B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (114 page)

The Invasion
- 1979

Pyramids of Mars
- 1974

Mawdryn Undead
- 1969

Unit Year -5

Around this time, the Cybermen contacted Tobias Vaughn, who offered them help with their invasion. Soon afterwards, Vaughn’s company, International Electromatics (IE), marketed the micromonolithic circuit. It revolutionised electronics, and made IE the world leader in the field.
 [127]

Unit Year -4

The Web of Fear
 [128]

Mysterious cobwebs started to appear across London, the fog thickened and “bears” and “monsters” attacked people in the Underground. Londoners fled in terror, and the army was called in to restore order. They found themselves under siege in the London Underground, where the disturbances were concentrated. Faced with an attack from the Intelligence, a sentience billions of years older than Earth and with its own army of robot Yeti, the military were reduced to blowing up tunnels to try to contain the situation. The second Doctor arrived with Jamie and Victoria, and met Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart for the first time. Together, they fought the Yeti, and the Doctor banished the Intelligence.

This became known as the London Event, and the official story was that there had been an industrial accident. Lethbridge-Stewart retained the Locus, a small carved statuette of a Yeti as a memento. Six months later, he met Air Vice-Marshall “Chunky” Gilmore in the Alexander Club and learnt that Earth had been invaded in the winter of 1963. He also learned there was evidence of aliens visiting Earth since the time of the Pharoahs.
 [129]

The public were told that the Yeti incident was actually a nerve gas attack.
 [130]
Lethbridge-Stewart attended a Middle East Peace Conference.
 [131]

Aware that the world faced new threats, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) was established.
 [132]
Lethbridge-Stewart appeared before the UN Security Council and, in part, UNIT was formed because of his efforts.
 [133]
The Russian branch of UNIT was called Operativnaya Gruppa Rasvedkoy Obyedinyonnih Natsiy (OGRON).
 [134]
The French branch was called NUIT.
 [135]
UNIT had a liaison office in Bombay.
 [136]
There was also a South East Asian branch, UNIT-SEA.
 [137]

Enabling legislation was passed in the UK (it was drafted by the future Minister for Ecology).
 [138]
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the Scots Guards Colonel who had led the soldiers that repelled the Yetis in the Underground, was promoted to Brigadier and made commanding officer of the British UNIT contingent.
 [139]
The Brigadier was present when UNIT took ownership of Kriegeskind Castle in Germany, and made it one of dozens of worldwide UNIT facilities that watched for signs of invasion, the paranormal and the unexplained.
 [140]

Gas warfare was banned by international agreement.
 [141]
SOS signals were abandoned.
 [142]
The British space programme was blossoming with a series of Mars Probe Missions. Space technology had dramatically improved since the old moonshot days. The new fuel variant M3, though highly volatile, provided a great deal more thrust than conventional fuels, and decontamination procedures had been reduced from two days to one hour. Space research took place at the Space Centre in London, not far from UNIT HQ. In this complex was Space Control (callsign: “Control”) where missions were co-ordinated. Astronauts were selected from the military.
 [143]

The British astronauts Grosvenor and Guest became the first men on Mars. They planted the Union Flag on Mount Olympus.
 [144]
The British astronaut Carrington, part of the Mars Probe 6 mission, discovered radioactive aliens on Mars that killed his crew. Returning to Earth, and terrified by what he saw as a threat to humanity, Carrington formed an elaborate plan to destroy them. On his return, he was promoted to General and led the newly-formed Space Security Department.
 [145]

Tales from the Vault
 [146]

A criminal gang staged a series of robberies in Manchester, Birmingham and the surrounding counties, using an alien crystal to erase the memory of any eye-witnesses. The second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe foiled the scheme. The Doctor later gave the crystal to the Brigadier, complete with a copy of Zoe’s memories as a user “manual”/interface. UNIT used the crystal to extract memories from anyone who witnessed alien activity, keeping secret the existence of extra-terrestrials.

(20th December, 1968 to 30th January, 1969) - The Left-Handed Hummingbird
 [147]

Early in its history, UNIT had a Paranormal Division. After extensive trials, they recruited six genuine human psychics. The division was run by Lieutenant Hamlet Macbeth, and investigated Fortean events. Following “the Happening”, a massive psychic event in St John’s Wood, London on 21st December, 1968, the Paranormal Division was disbanded.

Ace foiled an attempt to kill the Beatles on the roof of the Apple building on 30th January, 1969. At least two of the Doctor’s incarnations went to Woodstock.

Unit Year 1

A Cyber-scout ship surveyed Earth in preparation for an invasion, but its pilot died when the vessel crashed near Cambridge. It remained buried until Gareth Arnold, a local dentist, happened upon it some years later.
 [148]

(April) UNIT radar stations tracked a shower of meteorites in an odd formation over Essex.
 [149]

(summer) - The Invasion
 [150]

UNIT began monitoring the activities of International Electromatics after hundreds of UFO sightings occurred on IE property. IE now controlled every computer line in the world by undercutting the competition, and Tobias Vaughn had built a business empire around his philosophy of uniformity and exact duplication. One of IE’s most successful products was a disposable radio, which had sold ten million units. Vaughn was in league with the Cybermen, who were using his company as a front for their invasion plans. The second Doctor, Jamie, Zoe and UNIT defeated the Cybermen. Vaughn was
apparently
killed.

One cybership crashed in the South Pole.
 [151]

After the collapse of IE, Ashley Chapel, Vaughn’s chief scientist, set up his own company named Ashley Chapel Logistics.
 [152]
Vaughn, though, had survived by downloading his consciousness into a waiting robot body. For the next thousand years, he would secretly run a succession of massive electronics corporations that developed state-of-the-art equipment. He would re-encounter the Doctor in 2975.
 [153]
The public were told the mass unconsciousness that occurred during the Cybermen incursion was because Earth passed through the tail of a comet. Isobel Watkins’ photos of Cybermen were dismissed as fakes.
 [154]

The “Big Bug Era” began, as Earth was invaded and threatened by alien life. Many books and fanzines trying to catalogue and expose these invasions were published.
 [155]
One of the most popular fanzines was
Who’s Who and What’s That
. The government, though, covered much of UNIT’s work with D-notices, making it difficult to keep track of the dates. The time-displaced Isaac Summerfield set up a secret organisation to “mop up” after UNIT, with the intention of getting stranded aliens home. Initially, it was based in Llarelli.
 [156]

Mars Probe 7 was launched. After seven months, Mars Probe 7 landed on Mars and radio contact was lost, but two weeks later it took off from the red planet... or at least, something did.
 [157]

The third Doctor exiled to Earth

(October, “months” after The Invasion) - Spearhead from Space
 [158]

UNIT went on a covert recruitment drive, bringing Liz Shaw up from Cambridge to act as a scientific advisor. The very same day, reporters were tipped off that a mysterious patient with two hearts was present at Ashbridge Cottage Hospital.

This “spaceman” was the newly regenerated third Doctor, exiled to Earth in the twentieth-century timezone by the Time Lords. He turned up the morning after a meteorite shower, and UNIT were soon on the scene. The meteorites were Nestene Energy Units, part of a plan to conquer the Earth using killer automata Autons. With the Doctor’s help, UNIT led an assault on a plastics factory in Essex, mere hours after reports surfaced of “walking shop dummies” in city centres. They defeated the Nestene.

Captain Mike Yates led the clean-up operation after the Nestene Invasion, and discovered a single Energy Unit that had not been recovered by the Autons. It remained UNIT property, but was loaned to the National Space Museum.
 [159]
Gareth Wostencroft was one of the UNIT soldiers involved with the first Auton invasion.
 [160]

The Nestene invasion was covered up as a terrorist attack, which became known as Black Thursday. A report filed by journalist James Stevens had all references to UNIT erased. This prompted him to start investigating the mysterious organisation, an undertaking he would pursue for several years.
 [161]

The Vault, Department C19’s storehouse of discarded alien artifacts, recovered two Nestene Energy Units. Dr Ingrid Krafchin, a researcher for SeneNet, began experiments with plastic.
 [162]
The Doctor was put on UNIT’s payroll as “Doctor John Smith”, but did not cash his cheques.
 [163]
The Brigadier saw his friend, Kolonel Heinrich Konrad, after a debriefing on the initial Auton incident.
 [164]

Unit Year 2

(winter) - Doctor Who and the Silurians
 [165]

UNIT investigated power losses at the experimental Wenley Moor research centre. These were caused by the Silurians, reptile people who ruled the Earth millions of years before, and who had revived from suspended animation. The Silurians saw the humans as apes and plotted to wipe them out - first with a plague, then by dispersing the Van Allen Belt. This would have heated Earth to a level suitable for Silurians, but not to human life. The third Doctor attempted to negotiate, but the Brigadier triggered explosives that sealed off the Silurian base and possibly killed those within.

This was Earth Reptile Shelter 873, led by Okdel L’da.
 [166]
James Stevens followed a tip and managed to (briefly) phone the Brigadier at Wenley Moor. The plague spread to Paris airport. Four hundred people died, twenty of them abroad, and three ministers resigned.
 [167]
The Doctor believed that the Silurians at Wenley Moor were killed.
 [168]
The Brigadier was issued with direct orders to destroy the Silurians.
 [169]
Those orders came from C19.
 [170]
Mike Yates lead a team looking for surviving Silurian technology.
 [171]

Mortimus (also known as the Monk) used the captured Chronovore Artemis to create an alternative history where the Doctor died during the Wenley Moor adventure.
 [172]

= In a parallel timeline, the Doctor was captured and killed by the Silurians before he could find an antidote to their plague. Millions died in a matter of days, a time that would become known to the survivors as “the Nightmare”.
 [173]

The Silurian Imorkal was hatched. In one reality, he was one of the Silurian masters of Earth. In the proper timeline, he eventually worked for NATO.
 [174]
A UNIT station in Antarctica investigated a possible Silurian shelter uncovered in the 1920s.
 [175]
Another Silurian shelter was discovered and destroyed in Oregon.
 [176]
The government destabilised under political pressure following the plague.
 [177]
Anne Travers became scientific advisor to the cabinet.
 [178]

Old Soldiers
 [179]

Kolonel Heinrich Konrad was now head of the UNIT facility at Kriegeskind Castle, and oversaw research on Project 995: an attempt to create a supersoldier using the psychotropic elements of an extra-terrestrial plant - a phylum that originated in Galaxy M33 - found in the jungles of South East Asia.