On this day in conspiracies

Standing alone in the chamber before dawn, O'Kelly watches a shaft of sunlight enter through the roof-box and creep up the passage until the chamber is lit. He is the first person in the modern era to record the solstice illumination, and later documents it again on 21 December 1969.

Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747 bound from London Heathrow to New York, is destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, about 38 minutes after take-off. All 259 people on board and 11 residents on the ground are killed, 270 in total.

A reconstruction of the palisade rings, using about 1,675 oak posts standing some 2.5 metres tall, is completed on the original site and opened to the public on the winter solstice. Visitors can now stand at the centre and watch the solstice sun through the reconstructed gates.

The 13th b'ak'tun completes. NASA, which had published a standing FAQ dismissing the doomsday claims, notes the next morning that Earth is 'still here.' No unusual event occurs.

FIFA's independent ethics committee bans Blatter and UEFA president Michel Platini from football for eight years (later reduced on appeal) over a 2 million Swiss franc payment FIFA made to Platini in 2011. This is an internal ethics sanction, separate from the US criminal case; both men deny wrongdoing.

French investigating magistrates dismiss the case for lack of evidence, finding the charges rested on witness accounts that were mostly contradictory or impossible to verify. The Paris Court of Appeal upholds the dismissal on 3 July 2020.

Navalny releases a recording of a phone call in which, posing as a security-council official conducting a debrief, he draws a man the reporters had identified as a unit member into describing the operation, including that the poison had been applied to his clothing.

A peer-reviewed study by Gruenwald and colleagues estimates that about 12.7% of current childhood asthma in the United States is attributable to gas-stove use, a modeled population-level figure. Widely reported, it helps set the stage for the January firestorm.