The archive, day by day
On this day in conspiracies
The dated turning points behind the case files: assassinations, crashes, leaks, votes, and the moments a theory was born, each drawn straight from a file's sourced timeline. We only place an entry on a day the record actually names.
- 1885Servant Girl AnnihilatorUnsolved Crimes & Disappearances
On a single Christmas Eve night, two married white women, Susan Hancock and Eula Phillips, are murdered at their separate homes. The victims break the earlier pattern, and the panic reaches its peak.
- 1945The Sodder childrenUnsolved Crimes & Disappearances
On Christmas Eve, George and Jennie Sodder and nine of their ten children (one son was away in the Army) are at home. The younger children ask to stay up late playing with new toys. Around 12:30 a.m. Jennie answers a phone call from an unfamiliar woman asking for a name she does not know, hears laughter and clinking glasses, and hangs up.
- 1992Iran-Contra affairGovernment & Intelligence
President George H.W. Bush pardons six Iran-Contra defendants, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, days before his trial was set to begin.
- 1997UVB-76 / The BuzzerGovernment & Intelligence
The first widely-documented voice interruption is recorded: the buzz stops and a male Russian voice reads a formatted message identifying the station (transcribed by listeners as UZB-76), a code word spelled out with phonetic names, and groups of numbers, before the buzz resumes.
Drawn from 1,970 dated events across our case-file timelines. Dates reckoned in UTC.