On this day in conspiracies

At the Pentagon, Major General John Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, joined by Major General Roger Ramey, holds the largest military press conference since the Second World War. Samford says the radar returns can be explained by temperature inversions and the visual sightings by stars, meteors and other mundane phenomena, and puts the odds that inversion accounts for the radar at roughly fifty-fifty.

U.S. District Judge Carol Amon sentences Donaghy to 15 months in federal prison plus supervised release, calling him more culpable than his co-conspirators and noting that without him there was no scheme.

Dr. Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, dies of an apparent overdose of acetaminophen, days after learning that prosecutors were preparing to charge him. He is never charged, tried, or convicted.

The image reaches the website Gawker, which posts it under the headline "Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk." The photograph goes viral almost immediately and is picked up by outlets around the world.

Poland's own state commission, led by interior minister Jerzy Miller, publishes its independent findings. It concludes the immediate cause was descent below the minimum safe altitude at excessive vertical speed in conditions preventing visual contact with the ground, together with a delayed go-around. Like MAK, it finds no evidence of an explosion or sabotage, though it distributes more blame to Russian air-traffic and airfield failings.

A wing flaperon washes ashore on Réunion Island in the western Indian Ocean, the first piece of physical debris. French investigators, matching internal serial numbers through the part's manufacturer, later confirm it came from 9M-MRO, the missing aircraft.

After a formal in-person evaluation, a Bureau of Prisons psychologist removes Epstein from suicide watch, judging him cooperative and not actively suicidal. He is downgraded to less restrictive psychological observation and, by 30 July, returned to a Special Housing Unit cell with a new cellmate, Efrain Reyes.