Today is Wednesday, June 24, the 175th day of 2009. There are 190 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
Five hundred years ago, on June 24, 1509, Henry VIII was crowned king of England; his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was crowned queen consort.
On this date:
In 1314, the forces of Scotland’s King Robert I defeated the English in the Battle of Bannockburn.
In 1497, the first recorded sighting of North America by a European took place as explorer John Cabot spotted land, probably in present-day Canada, landing at what may have been Cape Breton Island. John Cabot was the first European to set foot in North America since the Vikings.
In 1793, the first republican constitution in France was adopted.
In 1807, a grand jury in Richmond, Va., indicted former Vice President Aaron Burr on charges of treason and high misdemeanor. (He was later acquitted).
In 1812, French Emperor Napoleon—who had massed his troops in Poland in the spring to intimidate Russian Tsar Alexander I—and 600,000 troops of his Grand Army launched an ill-fated invasion of Russia.
In 1821, South American patriots under Simón Bolívar defeated Spanish royalists on the plains near Caracas, Venezuela, in the Battle of Carabobo.
In 1859, the Battle of Solferino, the last engagement of the second War of Italian Independence, was fought in Lombardy.
In 1895, Jack Dempsey, the American world heavyweight boxing champion from 1919 to 1926, was born.
In 1901, painter Pablo Picasso has his first exhibit in Paris, at the age of 19.
In 1908, the 22nd and 24th presidents of the United States, Grover Cleveland, died in Princeton, N.J., at age 71.
In 1922, German nationalists assassinate foreign minister Walther Rathenau, a German Jew, in response to his policy of paying reparations for Germany’s role in World War I.
In 1932, the Promoters Revolution, a bloodless coup, overthrew Prajadhipok, the king of Thailand, ending the absolute monarchy in that country and initiating the so-called Constitutional Era.
In 1940, France signed an armistice with Italy during World War II.
In 1947, an American pilot reports seeing objects he describes as “saucers” flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state, leading to the popular term “flying saucers.”
In 1948, Communist forces cut off all land and water routes between West Germany and West Berlin, prompting the western allies to organize the Berlin Airlift. The Republican National Convention, meeting in Philadelphia, nominated New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey for president.
In 1961, the public learned of President John Kennedy’s letter assigning Vice President Lyndon Johnson the high priority task of unifying the U.S. satellite programs. Twenty-two years later, on the same day, astronaut Sally Kirsten Ride landed at Edwards Air Force Base aboard the 100-ton space shuttle Challenger, completing her voyage as the first American woman in space. These two events evidence the nation’s leap from an age of earth-bound methods of communication and travel into the space age.
In 1965, the Federal Trade Commission requires that a message be placed on all cigarette packages to warn consumers that cigarette smoking is dangerous to their health.
In 1968, “Resurrection City,” a shantytown constructed as part of the Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C., was closed down by authorities.
In 1975, 113 people were killed when an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 crashed while attempting to land during a thunderstorm at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
In 1983, the space shuttle Challenger — carrying America’s first woman in space, Sally K. Ride — coasted to a safe landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
In 1987, actor Jackie Gleason died at age 71.
In 1997, the Air Force released a report on the so-called “Roswell Incident,” suggesting the alien bodies witnesses reported seeing in 1947 were actually life-sized dummies.
In 1998, AT&T Corp. struck a deal to buy cable television giant Tele-Communications Inc. for $31.7 billion.
In 1999, ten years ago: Union organizers claimed victory after workers at six Fieldcrest Cannon mills in North Carolina voted to be represented by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. (Fieldcrest Cannon’s parent company, Pillowtex, went bankrupt in 2003.) Testimony wound to an end after 76 days in the landmark Microsoft antitrust trial.
In 2003, President Vladimir Putin arrived in London on the first state visit to Britain by a Russian leader since the 19th century.
In 2004, five years ago: Federal investigators questioned President George W. Bush for more than an hour in connection with the news leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity. A federal appeals court struck down an FCC effort to make sweeping changes in media ownership rules. In a bizarre conclusion to a huge upset, the chair umpire called the wrong score in the second tiebreaker, and Venus Williams fell 7-6 (5), 7-6 (6) to Karolina Sprem in the second round at Wimbledon.
In 2006, Patsy Ramsey, who was thrust into the national spotlight by the unsolved slaying of her daughter JonBenet, died at age 49
In 2008, one year ago: Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe refused to give into pressure from Africa and the West, saying the world can “shout as loud as they like” but he would not cancel an upcoming runoff election even though his opponent had quit the race. Leonid Hurwicz, who shared the Nobel Prize in economics in 2007, died in Minneapolis at age 90.
Today’s Birthdays
Actor Al Molinaro is 90. Comedian Jack Carter is 86. Movie director Claude Chabrol is 79. Actress Michele Lee is 67. Actor-director Georg Stanford Brown is 66. Rock musician Jeff Beck is 65. Singer Arthur Brown is 65. Rock singer Colin Blunstone (The Zombies) is 64. Musician Mick Fleetwood (Fleetwood Mac) is 62. Actor Peter Weller is 62. Rock musician John Illsley (Dire Straits) is 60. Actress Nancy Allen is 59. Reggae singer Derrick Simpson (Black Uhuru) is 59. Actor Joe Penny is 53. Reggae singer Astro (UB40) is 52. Singer-musician Andy McCluskey (Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark) is 50. Rock singer Curt Smith is 48. Actress Danielle Spencer is 44. Actress Sherry Stringfield is 42. Singer Glenn Medeiros is 39. Actress-producer Mindy Kaling is 30. Actress Minka Kelly (TV’s “Friday Night Lights”) is 29. Orlando Magic guard J.J. Redick is 25. Singer Solange Knowles is 23.
Historic Birthdays
Theodore Beza
6/24/1519 – 10/13/1605
French author, translator, educator and theologian
Robert Dudley Leicester
6/24/1532 – 9/4/1588
English favorite of Queen Elizabeth I
Saint John of the Cross
6/24/1542 – 12/14/1591
Spanish mystic and poet
Eleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (1771-1834), French-born American industrialist, who in 1802 founded what was to become one of the world’s largest business empires.
John Hughes
6/24/1797 – 1/3/1864
Irish-born American religious leader; first Roman Catholic archbishop of New York
Henry Ward Beecher
6/24/1813 – 3/8/1887
American Congregational minister
Gustavus Swift
6/24/1839 – 3/29/1903
American business leader; founded Swift & Co.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), American satirist, short-story writer, and journalist.
Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916), British military officer and statesman, known for his conquest of the Sudan region in Africa and as a symbol of British heroism. As secretary of state for war, he determined British military policy in the early part of World War I.
Victor Francis Hess
6/24/1883 – 12/17/1964
Austrian-born Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1936)
Jack Dempsey
6/24/1895 – 5/31/1983
American world heavyweight boxing champion
Harry Partch (1901-74), American composer, known for his music based on a scale of 43 tones per octave and played on instruments of his own invention.
Irving Kaufman
6/24/1910 – 2/1/1992
American judge; presided over the Rosenberg case
Norman Cousins
6/24/1915 – 11/30/1990
American essayist and editor of The Saturday Review
John Ciardi
6/24/1916 – 3/30/1986
American poet, critic and translator
Thought for Today
“There is a way to look at the past. Don’t hide from it. It will not catch you if you don’t repeat it.” — Pearl Bailey, American singer and actress (1918-1990).
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Full article: http://www.boston.com/news/history/articles/2009/06/24/today_in_history___june_24/
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/20090624.html
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html
http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?tag=24&monat=6&dayisset=1&year=2009&lang=en
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/onthisday.aspx
http://www.britannica.com/eb/dailycontent/rss
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See also:
Air Force Details a New Theory in U.F.O. Case
No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no Government cover-up.
The Air Force yesterday made public its latest report on the famous 1947 incident in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell that is at the heart of claims by flying-saucer fans that extraterrestrials have visited Earth and that has become a celebrated part of American popular culture.
The report, in voluminous detail, says the supposed mountain of evidence about aliens is a mirage.
Just as old sightings of squids and whales spawned tales of sea monsters, so too, the Air Force says, the shadowy doings of brave fliers, high-altitude balloons, lifelike crash dummies and saucerlike craft in the southeastern New Mexico desert at the dawn of the space age were glimpsed and embellished over the decades into false evidence of aliens.
For instance, one serviceman who crashed in a test balloon 10 miles northwest of Roswell suffered an injury that caused his head to swell and resemble the bulbous cranium of the classic science-fiction alien, the report says. This secretive 1959 mishap, it adds, apparently led decades later to tales of a crashed extraterrestrial that walked under its own power into a military hospital.
So, too, dummies were routinely dropped from balloons to test parachutes and were sometimes lost in the desert and disfigured in suggestive ways, their hands often missing a finger. A distinguishing characteristic of the aliens supposedly sighted near Roswell, the report notes, is four fingers.
Some critics fault the Government for addressing the topic of alien visitations, dismissing it as ludicrous.
But other experts say the United States’ obsession with unidentified flying objects has never been greater and praise efforts to combat what they view as a dangerous mania. They note the recent suicides of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who believed an alien spaceship passing near Earth would take them to an ethereal paradise.
Not surprisingly, true believers in Roswell are unshaken, seeing the new report as evidence of the most egregious Government cover-up of all time.
”This is the biggest story of the millennium, a visit to the Earth by extraterrestrial spacecraft and the cover-up of the best evidence, the bodies and the wreckage, for 50 years,” said Stanton T. Friedman, who has written about the Roswell incident and who is to be a featured speaker at the upcoming gala.
In an interview, Mr. Friedman accused the Air Force of false reasoning, selective use of data and lying.
”The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft,” said Mr. Friedman, who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, and whose 1992 book, ”Crash at Corona,” is in its sixth printing. (Corona is a village near the purported crash site.)
Critics of the new report bridle at its main thesis: that civilians are confusing military activities that took place over more than a decade and falsely recalling them as a single incident. Such memory failures, critics say, are highly unlikely.
But the Air Force says the witnesses are often recalling events more than four decades old and could have easily mixed up the dates.
Joseph W. Kittinger Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who was much decorated for his pioneering jumps from balloons high over the New Mexican desert, praised the report as exhaustive and overdue.
”I’m insulted at how this fraud has been perpetrated and delighted that the Air Force has taken it on,” Colonel Kittinger said in an interview.
The much-debated incident took place on a desolate stretch of desert that was surrounded by several secret military bases. Increasingly, the site or sites (the faithful disagree on its exact location) are today ringed by tourist attractions that play on the extraterrestrial theme.
More than 100,000 sky watchers and conspiracy theorists are expected to visit Roswell for a celebration of the incident’s 50th anniversary during the first week of July. Festivities are to include a soapbox derby of homemade alien vehicles.
The hullabaloo got started in July 1947 when a ranch foreman, W. W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material littering the ground. Mr. Brazel gave it to the sheriff, who turned it in to the military authorities at the nearby air base.
On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a news release about the crash of a flying disk, prompting a newspaper, The Roswell Daily Record, to run an article under the headline: ”R.A.A.F. Captures Flying Saucer.”
Military officials retreated the next day, calling the curious debris merely a downed weather balloon. With that, the matter was largely forgotten until the late 1970′s with the birth of what eventually became a small industry of experts, books, articles and television shows recounting alien visitations and conspiracy theories.
Under growing pressure from true believers and curious Congressmen, the Air Force in February 1994 began to investigate just what took place many decades ago.
A 23-page report made public in September 1994 said the silvery wreckage in the desert had been part of a top-secret system of atomic espionage. That admission made the 1947 story about a weather balloon a white lie. Carried into the atmosphere by balloon, the spy sensors listened for weak reverberations from Soviet nuclear blasts half a world away.
But the 1994 report said nothing about extraterrestrial beings, who in various accounts of the Roswell crash number between two and eight, dead and sometimes alive. The silence arose because the Air Force found nothing in the balloon saga to account for the reports of aliens, so it ignored the topic at the time and only later came up with a detailed and intriguing explanation.
The new Roswell report, titled ”Case Closed,” was written by Capt. James McAndrew, an intelligence officer assigned to the Secretary of the Air Force’s Declassification and Review Team. Its 231 pages are designed to go beyond the 1994 report by revealing more about Federal work in the desert and examining what apparently inspired sightings of not only alien artifacts but of the extraterrestrials themselves.
In places it is grim. For instance, it describes the crash of a KC-97G military plane near Roswell that killed 11 fliers, leaving their bodies badly burned and reeking of fuel. The stench was so foul that identification work at the Roswell air base was moved from the small hospital to the commissary, which had a large refrigerator.
The Air Force report suggests that this crash, recalled decades later by a civilian who visited the air base and talked to workers there, prompted his account of small, black, mangled, dead aliens who smelled so bad that their autopsies were moved from the base hospital to a place better suited to the dissections.
This civilian, W. Glenn Dennis, has been called the ”star witness” of the Roswell incident. Mr. Dennis is president of the International U.F.O. Museum and Research Center, which was founded in 1991 in Roswell.
The new Air Force report focuses on military work and accidents from 1947 to 1976 and says many of the claims about extraterrestrials are based on faulty memories and, in fact, are pieced together from military work that took place over many years.
The finding of shiny wreckage in 1947, it says, ”was the first of many unrelated events now collectively known as the ‘Roswell Incident.’ ”
The desert work focused on the development of spy gear and high-altitude escape systems. Starting in 1950, for instance, balloons rising as high as 19 miles dropped dozens of lifelike dummies to perfect parachutes for pioneering pilots, including those in the X-15 rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane. The dummies landed all over the New Mexico desert, and several were lost.
The report quotes one witness as saying of the Roswell aliens, ”I thought they were plastic dolls.”
Starting in 1957, test pilots began to join the dummies in bailing out at high altitudes, culminating in Colonel Kittinger’s 1960 leap from a balloon nearly 20 miles up, which remains the highest parachute jump ever.
At times this human research was also quite suggestive of aliens.
A balloon flight in 1959 ended in an accident that caused Capt. Dan D. Fulgham’s helmet to shatter and his head to swell. His eyes became mere slits in a puffy face. He was taken to the Roswell base with a high-security escort and was eventually transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for treatment.
The new Air Force report says this accident probably accounts for reports of an alien that walked into a Roswell air base hospital under its own power, and of the shipment of aliens to the Wright-Patterson base, where, according to Roswell lore, they underwent close scrutiny.
The report also tells of other activity in New Mexico that conceivably was mistaken for extraterrestrial craft. A V-shaped balloon flown in 1965 bears a striking resemblance to the sketch of an alien spacecraft drawn by an anonymous witness.
And the report notes that desert balloons between 1966 and 1972 lifted and dropped mock interplanetary probes. The program was designed to aid space agency research, but to the untrained eye the probes looked like flying saucers.
”The incomplete and inaccurate intermingling” of actual events, the report concludes, over the decades has resulted in a ”sensational story” about aliens crashing in the desert at Roswell. But the tale ”cannot withstand close scrutiny when compared to official records.”
It seems unlikely that the Air Force report will end the debate between the Federal Government and flying-saucer fans. If anything, as the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident draws near, the subject is likely to become as hot as the smoking wreckage of an alien spaceship.
”The arguments of the critics collapse of their own weight,” said Mr. Friedman, the Roswell author, who added that he had not yet read the new Air Force report. ”I hope it doesn’t have as many lies as the previous one.”
Photos: An insulation bag for balloon test dummies, left, may have been mistaken for a body bag, according to the Air Force, and the mock space probe at White Sands missile base, right, may have been seen as an alien spaceship. (Air Force Photos) Charts: ” ‘Aliens’ on the Ground” The Air Force says that what many witnesses believed to be aliens were just dummies used in a program to test parachutes. The dummies were dropped from high-altitude balloons over an area of southern New Mexico. Alien or Test Dummy? Eyewitness descriptions of aliens. EYES ”His eyes was open, staring blankly.” Gerald Anderson ”No visible ears . . . just a rise there and then a hole.” Gerald Anderson ”Their skin coloration . . . a bluish-tinted milky white.” Vern Maltais FINGERS ”They didn’t have a little finger.” Gerald Anderson ”They had four fingers.” Vern Maltais The dummies were often damaged from the drops. CLOTHING ”They looked like they had some sort of bandages on ‘em . . . over his arm, around his midsection and partially over his shoulder.” Gerald Anderson In some tests, the arms and legs of the dummies were secured with tape and nylon webbing. Parachute-Testing Program Fueled the Rumors The parachute-testing program probably contributed to alien theories because the dummies were not always recovered immediately; some were never found. This increased the chance that non-military personnel might have come across one and misidentified it. ”What Aliens? A 2-Part Explanation” Believers call it the Roswell incident: an alien crash-landing in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947, followed by a diabolical Air Force cover-up. The Air Force released a 231-page report yesterday intended to debunk claims of alien sightings. These pictures and diagrams lay out the basics of its case. JUNE 1947: THE INCIDENT A secret Air Force experiment leaves debris 75 miles northwest of Roswell which is mistaken for debris from an alien spacecraft. ‘Aliens’ At the Hospital The star witness for believers in an alien landing, the Air Force says, was W. Glenn Dennis, a 22-year-old mortician in 1947, who claimed that the Air Force recovered alien bodies and performed autopsies on them. The report says his accounts clearly refer to events that happened years after 1947, and to people who were there years later. People From Another Time After matching key people in Mr. Dennis’s account to personnel who served in Roswell, the Air Force found only one who was there at the time of the incident. The missingnurse 1st Lieut. Eileen M. Fanton Capt. ‘Slats’ Wilson Composite of two individuals: Capt. Lucille C. Slattery and Maj. Idabelle M. Wilson The pediatrician Capt. Frank B. Nordstrom ”Big Redheaded colonel” Col. Lee F. Ferrell Victims of Two Accidents Were Mistaken for Aliens *1 KC-97G Plane Crash, June 26, 1956 GRISLY AUTOPSY Mr. Dennis said a nurse at the base hospital told him she witnessed an autopsy on three very mangled, black little bodies. The Air Force says this was the part of the autopsy of the victims of the crash of a KC-97G plane. SUSPICIOUS CARGO WRECKAGE The Air Force says that items Mr. Dennis believed to be wreckage from an alien spacecraft in the back of military ambulances were actually equipment used in a parachute-testing program. ”HIEROGLYPHICS” — Mr. Dennis described markings that looked like hieroglyphics. The Air Force says they were most likely poorly stenciled labels. *2 Manned Balloon Accident, May 21, 1959 LARGE-HEADED ALIEN The Air Force believes that the image of bulbous-headed aliens with slits for eyes, below, probably originated from sightings of Capt. Dan D. Fulgham, who was injured in a ballooning accident. He is shown at far right after blood was drained from his scalp. (Source: The Roswell Report: Case Closed, U.S. Air Force)
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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/25/us/air-force-details-a-new-theory-in-ufo-case.html
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0624.html#article
