On this day in conspiracies

Shortly after 2 a.m., radar and observers report contacts approaching from the sea. Air-raid sirens sound around 2:25 a.m. and a total blackout is ordered across Los Angeles County. Searchlights sweep the darkness.

A college student checking rabbit traps in the brush off Susquehanna Road in Fox Chase, Philadelphia, finds the body of a young boy, nude and wrapped in a plaid flannel blanket, inside a cardboard box that had originally held a bassinet sold by JCPenney. An earlier passerby had reportedly seen the body days before but did not report it.

Cassius Clay, a roughly 7-to-1 underdog, upsets Sonny Liston in Miami Beach when Liston quits on his stool before the seventh round, citing a shoulder injury. Doctors diagnose a torn tendon in the left shoulder, but a minority immediately wonders aloud whether Liston, a former champion with a criminal past and mob associations, threw the fight. The seed of suspicion is planted a year before the rematch.

A Forest Service employee reports later having seen Madruga's car parked along the Oroville-Quincy Highway in the Plumas National Forest, a high, snowy road far off any route between Chico and the men's homes.

The crew begins deploying TSS-1R, unreeling the satellite from Columbia on a thin conducting tether. As the tether extends through the ionosphere it generates voltages as high as about 3,500 volts, roughly three times what was predicted.