On this day in conspiracies

The army launches a propaganda campaign blaming the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) for the killing of the generals, publicizing lurid and later-discredited claims about the mutilation of the officers. The campaign primes the public for a violent purge.

A Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Navy search of the area, including divers in the following days, turns up nothing identifiable. No aircraft is reported overdue or missing by Canadian or United States authorities, and no vessel is unaccounted for.

Robert Stevens, a photo editor at American Media in Boca Raton, dies of inhalation anthrax, the first such death in the United States in a quarter century. Over the following weeks four more people die: two Washington postal workers, Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen; a New York City hospital worker, Kathy Nguyen; and Ottilie Lundgren, a 94-year-old woman in Connecticut. Seventeen others are infected and survive.