On this day in conspiracies

By his own account, 17-year-old Christopher Davis is driving home from a late shift near Bishopville when a tire goes flat on a road bordering Scape Ore Swamp. As he finishes changing it, he says a tall, green, scaly figure with red eyes rushes him, and that it grabs at and climbs onto his car as he speeds away. He reports the encounter to family and, soon after, to the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

According to the survivor account documented by Human Rights Watch, security forces herd hundreds of prisoners into courtyards. At around 11:00 a.m. a grenade is thrown into one courtyard, followed by sustained gunfire from the rooftops with heavy weapons and Kalashnikovs, lasting until roughly 1:35 p.m. Survivors describe bodies later buried on the prison grounds.

After more than eight months of hearings, a jury at Moscow's District Military Court finds five Chechen men guilty of the murder: Zaur Dadayev, Anzor Gubashev, Shadid Gubashev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov, and Khamzat Bakhaev. The jury identifies Dadayev as the man who fired the shots.

The Pentagon says its assessment is that the balloon did not collect intelligence as it crossed the United States and that its sensors were not activated over U.S. territory. A later December 2023 report complicates the picture, describing a link to a U.S. internet provider used chiefly for navigation.

Fact-checkers publish detailed debunks. PolitiFact runs down five miscaptioned videos; France 24's Truth or Fake and AFP trace the 'laser beam' montage to clips posted on TikTok months earlier by an account focused on UFOs, note AI-generation indicators, and point out the quake struck in daylight.