On this day in conspiracies

At a ransom drop on the Meishin Expressway, police again spot the 'Fox-Eyed Man' at a rest area but lose him. A Shiga patrol separately notes a suspicious van whose driver, in a golf cap and radio earpiece, speeds off when noticed. No arrest is made.

US and Scottish prosecutors indict two Libyans, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, alleging the bomb was loaded as unaccompanied baggage in Malta. The investigative focus has by now shifted decisively from the PFLP-GC and Iran to Libya.

The Princeton vectors two F/A-18F Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz, one flown by Cmdr. David Fravor with his weapons systems officer and the other by Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich with hers, to investigate a contact. Fravor reports seeing a white, wingless, roughly 40-foot Tic Tac-shaped object moving erratically over a patch of churning, disturbed water, with no visible wings, rotor, or exhaust.

The Smoking Gun identifies the 'daughter' as Alexandra Tatarsky, a 24-year-old New York actress whose real father is a Manhattan psychiatrist. The stunt collapses within days, and Michael Kaufman later says he believes he too was deceived.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issues its judgment in Rodriguez Vera et al. (The Disappeared from the Palace of Justice) v. Colombia, holding the Colombian state responsible for enforced disappearances, torture, and an extrajudicial execution, and finding a proven modus operandi of disappearing people suspected of collaborating with M-19.

AARO's Fiscal Year 2024 consolidated annual report to Congress logs 757 new UAP reports. It closes cases as prosaic objects (balloons, birds, drones, satellites) where data allows, but reports that the majority of its holdings remain unresolved, chiefly for lack of the data needed to analyze them.