they’re screwing with him. This time Bob doesn’t get frustrated or angry. Instead, Bob gets very, very interested. With this discovery he also realizes that his parents do not have Alzheimer’s disease after all. And with that realization, he experiences a huge wave of relief.
Many wild and peculiar things take place during the next ten months that follow this first meeting in Bob’s living room. In fact, you could say that the number of events that would normally occur over a two to three year span were crammed into this ten month period of time. We are not, though, going to go into any detail regarding those many events. Instead we are going to return to that first day of Bob's finding the sphere and move forward from there taking up only a few important highlights.
Bob tried very hard to repair the gaping hole created between he and his parents. But the collision of the two immensely different realities that day caused irreparable damage. Bob tried everything he could to close the hole but to no avail. Because try as he might, Bob could never return to being “that Bob.” The Bob his parents had so intimately known for fifty-one years, “that Bob” was forever gone from their lives.
On that first day of finding the sphere; after Bob had made the discovery that not everyone could see the object, or if they did see an object, it was some object other than the sphere; he decided to take a picture of it to see what would happen. He grabbed his digital camera and took several pictures of the sphere from various angles. He then went into his office and printed out a few copies. Bob and his best friend could plainly see, in fine detail, the sphere in each photo on all of the prints. However, their other friend could not ever identify a sphere in any one of the pictures.
Of course, all the while this strange meeting was transpiring the friend who could not see the sphere was getting more and more confused by what his other two friends were saying and how odd they were acting. Once he realized that he wasn’t being the object of some sick prank, that this was no joke they were playing on him, he began to get spooked by all this strangeness. The events going down in this meeting had abruptly leaped way beyond his reality and he was feeling like he had been left very far behind. On the surface he was appearing to get pissed-off but that was just to hide the actual terror that was beginning to quickly creep through him.
In the days that followed Bob and his friend carried photos of the sphere with them at all times. There wasn’t a person they came across that they didn’t show these photos to. In fact, they both went out of their way to find people that they could show the photos to. After nine months and who knows how many thousands of people there were who had looked at the photos, only twenty-seven other people were found who could see the sphere. With Bob and his friend this made twenty-nine people in all who could actually see it.
Throughout this time of search and discovery the group began to have regular meetings over at Bob’s house centered around discussions regarding the sphere. This new reality that, for whatever reason, they had come to share, had forged a unique bond between them. However, this new reality was taking a heavy toll. It seemed as if all their former relationships that were held together by various tacit and open agreements were disintegrating around them. It seemed everyone, including spouses, family, other friends and coworkers, were turning against them. Why? They were still the same people they had always been. How can being able to see something that most other people can’t see make you an evil person? But that is exactly how they began to be treated – as if they had become something evil and alien.
When the group met over at Bob’s they would discuss the object. They would pass it around and take turns holding it and the ideas about what it might be just kept getting wilder and wilder. But no matter how much they talked or how many ideas they would come up with, they never got any closer to figuring out what the sphere was. Then one day at one of the meetings something very strange happened that would change everything.
In the meantime while all this was taking place there were some other events coming down the pike that would prove to be quite dangerous to this group of twenty-nine.
Only twenty-nine people out of thousands of others shared the reality that this sphere existed and they were the only ones that could see it. Now something that didn’t help the extant state of circumstances was that, in the early days of becoming part of this very exclusive group, the new members talked far too much about what they were doing to way too many people. And as they talked about this new and strange reality they had and showed their photos of an object no one could see, they began to look more and more weird to everyone outside their special group. And to some people this little group of twenty-nine began to be perceived as an ominous threat to their very safety. The next thing you know the story begins to circulate that this little group of twenty-nine is and extremely dangerous cult. Indeed, they began to be broadly thought of as being an actual threat to national security. Some even referred to them as being a “religious cult.” There were people who said that these twenty-nine were minions of the devil. Others “knew” they were extraterrestrials here to spy on the inhabitants of the planet before “their kind” invaded and took over control of earth.
Fear is a dangerous emotion.
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