The Night the Prom Died.

     There's alternate history and then there's actual alternate history.  This might have happened, depending on which history book you read and where you might have found it.  Or not.

     Prom Night '87 ("Forward to our future") was held aboard the SS Queen Mary, a former British liner converted to a floating hotel / Exhibition Hall and "home ported" in Long Beach California.  It was, until a night in June, '87, a popular locale for high school proms, on the night in question, there were no fewer than a dozen schools holding Senior Prom on the ship.  Sometime around 10pm, witnesses (of whom there were few survivors) agree that a Led Zeppelin tribute band was playing a note-for-note cover of Stairway to heaven when an enormous green explosion erupted out of the water about 200 yards from the ship.  At the same time, fireworks, later determined to be aerial flares, dropped from the sky on the other (landward) side of the ship.

     What had happened was beyond belief, but evidence does not lie.

     On the same date and time in 1942, an Imperial Japanese Navy task force of four heavy cruisers and a destroyer began a well coordinated attack run against Allied shipping anchored in a harbor in the south Pacific.  Just after the spotter planes had catapulted off the cruiser decks, the task force entered a time portal that opened up thousands of miles away and 45 years in the future -- in Long Beach.  The cruisers fired about 50 torpedoes then wheeled away to open the range.  Spotter planes circled overhead, timing their illumination flares to silhouette shipping within a minute of the torpedo strikes to enable gunfire to add to the destruction.  The explosion remembered by the survivors was a premature detonation of a torpedo because of a faulty trigger.  About 30 torpedoes exploded against or under the hull.   The liner simply blew apart into atoms, the illumination flares showed no target for the cruiser guns.   Sometime after that, the lone destroyer appeared out of the darkness, insolently opened its searchlights and found nothing but wreckage and bodies and a handful of survivors who it machine gunned before sailing off.

     This is a true story, as far as it goes.