We all live in a small, remote village in the depths of Missouri. Our parents all work more or less together. They all have jobs that are, as they say, "ordinary," but yet so useful ! Farmers, teachers, nurses... No engineers or magistrates, just people who do their work more or less conscientiously and who, when they come back from work, like to be in nature. Returning to this somewhat remote village, a little removed from the rest of the world and which sometimes seems to have been wiped off the map... Just like the other surrounding villages, moreover, lost in the heartland of America. The wide open spaces also keep them from going elsewhere. They like to breathe the fresh air, like their ancestors, and it was often the houses where our grandparents already lived that we live in. Large, thick wooden huts, with wide, generous porches, where our parents tinker, protected from the sun on the days when there was some.

We are a community of simple people who just want our peace and quiet, far from noise pollution, visual pollution, and even pollution in general ! But Nicolas was even more marginal. He was American too, but it was as if he came from another planet. No children, no house, no car, no credit... He lived in a sort of bungalow, at the edge of the forest, where we all liked to meet to hunt or have barbecues in the summer. We didn't really know how he made a living, because he didn't have a job. At least not an official job, because some in the community said they had seen him selling drugs, or at least some kind of herb that could have been illicit. Others said he fixed things for people, that he tinkered in general... But hey, all of this was just rumors, and sometimes spread by people who didn't like him, who thought he was crazy. And we didn't try to find out more from him because he commanded far too much respect from us to allow oneself to do such a thing... What was certain was Nicolas didn't need much to be happy and he had chosen an even more atypical path than our parents or our grandparents... And he fascinated us all, in a way.

We young people loved to play by the forest in the evenings after school. Playing country children's games, building huts and fishing for little fishes in the river, often releasing them, as there wasn't much to eat there ! This happened more or less naturally... Nicolas often gave us tips for building or repairing our huts, often seeing us hanging around nearby. Once, he even helped us build a small boat to go upstream in the river, while warning us that if it happened to be a waterfall at the end, or if any problem arose, he wouldn't take responsibility, that it was at our own risk... He had a dark sense of humor and a great wit, but he was always kind-hearted. We also sometimes confided in him because he was more easy-going than our parents, and didn't judge us for the stupid things we used to experience. No, he listened to us one after the other with a patient ear, us and our not always very exciting teenage stories !

And that's how it was, as we grew up, and later on, when we were about 16 to 20, that we got into the habit of gathering around the fire on Saturday nights, quite late in the evening. We would grill things to eat and some would even bring their guitars. But above all, we would all look forward to hearing Nicolas' stories. The fire brought us warmth in the cool, damp night air, but it also made his stories much more vivid. He would talk to us all night long about the results of his research. He called himself a "truth seeker." An investigator, but certainly not an official or conventional one. One of only unexplained or hidden phenomena, such as secret societies, Satanism, chemtrails, or even civilizations practicing white magic that would have ended up in the dustbin of history... We looked into the flames and could distinguish the faces of the creatures that Nicolas described... As if he knew these creatures intimately. The distortions of the flames made them appear in the hearth. It must be said that he told his stories very well…

Other young people and even girls from other surrounding villages who had heard about our evenings around the fire even joined in. They came in old, restored cars or on mopeds. We were all fascinated by the realism of his stories. He also sometimes said that many of our leaders were not of human origin, that some were fallen angels in the service of Freemasonry and Satan, when they weren't just holograms ! He often scared us, but he gave us so many explanations and details each time that we couldn't help but find it all coherent. Nicolas said he was reeducating us, making us informed citizens, and not docile, naive, and sleepy consumers. Independence was his credo, almost an obsession with him... Some parents in the community prevented their children from coming, arguing that this Nicolas was nothing more than a dangerous fascist or worse, a cult tout, but we knew very well that he had nothing to sell or offer... As a matter of fact, we always saw him alone. Both his parents had been dead for quite a long time, and he didn't even have a partner, nor real friends, apart us, of course. But Nicolas also died, the victim of an accident that still seems strange to us to this day : A car allegedly hit him head-on as he was crossing the road to go get a drink at the hostel, 400 meters away from his home. And this, two days after he told us that he had had an extraterrestrial encounter with a peaceful civilization from the Andromeda galaxy.