Giant Surprise Parts 1 & 2

Author says: what if the events portrayed in "Land Of The Giants" really happened? Please note that the opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the author(s).

on this day U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Alexander B. Fitzhugh was committed to Bethesda Naval Hospital's psychiatric ward after an incident in which he accosed the pilot of a London-bound United Airlines jet and urged the jet's flight crew to turn around "before it's too late".

When later questioned by hospital psychiatrists what that remark meant, Lt. Cmdr. Part 1

Fitzhugh claimed that on a previous flight to London his plane had been drawn into a time-space rift and crash-landed in what he described as "a land of giants" populated by people ten times the size of a normal human being. Initially his doctors regarded his story as a delusion resulting from the post-traumatic stress disorder Fitzhugh had suffered since serving a grueling tour of duty in Vietnam 25 years earlier; however, when three of the commander's fellow passengers came forward with similar accounts of the rift Fitzhugh had described, the staff of Bethesda began to think maybe their patient wasn't so delusional after all.

On June 23^rd,

on this day socialite and former Studio 54 disco regular Valerie Scott met with 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer in Los Angeles to recount her experiences with the time-space rift described by Lt. Cmdr. Alexander Fitzhugh to his doctors at Bethesda shortly after his admission to the hospital's psychiatric ward.

Scott's interview was the first account by someone other than Fitzhugh about the so-called "land of giants" the Part 2commander had alluded to in his initial therapeutic session; her story, like his, was at first viewed with skepticism as she had been known as a serious drinker in her Studio 54 heyday. In fact, at the time the 60 Minutes interview was broadcast Scott was preparing to file a libel suit against the National Enquirer for printing a story which alleged she had relapsed into alcoholism.

Scott's comments about the rift might have been dismissed as a hallucination but for two small yet important events. First, on the day after CBS aired the Scott interview a routine pass by a U.S. weather satellite over England picked up unusual electrical surges in the vicinity of where Fitzhugh said the phenomenon had originated; second, in early July energy tycoon and amateur film buff Mark Wilson released to the press a series of home movies clearly showing the rift's outline as well as brief glimpses of the so-called "land of giants".

July 5^th,

on this day energy mogul and self-made millionaire Mark Wilson held a press conference at his Houston corporate headquarters to reveal the existence of a series of home movies he'd filmed of the time-space rift described by Alexander B.

Fitzhugh in his account of the so-called "land of giants" at first the media were reluctant to lend much credence to these films, fearful they might be as phony Part 3as the bogus "Hitler diaries" that had duped the world a few months earlier, but after extensive photographic analysis it was determined that the films were genuine and the press started taking the rift idea more seriously.

Three weeks after Wilson's press conference the Reagan Administration's top science officials met at the White House to determine what should be done next in regard to the phenomenon; the end result of this meeting was Project Spindrift, a combined NASA/Defense Department program that marked the first serious effort in human history to explore parallel universes.

Author says to view guest historian's comments on this post please visit the Today in Alternate History web site.

Imagine what would be, if history had occurred a bit differently. Who says it didn't, somewhere? These fictional news items explore that possibility. Possibilities such as America becoming a Marxist superpower, aliens influencing human history in the 18th century and Teddy Roosevelt winning his 3rd term as president abound in this interesting fictional blog.