On this day in conspiracies

In the early evening, Billy Ray Taylor, a visitor at the Sutton family farmhouse near Kelly, walks to the well and reports seeing a bright object with an exhaust trail streak across the sky and appear to come down beyond the tree line. The others take it for a shooting star.

Police and firefighters reach and recover the bodies. Both men are in formal suits and raincoats; each wears a crude mask of cut lead sheet shaped to cover the eyes. There are no obvious wounds and no signs of a struggle.

Near Signa, west of Florence, Antonio Lo Bianco and Barbara Locci are shot dead in a parked car as Locci's six-year-old son sleeps in the back. Locci's husband, Stefano Mele, is convicted of the murder; the case is treated at the time as an ordinary crime of passion.

Aquino returns to Manila aboard a China Airlines flight despite warnings against his life. As soldiers escort him down a service stairway to the tarmac, he is shot once in the back of the head at close range. A man later named as Rolando Galman lies dead on the apron nearby, shot by soldiers. Both deaths happen within seconds, inside a security cordon that had sealed the area.

A U.S. District Court judge dismisses the case, persuaded that no agency of the government owned such a craft and that no evidence tied the helicopters to the U.S. military.

At Ruby Ridge, Idaho, a surveillance team of U.S. Marshals encounters Randy Weaver, his 14-year-old son Samuel, and family friend Kevin Harris. A firefight erupts in which Deputy Marshal William Degan, Samuel Weaver, and the family dog are killed. Weaver, a white separatist, had failed to appear on a charge of selling two illegally short shotguns to an informant.

Norwegian divers open the hatch to the ninth compartment and find the boat flooded and no one alive. All 118 aboard are confirmed dead. Public anger in Russia focuses on the delay and on official dishonesty about the crew's condition.

NIST releases its draft report on WTC 7, announcing that uncontrolled fires, not explosives, caused the collapse, the first known instance of a tall building brought down primarily by fire. NIST states it found no evidence of a blast or controlled demolition.

The Great American Eclipse crosses the United States coast to coast and touches off a wave of prophecy speculation online, with commentators tying its path and timing to biblical signs. The predicted upheavals do not follow, but the genre gains a large new audience.