The Mystery of the 1968 Envelope

In the late 1960s, as a middle school student in Italy, I was asked to choose an English pseudonym. I chose a name at random: Andrew Spencer.

Not long after, I was told of a boy living in a forgotten suburb of London—Holloway—who was willing to exchange letters with foreign students. That was how it began.

For nearly twenty years, Andrew and I corresponded.
Letters only.
No photographs. No phone calls. No proof he truly existed—except for his words.

Then, one day, he vanished.

Decades later, during the COVID pandemic, I received an unexpected phone call. An elderly woman, speaking Italian with a heavy London accent, asked for me by name. She had been searching for years.

Andrew had left something behind.

A sealed crate.

Inside, I found hundreds of pages: typewritten manuscripts filled with distorted characters, as if encoded in a language that did not fully belong to this world.

I set them aside.

Only in 2024 did I begin to decipher them.

What emerged was not a story.

It was a testimony.

A record of a future—our future—where Earth lies broken, ruled by forces that are not entirely human… and of a journey backward through time, in search of a truth that was meant to remain hidden.

I am not the author of these pages.

I am only their witness.

— Andrew Spencer