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Led Zeppelin released their fourth and most famous album; untitled, it was called IV (since the other three were I, II, III), or Zoso from the Jimmy Page logo stamped on the LP (the logos of John Paul John, John Bonham, and Robert Plant were

The astronauts of Apollo 15, one of the most brilliant space science missions, re-enter the atmosphere; one of the three parachutes collapses, resulting in a violent impact with the water; after a few hours, the astronauts are on the aircraft carrier Okinawa.

2:56 PM Italian time: Apollo 15: David Scott, returning from the Lunar Rover tour, before reentering the LM, announces: “In my left hand I have a feather. In my right hand, a hammer… Where would be a better place than on the moon to confirm

12:57 PM Italian time: Apollo 15: For the only time during the Apollo missions, traces of volcanic eruptions are found on the Moon.

7:00 PM Italian time: Apollo 15: Scott drills deepest lunar core to date, reaching a depth of 2.4 meters.

Apollo 14 (Saturn V SA-509): Alan Shepard (a veteran spaceflight pilot), Stuart Roosa (a nuclear bomber pilot trained for thermonuclear warfare), and Edgar Mitchell (a secretive follower of telepathic communication and EMP) complete their third lunar landing in the Command Module Kitty Hawk and the

Uganda. While elected President Milton Obote is traveling abroad, Idi Amin Dada, with the support of his loyal armed forces, carries out a coup. It is the beginning of one of the worst military dictatorships the world has ever seen. After expelling all Indian immigrants

Civil war in Uganda: 500,000 dead.

Giovanni Leone President of the Italian Republic

The publication of X-Men was suspended, only to be resumed five years later, in a revised version.

H1N1 virus epidemic, of Russian origin

Alien amino acids (not present on Earth) discovered on a meteorite that fell in Australia

X-ray satellite Uhuru sees evidence of Cygnus X-1 black hole

Lockheed puts the first C5A Galaxy into service: 348t takeoff, 110t payload for 6000km; 10 Galaxies would have supported the Berlin Air Show in 1948-49.

Xerox creates the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which will invent black-and-white displays, icons, pointers, word processors, and networks (Ethernet).

Apollo 12: Charles “Pete” Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean make the second lunar landing with the Command Module Yankee Clipper and the Lunar Module Intrepid; they remain on the Moon for 1 day 7 hours 31 minutes, walk on the Moon for 3 hours

In the United States, there are 57 airlines with a combined 164 million departures and 20 million paid ton-miles.

Birth of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, future collaborator of Dutch director Van Gogh, later assassinated by Islamic terrorists

ARPANET Project. Informally, the ARPANET becomes operational. An undergraduate student, Charley Kline, supervised by Crocker and Cerf, from UCLA connects to SRI, 500 kilometers away, via telephone line, using a login sequence. Dial “L” and the other end confirms reception. Then dial “O” and it’s

special Task Force chaired by US Vice President Agnew reports that the United States faces three options for the future of space travel: 1) Space Shuttle and Space Station for $4–6 billion annually; 2) Mars for $8 billion annually; 3) Space Shuttle, Space Station, Moon

USSR. Zond 7. This was the only truly successful mission of the Lunar Module L1, launched with a Proton, to perform a moon flyby. The first (color) photos arrived on August 9th, and the flyby was completed on August 11th. It then returned to Earth

Quarantined at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, Neil Armstrong receives a birthday cake for his 39th birthday; the astronauts also have time to fill out their Travel Expense Report for the “trip” to the Moon, so as to get the $33 (!!!) owed to

8:16 PM Italian time: The Apollo 11 astronauts board the Hornet aircraft carrier.

10:17:38 PM Italian time, Sunday (4:17:38 PM EDT, 8:17:38 PM GMT, mission time 4d:06h:45′:57 PM): The Apollo 11 LEM touches down on the lunar surface with one leg and Buzz Aldrin comments: “Contact Light!”

10:14 PM Italian time (mission time 4d:06h:43′:15s): Neil Armstrong, to fly over a huge crater the size of a stadium, takes manual controls; he is at 500m altitude at -8m/s

A CIA Corona spy satellite sends back a series of photographs showing that the Soviets have landed a massive rocket on the Baikonur launch pad. On its next orbit, the satellite takes more photos, but the rocket and the entire launch pad have disappeared, replaced

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins are called to Deke Slayton’s office to be named to the Apollo 11 crew. Deke also tells them that Apollo 11 could be the first attempt to land on the Moon (other possibilities were Apollo 12 or 13,

Nigeria. Lassa fever outbreak. The virus is so contagious that as soon as the first case appears in any Nigerian hospital, it is completely closed.

In an attempt to bring some order to the classification of species, Cornell ecologist R.H. Whittaker proposed in the journal Science to divide life into five branches (kingdoms): Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Monera; this classification was slowly accepted by the international scientific community, only to

NASA begins supplier selection for the so-called National Space Shuttle; the payload must be able to lift a 23-ton payload to an altitude of 500 kilometers; General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell are all invited to participate in the tender process.

The Soviet probe Zond 5 circumnavigates the Moon with its cargo of bacteria, plants, flies, worms, and turtles.

Vietnam. My Lai Massacre. American troops destroy a village, killing 347 civilians. The trial will take place on November 16, 1969.

Flu epidemic (called Hong Kong) kills one million worldwide

Felice Ippolito, accused of 40 crimes and sentenced in October 1963 to 11 years in prison for squandering public funds in the Italian nuclear industry, was released from prison pardoned by Giuseppe Saragat, who had first attacked him four years earlier. A few months later,

CERN, Geneva. Gabriele Veneziano and Mahiko Suzuki lay the foundations of superstring theory. The so-called Veneziano model is based on the Euler beta function.

The first World Championship of Poker takes place in Reno, Nevada. The first champion is Johnny Moss. He wins $31,000.

Vietnam. American military personnel rise to 485,000.

First successful heart transplant. On December 3, 1967, in Cape Town, South Africa, fifty-three-year-old Lewis Washkansky underwent the first successful heart transplant in history. Washkansky, who suffered from chronic heart disease, received his new heart from Denise Darvall, a twenty-five-year-old who had died in a

The Saturn V was tested on two unmanned missions: Apollo 4, Apollo 5, and Apollo 6.

USSR. The “Galaktika” lunar base project was approved by the government in November 1967. It was to permanently house four to twelve cosmonauts, for periods of up to twelve consecutive months each, on the western edge of the Ocean of Storms. Nine modules with a

Nobel Prize in Physics to Hans Albrecht Bethe for his contributions to the understanding of nuclear reactions inside stars

Barack Obama arrives in Jakarta; Obama’s mother has married an Indonesian student she met at the University of Hawaii.

Charles de Gaulle ends the Algerian War and seeks to re-establish the previously good relations with other Arab countries. With this in mind, he ends military supplies to Israel. At the same time, Israel’s swift military victory in the Six-Day War arouses sympathy from the

China detonates its first thermonuclear device: 3.3Mton

End of the Six-Day War. Israel won the so-called Yom Kippur War, defeating the Arabs, despite being outnumbered, and vastly expanding its borders. On June 5, 1967, Israel had responded to Arab troop buildups along its borders with a simultaneous attack against Egypt and Syria.

Middle East. Six-Day War. The army moves north, capturing the Golan Heights. In 130 hours of war, Israel changes the face of the Middle East. There are 676 dead and 2,563 wounded on the Israeli side, and 20,000 dead on the Arab side, with the

Middle East. Six-Day War. The Israeli army moves eastward, capturing the West Bank. In Jerusalem, fighting is hand-to-hand. In 130 hours of war, Israel changes the face of the Middle East. There are 676 dead and 2,563 wounded on the Israeli side, and 20,000 dead

After the tragedy of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov’s death aboard Soyuz 1, his close friend Yuri Gagarin was furious with Leonid Brezhnev for what had happened. Gagarin would die 11 months later in a plane crash.

NATO’s strategy for managing a potential Soviet attack in Europe still relies on containing the Soviet intervention in the first one to two weeks in central and northern Germany, before potentially moving on to the use of nuclear weapons. The strategy, called “flexible response,” envisions

The Surveyor 4 automatic probe has a radio problem

The unmanned Surveyor 3 probe lands on the Moon; two years later, it will be joined on foot by Pete Conrad, who disembarked from the Apollo 12 LM. From the probe, Pete Conrad and Alan Bean will detach the camera (now on display at the

First Soyuz missions

10:40 p.m.: Robert Oppenheimer dies in his sleep; he had been suffering from throat cancer for a couple of years.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments realizes an idea his Executive VP had proposed to him during a plane trip: to launch the first battery-powered pocket calculator. It costs $150. In 1975, similar models, also from Texas, cost $25, and in 2014, $3.

In Dublin, Werner Israel writes an article demonstrating that all black holes that are not rotating on themselves must have a perfectly spherical shape, and their size depends only on their mass.

Twenty years earlier, Alpher and Herman had already developed an idea by George Gamow, calculating that the ratio of the density of the Universe to the cube of its temperature is a cosmic constant. They now calculate the current background radiation at 3.5K ± 1.0K,

Lunar Orbiter 2 is operating correctly in lunar orbit and is sending back photos of possible landing sites.

TetraRex releases the GableTop

Luna 12 went into orbit in October 1966. This time, scanning the dried photos revealed further details of the lunar surface.

Urta-Bulak, Soviet Union (now Uzbekistan). To put out a persistent fire in an oil and natural gas well, the Soviets opted for a drastic solution: an underground explosion (1,532 meters underground) of 10,000 tons of nuclear charge to block the pipeline. It worked (the explosion

NASA’s Lunar Orbiter mission program: 5 successes and 0 failures. They map 99% of the lunar surface, with a resolution of 60 meters per pixel. The Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter, Mercury, and Gemini space programs pave the way for the Apollo missions.

After a long series of failed moon launches, Sergei Korolev is called back to Moscow to report. His protector, Khrushchev, has been discharged, and now Brezhnev is in charge. He will never make it to Moscow. He is admitted to the hospital on January 13,

United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act comes into force, replacing the Johnson-Reed Act. The Johnson-Reed Act, for example, limited the percentage of Jews who could immigrate to the United States to 2%, while the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the quota system to introduce

In the document Nostra Aetate, the Vatican decides, after nearly 2,000 years, that it is time to stop blaming all Jews, past and present, for the death of Jesus Christ.

Gemini-Titan VI: first attempt at rendezvous and docking in orbit: before Gemini, an automated Atlas-Agena rocket is launched, but it disintegrates in the atmosphere; the mission is aborted.

General Dynamics delivers the first Benjamin Franklin-class nuclear-powered submarine (USS Kamehameha SSN 642) (U.S. Navy)

First geostationary satellite: Intelsat I

A researcher at Searle Laboratories in Illinois discovers aspartame, 200 times sweeter than sugar.

Discovery of mites

Vietnam. US President Johnson publicly offers Ho Chi Minh $1 billion for the development of the Mekong Delta in exchange for freedom for South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh refuses. Johnson approves nine new battalions to be sent to Vietnam, bringing the total to 82,000 soldiers.

Operation Rolling Thunder begins: heavy bombing of North Vietnam

Nikolai Kardasev and Gennadiy Solomickij, with a radio telescope in Crimea, recorded regular changes in brightness on CTA21 and CTA102, the news of the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization was published the next day in Pravda, but just six days later it was discovered that

China’s first nuclear test

The Ranger 7 probe photographs the Moon. The unmanned US lunar probe Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the Moon—4,308 in all—before impact with the lunar surface, northwest of the Sea of Clouds. The images were 1,000 times sharper than those previously obtained

BASIC was invented at Dartmouth College by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. It is an easy-to-use and easily learned programming language: Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC, which would remain the most widely used programming language for many years. The first BASIC program was

Gemini 1: First Gemini launch, an unmanned prototype launched by a Titan II

Vietnam. New coup. General Van “Big” Minh, who had succeeded Diem a few months earlier, is deposed by a military junta led by 36-year-old Nguyen Khanh. Johnson, among his entourage, sometimes refers to him as “our boy.”

At the Medicina radio telescope, Bologna, the Northern Cross, two T-shaped arms measuring 640 and 565 metres, comes into operation.

A landslide generates a tidal wave that surpasses the Vajont dam by 200m and causes 2,160 deaths (160 upstream of the dam)

American agent Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky is executed.