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Crazy: my old colleague Cory Doctorow won a Hugo award for Best New Writer.
ParaScope: UFOs, the paranormal, conspiracies, and covert ops.
The Jargon Dictionary: "HTML-ized version of the [in]famous hacker slang dictionary, the Jargon File. It includes a full-text search feature, and it presents the terms both grouped by letter (for serendipity) and in separate files (for speed and linking). The file also explores the traditional meaning of "hacker", which has been obscured by news coverage."
It was August, 1976; I was 12, and on the cusp of adolescence. My family spent its summer holidays at the Patterson "homestead" in Tatamagouche, a village on the north shore of Nova Scotia, about 30 miles from the town of Truro where we lived. While the area was beautiful, the nights were humid and sticky, and I was isolated from my friends in nearby Truro. But for a few weeks that vacation, my best friend Rob visited, and we did the things older boys do in the summer.
It was also an odd holiday. A local Tatamagouche farmer, Ignatious Kennedy, had told the Truro Daily News that not only had he seen a UFO at his farm, but that it had burned a ten foot long cross in his hayfield, and siphoned power from his electrical line.
Of course, I wanted to see the cross, and maybe a UFO, so my father promised to take Rob and I out to the farm. It was early August, the weeks of the Perseids meteor shower, and I think my father believed that, at the very least, we'd see some shooting stars. Understand that the North Shore of Nova Scotia is like few places in North America; there are no large cities within several hundred miles, and virtually no light pollution. My friends who have grown up in Montreal and Toronto have never really seen the stars, I think.
Rob, my father and I drove out to the Kennedy farm, parking on the side of a dirt road leading up to the farmhouse. It was dark enough to make my heart pound; swirling shapes of my own tension moved in the woods. We sat on the car for awhile, watching the occasional meteor shoot across the sky.
We weren't the only ones out at the Kennedy farm that night. As I found out later, the farm had become a Mecca for many people in the area, a place to go and see something, or maybe not see something. In particular, area teenagers with little else to do would spend the evening there, looking at the sky and drinking beer.
Our first stop was the cross. Kennedy had surrounded it with a simple fence, really just a chain strung through small loops at the top of short metal rods. The fence appeared to be more for decoration than protection. Kennedy had told the Truro Daily News that a UFO had appeared and brunt the cross into his hayfield, but the grass appeared mowed, not burnt.
We didn't see Ignatious Kennedy that night, but we did speak with his wife. She was making the rounds among the visitors, pointing out the locally famous landmarks of her farm, including the power line that a UFO was supposed to attached itself to. I had little trouble imagining the supposed spacecraft hanging beside the lines, maybe glowing, the energy seeping from one world to the next.
Then, turning in the opposite direction, she pointed to the horizon. "Look over there. You can see them. Look."
We followed her hand, and, sure enough, at regular intervals and in the far distance, what appeared to be multicoloured lights rose up from the trees, and then slowly faded away.
"They're coming out of the Northumberland Straight," said Mrs. Kennedy, indicating the narrow body of water that lies between the North Shore of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to the north. "They have a base there."
The objects, whatever they were, seemed to be appearing at regular intervals. While it was impossible to tell how far away they were, their behaviour was predictable. They seemed to move up from the horizon, and after reaching a particular height, would fade away into the night. And in another minute or so, another light would appear. We watched the lights as Kennedy's wife moved on to others.
A man who had been watching and listening with us laughed. "That's the wrong direction for the ocean," he said, and pointed the opposite way. "The ocean's that way. Those are planes taking off from Halifax Airport."
I turned back to look at the lights. The Halifax airport was about 120 miles to the south, the moon was new and the night dark. I wondered how a large number of glowing objects would be able to appear out of the Straight at regular intervals and not be noticed by people in Pictou, New Glasgow, or along the shore of PEI.
As it turned out, Kennedy's claims became more fair-fetched as the year went on. While I don't remember all the details, he had the water taken from a stream running on his property checked for radioactivity, and nothing was found. Then, he claimed a fan blade he had found was a product of alien technology. As I remember, the climax of the whole thing saw Kennedy dragged behind the car of a group of drunken teenagers, trying to stop them from destroying the UFO-created cross.
I have heard bits and pieces about Ignatious Kennedy since: that he ran for the provincial legislator in Halifax at some point, and that he hung out with "UFO types" on the Valley Road. I would welcome any further information.
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