UFO

In 1978 I was living and working in Toronto and not enjoying it very much anymore. I decided to come back to the west coast starting with a move to Regina to spend some time with my family again. I'd recently shot a national spot for Listerine where I played Harpo Marx (which the Marx family put a stop to after one cycle but that's another story) so I had a pretty good pay cheque coming and with what I had saved I knew I could swing it. So I took the train along with a couple of trunks of stuff and got to Regina in time for Christmas of 1978. I stayed with my parents over the holidays and in January of '79 moved into a little apartment in the Cathedral neighbourhood.

Fast forward several weeks and I'm working at Globe Theatre doing some play or other, I don't recall what. It was probably late February or even early March by now. The routine at The Globe was that after the show came down most of us would gather at The Copper Kettle restaurant on Scarth Street for a bite and a pint or two and then head off home. I almost always walked because it wasn't very far and those winter nights after midnight were very, very quiet in Regina in those days.

On one very cold, clear, quiet night, bundled in a huge down parka, hood up, frosted scarf wrapped around my face revealing only my eyes I walked home westward along 14th Avenue, crunching through the dry snow right in the middle of the empty street.

I looked up into the western sky and saw three lights formed into a triangle and moving. They moved around relative to each other as well as moved as a unit relative to me. The triangular formation remained a constant although it did alter it's shape, flowing from isosceles to equilateral to obtuse and so on. Always in motion.

I stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the street. looking up, and after what must have been only 15 or 20 seconds the triangular formation of lights sped off into the south western night, smaller and smaller until they winked out of sight.

That was amazing.

It gets more amazing.

That summer I accepted a contract to do two one acts plays in Banff, Chekhov's A Marriage Proposal and The Diary of Adam and Eve from Bock and Harnick's The Apple Tree. This was an attempt to get a professional company off the ground in Banff. The company transformed one of the ballrooms in the Banff Park Lodge into a theatre in the round and that's where we played. Decent enough notices, reasonable sales and massive interference from the Banff School (but that's another story).

This is where I met Jane. She was the resident costume designer at Theatre Calgary but with no summer season at TC was at liberty and took on the assistant producer gig for this. We've been together ever since.

Fast forward again. This time to November or December of '79. I've moved to Calgary from Regina. Jane's already expressing an interest in getting into film and television. I'm still wanting to get back to Vancouver and we've begun talking about all these things and more.

One clear, cold, snowless night we decide to go for a long walk around the parts of the city she likes the most. I don't remember what street we were walking along though I do remember we were walking west. I was telling Jane about the night I was walking home in Regina the year before when I saw the triangular formation of lights in the sky.

I pointed up into the south western sky saying they were just up there-

- and there they were.

Again.

As though I had, like Prospero, conjured them out of air, out of thin air.

The same triangular formation, the same flowing movement, the same everything although this time it seemed they actually remained clearly in sight for a slightly longer time before once again moving off, in flowing formation, into the south western sky, becoming smaller and smaller before they winked out of sight.

We both stood rooted to the spot this time, asking one another if that really just happened. It took a moment or ten before we continued our walk. Much more contemplatively.

Neither of us have ever seen those lights again.