02/05/2026
This is my encounter with the sphere.
The Sphere-
In July of 2012 we were bringing in hay as the sky was darkening and a thunderstorm was brewing in the air. The air took on that quality it does just before the rain. I had a strange feeling of urgency which I attributed to recently reading about a phenomenon called ball lightning.
Up here on the windy ridge at 1600+ feet, the sky feels especially close and the clouds have an almost sentient presence at times. We worked quickly, feeling the storm was about to let loose, and managed to bring all the hay in, safely stacked in the barn. Oddly, the storm never arrived.
That evening, my partner headed to bed early, and I stayed up reading on the couch with my dog, Grace, sleeping on the floor beside me. I was feeling sad about the recent death of my nephew and was thinking about him, grieving this horrible loss.
I felt a strong visceral opening at my solar plexus that was very unusual. It was then, at about 9:30 p.m., that I noticed what I initially thought were headlights shining on the wall next to a stairway on the east side of the house. I was facing in that direction. I wondered who would be driving in at that hour, as we have a long road we built into our home site, well away from the main dirt road.
I noticed that neither of our dogs barked. One dog was outside. This was unusual. I remember staring at the light, waiting for it to move across the wall, which would have indicated that a car was turning around or had mistakenly driven in. I then decided to call out to my partner, who was already in bed about twenty feet away in the next room.
It was then that I realized I was unable to speak or move.
My eyes remained fixed on the light, which now had two vertical bars of light behind it. That was when I realized it wasn’t car lights. I began ransacking my mind, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was so strange. I have no idea how long this went on, but I still couldn’t get up or speak. I wasn’t terrified, but I wasn’t comfortable either, because none of it made sense.
At some point, I think I decided to lie down and try to forget about it. It was simply too much.
At the exact moment I decided to dismiss it, my dog—who had been sleeping on the floor facing the opposite direction—lifted her head, looked straight at it, and immediately left the room. She crawled low, tail between her legs, went into the office, and hid under my desk.
When I looked back at the light, it was no longer on the wall. It was hovering about eight feet above the stairs. It was incredibly bright. about the size of a basketball. I just stared at it. At this point, I was shaken and still unable to get up or speak. I remember looking at this brilliant blue-white light and asking silently in my mind, What is this? What do you want?
The word "observation" appeared in my mind.
I lay down and covered my head with a blanket—not terrified, but in a state of conscious surrender. I think some time passed; I’m not sure. When I sat up again, the sphere had moved into our kitchen. I looked away for a second, then directly out a window, and saw a distant flash.
The next morning, I woke up with no memory of the encounter at all. I went outside and immediately noticed that all my flowers—I have made extensive perennial beds here—appeared incredibly bright, as if someone had turned up their vibrancy. Later that day, a friend stopped by and was walking around the yard. He pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes, gesturing at how bright the flowers were.
It wasn’t until late in the day, while I was working in one of the gardens, that the memory of the experience returned. My knees literally buckled beneath me. I ran to find my partner to tell him what had happened.
The full impact of the experience took weeks to unfold. For many years, I was unable to speak about it at all without shaking. I shared it with my acupuncturist at the time, who was very understanding. When I tried to recount what had happened, I cried and shook. This was crazy. She told me that she had another client who had recently experienced a very similar encounter and that this person was part of the legislature.
I also shared it with people I knew who were much further down the rabbit hole than I was at that point. I was told I must have been dreaming. But I was not dreaming. Grace witnessed this with me, and as testimony, for the rest of her life she went into full panic mode at any source of flashing or sudden bright light.
Every time I think of it, to this day, I can feel the experience in my body. I still lack the right words, if there are any, to describe it. It changed me profoundly. My perspective widened, and I made many personal changes in how I lived my life, how I viewed the world, and everything in it. I became deeply interested in space and the entire UAP phenomenon and felt strongly drawn to looking at the stars.
Years later, I am less focused on any single interpretation. I do not discount other people’s experiences, but I have clarified my own thoughts based on what I experienced. It has never left my mind, and it likely never will.
Somewhere along the way, I recognized a familiarity with the sphere itself. I remembered being very young and having thoughts about God, visualizing God as a sphere—the mind of an inquisitive, naturally clairvoyant child.
I shared this story with my mother long before her dementia diagnosis, and she told me things about myself related to these ponderings that I had no memory of. She said there was a period when they would find me standing at my window at night, staring out at the sky. When asked what I was doing, I would say, “I’m talking with God.”
She also told me about the time I came downstairs hours after being put to bed to announce that God had come to my window and asked me if I wanted to go with him—but that I said no, I didn’t want to go yet. I can imagine my parents running upstairs to see whether someone had put a ladder up to the window of that old 1800s house we lived in, except during summers.
There are memories that stay with you for a lifetime. In retrospect, I see how everything fits together and how it has led me to how I live in this world to this day.
For years, I researched everything I could find related to this phenomenon. The work that affected me most was that of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who dedicated his career to interviewing abductees, often under hypnosis. Reading his books shook me to the core. A common occurrence he documented was people recalling seeing deer or owls prior to their experiences, and how many young children describe or name their encounters as interactions with God. The thought has crossed my mind that maybe they'll come back for me when I drop my body, I hope so.
