On this day in conspiracies

The Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen becomes the first European to record the island, arriving on Easter Sunday and giving it the name that stuck. He describes standing statues and a living population.

Seward, sixty-three, is thrown from his carriage and suffers a concussion, a broken arm, and a fractured jaw. Physicians fit a metal-and-leather splint to immobilize his jaw and neck, and he is bedridden at his home on Lafayette Square when Powell comes for him nine days later.

President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 6102, requiring most persons to deliver their gold coin, bullion, and gold certificates to a Federal Reserve bank by May 1, 1933, in exchange for the official price of $20.67 per troy ounce. It exempts collector coins of recognized special value, jewelry, gold used in industry and the arts, and modest amounts up to about $100.

The weekly news magazine Shukan Shincho carries the legend as well, and through the spring the fear reaches schoolchildren across much of Japan. The rumor now travels by both playground and press at once.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) captures the first re-image at ten times Viking's resolution. The 'face' resolves into a natural mesa with none of the symmetric facial detail.

Russia pushes its staging narrative at the United Nations, demanding a Security Council session, while state television airs the images of the dead stamped with the word 'FAKE.' Bellingcat, the BBC, and fact-checkers publish point-by-point rebuttals.