On this day in conspiracies

At the morning count guards discover the dummy heads and the empty cells. A massive search by the FBI, Coast Guard, and prison authorities begins across the bay and the surrounding shorelines.

A man later known only as “Peter Bergmann” is recorded at a bus depot in Derry in the early afternoon, then arrives at Sligo bus station around 6:28pm and takes a taxi to the Sligo City Hotel, where he checks in under that name and gives an address in Austria that is later found not to exist.

At the fourth inquest, Coroner Elizabeth Morris finds that Azaria Chamberlain died at Ayers Rock on 17 August 1980 as a result of being attacked and taken by a dingo. She offers her condolences to the family and confirms that an amended death certificate has been issued. The record is closed: a dingo took and killed Azaria.

AI researchers publicly push back. Gary Marcus calls the sentience claim “Nonsense on Stilts” and likens LaMDA to autocomplete on steroids; others invoke the 2021 “stochastic parrots” framing to explain why fluent text is not evidence of a mind.

Air India Flight 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner registered VT-ANB, takes off from Ahmedabad at about 13:39 local time bound for London Gatwick with 242 people aboard. Roughly half a minute later it crashes into the hostel of B. J. Medical College, about 1.7 kilometres from the runway.