On this day in conspiracies

In a coda to the affair, Poe places his own 'Balloon-Hoax,' a fabricated report of a transatlantic balloon crossing, in the same New York Sun, where Locke was by then an editor. The Sun retracts it within days. The episode underscores how ready the penny press was to print a thrilling fabrication.

German forces, now occupying the Smolensk region, announce the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest and blame the Soviet Union. Berlin radio broadcasts the find and invites international observers, including a commission of forensic experts and Allied prisoners of war.

Brigitte Trogneux is born in Amiens, France, the youngest of six children in the family that runs the well-known Amiens chocolatier Trogneux. Her older brother Jean-Michel Trogneux is a separate person, later a real party in the court cases the smear provokes.

A Senate subcommittee led by John Kerry releases Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy. It finds substantial evidence of drug smuggling by individual Contras, Contra suppliers and pilots, and finds that US agencies knew of and at times tolerated the connections. The report draws limited public attention at the time.

The Kerry Committee releases its report, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, finding that individuals supporting the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, that elements of the Contras knowingly received help from traffickers, and that US officials knew.

With anger boiling over in townships and fears of a descent into open conflict, Nelson Mandela addresses the nation on state television, appealing for calm and discipline and pointing out that a white Afrikaner woman had helped bring the killer to justice. The address is widely credited with steadying the country.

The New York Times reports on Google's 'Sensorvault,' a vast internal store of user location history, and on the 'geofence' (reverse-location) warrants police use to ask Google for every device that was inside a defined area during a defined window, a technique that can sweep in uninvolved bystanders.

The planned date of closest approach. Apophis is forecast to pass roughly 32,000 kilometers above Earth's surface at about 21:45 UTC, inside the belt of geostationary satellites, brightening to around magnitude 3 and becoming visible to the naked eye for observers across Europe, Africa, and western Asia.