On this day in conspiracies

The Joyita is overdue at Tokelau. A large air-and-sea search, covering roughly 100,000 square miles of ocean, finds no wreckage, no rafts, and no bodies.

The Belgian minister for African affairs, Count Harold d'Aspremont Lynden, cables Katanga that Belgian policy toward Lumumba is now his 'definitive elimination.' Belgian plans for his physical removal circulate among diplomats and officers.

The University of Colorado formally agrees to undertake the study for the Air Force, with physicist Edward U. Condon, a former director of the National Bureau of Standards, as scientific director. Funding, initially in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, eventually rises past half a million.

The OPCW announces that its own analysis of samples taken from Navalny confirms a cholinesterase inhibitor of the Novichok group, structurally similar to agents already banned, though the specific variant was not itself on the treaty's schedules at the time.

The US Supreme Court denies Maxwell's petition for certiorari without comment, leaving her conviction and 20-year sentence in place. Her family says she intends to pursue a habeas petition.