The thing looked like a cloud, yet a cloud like a kind of black-collared mushroom you can find a lot in the valley where I live. A mushroom that seemed to be adorned with the colors of the sky in the light of the setting sun, blending in with it... That's to say, colors like red, purple, and an acrid color tending to golden brown... The shape of the cloud seemed to be an integral part of the sky, yet it stood out against it. One could clearly see this mushroom shaping in the sky, even, truly said, a saucer... A saucer, that was a children's story, I had always told to myself, sitting in the kitchen, front of my farm window...

Yet, these clouds, that regurlarly appeared in the sky - even daytime - had always seemed to me too precisely chiseled, cut out in the sky to be considered as simple clouds... But afterthought, I always told myself that I was letting my mind wander a little too much as my gaze got lost into the sky and in my own solitude as a retired goat breeder... Being a widower without really any friends, at the only exception of village drunkards, isn't really something conducive to discernment, is it ?

Except that one day, the cloud moved very quickly (I'm not a meteorologist, but still !) at least too fast for a cloud. The thing, certainly in the stratosphere (tell me if I'm wrong!) fell suddenly from its pedestal (or from the place which kept it weightless) as if to crash on the Earth like a meteorite (well the ones we see in the movies) to end up miraculously catching itself in its fall, perhaps a few seconds before the fatal impact. Because there was in fact no shock a all, since this kind of ship didn't crash anywhere, but actually plunged into the air like a kind of rocket and disappeared very, very high in the sky then into space, to maybe get back... Where it came from ?