Director Michael Bay recently revealed that the next installment in his Transformers film franchise may be the last. As much as that news saddens us (not really), we were more intrigued by what little was revealed of the plot: the story will center around the U.S.-Soviet space race, which apparently involved our friends from Cybertron!
This fact, combined with the knowledge that an ancient Cybertronian weapon resides in one of the great pyramids, makes us wonder: how long have the aliens been influencing our history? What other historical events could they have played a part in that we didn’t know about? We scoured our high school textbooks and read between the lines to find the unexplained moments where shape-shifting techno-organic beings from outer space set the human race on a different course.
2600 B.C. Who built Stonehenge? Was it druids? Did human hands erect the 13-to-24-foot-tall pillars that would mystify future generations? Or was an enterprising Transformer merely laying the foundation for the first Cybertronian-style restaurant on Earth, offering a complete menu of food “just like your manufacturing supervisor used to synthesize”?
1937 A.D. The Hindenburg disaster, in which a cross-Atlantic Zeppelin burst into flames over New Jersey, was at least partially responsible for the death of the blimp industry. It was also entirely responsible for the death of Blimp-Bot, a heroic Autobot who had dedicated his life to providing humans with comfortable air travel and was punished for his hubris by the sky-hogging Decepticons.
1200 B.C. The Trojan Horse, which the Greeks famously used to win the Trojan War, has been a point of debate between historians, who wonder if the soldier-filled wooden horse was in reality some kind of battering ram. However, as it turns out, the giant horse was actually a Horsicon, and once the Trojans opened the gate it immediately split into 30 different robots, who then proceeded to sack the city.
1963 A.D. There have always been questions surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, the most famous being “Was there a second shooter?” It turns out there was — a Decepticon named Crossfire, who had cleverly disguised himself as a nearby grassy knoll. In the most unfortunate turn of events, Kennedy wasn’t even the real target — Crossfire had been aiming at Kennedy’s car, a disguised Autobot named Top-Down. Wracked with guilt, Top-Down later transformed into an eternal flame.
65.5 Million B.C. Without the extinction of the dinosaurs, it’s doubtful that humans would have risen to the heights they have on Earth. However, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, which was responsible for most dinosaur deaths, did not go down the way scientists claim. The massive asteroid that crash-landed in that period was actually a Decepticon named Megacrusher, who hit his head upon impact with Earth, mistook the dinosaurs for Dinobots in his delusion and wiped them out one by one, allowing mammals to rise to ascendancy.
1492 A.D. Three boats set out from Spain on August 3, 1492, and they carried Christopher Columbus and his crew to the New World. However, they were not real boats, but robots in disguise! The vacationing Autobots known as Nina-One, Pinta Prima and Santa Mariatron successfully led Columbus to make landfall in the Bahamas, where they got so drunk on mega-daiquiris that Santa Mariatron later ran aground on Hispaniola.
-TWP
