I have to tell a story which is terrible and beyond imagination, the story of a man: my story. It belongs solely to me, together with long years of silence and the anguish of endless, wakeful nights. It’s mine, the inconceivable and amazing story of a man like many others that wander through the notes of the destiny, crowding this forlorn world lost in the coils of the obscure Universe. One night, this man is hurled beyond the frontiers of what we use to define reality; he is taken to the edge of folly, to a different concept of time and space. That night, flung into a chasm of nonsense and impotence, I met the Lords of the stars, the ancient keepers, the Creators of ancestral memory, and I began to die. Dragged out from the reassuring forms of the Euclidean geometry, from the friendly schemes of a limited knowledge, far beyond the binary awareness of the good and of the evil, a man died. It was a delirium that lasted for eleven years, a slow agony, an inexorable change. That late summer night I began to die to be born again into a new conscience. That, and much more is still wandering restlessly inside the deep gorges of my memory, that’s why this story belongs to me; and erudites, advocates of absurd religions, scientists, either astronomers, psychologists or sociologists, will never be able to change the true story by using their knowledge, even though the truth may appear inconceivable. Their wise disquisition and their pontificating “truth” will not be enough to spare me what I have experienced with my flesh and blood in silent and exacerbating marginalization.

What I’m asking is neither to believe me, nor to understand me, but only to think over and meditate upon what has happened to me. Isn’t it folly, all that escapes from the rational sense of comprehension? Not long ago, wasn’t it regarded as crazy the idea of soaring to the sky by means of aircraft heavier than the air? What about all madmen of the past, of those who paid with their own life for the imprudence of expressing their own view of reality, a view too much beyond the conceited capacity of understanding of the “sages”? What to say of the many Giordano Bruno’s and Joan’s of Arc whose main wrong was to be able both to see (or they were induced to see) beyond the mere confinements of the human narrow mindedness, and to hear the voices proceeding from the dimensions of the unknown? By speaking and revealing their thoughts, they became guilty of contrasting the arrogance of the holders of the knowledge. The human history of this planet is flooded by pyres and martyrs, by mocked and mad people who were pilloried by the erudites, by conceited and rational scientists which believed and still believe that everything can be explained by means of logic and rationality. Everything that looks foolish, fuzzy and unreal should either belong to the by now decadent religious heritage, or pertain to the symptomatic field of psychoanalysis, under the definition of delirium, obsessive disorders, feeling and emotional deficiency, maladjustment and persecution mania. And here sits a question: but what does the mankind really know about human psyche? Does mankind really think to know the secret of the mind, the frequential interactions between cells and galaxies? And what does astronomy know about the universe and the stars which fluctuate inside the immense canopy of heaven? Little and badly, if not just anything at all. Possibly, it is the ignorance of not knowing mankind’s own past and of not being able to imagine mankind’s own future, what bears fear and humiliating terror. Also the assuming arrogance which refuses anything that seems anomalous, and which calls folly all the unknown or inexplicable, gushes from fear as well. Anything departing from the established schemes must be either refused or destroyed, and, in a world geared toward the homogenizing droidization of the masses, it doesn’t matter if the “mad” bearers of such anomalies are destroyed at the same time. But unfortunately – unfortunately for the holders of the political, religious and cultural power – sometimes it happens that some damned fortunate is touched by folly and, while being prey of delirious fever, he begin to speak telling a story of his own. Damned fortunate people – indeed, such I feel: struck by a knowledge curse transcending human mediocrity, and lucky for having been placed in the script of an extraordinary event leading beyond the imaginary, toward the future – left living in suffering for their new conscience and with nothing else but their plain freedom.

It all began one mid-September evening. The heat of a torrid summer was still in the air, melting down in a fragrant, dusty drizzle and in light gusts of wind. A Saturday evening with friends in a pizzeria, then a car ride along narrow streets which were going uphill. As soon as we reached a clearing, we got off the car. Suddenly, an incandescent meteor, a ball of fire, appeared out of nowhere, splitting the dark. We were watching in silence, astonished, following such strange movements until “the thing” began to move down toward a near poplar wood with a rapid maneuver of approach, quickly disappearing from view but still radiating all around a dim red-orange glow. Surprised and excited, we soon decided to walk toward the place where the object had disappeared. However, we had to give up because of both darkness and the rocky subsidence we encountered on the way to the wood. On our way back to the car first, then home, we kept talking about the strange event, leaving our imagination run riot. About half past eleven, we split and immediately after I started to feel unwell. Soon enough, dizziness and sudden flushes up the belly doubled me up, leaving me with a diffuse and intense pain.

I was turning over my bed in prey to anguish. I was cold and sweating a lot. Confused in my mind, I was struggling, making both a great din because of my distress, and an obvious noise because of my frequent walking to the bathroom trying to soothe with cold water (I remember also trying to force myself to throw up. At the time, I was convinced that all was due to food poisoning). The suffering was now unbearable and I called, unheard, my family, which kept sleeping. Eventually, at the moonlight filtering through the ajar shutters, it seemed strange to me to see their faces crystallized in a still, stupefied-like sleep. Everything was oddly deadened, and when I clumsily bumped into a glass left on top of the sink, I saw it falling to the floor at a disturbing slowness, exploding at the impact, causing thousands of bright chips. But I didn’t hear the thud that should have fatally occurred. The house was silent, and the silence was terrifying and impregnated of disturbing allegories. The walls were oozing with muffled shades, and from the outside street, usually alive for the din of the Saturday night traffic, no noise was coming. I checked the time: it was past 1 a.m. Feverish, I tried not to be overcome by desperation, without success. I wasn’t thinking straight any longer. I wasn’t aware of exactly what, but I felt something was going to happen. It was then, when I began to battle with the strangers that were overrunning my mind: something or somebody was ordering me to get dressed, to move outside and to go back up to the hills. Strange forces were inducing me to do something I didn’t want to. Nevertheless, despite my strong opposition, I found myself inside my car, the engine already running, and then hillside, struggling with narrow, winding roads, going uphill. I was scared, feeling I was going to die, while clouds of confused thoughts were overrunning my mind. All of a sudden, it occurred to me to be short in fuel. Immediately, the car decelerated abruptly and the engine went off. I was lost in the darkness. I could barely stand up and I felt in a miserable psychophysical state. The idea of escaping, going back to town to look for medical help came to my mind: but I had forgotten that opposing the invisible one’s was useless and painful. As the order to keep going reached me, a stubbing pain devoured my mind. Beaten and disheartened, I went ahead. Once in the same clearing of the previous evening, I perceived the same oppressive and unnatural silence, the same rarefied and still atmosphere that I felt home one hour earlier. It was too dark to read my watch and, therefore, I wasn’t aware of the precise time. I recollect that I calculated the time to be approximately 4.00 o’clock a.m. by mentally adding the time required to reach that location, to the last watch reading done at home. Obviously, since at that time I wasn’t feeling that well, it is not a precise datum. Then, the most dreadful and absurd event that human mind could bear or conceive, took place. It appeared suddenly: it was enormous and fearfully impending. A sphere of whirling fire was floating over me. Inside it, I could see a clearer, flamboyant, silverish nucleus. In a continuous succession of brisk and disjointed events, just as it happens in the dreams, I felt fluctuating in the air, sucked up and lifted from the ground.

Every cell of my body was screaming in desperation and resignation. In vain, I tried to escape that terrifying nightmare that I was living open-eyed, but eventually I gave up, waiting for the inevitable. In the silence, a buzzing made its way to my ears, while my painful eyes tried to get used to a diffuse and diaphanous brightness. It seemed to me to be sealed inside a glass capsule or plastic bell jar through which I saw an incredibly vast surrounding. Unconsciously, the evident paradox pointed out the abnormal difference between the object, as I saw it from the outside, and the inner space, in which I was standing and whose borders I could barely see. (From the outside, the apparent diameter of the object could be extimated 15- 20 meters). The surrounding, inner space seemed quite bare, devoid of any kind of instrumentation, beside panels that were standing along the entire circumference. The panels were starting one meter above the translucent green, emerald-like floor and converged degrading toward the hemispherical ceiling. The panels pulsated and emanated a soft light, with colors ranging from metallic blue to white-violet. All of a sudden, I had the precise feeling of being coiled up inside a living creature. My position inside the diaphanous niche, where I set immobilized, didn’t allow me to pick up any detail of the space behind me, so that I cannot depict entirely the surroundings. Nevertheless, I had the feeling not to be located centrally, but somehow at 2/3rd of the distance between the border and what I considered to be the central core, a sort of lightly convex structure of burnished-copper color that was standing out. The buzz grew in intensity and, almost simultaneously, the voice entered my mind: “don’t be afraid, you wont be harmed”, I was told. The voice remembered to me the rustle of the wind among the reeds, monotonous like flowing water. I felt hanging inside the Universe, heart beating at the pulsation of the stars. I felt like dilated toward impossible to describe emulsions of light, flickering of precious stones in the cosmic dark…. It was like of a sudden I knew all about everything, just as the whole universe had no more secrets for me: no more mysteries. While my conscience was expanding, mastering an ancestral and almost scaring knowledge, I kept pulsating with the stars, falling headlong toward maddened stars, carried away by a vortex of dancing planets. For a while, I felt like a note of an elusive symphony. “Don’t be afraid” kept saying the voice, apparently coming from abysmal depth, beyond boundless galaxies. The buzz intensified altering the low tones in strident, shrill echoes, while a nauseating feeling induced retching and silent screaming. When the noise, now resembling an enormous dynamo, reached unbearable, dangerous levels, I closed my eyes and I felt falling dawn. I was gliding, quickly falling headlong. Then, all died down and an inconceivable scenario appeared through my half-shut and painful eyelids: I was watching an unreal, fairy-tale landscape where alien constructions of monolithic and rounded architecture were standing out for as far as eye could see, all of them emanating a fluorescent light of warm shades ranging from yellow to orange; unusual crafts were floating in the air, rolling within a wide, circular open space. I was especially impressed by a major building that struck my imagination as abstractly simile. The construction looked like an upturned shell with big arches stretching along the external perimeter. On the tall edges there were pediments embellished by strange symbols, somehow resembling both ancient cuneiform writing and hieroglyphics. Incredibly, the arches included in their shape circles and triangles, an architectural elaboration difficult to describe, but imaginatively real. I moved a few undecided steps forward, then I turned back to give a better look at the spacecraft on which I had been abducted. It was not pulsating any longer, neither flames were wrapping it anymore. It looked like a rounded gem with thinner edges. Its color was bright mercury, apparently made out of a diaphanous material, since I had the impression of catching a glimpse of the inner structure. At regular intervals, its circular, sapphire-like, flamboyant flange was flashing cobalt-blue light, almost a flame of electric nature. Although obviously dazed, I realized to have no fear; even the slight illness was completely gone. An intense, pungent smell in the air, a mixture of wet grass and saltiness, reminded me of the mountains. While clashed by mixed feeling, I was trying to explain to myself the unnatural and by now unbearable silence, when the voice materialised itself again: “Welcome, son of Sahrahs. My name is Chama and I come from Clarion” That voice had the unbelievable power to make me see things in a way that, while the sound was flowing inside me with a light metallic reverberation due to the action of a simultaneous translator (as I will be told later), images of places and events were generated inside my mind. The images were so clear to make me feel as being part of the events shown to me, almost to be living them, while them were just projection inside my mind. I had a view of Clarion, a crystal blue and yellow planet. Initially, I saw it far in the space, then closer and closer, until I plunged in a grazing flight, travelling all over the planet, skirting deep fiords and tall peaks, flying over oceans and forests, and on top of round cities plunged into grassy, luxuriant scrub characterized by an indefinable tone, not comparable to known colors. The blue-green of the oceans resembled the color of our seas, but the water was suggestive of constantly melted metal which created alternating bands of silverish brown and plastic, pearly waves.

Clarion, I was told, means ” splendor” in the alien language, and belongs to a binary system located inside the third galaxy. The planet revolves around two suns, a condition similar to the one that was present long time ago in our solar system. I was taught that binary systems are almost the rule in the universe, while, on the contrary, our present situation is defined “an anomalous event due to a planetary catastrophe occurred approximately 180 millions of years ago”. The orbital configuration of planet Clarion causes on the same a very long day followed by a short twilight. I also learned that, owing to the elliptic and, at the same time, sinusoidal planetary orbit, lasting 425 terrestrial days (Clarion’s year) around the two suns, a distinctive condition is created such that the night comes every 45 days. In their idiom, this event is called: “amhutzar”, the endless day. Still by means of induced images, I learned that Clarion is 150 000 light years far from Earth. Such a distance force our visitors to travel for 72- 73 of our days on board of their spacecrafts along kind of magneto-temporal corridors. While an amazing load of information was flowing into my mind at a frightening speed, I noticed a movement close to the spacecraft: somebody was coming toward me. Eventually, under the blueish, flashing light of the aircraft, I was facing one of my abductors. He was tall and of athletic build, and had human features. His face had pre-Incan features. This though thrilled and upset me at the same time. He seemed slipping rather than walking. When he was close enough to me, he raised his right arm in a gesture that I anxiously interpreted as a greeting. Again the voice penetrated my mind without hearing any sound: “Don’t be afraid, you will not be harmed”, Chama told me. At the same time, I knew I had to follow him, so we moved toward the unusual constructions. It was then that I realized that there were no shades. Everything was in full light as the light itself was coming from the structures themselves, including those architectural elements whose position would prevent proper illumination under normal circumstances. We walked side by side along a diaphanous structure, a wide glass-like tunnel winding between the buildings and dividing us from them. I raised my eyes for a while in the hope to see the sky. Whatever there was, it was well hidden by a dense vegetation sideways and above us. Strange plants, tall and contorted tree trunks, enormous light-violet, sprinkled with sandy-yellow dots ferns were standing out, thickening into a uniform and absurdly stained background. I recollect that, for some reason, I compared it to the luxuriant vegetation that should have covered our planet millions of years ago. An incomparable light was wrapping everything, in a way that remembering to me a tropical sundown after a torrid day. While trying to analyze the events, I felt under stress. I couldn’t believe that all that was indeed happening to me, but all evidences were against my will. All around us there was stillness. Our footsteps were raising neither echoes, nor rustling. Once fronting the enormous, inverted shell-shaped building, Chama stepped inside first, then invited me to do the same. He probably felt my reluctance, the indecision and the distrust caused by survival instinct, so that his voice echoed again inside my mind: “Don’t be afraid! There is nothing to be afraid off”. But I was wrong thinking that nothing else could surprise me any longer. At regular intervals, something like friezes or bas-relieves was covering both the arched ceiling and the upper sides of the new passageway. The walls were convexed, polished, translucent and still looking like they were made out of steel. As my fingers tried instinctively to touch it, the repelling surface seemed electrically charged and slippery. Disoriented and amazed, I didn’t realized that we had already reached the end of the corridor and we were now entering an immense, circular room flooded by soft, blue light. Grey, spiralized, metal-like structures, all interconnected by cylinders of different diameters, were standing out sideways and in the center of the room. Diaphanous spheres containing crimson vapors were floating in the air. …I almost missed their presence! A group of creatures dressed by long, colorful tunic were standing still and looking at me with their penetrating eyes. They had fair complexion, their faces of an indefinable age were framed by white, long, flowing hair. They induced me to look at a pyramidal monolith standing out in the center of a wide rectangular desk, again metallic in appearance. Flooding my mind with sounds and images, they talked to me: my entire life flowed at high speed in my mind. It was my infancy, my memoirs that was being brought out of the dark and back to my mind. It was then that I was told to be inside one of their underground bases located in the center of Amazon, on our planet. Then, I also realised that they are observing us since a long time. They know all the history of mankind since its beginning.