Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
It was a time of religious and political turmoil, and Eric Corbett had to take special care to remain unnoticed while he searched for Jesus Christ in the flesh.
He had a time machine, and inside a pack he carried an array of wondrous technology, the least of which, a solar-powered lamp, was enough to cause any number of difficulties for him were it discovered. He knew the languages of the time, but his accent was enough to mark him as a stranger, not to mention, he was much taller than the average man of the time.
Dissatisfied with the theory of evolution to explain existence, Corbett used a time machine he developed at a NASA facility to travel 2000 years backward in time where he hoped to find Jesus and answers to the questions of where we came from and why we’re here.
These are the questions former Sweet Home resident Bob Otis explores in his new self-published book “A Testimony of Lions.”
Otis, 91, lived in Sweet Home during the 1990s before moving to the coast in 2002 and dividing his time between a small fishing village in Southern Baja, Mexico, and the Seal Rock area.
He was born in 1929 in the small town of Payne, Ohio, before his family moved six months later to Ft. Wayne, Ind., where he said, he grew up. He graduated from school in Westwood, Calif. In 1950, the U.S. Army drafted him. He served part of his time in the Army as a combat artist in military history.
After his discharge from the service, he spent most of his career in forest products.
He lived on a boat in Long Beach, Calif., prior to selling his concrete business and retiring to Sweet Home in 1991. He did most of the writing in the book while in Long Beach.
Los Angeles was too overcrowded, he said. “I found this beautiful little town.”
In Sweet Home, he was active as a volunteer teaching art in local schools.
“That was the one of the most fun times of my life,” Otis said.
He still has many friends in Sweet Home, and his daughter, Lori Peterson, and grandchildren still live in Sweet Home.
Realizing he’s not going to live forever, he said, he decided he wanted to do at least three things before he dies. He decided he wanted to see Michelangelo’s statue of David and the pyramids, and he wanted to publish a book.
“I worked on it for a long time,” Otis said. It included a wide range of research to put it together, including archaeology, paleontology and physics along with the Bible. That research was probably the most difficult part of the project.
His fiancé, Lynda, was a big part of getting the book finished and published, he said. Initially, he went to a library looking for publishers who would accept unsolicited material without agent involvement. They required a short excerpt from the book, but when he submitted the stories, they responded that they don’t accept short stories.
He hired an agent and submitted the book several times, but he never heard back, so he published it himself. Instead of using an agent, at his fiancé’s suggestion, he hired a publicist to help promote the book.
Otis said he has always fantasized about time travel. Also listening to radio evangelists and the constant fund-raising talk, he wondered what the Bible and Jesus might have to say about it.
“The man does indeed have a conversation with Jesus Christ,” he said.
“How do you categorize this thing?” Otis asked. “Is it science fiction, an adventure story, a religious story? They categorized it as religious.”
Otis has been working this story out and writing it for many years, he said. He set the initial part of the book in 1984 rather than revising the history and current events that appear in the story.
“I think you’ll enjoy it, all the characters you’ll get to identify with,” Otis said. The story ranges from the Oval Office to the Biblical past and Herod’s palace and issues ranging from national security to the origin of man.
In the story, Corbett uses the works of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking as a springboard to a time machine, working with the idea of doubling the speed of light and theoretically running time in reverse.
Corbett invents a time machine and then uses it without authorization, Otis said, raising national security concerns during the final chapters of the Cold War.
“Nobody knows where this guy went,” Otis said. He is supposed to turn his findings over to the government that employs him, but he must answer questions that evolution has been unable to satisfactorily answer. He wants to turn to a face-to-face meeting with Jesus if he can manage.
“There was something he had to know – now,” says “A Testimony of Lions” as Corbett prepares to depart across the ages. “Blessed are those who can say, ‘God, I know you’re there,’ he thought, instead of a jerk like me who says, ‘God, I think you’re there, but I’ll know for sure just as soon as we’ve had a little chat.”
He does not believe the book will be offensive to either the religious or the non-religious, Otis said.
The book is available through amazon.com and other Web sites. He is working on a local seller.