2004—NASA gives odds of 1 in 233 that an asteroid will hit Earth in 2029.
1994—Tipped off by a Boston FBI agent that he’s about to be arrested, James “Whitey” Bulger takes a powder. He’s on the lam for 16.5 years.
1986—The airplane Voyager completes its nonstop circumnavigation.
1981—Basement digging causes the Foye Building, next to the Portsmouth Athenæum, to partially collapse.
1971—Nixon lets Jimmy Hoffa out of prison but bars him from running against Frank Fitzsimmons, whose Teamsters then back Nixon.
1963—FBI officials begin scheming to “neutralize” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with wiretapping, bugging, infiltration, sabotage, and blackmail.
1955—James Kutcher, a legless WW II vet, has his disability payments cut off, too, because he’s a Socialist.
1953—In Korea, 21 American POWs refuse to go home. In response, the CIA starts studying mind control.
1944—Lax security combines with German industriousness: 25 Nazis escape from Phoenix’s Papago Park POW camp through a 178-foot tunnel hacked out of rock-hard caliche.
1924—The world’s biggest manufacturers of light bulbs form the secret Phoebus cartel. Its aim: shorten the life-span of light bulbs by 60 percent.
1849—Tied half-naked to a pole, Fyodor Dostoevsky is presumably pleased to learn he’ll be going to Siberia for four years, instead of being shot.