Timeline (Arrival)

1963

 * June 19th: An unidentified radio signal emerges from the direction of Orion. The US drops to Defcon 4. It is confirmed to come from a group of 20km-long objects in the vicinity of Jupiter.
 * June 20th: A reply is sent. More radio signals are received.
 * June 21st: A video message is dispatched. A radio message is received, but with no visual data.
 * June 28th: A global SETI conference is held at Green Bank.
 * July 2nd: Aliens are confirmed to be named 'Aash'n '.
 * July 14th: Aash'n ships Braking Day in Low Earth Orbit.
 * July 16th: Two cosmonauts and three astronauts rendezvous with the largest Aash'n vessel, revealing the origin of the Aash'n.
 * July 17th: An emergency session of the UN is called. Ceasefires are declared in most conflicts around the world, chiefly in Vietnam.
 * September 9th: The UN reaches a conclusion. The Aash'n vessels will be landed on the northern part of the African continent.
 * September 22nd: The first Aash'n ship arrives, making a controlled descent and landing fifty miles west of Algiers. More ships will land across the Maghreb in the following weeks.
 * October 2nd: An Aash'n ship suffers a critical hull failure whilst entering the atmosphere and disintegrates over the Canary Islands, killing 10.7 million Aash'n.
 * October 8th: Another Aash'n ship near Alexandria malfunctions during its landing process and lists to port. The vessel is mostly destroyed, claiming 5.6 million Aash'nite lives.
 * October 15th: A small Aash'n vessel overshoots its landing site near Tripoli and splashes into the Mediterranean. The vessel survives, and manages to beach itself, but the resulting tidal wave will cause three thousand deaths and cause billions of dollars of damage around the Mediterranean.
 * October 27th: The final Aash'n craft makes its landing. However, a slight error in its manoeuvring jets means it very nearly ploughs through Cairo; incredible luck prevents such a disaster from happening, though the buried nose of the ship ends up just a stone's throw from the Great Pyramid of Giza.
 * November 22nd: JFK delivers a speech on the need for increased cooperation between the Republican and Democrat parties whilst in Dallas. Apart from a heckler in the crowd the day is otherwise uneventful.

1964

 * January 6th: Operation Silk Road begins, with a combined UN effort resulting in the construction of tens of thousands of miles of roads and railway across the Maghreb.
 * February 17th: After prolonged testing on a volunteering test group of Aash'n it is confirmed that they carry neither any harmful viruses and do not react badly with human vaccines against disease. The race may leave quarantine of their vessels. This also proves to be the beginning of a slow revolution in medicine.
 * February 29th: Forces in Vietnam agree to a full cessation of hostilities and establish status quo ante bellum.
 * May 11th: The United Nations Aash'n Affairs Council is inaugurated, with its headquarters in Malta.
 * August 14th: The first prefabricated town for the Aash'n, Terraville, is completed for one of the Moroccan ships. It has a maximum population of two thousand and contains a number of pioneering techniques in construction and irrigation.
 * August 27th: The first Aash'n seeds are sown in the wild.

1965

 * April 2nd: The United Kingdom joins the European Economic Community.
 * June 12th: A famine begins in sub-Saharan Africa. With foreign aid directed solely at the Aash'n millions die. The Soviet Union makes a token effort to help in July but far too late to help in any major way.
 * November 30th: The first public human-Aash'n dictionaries are published. The human languages are English, French, and Russian, but the only Aash'n language offered is Anfrandi.

1966

 * January 12th: Human-Aash'n dictionaries are reported to have sold over three hundred million copies worldwide in less than a month and a half. It is thought every household in America has at least one of the dictionaries after Christmas.