On this day in conspiracies

Five weeks after departure, the merchant ship Tuvalu, under Captain Gerald Douglas, sights the Joyita adrift roughly 600 miles off her intended course, north of Vanua Levu, Fiji. She is listing heavily to port, her decks awash and part of her superstructure submerged, with no one aboard.

A Ford Corsair Lucan had borrowed is found abandoned near the Channel ferry port of Newhaven, East Sussex. In the boot is a length of lead pipe, wrapped in tape and heavily bloodstained, closely resembling the weapon used to kill Rivett, along with a bottle of vodka.

After five days, Walton telephones his sister's home from a booth in Heber, roughly a dozen miles from the site. He is picked up, dehydrated and disoriented, and says he remembers seeing non-human beings and being inside a craft, with most of the five days a blank.

Lothian and Borders Police visit the site with Taylor. Officers photograph and note ground marks: a set of ladder-shaped impressions and a ring of smaller holes that Taylor attributes to the large object and the spheres. Because he was injured, the force logs the incident as a common assault by person or persons unknown.

After lying in state at Jerusalem's main convention hall, Maxwell is buried on the Mount of Olives. President Chaim Herzog delivers the eulogy and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is among the mourners, in a send-off widely described as fit for a head of state.

NBC airs the prime-time special The Mystery of the Sphinx, hosted by Charlton Heston and featuring West and Schoch. Reaching an estimated 33 million viewers, it turns the redating into a mass-culture talking point; West later receives a research Emmy for the program.

All nine are hanged at Port Harcourt prison. The executions are carried out despite last-minute appeals from world leaders. Nigeria is suspended from the Commonwealth at its summit in Auckland within hours of the news, and several governments recall their ambassadors.