I subscribe to a couple of services that watch Google for new references to selected search terms. As a result of this I discovered a blog, “Homeless Veteran of Microsoft” written by a former Microsoft employee, Kerry Wayne Burgess. Burgess claims to have resigned from Microsoft due to an ethics dispute with his supervisor, but reading this blog I suspect that he was sliding into the mental illness that he is now clearly in the grip of. He opened his blog in February 2006 and makes daily entries even though he is homeless. Somewhere along the way he has become convinced that Kerry Burgess is “an alias for the covert U.S. military operative Thomas Allyn Ray”. Thomas Allyn Ray is a real 1982 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He believes that he was given a new identity as Kerry Burgess as part of treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and that his “real” identity and memories as Thomas Allyn Ray were taken from him. He believes that Microsoft is trying to kill him because he has "discovered" his true identity in a photograph taken in the Israeli air raid on Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1981, which he believes he participated in even though he was a Midshipman at the Naval Academy at the time. But “my theory to all this, the key to all this, is that I was some kind of extreme child prodigy and, among several other accomplishments, I could fly a jet by the age of 8 years old. My theory is that I started college at Princeton University on 9/2/65 at the age of 6.5 years and then graduated with a Master's degree in computer science in 1970. From there, I studied at Oxford, possibly at Lincoln College, although I don't know what I was studying. I believe I graduated from Oxford in 1973 though. I don't actually remember any of this but I found some clues that I have started to believe represents details of my real but lost identity.”

He also believes that as Thomas A. Ray he flew to the moon with Apollo 11 (he would have been 10 at the time), and then flew an extended mission at the age of 16 to the the outer planets of the solar system to intercept the Comet Hyakutake: “I have been thinking for a while that I made four separate flights into the coma of the comet to deliver the ordnance that would divert the comet. I am still thinking that just as I was about the clear the coma on that first return to my Project Orion ship for another round of ordnance, I smacked into a large boulder as I was maneuvering to avoid other objects and my shuttle craft, or whatever we called it, was a total wreck. I had some kind of maneuvering thrusters that I used to get back to my Orion ship, but I almost didn't make it. I am also still thinking I incorporated that incident into the 1979 “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” in the scene where “Spock” uses an escape suit to fly into the “V'Ger” ship. I made 3 more flights into the comet and fortunately didn't have anymore collisions as that was my only other shuttle craft for transporting the ordnance. The mission was succesfully completed on 7/4/1976, as astronomers on Earth would later confirm, and then I left for the Jupiter moon Callisto, where I thought my oxygen supply would run out. I found water ice on the moon though and was able to convert enough to oxygen to make a return to Earth on 4/14/1977.”

This is a story both fascinating and tragic. An obviously bright man gripped by paranoia and delusion roams the streets of Seattle, ducking into libraries and other public Internet venues to update his blog, living in constant fear that Microsoft will kill him. He lives in a shadowy land where everything boils down to numbers, especially 33 and 59, that prove that all he believes to be true is really the truth. Now I feel compelled to track down Thomas A. Ray '82 to see if he is aware of his alter-ego and what he thinks of him. I also think I might want to do a novelization of Kerry Burgess' life and pay him for the rights, but I don't know if he can even handle money. Anyway, it's odd, a bit frightening and yet strangely compelling to reconstruct the life of Kerry Burgess as Thomas A. Ray.

James Traub, writing in the New York Times has a good, high-level view of education at the Naval Academy in “What a Naval Officer Now Knows”. What they're really looking at here is how the education is different now than in the days of John McCain. One of the points he makes is that tenured faculty at USNA can teach their classes essentially with no interference and any way they want to. During my years at the Boat School, I was a European Studies Major, and I slanted my studies very heavily toward history--because that's what I liked! In my time there, I had three history courses that were taught with a Marxist perspective; one of my senior courses, Imperialism, used as a textbook Imperialism by V.I. Lenin, printed by the Export Press of the People's Republic of China. I can state without hesitation that the ability to think independently and form my own opinions and conclusions was clearly a part of what was expected of me during my Naval Academy experience. I have a minor reputation as an outspoken critic of my alma mater, but really I am convinced they are doing the best job of all of the service academies in producing officers who can think. (My real criticism is of the Alumni Association and the closed-off exclusive good-'ol-boys excluding any real participation or governance by the vast majority of alumni--but that's outside the scope of this comment.) I can only speak for myself but it was clear to me that just as Traub writes in his article, critical thinking is still an expected skill at USNA. Of course I was not an engineer.