Hello? Yes. Thank you for taking my call. I... I need to tell someone about this. It's something I've barely spoken about in fifty years, but it feels important to say it out loud to people who might understand. It happened in May of 1973. I was just a child, only eight years old. I was with my two friends, we were playing near the old Culver Down battery, not far from Sandown. It was our playground, all heather and gorse and old wartime concrete bunkers. We knew every inch of it. On this particular afternoon, we saw something that wasn't there before. Tucked into a small, grassy hollow was a building. It wasn't a house, more like a beach hut or a very small cottage, but it was... wrong. It seemed to shimmer slightly at the edges, like a heat haze, even though the day wasn't particularly hot. We'd played in that exact spot a hundred times. There had never been anything there. Curiosity, you know, it overcomes fear when you're that age. We crept closer. The door was ajar. We pushed it open and peeked inside. The room was bare, except for a stool and a figure sitting on it. And that's when I saw him. He was tall and very thin, wearing what looked like a clown suit, but not a happy, circus clown. It was more like a Pierrot, a kind of sad, theatrical costume. It was a one-piece garment with a ruff or frill around his neck. He wore a tall, pointed hat, and on the front of the hat was a perfect, solid blue triangle. He had a red, spherical nose, but it didn't look like it was painted on; it was part of him. His skin was the most unsettling thing. It was pale, smooth, almost waxy, like a mannequin. He had no hair that we could see, and his ears were pointed, like an elf's from a storybook. But his eyes... they were large, dark, and completely empty. Not mean, not kind... just absent. And when he spoke, his voice didn't come from his mouth. It was a tinny, metallic sound, like a cheap radio, and it seemed to fill the room from all directions at once.
He told us his name was Sam. He stood up, and his movements were jerky and unnatural, like a puppet with tangled strings. He asked us what we were. We said we were children. He seemed to process this for a moment, then asked, 'What are children?' Curiosity, you know, it kept us there when we should have run. He pulled a crinkly bag from his pocket and offered us sweets. We just shook our heads. We were too mesmerized and too frightened to move. He then showed us a book. It was about the size of a photo album. He opened it, and the pages were filled with strange symbols, like nothing I had ever seen. They weren't letters or numbers. As his long, thin finger traced a line underneath one of the symbols, it seemed to glow and shimmer on the page. He asked us if we could draw them. We had some paper and crayons with us in a bag, so we did. He watched us intently, his head cocking at a strange, impossible angle. When we showed him our drawings, he made a sound that wasn't a word, more like a... a computer beep. He seemed pleased. He kept asking these simple, profound questions. 'What is fun?' 'Why do you play?' 'What is a mother?' It was like he was a scientist trying to understand the most basic concepts of human life. When we asked where he was from, he didn't speak. He just slowly raised a finger and pointed straight up, towards the sky. After about half an hour, he suddenly stood up and walked to the door. He said, 'You must go now.' It wasn't a suggestion. He ushered us outside and stood in the doorway. We turned to walk away, and after maybe ten steps, I looked back. The cottage was gone. Not just empty, but completely vanished. There was nothing but the grassy hollow, the same way it had always been.
We ran all the way home. Of course, our parents didn't believe us. They thought it was a game, a story we'd concocted. But my friends and I, we knew. We had seen the exact same impossible thing. The story didn't stay quiet for long. It got out, and a local UFO research group, the Wight UFO Research Group, got in touch with our parents. They interviewed us separately, for hours. They had us draw the figure, the hat, the symbols in the book. Our drawings were virtually identical, right down to the blue triangle on the hat and the specific shapes of the symbols. UFO Research Association investigated, three children, identical stories, identical drawings - Teagan' They told us the symbols didn't match any known language, ancient or modern. They were very thorough and very kind. They didn't treat us like silly children; they treated us like witnesses. As I got older, I went back to that spot at Culver Down so many times. I searched for any sign of a foundation, a post hole, anything. There is nothing. It's as if that structure never existed. I even looked at old maps of the area from before and after 1973. There's no record of any building ever being there. So I don't know what we encountered that day. Was it a ghost? An entity from another dimension? A visitor from somewhere else in the cosmos? He didn't feel threatening, but he wasn't of our world. That metallic voice, the waxy skin, the way he moved... it's all burned into my memory. That experience changed my perception of reality forever. Curiosity, you know, it led us to something impossible that day. It taught me that the world is a much stranger and more wonderful place than most people dare to imagine. I know what I saw. My friends know what we saw. And for the rest of my life, I'll be grateful for that terrifying, bewildering afternoon we met Sam.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]