Guest Post: Tunguska UFO

This article originally appeared on Today In Alternate History.

On June 30, 1908, on this fateful day in alternate history, an alien spaceship crashed into the Tunguska River in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal. The extraterrestrial occupants were rescued and carried to safety by Evenki natives and Russian settlers.

The Russian Court was subsequently offered a single gift to repay the debt of gratitude. The aliens made a helpful suggestion based upon an observation of a point of interest made during their approach to Earth. Their sensors had taken remote measurements of a narrow strait of water separating two land-masses. This Bering Strait offered a rich opportunity for construction. Not only could human beings use this land crossing, but it would also provide an additional benefit of blocking the cold Pacific current from entering the Arctic. Over a few decades, this would warm the Russian north coast, bringing a new fertility that might accelerate the development of agriculture.

It was highly ironic then that the Alaskan territory across the Straits had been Russian America until the Seward Purchase which had occurred some forty years earlier. Had the Russians kept the land north of the Yukon River, then they would have gained the full benefits of a uniquely strategic territory. Of course such a windfall might well have triggered military aggression from the expansionist German Empire, so perhaps this Russian/American benefit sharing was just as well after all. As a consequence of the Seward Purchase , the Russians were obliged to negotiate with the United States. This was a fresh round of negotiations occurring only two years after President Theodore Roosevelt had played such a key role in settling the Russo-Japanese dispute in the Far East.

Serving in the final year of his second term, the show-boating "Bull Moose" was characteristically taken by the prospect of further bolstering his historic legacy. As a consequence of his impending departure from office, he was in the heady mood to agree to the land crossing. But he also proposed the building of two canals that would permit navigation. TR used the bully pit of the Presidency to demand that Congress finance the American Arctic shipping canal so the Great White Fleet could protect the Northwest Passage north of Canada and develop America's own shortcut from Europe to Asia in competition with the Russian Siberian coast route.

Once agreed to between USA/Russia, the causeway would be built on top of the dam. But European governments soon began to fear that the Bering Crossing would move the epicentre of the world to Asia. Tensions were still rising at the point when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. In a final act of benign intervention, the aliens helped to smooth over this gathering crisis before they departed for their home planet in July 1914.

Author's Note:

In reality, this is an fictionalized ASB account of the Tunguska Event although OTL the crossing actually was proposed by the Soviet Union in 1956.