On this day in conspiracies

Irene Cross is attacked and dies of her wounds. Investigators struggle to connect the killings or to develop a suspect, and rumors of a single roaming murderer spread through Austin.

Jim Templeton, a firefighter from Carlisle, takes his family to Burgh Marsh near Burgh by Sands, overlooking the Solway Firth, and photographs his five-year-old daughter Elizabeth. He later says the air felt oddly still and that a few nearby sheep and cows seemed agitated, but he sees no other people close by.

An ad hoc panel of outside scientists convened by White House science adviser Frank Press and chaired by MIT's Jack Ruina reports that the signal was probably not a nuclear explosion. It notes that no other sensor clearly corroborated a blast and suggests the flash could have been a 'zoo event': possibly sunlight glinting off debris knocked loose by a micrometeoroid striking the decade-old satellite.

Under pressure from veterans and Congress, the Department of Defense publicly releases the first detailed fact sheets on the tests, naming the trials, the ships and units involved, and the agents, simulants, and tracers used. Further fact sheets follow in October 2002, with revisions into 2003.

Italian researcher Luca Scantamburlo publishes an interview with a man who identifies himself as William Rutledge, a retired American astronaut said to be living in Rwanda, who claims he commanded Apollo 20.

Pope Francis beatifies Romero as a martyr killed “in hatred of the faith,” having declared his death a martyrdom. Romero is canonized as a saint on 14 October 2018; Francis wears the blood-stained belt Romero was wearing when he was shot.

Divaina, a nationalist Sinhala-language daily, publishes a front-page article alleging that a Muslim doctor had covertly sterilized around 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women after caesarean deliveries. The claim, framed as a plot against the Sinhalese, races across social media.

The UN General Assembly adopts Resolution 78/282, designating 11 July as an annual International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica and condemning denial of the genocide as a historical event.