The "GIFT OF THE JONAHS" refers to the bestowal of five massive interstellar carriers by the Reticulans for human use. This event traditionally marks the end of the Expansion Period and beginning what is referred to as the Fencepost Years.
The use of the word "gift" is as contentious among historians today as it was to the human population at the time. The Jonahs were in fact on loan. They were piloted by human crews, but always under Reticulan supervision. Blue Agency Executive Mansuel Khalil called the Jonahs "a reward for good behavior".
Pro-Reticulan historians (see "Reticulan Revisionist History") have emphasized that the normalization of interstellar trade and commerce after the Expansion Era would have been impossible without the use of the Jonahs, and that panstellar human civilization would have met the fate of the ancient Vikings in the old North Americas - a story to be told of what might have been, instead of the rich and bustling human multi-culture which now dominates more than 430 star systems.
For some decades after the gift of the Jonahs, there was a movement among pro-Reticulan radicals to begin a new yearly calendar system from that point. They submitted that that the Calendar of the New Era should be jettisoned in favor of a Calendar of the Grey Fatherhood. In this calendar, the Gift of the Jonahs would be marked as year ZERO, and years before or after marked "pre-Jonah" or "post-Jonah". This idea quickly lost steam since commerce had long-since adopted the New Era calendar as its standard. When the gift of the Jonahs resulted in an unprecedented boom in commerce and trade, the fate of any alternative calendar systems was sealed.
