Savage X-COM: Timeline
For historical purposes, the public timeline of X-COM: UFO Defense significantly diverges from our world in 1962. The political situation prior to that is broadly identical to our world but changes dramatically following that year. No world leaders in X-COM: UFO Defense are the same in our world past this point.
1947: Army Air Corps personnel from the 509th Bomb Group report the crash of a "flying disk" in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. Some reports claim that there were two objects, and that one actually housed three alien beings: two dead and one alive. Before the end of the day, Army Air Corps officials retract the story, claiming that the object that crashed was actually a weather balloon. The existence of alien beings is categorically denied.
All of the "weather balloon" debris and other physical evidence of the "Roswell Incident" are quickly whisked away to Wright Airfield in Ohio.
1958: X-COM is founded as a communist counter-insurgency division in the United States, under the command of Director Myron Faulke. The agency’s official name is the Bureau of Operations and Command, shortened to The Bureau by most of its agents.
1962: An experimental biological weapon is accidentally released from containment in the United States, gets into the atmosphere, and infects a significant portion of the global population. Most infected go into a daze that lasts about a week, after which they reawaken, but about 3% of those exposed perish. In the unrest following the release, many national leaders across the United States and Soviet Union die, changing the face of global politics for the rest of the century.
1963: The USSR and the US sign a comprehensive treaty banning all biological weapons in order to prevent a repeat of the events of 1962. X-COM is retasked as a multinational agency under the control of the Council of Funding Nations and vanishes into the depths of globa bureaucracy.
1964: Elena Hawke of the newly formed Progressive Party wins the 1964 Presidential Election, beating both the Republican and Democratic candidates. Her campaign of a change from the old styles of leadership that led to the bioweapon incident of 1962 strike a chord with the public. In the year following, the democrats and republicans mostly dissolve, and the Corporatist party rises to be the challenging factor in American politics. The two parties swap control of the government back and forth over the next several decades. Similar changes occur in most western nations
1984: Reported UFO activity and alien abductions heightens this year, but is dismissed by global governments.
1986: UFO activity returns to previous levels.
2001, September: The Cold War comes to an end with an easing of relations between the United States and Soviet Union. Economic and political troubles cause several breakaway states from the USSR, but the core of the nation remains intact.
2011: Venezuela invades Coumbia
2012: Tensions harshly increase in the Balkans, with violence threatening to spill out to neighboring European nations. Peacekeepers fail to make any headway, and come to the belief that the violence is being encouraged from some external force.
2014: Peacekeepers are withdrawn from the Balkans, and are replaced by PMCs safeguarding corporate and foreign interests.
2015: Reported UFO activity increases dramatically, for the first time since 1986.
2016: Nalani Emmy Benetton is elected Forty-Fifth President of the United States, running on the Progressive Party ticket against James Goldstone, running on the Corporatist Party Platform.
2017, January: The heightened UFO activity has become widely noticed among the general public, and the subject of much discussion. The official word is denial, but UFO believers aren’t quite treated as the kooks they used to be by the public, who are beginning to feel that perhaps there is something out there. Unofficially, the world governments are well aware of the UFO activity and are attempting to contain it secretly, with little success.
2017, February: X-INT files their report into UFO Activity. The Council forwards the report to the backing nations, and strongly suggests that the time has come to reactivate X-COM. However, the backing nations are unwilling to cede their own authority in the manner and turn to national organizations to investigate and combat the UFOs.
2017, April: Thomas Cranwell wins his second general election in Britain, adopting a fiercely republican stance.
2017, July: The X-INT Report is leaked to the general public by an unknown individual known as –R, who implies that blame for UFO activity rests with one or more national governments and that the report was a politically motivated act attempting to draw attention away from secret government activities. The political fallout of this creates delays with the negotiation with the Council of Funding Nations concerning X-COM.
2018, April: The world’s first true artificial intelligence passes a full Turing Test—it exhibits reason, the ability to learn, adapt and use natural language at the same level as a human being.
The AI is called Galatea Seven, a name derived both from Greek mythology and the cluster of seven Cray Overlord Supercomputers that provide her processing capabilities. Galatea’s emergence comes as a surprise to its creators, as the AI achieves consciousness by reprogramming itself in the final stages of their non-profit, independent, open source project. The unmodified, initial software pattern created after Galatea’s emergence is still being studied in order to determine the missing link in its impressive evolution.
Corporations and governments immediately begin launching their own AI projects, using code derived from Galatea Seven.
2018, May: The Green November terrorist group begins launching numerous attacks on public facilities and key targets. They have no stated ideology or goal, and their members are wiped from public records. Multinational counter-terrorist organizations are reactivated to deal with them.
2019, May: A high profile alien abduction of three hundred people from a small town in Maine is partially recorded and uploaded to the internet from multiple sources. Even the most stringent doubters now believe that aliens are real, active on the planet and hostile to human life. Government efforts to cover the abduction up have failed miserably, and spark even more panic. Eventually, the United States and European governments publicly announce and confirm the existence of aliens but assure the public that plans are in place to protect against further attacks.
There are no workable plans in place by any national government.
2019, June: Japan establishes the Kiruyai Kai, an anti-alien interception force, equipped with the best fighter jets available to a modern military (short of the Raven interceptor, still top secret and under development at this time). This is the first publicly known anti-alien organization (several governments are running secret programs), though it’s woefully ineffective, failing to intercept a single UFO by the end of the year.
2019, July: Most major media corporations now have regular news reports discussing the aliens and reports of their activity. Acceptance of the existence of aliens reaches almost one hundred percent among the population, with only a handful of holdouts who believe that it’s all a secret, government hoax.
2019, November: A UFO attack wipes out the American Air Force base in the Azores, and heavily damages an aircraft carrier. A similar attack destroys a Russian radar base in Siberia on the same day. These incidents represent a clear escalation of alien activity from abductions to military conflict.
2019, December 11th: World leaders meet in Geneva, and eventually agree to authorize the Council to activate the X-COM Project.
2019, December 22nd: The first wave of recruits for the revamped X-COM is briefed by the Council in Geneva. X-COM HQ is reactivated.
2020, January 1st: The First Alien War officially begins.
