On this day in conspiracies

Franco signs the Law for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism, making mere membership a crime. A Special Court, seated in Salamanca where seized Masonic records were gathered, is created to enforce it; between 1941 and 1953 it processes tens of thousands of cases and convicts thousands.

GEPAN publishes Technical Note No. 16, its detailed report on the case. It concludes that a significant physical event occurred at the site that the investigation could not explain in ordinary terms, and the case is classified in the category reserved for reports with physical effects that remain unidentified. Internationally, it becomes one of the most-cited physical-trace UFO cases.

The wave spreads sharply to Tehran and many provinces. Reporting describes suspected incidents at dozens, then more than 200, girls' schools across most of Iran's provinces. No deaths and no critical cases are reported.

The state-linked Tehran Times posts to X an image of damage to a U.S. Navy facility in Bahrain; BBC Verify and The Guardian report the picture is AI-generated and overstates the actual damage, with Google’s SynthID detector flagging a Google AI tool.

Alexis Stone, a UK-based drag and special-effects transformation artist known for hyper-realistic celebrity prosthetics, posts on Instagram a Carrey mask, teeth, and wig on a mannequin, captioned 'Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris.' Read as a claim to have stood in for Carrey, it supercharges the impersonator strand and divides the internet.

Amid widely reported US-Iran tensions, US military officials state that the missiles Iran launched did not come close to hitting an American aircraft carrier, directly contradicting the viral videos claiming a carrier was set on fire.