On this day in conspiracies

Eleven patients are admitted to Stanford University Hospital (then in San Francisco) with rare Serratia marcescens infections. Ten recover; Edward J. Nevin, recovering from prostate surgery, dies weeks later of an infected heart valve.

CIA Director Richard Helms sends a memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and others, “Capture and Execution of ‘Che’ Guevara,” reporting the agency's contrary information that Guevara had been taken alive and then killed on orders relayed from La Paz. The document is declassified decades later.

Cab driver Paul Stine, 29, is shot dead in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. A letter with a piece of Stine's bloodstained shirt follows, and later mailings include a second, 340-symbol cipher (sent 8 November 1969).

At dusk, Hickson, a shipyard foreman, and Parker, a 19-year-old coworker, are fishing off an abandoned pier on the west bank of the Pascagoula River. They report hearing a whirring sound, seeing a blue light, and watching an oval craft roughly 30 to 40 feet across hover just off the ground. Three beings, about five feet tall with wrinkled grey skin and pincer-like hands, glide out, and the men say they are floated aboard and examined. Parker, terrified, faints during the encounter.

Reporters from the magazine Stern, acting on a tip, enter room 317 of the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva and find Barschel dead, fully clothed, in a bathtub of water. He is 43. A photograph of the scene is published and becomes one of the most reproduced images in German press history.

A military tribunal in Ouagadougou opens the trial of fourteen defendants, including Compaoré (tried in absentia) and General Gilbert Diendéré (in custody). Over six months a panel of civilian and military judges hears more than a hundred witnesses.