On this day in conspiracies

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, Alfred Naujocks signs a sworn affidavit describing how he organized and led the Gleiwitz attack on Heydrich's orders. His account becomes the primary direct evidence that the incident was a German fabrication.

During Apollo 12, the ascent stage of the lunar module Intrepid is deliberately crashed into the Moon about 72 kilometers from the seismometer the crew had just deployed. The instrument records reverberations that continue for the better part of an hour, far longer than a comparable impact on Earth would produce.

Mongolia's intelligence service, with Soviet military experts, completes a report on the crash. It attributes the disaster to pilot error during an attempted forced landing, not to hostile fire or a shoot-down. A Russian-language copy resurfaces in a US archive and is reported by the South China Morning Post in 2016.

The U.S. Senate's Church Committee publishes its interim report, 'Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,' documenting the CIA plot against Lumumba in detail while concluding that the evidence does not show the United States was involved in the killing that actually took place.

The Church Committee's assassination report is published. It concludes the CIA had plotted to kill foreign leaders, most extensively Fidel Castro of Cuba (in some plots using Mafia intermediaries) and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, while finding that the agency's own direct assassination attempts had not succeeded.

NIST publishes the final report (NCSTAR 1A). Responding to public comment, it explicitly acknowledges a roughly 2.25-second stage of near free-fall descent and explains it as a consequence of the interior structure having already failed progressively, out of view, before the exterior shell came down.

The United States relists North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, having removed it in 2008. US officials cite the Kim Jong-nam killing, among other conduct, as grounds, treating the assassination as an act of state-directed terror.

After his 80th-birthday announcement that he would sell the answer, Sanborn's Kryptos archive - including the K4 solution - is auctioned by RR Auction for $962,500 to an anonymous buyer. Weeks earlier, researchers had found the plaintext among his donated papers rather than by breaking the cipher; all parties agreed to keep it secret, and K4 stays unsolved as a cryptographic challenge.