In 1910, Robert Todd Lincoln, an esteemed scientist, the only living son of former US President Abraham Lincoln, and a close friend of incumbent President William Howard Taft, reveals to the President that he has found an old pocket watch that belonged to his father. Lincoln explains that he can find no records of his father ever acquiring or owning the watch (though the watch fob was found on Abraham's person the night of his assassination), and although the watch has been running for a very long time, there is no inbuilt way to open or adjust it, and it has no discernible power source, save for a small cylinder of an unknown material. Furthermore, the watch bears a Russian inscription that translates to "Made in America", suggesting that the watch came from Russian America. Lincoln believes that the watch is so technologically advanced that it could not possibly have been built by humans, leading him to theorize that extraterrestrial beings are beginning to populate Alaska. Lincoln requests to use Taft's secret government zeppelin, Airship One, to travel to Alaska and test his hypothesis, which Taft gladly allows.