On this day in conspiracies

At a retreat of CIA and Army scientists at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland, Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the CIA's MKUltra program, secretly laces a bottle of Cointreau with LSD. Frank Olson and several colleagues drink it without being told. Olson, a bacteriologist from the Army biological-warfare labs at Camp Detrick, becomes agitated and withdrawn in the days that follow.

After drifting overnight on the hull, roughly ten miles from land, Rockefeller straps two empty fuel cans to himself and swims for shore, reportedly saying “I think I can make it.” Wassing stays with the boat and is rescued the next day. Rockefeller is never seen again.

Around 1:35 a.m., Allen Plaster photographs a large, pale, man-sized shape near Greer Island with a Polaroid camera. The image is published and becomes the best-known photograph associated with the case.

The Appellate Division of Bangladesh's Supreme Court upholds the death sentences of twelve of the convicted men, exhausting the final appeals of those in custody.

In Vietnam Veterans of America v. CIA, a federal court in California rules that the Army has an ongoing duty to warn the test subjects of newly acquired information affecting their health, formalizing a notification obligation to the surviving veterans.

The two officers, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, are indicted in Manhattan federal court for falsifying records and conspiracy, accused of shopping online and appearing to sleep while claiming to have made rounds they never conducted.

At a nationally televised news conference, Trump lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani lay out sweeping fraud allegations, including claims about Dominion voting machines. Over the following weeks these specific machine claims are advanced without supporting evidence and later become the basis of major defamation suits.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act is enacted. It requires the Justice Department to release all unclassified records relating to Epstein and his associates by 19 December 2025, and it is unusually specific about what may be withheld: it bars redactions made 'on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary', permitting them only in narrow circumstances such as protecting victims' identities and privacy.

The bill is signed into law as Public Law 119-38. It directs the Attorney General to publish the government's Epstein-related files in a searchable, downloadable format within 30 days, and to provide the House and Senate Judiciary Committees a list of government officials and politically exposed persons named in the files.