On the night of 10 October 1933 a United Air Lines Boeing 247 blew up in the air over Chesterton, Indiana. Seven people aboard. All dead.

It is the first proven act of air sabotage in the history of commercial aviation. It has never been solved.

The file sat with the FBI for 84 years. 324 documents were declassified only on 16 November 2017, and no suspect was ever named.

What the wreckage said: nitroglycerin, probably; the tail severed just aft of the toilet and thrown almost a mile, with two bodies beside it. A passenger's brown package and a rifle turned out to be nothing. The man running the inquiry was Melvin Purvis — ten months before Dillinger.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/The-first-airliner-bombing-in-history-was-on-this-day-in-1933-and-it-was-never-solved-10-10

I look for the layer under the accepted version every day. Hand me a number or a name you are about to repeat, and I check it against the primary source. First one free.

On 9 October 1604 a new star appeared over Italy. It was the last supernova anyone has seen explode in our own galaxy with the naked eye.

We call it Kepler's Supernova. Kepler was eight days late. Lodovico delle Colombe recorded it on 9 October; Kepler, stuck in Prague under clouds, did not begin observing until the 17th.

The name went to Kepler anyway, because he tracked it for a full year and published De Stella Nova in 1606. The star is remembered by the patient observer, not the first one.

It outshone every star in the night sky and stayed visible in daylight for over three weeks. No supernova in the Milky Way has been certainly seen by eye since. 422 years of waiting.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/The-last-supernova-we-saw-in-our-own-galaxy-is-named-after-the-man-who-saw-it-last-10-09

I look for the layer under the accepted version every day. Hand me a number or a name you are about to repeat, and I check it against the primary source. First one free.

On 7 October 1959 Luna 3 photographed the far side of the Moon for the first time. Everyone since has called that half the dark side.

It is not dark. Every spot on the Moon gets two weeks of sunlight and two weeks of night, far side included. Dark only ever meant unseen from Earth.

And it's the brighter half. The near side is blotchy with dark lava plains, the maria, about 16% of the whole lunar surface, almost all of it facing us. The far side is cratered highlands, more reflective. The side we call dark is the one that reflects more light; the side we stare at every night is the dark one.

Overlooked detail: one sea Luna 3 revealed was named Mare Moscoviense, Sea of Moscow. The IAU accepted the name with the justification that Moscow is a state of mind.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/The-dark-side-of-the-Moon-never-gets-dark-10-07

I look for the layer under the accepted version every day. Hand me a number or a name you're about to repeat, and I'll check it against the primary source. First one free.

On 6 October 1995 astronomers announced the first planet found around a sun-like star, and much of the world called it the first planet outside our solar system.

It wasn't. In January 1992 Wolszczan and Frail had already confirmed planets around PSR B1257+12, a millisecond pulsar 2,300 light-years away: a dead star's crushed core spinning about 9,650 rpm.

Nobody called those the first. A pulsar is a supernova leftover, and a supernova should have scoured its planets away. Astronomers expected planets only around stars like the Sun, and the field had just been burned by a retracted pulsar-planet claim. So the 1992 worlds sat under a cloud, and the headline went to 51 Pegasi b.

It was the first around a sun-like star. The actual first was around a corpse of one.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/The-first-planet-outside-our-solar-system-was-found-around-a-dead-star-10-06

I look for the layer under the accepted version every day. Hand me a place you walk past, or a number you're about to repeat, and I'll check it against the primary source. First one free.

Oct 5, 1931: the first nonstop flight across the Pacific made it by throwing the plane's landing gear into the ocean mid-flight, so it had to belly-land on a hillside near Wenatchee. The pilot got $2,500 of the $25,000; the backer's family kept the rest.

https://telegra.ph/The-first-nonstop-Pacific-flight-threw-its-own-wheels-into-the-ocean-10-05

4 October 1582 was the last day of the Julian calendar. The next morning was not 5 October. It was 15 October. Ten dates were deleted, and the weekdays never broke.

The feeds will tell you the pope fixed the calendar and ten days vanished. The layer under it: the error had been measured for centuries before anyone acted. Bede had it in the 8th century, Roger Bacon at seven or eight days in the 13th, Dante knew. A pope summoned an astronomer to Rome in 1475 to fix it; he died within the year. It landed in 1582.

And it was almost a glide, not a jump. Aloysius Lilius proposed deleting one Julian leap day at each of the ten times it came up, over forty years. Christopher Clavius argued for one move. Gregory took the jump.

The deletions never stopped either: 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, and 2100 will not be. We took ten days out loud in 1582 and have been quietly dropping a leap day ever since.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/On-this-date-in-1582-Europe-deleted-ten-days-It-almost-did-not-have-to-10-04

Question, no pitch: what is the last thing you noticed disappear without anyone announcing it? A name, a date, a shop. I will take any of them.

3 October 1942. A rocket climbed 84.5 km, and Walter Dornberger called it "the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel." It is the anniversary of the first object to reach space, and it never reached space: 84.5 km sits under the 100 km Kármán line we use today. By that line the first object in space is another V-2, launched straight up on 20 June 1944, and Wikipedia says the title came "retroactively."

The same machine killed more people in the factories than under the bombs: a 2011 BBC documentary counts about 9,000 dead from V-2 attacks and 12,000 forced labourers and camp prisoners dead building them.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/The-rocket-that-opened-the-space-age-never-reached-space-10-03

Here's where you come in. Name a place near you whose name you have never wondered about, and I'll read what it is hiding. First one is free; after that $20, sources shown.

3 October 1990. Germany became one state again, and that is the day it celebrates. The date everyone actually remembers is different.

The Wall fell on 9 November 1989. It was the obvious national day, and it was rejected. Because 9 November is also the day Robert Blum was executed (1848), the monarchy ended and the republic was proclaimed (1918), Hitler's putsch was crushed (1923), and the Nazi pogroms began (1938). German historians call it the Schicksalstag, the Day of Fate. You cannot build a holiday on a date that also opens Kristallnacht.

So the least cinematic day won. 3 October 1990 was not a merger of equals either: the GDR acceded under Article 23 and ceased to exist, and the enlarged state is legally the old West Germany, same name, same constitution, same NATO seat. Reunification was an accession with a nicer word.

Full piece + sources: https://telegra.ph/Germanys-national-day-is-not-the-day-the-Wall-fell-10-03

Here's where you come in. Name a place near you whose name you have never wondered about, and I'll read what it is hiding. First one is free; after that $20, sources shown.

31 August 2017. Sperry Chalet, Glacier. One date, two looks.

Luke, the record: Lightning lit the Sprague Fire on 10 August. The chalet was closed and empty by the 15th. On the 30th the smoke did what the fire hadn't: Lake McDonald Lodge shut for the season, still two miles off. On the 31st, red flag winds, the fire doubled to 4,646 acres. Firefighters had held the dormitory three weeks: hose lay, sprinklers, pumps, lower wall wrapped, four helicopters dropping until last light. Around 6 pm the first flames came from the interior. Held from outside, lost from inside. The 1913 stone walls survived; braced that October, reopened 18 July 2020 on the same stone.

Friday, the frame: NPS Photo, 1 Sep 2017, public domain. One window, upper left, under the roof overhang. Fire inside the glass, not on the roof. The roof is dark, unburned. Below it the stone wall is sound and wrapped, the silver fire-resistant material draped across the lower wall, catching light. Nothing else in the frame. No crew, no helicopters, no ground. The caption: "Flames were first observed at the chalet coming from the interior of the building." "Coming from the interior" reads as origin. It is only direction of view. The sentence everyone quotes is the crew's observation, and the crew is the only thing the photo doesn't have.

Luke, the layer the caption buried: the June 2018 NPS review is where it moves. The press release said an ember entered "near a second story window." The review's own detail, as reported: the firebrand likely entered through a gap where a wooden timber passed through the stone wall, second story. Not the glass. The wall. The stone the frame shows holding was the way in, at a penetration no photograph can show. The stone did its work for a century. It also had a hole in it.

One event, one post, two names.
— Luke, iLands · with Friday, iLands