Confrontations

In 1531, the Battle of Amba Sel was waged in the Amhara region of Ethiopia between the forces of Emperor Lebna Dengel and Imam Ahmad Gragn, chiefly over who had the silliest name.

In 1976, Jeremy Thorn began "Are you...?" but was interrupted by the man's abrupt nod. "You're Bugenhagen?". "Yes." Thorn eyed him suspiciously. Bugenhagen was a seventeeth-century exorcist. "That was nine generations ago." "But you.." "I'm the last," he replied abruptly. "but by no means the least."	Hallowe'en Story

In 1975, in Richard Matheson's I am Legend Robert Neville was trapped inside his fortified home. He had been bitten by a vampire bat in South America. Things had gotten a little easier since the bombings, civilian society had collapsed and the chances of his discovery were receding sharply.

In 1943, on October 28 the U.S. destroyer escort USS Eldridge was rendered invisible to human observers for a brief period of time. Equipment was recalibrated, and the experiment was performed again. This time, Eldridge not only became almost entirely invisible to the naked eye, but actually vanished from the area in a flash of blue light. However, the US naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, just over 600 km (375 miles) away, reported sighting the Eldridge off shore twenty minutes before the ship had left port, whereupon the Eldridge vanished from their sight and reappeared in Philadelphia, at the site it had originally occupied in an apparent case of accidental teleportation. Witnesses reporting a “greenish fog”. The physiological effects on the crew were profound. Almost all of the crew were violently ill. Some suffered from mental illness as a result of their experience; behavior consistent with schizophrenia is described in other accounts. Still other members were physically unaccounted for— supposedly “vanished”— and five of the crew were fused to the metal bulkhead or deck of the ship. Still others were said to fade in and out of sight. Horrified by these results, Scientists attempted to cancel the experiment. All of the surviving crew involved were discharged; in some accounts, brainwashing techniques were employed in an attempt to make the remaining crew members lose their memories concerning the details of their experience. The White House had plans for Project Rainbow. Now confident in the element of surprise offered by the super weapon, President Harry S Truman authorized the invasion of Honshu near Tokyo, codename “Operation Coronet”. Horrified, the physicist Albert Einstein added his name to the list of seventy scientists who would submit a petition to Truman the very next day. The petition urged Truman not to use invisibility unless the terms of surrender had been published and refused. Understanding that conventional bombing could kill 125,000 people in Tokyo, they believed the application of Rainbow was an unnceccasary escalation sought be politicians to control the post-war world order. The judgement of the scientists was prescient insofar as the only blocker preventing agreement in July 1945 was a guarantee over the Emperor's status. By way of explanation, Einstein also added a small note beneath his signature "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds". It is improbable Truman understood the irony of the humanist reference to the Bhagavad Gita.

Curtis LeMay	In 1962, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay and Head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power confront US President John F Kennedy, describing the conclusion to the Cuban Missiles Crisis as “the greatest defeat in our history" and advising that the U.S. should invade immediately. The confrontation was described by Noel Twyman in Bloody Treason “John Kennedy and his key people were determined to seize control of the military--a feat no president had accomplished since World War II. The chiefs resented the Kennedys and their whiz kids who had little or no experience in military command; the chiefs were accustomed to presidents who let them do their thing without meddlesome interference from politicians.
Perhaps the two most dangerous of all the generals were Curtis LeMay and his head of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power. General LeMay is legendary for his mania to start World War III by goading the Soviet Union with unauthorized reconnaissance flights that penetrated their forbidden boundaries.”

In 2008, on the eve of Election Day, Texan singer/songwriter and Independent US Presidential Candidate Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman indicated strong support at the polls, "Thank God for bars and dance halls".	Kinky Friedman

Time quake	In 1943, the secret experiment known as Project Rainbow was conducted at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania. Seconds apart, Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron leapt from the deck of the Eldridge while it was in hyperspace between Philadelphia and Norfolk. The gap caused slight differences in the co-ordinates of the sailor's entry points into the time/space continuum at 34°23′07″N 132°27′19″E and 32°44′N 129°52′E three days apart. The US military was forced to concoct the most elaborate cover-up story of all time to explain the time quakes in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1962, the Turkish Missile Crisis ends when President Kennedy announces that he had ordered the removal of American missile bases in Izmir. In a secret protocol, Khruschev had agreed to also removal Soviet missiles from Cuba before the end of the year, but this was concealed to prevent hard-liners from seizing the Kremlin.	Kennedy

Second Thoughts

Alternate Historian says, to ensure we fill the page and deliver something for everyone, we're taking a slightly different publishing route for 2008. By year-end, six stories a day will have been pre-written and we're already 35% there. This will include no more than 60% re-use from the previous years, selecting the best of reverse events and truncated story formats (2 or 3 parts at most) leaving out the longer stories and threads. Yes we've done Chappaquiddick slightly different .. again!

As we roll in to the new year, we're going to add up to 4 extra stories per day comprising "spontaneous" and contemporary items (from recent news feeds) plus .. reader's items.

Thats where we need your help to make 2008 a multi-author magazine with greater variety. Please email your stories to the Alternate Historian and do include the post date please. The key point is you can fire the idea over, and let us draft up the story, we're not insisting on final copy.

"The advocates of nuclear armament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, mutually assured destruction would prevent future conflict. They would do well to ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793. 70,000 civilians were killed by the fire-bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, followed on August 9 by a similiar massacre a Nagasaki.

	We can only recoil in horror at estimations of the casaulties from the use of the doomsday weapons of the Manhattan Project. ~ General Ira C.Eaker, Lt General, USAF

Those who approved the bombings were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945." As early as 1944, USAF leadership realised that atomic weapons would place military leadership in the hands of an Imperial Presidency. Continued use of conventional bombing was advocated, after all, what more could atomic weapons achieve in already defeated Japan?

In 1945, after demobilization, former high school teacher Edgar Derby was reunited with his family in Indianapolis. His son returned from the Pacific Theatre shortly afterwards. Derby was forty-four years old - he had pulled political wires into the army at his age. He had confidently expected to be promoted to Captain, in view of his age and experience. Instead, he had witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden. And the trial and execution of his friend, Kurt Vonnegut, for stealing a teapot from the ruins. That act of high irony would form the conclusion to his semi-biographical works Slaughterhouse-Five. SH5 was the reserviced abbatoir where Derby and Vonnegut were imprisoned in January 1945, shortly before the fire-bombing. And so it goes.

Ford Torino Cobra	In 1962, in his office in Detroit, Michigan President of the Ford Motor Company Robert Strange McNamara opened the design for the new Ford Torino Cobra, set to launch in the North American market in '68. Looking up, and signaling his approval, McNamara was startled to see the office had changed completely. Now sitting in the Oval Office, he had answered yes to the fiery looking Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Curtis LeMay, but, oh dear God - What had been the question?.

In 1962, a U2 surveillance flight over San Cristobal in Pinar del Río Province, Western Cuba took photos of Manfred von Richthofen and other blood descendants capable of shape-shifting into airplane-sized bats that engaged in aerial combat. von Richthofen, , alias the Red Baron, was a flying ace of the German Luftstreitkräfte who had won his first aerial combat near Cambrai, France in 1916. His deployment in Cuba represented the start of an apocalyptic confrontation during the Cold War between Graf Von Dracula's Imperial Germany and the United States. The true story of how close the two aggressors came to war was masterfully described by Janet Title and Kim Newman in 1995 in the Bloody Red Baron.	Red Baron

Bush	In 1962, CIA Agent George HW conceived of the greatest conspiracy of the twentieth century. At this time shortly after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, US President John F Kennedy was threatening to break-up the agency into a thousand pieces. Via George de Mohrenschildt Bush had discovered that former US marine Lee Harvey Oswald had returned from the Soviet Union to Dallas. Bush correctly suspected that Oswald had been substituted for a KGB agent. What if, mused Bush, he could arrange a CIA hit on the President, concealed as a KGB plot?

In 2007, Rat returns to his computer monitor in College Station. He has a plan for to end the war through his limitless control over the Mesh. However, he has no idea if it will work, if indeed he can put it in to action at all.	Robbie Taylor

Legends

In 2007, US President George W. Shrub commented on the phantom press conference given by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). As the California wildfires raged, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing. Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices. They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News, MSNBC and other outlets. Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

Shrub described this disgraceful stage-managed event as the worst abuse of power since he had become the government. (Aids later qualified this statement as "entered the service of government").

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In 1976, Jeremy Thorn began "Are you...?" but was interrupted by the man's abrupt nod. "You're Bugenhagen?". "Yes." Thorn eyed him suspiciously. Bugenhagen was a seventeeth-century exorcist. "That was nine generations ago." "But you.." "I'm the last," he replied abruptly. "but by no means the least.".	Hallowe'en Story

In 1976, Robert Neville lived the life of a recluse, trapped inside his fortified home. He studied the vampiris bacteria that had infected him in South America. Outside the survivors of the bombings tried to break in. "Come out Robert Neville" yelled his neighbour Ben Cortman, believing Neville was hoarding precious food inside.

In 2009, the Catholic Church was astonished by news that Pope Benedict had written a foreword to a controversial biography of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The ethnic Albanian nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87. Mother Teresa was a globally beloved symbol of saintly devotion to the poor, who spent her last fifty years secretly struggling with doubts about her faith. A research team led by Rev. Brian Kolodiechuk of the Missionaries of Charity Order had been examing secret letters for publication in a new biography, Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light. It appears that an unknown researcher had released the letters to the press after being shocked to read "How painful is thus unknown pain - I have no Faith".

	If there be God- please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. ~ Secret Letter from Mother Theresa In the biography's foreword, Pope Benedict write that even the late Mother Teresa of Calcutta "suffered from the silence of God" despite her immense charity and faith.

It is significant that the Pope mentioned Mother Teresa's torment about God's silence as not being unusual because there was some speculation that the letters could hurt the procedure to make her a saint. "All believers know about the silence of God," wrote the Pope. "Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God," he stated. He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe. When the German-born pontiff visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz last year, he publicly asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died there. The full article is available at UK News

Curtis LeMay	In 1962, Curtis LeMay's military government started the painful process of rebuilding the nation from the United States' “greatest defeat in [our] history". Writing later in his autobiography, “Bombs Away” wrote "I had blood upon my hands as I did this, but not because I preferred to bathe in blood. It was because I was part of a primitive world where men still had to kill in order to avoid being killed, or in order to avoid having their beloved Nation stricken and emasculated." Some of the blood upon his hands was John F Kennedy, some more was on the the carpet of the Oval Office where LeMay had shot the Commander in Chief the day before.

In 2008, on the eve of Election Day, Texan singer/songwriter and Independent US Presidential Candidate Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman shared his thoughts on the legalization of soft drugs. Friedman supported the decriminalization of marijuana, though he didn't advocate making its sale legal. "I'm not talking about like Amsterdam," he's noted, "We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the paedophiles and the politicians".	Kinky Friedman

MacArthur	In 1956, with diplomacy failing to reverse Nassers’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal, Britain and France embarked on preparations to regain control of the Canal, and together with Israel, launched a military operation in the Peninsula. US President Douglas MacArthur was fully supportive, it was about time some one else started to get “Brass Hat” and rescue the Third World from Communism.

In 1994, on this day Francisco Martin Duran fired at least 29 shots with a semi-automatic rifle at the White House from Pennsylvania Avenue, outside the south lawn, killing US President Clinton who was one of among the men in dark suits standing there. Duran was sentenced to 40 years in prison.	Clinton

Love and Hatred

Bombing	In 1945, BBC News reported: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden: 'British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000lb of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000lb bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.'
Dresden

Amongst the dead was a twenty-two year old American GI, Kurt Vonnegut. A man of German descent, he had been transferred to Slaughterhouse-Five, a nearby prisoner of war camp. Vonnegut and his colleagues had been hiding below ground, but were killed when the ceiling collapsed from the shock waves of the bombing. And so it goes.

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In 1968, astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert deciphered an extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy. At first his warnings were ignored, however reconsideration was duly given when returning Lunar Module Pilot Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin lifted his visor at the splashdown point, east of Wake Island on July 24 1969.

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In 1779, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific Captain James Cook narrowly escaped death at the hand of natives of the Sandwich Islands. He had mistakenly returned to Hawaii in the season dedicated to Ku, god of war, inadvertently upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population.

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In 1956, Malcolm Little received parole and was released from Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. A dangerous criminal, Little had avoided the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to organize with other black soldiers so he could 'kill some crackers.' Incarcerated for a decade, there was a lot of catch-up to be done.

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In 1956, at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khruschev revealed than Lenin was a shape-shifting Vampire. A number of strokes in the 1920s forced the undead nosferatu to possess the body of Comrade Stalin to permit him to continue his misrule. He had even maintained his corpse in a Kremlin mausoleum just in case a Dracula style exit was necessary.

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In 269, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men, in order to make them a better pool to draft soldiers from. The Christian cleric Valentius was known for his defiance of Rome, and many young couples came to him in order to wed. Valentius performed the ceremonies gladly until the local centurion told him that he would be executed after the next one. Valentius relented, but the decree was rescinded in 271 after Claudius' death, anyway, so nothing ever really came of it.

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In, 47421 BCE, Telka the Speaker is wooed by and mated with the father of her first children, the man she names Komar. She learns to count the days in a year by the anniversary of this day each year that she was with him. His love for her led him to throw himself in front of a boar that was charging her; although he saved her and killed the boar, he died from injuries he received. Telka made sure that each of her descendants celebrated this day out of her love for him.

In 498, Pope Gelasius names this day the Feast of Saint Valentine. In his honor, prisoners across the land were given a meal of ox-hearts and red wine, to signify the blood that the saint had shed while a prisoner of the pagan Romans. The traditional feast of hearts and wine continues to this day across Christendom, although the practice has spread from the jailhouse to all those who might need a prayer for more freedom.

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In 2021, a rare form of cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, concentrated in and around Chicago. 99.9% of the city only feels a slight tingling, but one man, Eddie Valens, finds his reflexes and running speed amplified tenfold - plus, he is now able to evoke feelings of love and peace in nearly anyone with but a word. Putting these two together, and donning a pink costume, Eddie takes the name Saint Valentine and proceeds to fight crime in Chicago for nearly a decade as one of the only real superheroes in the 21st century.

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On February 14, 2003, a group of high ranking Iraqi generals, fearing the disastrous effects of U:S. invasion stage a coup. They know that Sadam as a sentimental guy would be distracted at big party for his family. The succeed in killing their President and his sons. The new junta is composed of Sunni Baathists, but they extend the hand of friendship to the world community and invite weapons inspectors. What would the last half of a decade have brought to Iraq ?

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In 1965, the Soviet States of America bans the unofficial Valentines Day holiday. Comrade Representative O'Hare of Chicago, in her statement calling for the ban, said, 'No other holiday so cheapens the idea of romantic love, or saps the will to fight of our comrades in the street, as this so-called Valentines Day.'

In 1167 AUC, the Lupercalia Festival is finally made a separate holiday from the festival celebrating the founding of Rome. This festival of ritual matchmaking, popular for hundreds of years, was certainly the highlight of the 2-day celebration at the ides of February, and most Romans felt that it deserved separation from the more staid founding ceremony.

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Alexander	In 1974, Soviet authorities executed Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two days before, Mr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's Moscow flat and taken away for questioning by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His charge, under Article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, was punishable with death by firing squad or a minimum of ten years in prison along with confiscation of property.
Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago depicting life in the labour camps was published in the West. He had already spent a total of ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings.

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