These Photographs Look Normal To The Unsuspecting But Have a Haunting Backstory

Things are never as they seem. Something can look inviting, attractive, and draw us in only to hold nothing but harm for us. Pictures are just a moment captured in time. The chances of that moment being representative of what is captured without context are slim. Usually there is a lot more than meets the eye.

That’s a lesson we should all remember in everything we look at. When you see a person you have no idea what’s ging on in their lives at that moment in time. When you go to a place you ca’t fathom all the events that make up its history. Life is so much bigger than ourselves, all we can do is try to make up the pieces of the big picture…even though these pieces may be quite hanting.

Not Your Typical Lunchbox

United States Geological Survey, via usgs.gov

United States Geological Survey, via usgs.gov

​What do you see? Without context, this looks like an innocent man carrying a lunchbox on his way to work. Except this isn’t any man and it is not just an ordinary lunch box. This is physicist Harold Agnew holding the core of the Fat Man atomic bomb.

Not long after this photo was taken on August 9, 1945, a thick cloud would take over the city of Nagasaki where the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 that morning killing 80,000 people in the process. This lunch boxed-sized item would be the heart of a bomb that weighed nearly 10,000 pounds and was built to produce a 22-kiloton blast.  Let this be your reminder that things happen when you least expect them, so make every moment count.