on this day French president Eduoard Daladier (pictured) met with a delegation of Martian envoys near Paris to witness a demonstration of a directed energy weapon which the chief envoy said would enable France and its allies to better defend themselves against possible future attack by Germany.

This weapon, nicknamed a "heat ray" by an American newspaper correspondent who was covering the demonstration for the Chicago Tribune, was capable of vaporizing even the hardest targets in the blink of an eye; in its first test firing on Earth soil it disintegrated more than a dozen heavy tanks in barely two seconds.

Part Three Movie footage of the test firing was duly sent to the British embassy in Paris, which in turn dispatched it to the Ministry of Defence offices in London for further review.A new thread by Chris Oakley

One British leader who was especially fascinated by the heat ray demonstration film was ex-Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. Churchll, a fervent opponent of the Nazis from the day Hitler first came into power in 1933, saw the weapon as a lethally effective countermeasure to the Third Reich's constantly expanding bomber force and submarine fleet.

By the spring of 1939 Churchill would be personally overseeing the construction of nearly a hundred heat ray projectors in Great Britain, twenty-five of them lined up along the coast of the Straits of Dover to deter the Germans from mounting an invasion attempt.

Western fears that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had forged an alliance with the militarists trying to overthrow Mars' royal house were realized when Stalin used the occasion of the 21st anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to announce the Kremlin had signed what he called "an historic accord" with the Martian militarists to receive weapons and technological assistance from them in return for Moscow's support of their insurrection against the Martian monarch.

Part FourBut that was only the beginning of the bad news for the West: just 24 hours after Stalin dropped his diplomatic bombshell, Third Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop set off another one with the news Martian militarist technicians were assisting German rocket scientists in upgrading facilities at the ballistic weapons development complex in the Baltic city of Peenemünde.

And two days after Ribbentrop's announcement, the Japanese war ministry accepted an offer from the Martian militarists to furnish the Imperial Army with a new type of improved armor for its tanks and blueprints for a portable heat ray that could be used by its infantry.

These developments prompted the West to accelerate its own efforts to master Martian technology. The most dramatic example of this acceleration was in the United States, where a research and development laboratory was hastily established at the town of Roswell, New Mexico on orders from President Roosevelt's Secretary of War Harry Woodring.

CBS Radio producer Orson Welles, who had been responsible for broadcasting the first accounts of the Martians' arrival at Grovers Mill, would be among those in attendance at a White House press conference in late November announcing the laboratory's historic breakthrough in creating an airframe capable of traveling at the speed of sound.

November 10^th 1938,