1969 - Wikiwand

1969 (MCMLXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1969th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 969th year of the 2nd millennium, the 69th year of the 20th century, and the 10th and last year of the 1960s decade.

16 major events of 1969. From left to right, top to bottom:

Quick Facts

1969 in various calendars
Gregorian calendar	1969 MCMLXIX
Ab urbe condita	2722
Armenian calendar	1418 ԹՎ ՌՆԺԸ
Assyrian calendar	6719
Baháʼí calendar	125–126
Balinese saka calendar	1890–1891
Bengali calendar	1375–1376
Berber calendar	2919
British Regnal year	17 Eliz. 2 – 18 Eliz. 2
Buddhist calendar	2513
Burmese calendar	1331
Byzantine calendar	7477–7478
Chinese calendar	戊申年 (Earth Monkey) 4666 or 4459 — to — 己酉年 (Earth Rooster) 4667 or 4460
Coptic calendar	1685–1686
Discordian calendar	3135
Ethiopian calendar	1961–1962
Hebrew calendar	5729–5730
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	2025–2026
- Shaka Samvat	1890–1891
- Kali Yuga	5069–5070
Holocene calendar	11969
Igbo calendar	969–970
Iranian calendar	1347–1348
Islamic calendar	1388–1389
Japanese calendar	Shōwa 44 (昭和４４年)
Javanese calendar	1900–1901
Juche calendar	58
Julian calendar	Gregorian minus 13 days
Korean calendar	4302
Minguo calendar	ROC 58 民國58年
Nanakshahi calendar	501
Thai solar calendar	2512
Tibetan calendar	阳土猴年 (male Earth-Monkey) 2095 or 1714 or 942 — to — 阴土鸡年 (female Earth-Rooster) 2096 or 1715 or 943

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Events

January

January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco.
January 5 – Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London's Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home's occupants.^[1]
January 14 – An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 28 and injures 314.
January 16 – First successful docking of two crewed spacecraft in orbit and the first transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another (by a space walk) between Soviet craft Soyuz 5 and Soyuz 4.^[2]
January 18 – Failure of Soyuz 5's service module to separate correctly causes a near-fatal re-entry (not publicly acknowledged until 1997) but the module makes a hard landing in the Ural Mountains.^[3]
January 19 – End of the siege of the University of Tokyo, marking the beginning of the end for the 1968–69 Japanese university protests.
January 22 – Attempted assassination of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured; Brezhnev escapes unharmed. Very little is publicly admitted about the incident by the Soviet authorities at this time.
January 27
- Fourteen men, 9 of them Jews, are executed in Baghdad for spying for Israel.
- Reverend Ian Paisley, Northern Irish Unionist leader and founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster is jailed for three months for illegal assembly.
January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil's Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara's harbor. The incident inspires Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to organize the first Earth Day in 1970.

February

February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
February 8
- The Allende meteorite explodes over Mexico.
- After 147 years, the last weekly issue of The Saturday Evening Post is published in the United States. (The magazine is later briefly resurrected as a monthly magazine.)
February 9 – The Boeing 747 "jumbo jet" is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington.
February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange.
February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues Mysterii Paschalis, a motu proprio, deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day).
February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California.
February 24 – The Mariner 6 Mars probe is launched from the United States.
February 28 – The 1969 Portugal earthquake hits Portugal, Spain and Morocco.

March

March 2
- In Toulouse, France the first Concorde test flight is conducted.
- Soviet and Chinese forces clash at a border outpost on the Ussuri River.
March 3
- Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 (James McDivitt, Rusty Schweickart, David Scott) to test the lunar module.
- In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
March 13 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
March 16 – Viasa Flight 742 crashes into a neighborhood in Maracaibo, Venezuela, shortly after taking off for Miami; all 84 people on board the DC-9 jet are killed along with 71 people on the ground.^[4]
March 17
- Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.
- The Longhope life-boat is lost after answering a mayday call during severe storms in the Pentland Firth between Orkney and the northern tip of Scotland; the entire crew of 8 die.^[5]
March 18 – An annular solar eclipse is visible in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and is the 49th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 129.
March 20
- One hundred of the 105 passengers and crew on a United Arab Airlines flight, most of them Muslim pilgrims returning to Aswan from Mecca, are killed when the Ilyushin-18 turboprop crashes during a sandstorm.
- John Lennon and Yoko Ono are married at Gibraltar, and proceed to their honeymoon "Bed-in" for peace in Amsterdam.
March 22
- UCLA wins its third consecutive NCAA basketball championship by defeating Purdue University, 92 to 72.
- The landmark art exhibition When Attitudes become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, opens at the Kunsthalle Bern in Bern, Switzerland.
March 28 – Pope Paul VI increases the number of Roman Catholic cardinals by one-third, from 101 to 134.
March 29 – The Eurovision Song Contest 1969 is held in Madrid, and results in four co-winners, with 18 votes each, from Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France.
March 30 – The body of former United States General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower is brought by caisson to the United States Capitol to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda; Eisenhower had died two days earlier, after a long illness, in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
March 31 – The Barroterán coal mine disaster kills 153 coal miners in Mexico.

April

April 3 – The Mass of Paul VI is promulgated in the Catholic Church by the Pope.^[6]
April 4 – Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.
April 7 – RFC series begins with Network Working Group RFC 1 on ARPANET host software.
April 8 – The Montreal Expos become Major League Baseball's first team outside the United States.
April 9 – Fermín Monasterio Pérez is murdered by the ETA in Biscay, Spain; the 4th victim in the name of Basque nationalism.
April 15 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down a US reconnaissance aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.^[7]
April 17 – Sirhan Bishara Sirhan is found guilty of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
April 20 – British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
April 22 – English sailor Robin Knox-Johnston becomes the first person to sail around the world solo without stopping.
April 28 – Charles de Gaulle steps down as president of France after suffering defeat in a referendum the day before.

May

May 10 – The Battle of Dong Ap Bia, also known as Hamburger Hill, begins during the Vietnam War.
May 13 – May 13 Incident: Race riots occur in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
May 14 – Colonel Muammar Gaddafi visits Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
May 15 – An American teenager known as 'Robert R.' dies in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, of a baffling medical condition. In 1984 it will be identified as the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America.
May 16 – Venera program: Soviet space probe Venera 5 lands on Venus.
May 17 – Venera program: Soviet space probe Venera 6 begins to descend into Venus's atmosphere, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by pressure.
May 18 – Apollo program: Apollo 10 (Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford, John Young) is launched. It is to be a full rehearsal for the Moon landing, stopping 15 kilometers short of actually reaching the lunar surface.
May 20 – United States National Guard helicopters spray skin-stinging powder on anti-war protesters in California.
May 21 – Rosariazo: Civil unrest breaks out in Rosario, Argentina, following the death of a 15-year-old student.
May 22 – Apollo program: Apollo 10's lunar module flies to within 15,400 m of the Moon's surface.
May 26
- The Andean Pact (Andean Group) is established.
- Apollo program: Apollo 10 returns to Earth, after a successful 8-day test of all the components needed for the upcoming first crewed Moon landing.
May 26–June 2 – John Lennon and Yoko Ono conduct their second bed-in. The follow-up to the Amsterdam event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Lennon composes and records the song "Give Peace a Chance" during the event.
May 29 – Cordobazo: A general strike and civil unrest break out in Córdoba, Argentina.
May 30 – Riots in Curaçao mark the start of an Afro-Caribbean civil rights movement on the island.

June

June 3 – While operating at sea on SEATO maneuvers, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne accidentally rams and slices into the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea, killing 74 American seamen.
June 5 – An international communist conference begins in Moscow.
June 8
- Francisco Franco orders the closing of the Gibraltar–Spain border and communications between Gibraltar and Spain in response to the 1967 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum.^[8] The border remains closed until a partial reopening on December 15, 1982.
- U.S. President Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu meet at Midway Island. Nixon announces that 25,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn by September.
June 15 – Georges Pompidou is elected President of France.^[9]
June 17 – After a 23-game match, Boris Spassky defeats Tigran Petrosian to become the World Chess Champion in Moscow.
June 24 – The United Kingdom and Rhodesia sever diplomatic relations, after the Rhodesian constitutional referendum.
June 27 – Gay intercourse is officially legalized in Canada.^[10]
June 28 – The Stonewall riots, a milestone in the modern gay rights movement in the United States, began in New York City.

July

July 7 – French is made equal to English throughout the Canadian national government.
July 8 – Vietnam War: The first U.S. troop withdrawals are made.
July 14
- Football War: After Honduras loses an association football match against El Salvador, rioting breaks out in Honduras against Salvadoran migrant workers. Of the 300,000 Salvadoran workers in Honduras, tens of thousands are expelled, prompting a brief Salvadoran invasion of Honduras. The OAS works out a cease-fire on July 18, which takes effect on July 20.
- The Act of Free Choice for West Irian commences in Merauke, Indonesia.
July 16 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 (Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins) lifts off from Cape Kennedy in Florida towards the first crewed landing on the Moon.
July 19
- Chappaquiddick incident: US Senator Edward M. Kennedy drives off a bridge into a tidal pond after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy does not report the accident for nine or ten hours.
- John Fairfax lands in Hollywood Beach, Florida, United States and becomes the first person to row across an ocean solo, after 180 days spent at sea on board the 25' ocean rowboat Britannia (left Gran Canaria on January 20, 1969).
July 20
- Apollo program Moon landing: At 3:17 pm ET (20:17 UTC) Apollo 11's Lunar Module Eagle lands on the Moon's surface. At 10:56 pm ET (02:56 UTC July 21), an estimated 650 million people worldwide, the largest television audience for a live broadcast at this time, watch in awe as Neil Armstrong takes his first historic steps on the surface.^[11]
- 1969 Tour de France: Belgian Eddy Merckx wins the cycle race for the first time.
July 22 – Spanish dictator and head of state Francisco Franco appoints Prince Juan Carlos to be his successor as head of state following his death.
July 24
- Apollo program: Apollo 11 returns from the first successful Moon landing and the astronauts are placed in biological isolation for several days in case they may have brought back lunar germs. The airless lunar environment is later determined to rule out microscopic life.
- The Soviet Union returns British lecturer Gerald Brooke to the United Kingdom freed from a Soviet prison in exchange for their spies Peter and Helen Kroger (Morris and Lona Cohen).
July 26 – A 6.4 earthquake shakes the Chinese city of Yangjiang destroying thousands of homes and killing 3,000 people.
July 30 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon makes an unscheduled visit to South Vietnam, meeting with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. military commanders.
July 31 – Pope Paul VI arrives in Entebbe, Uganda for the first visit by a reigning Pope to Africa.^[12]

August

August 2 – U.S. President Richard Nixon visits Romania, becoming the first incumbent U.S. president to visit a communist state since the start of the Cold War.^[13]
August 4 – Vietnam War: At the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy begin secret peace negotiations. They eventually fail since the two sides cannot agree to any terms.
August 5 – Mariner program: Mariner 7 makes its closest fly-by of Mars (3,524 kilometres (2,190 mi)).
August 9 – On orders from Charles Manson, members of the Manson Family invade the Los Angeles home of film director Roman Polanski, and murder his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four others.
August 10 – A day after murdering Sharon Tate and four others, members of the Manson Family kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Angeles.
August 13 – Serious border clashes occur between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
August 14 – The Troubles: British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland to restore order following three days of political and sectarian violence, marking the beginning of the 37-year Operation Banner.^[14]
August 15–18 – The Woodstock Festival is held near White Lake, New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era.
August 17 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille hits the Mississippi coast of the United States, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 USD).
August 21 – Australian Denis Michael Rohan sets fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
August 29 – A Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv is hijacked and diverted to Syria.

September

September 1
- 1969 Libyan coup d'état: A bloodless coup in Libya ousts King Idris and brings Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power.
- For Brazil, the Jornal Nacional was created on Monday, 1 September 1969.
September 2 – Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam, dies at the age of 79.
September 5 – Lieutenant William Calley is charged with six counts of premeditated murder for the 1968 My Lai Massacre deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.
September 9 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 853, a DC-9 airliner, collides in flight with a small Piper PA-28 airplane, and crashes near Fairland, Indiana, killing all 83 people in both aircraft.
September 11 – An annular solar eclipse is visible in Pacific Ocean and South America, and is the 41st solar eclipse of Solar Saros 134.
September 13 – Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premieres on CBS, starting the Scooby-Doo franchise.
September 22–25 – An Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco, following the al-Aqsa Mosque fire (August 21), condemns the Israeli claim of ownership of Jerusalem.
September 23 – China carries out an underground nuclear bomb test.
September 25 – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded.
September 28 – 1969 West German federal election: The Social Democrats, led by Vice Chancellor Willy Brandt, and the Free Democrats led by Walter Scheel, formed a coalition government with Brandt as Chancellor, after the Social Democrats severed their relationship with Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger's Christian Democratic Union.

October

October 1
- In Sweden, Olof Palme is elected Leader of the Social Democratic Worker's Party, replacing Tage Erlander as Prime Minister on October 14.
- The Beijing Subway begins operation.
October 2 – A 1.2 megaton thermonuclear device is tested at Amchitka Island, Alaska. This test is code-named Project Milrow, the 11th test of the Operation Mandrel 1969–1970 underground nuclear test series. This test is known as a "calibration shot" to test if the island is fit for larger underground nuclear detonations.
October 5 – Sazae-san first airs on Fuji Television.
October 9–12 – Days of Rage: In Chicago, the Illinois National Guard is called in to control demonstrations involving the radical Weathermen, in connection with the "Chicago Eight" Trial.
October 11 – The Zodiac Killer shoots and kills taxi driver Paul Stine in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco; this is the serial killer's last known murder.
October 11–16 – The New York Mets upset the Baltimore Orioles four games to one in the World Series.
October 15 –
- DZKB-TV Channel 9, the Philippines' sixth TV station, is launched.
- Vietnam War: Hundreds of thousands of people take part in Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations across the United States.
October 17 – Willard S. Boyle and George Smith invent the CCD at Bell Laboratories (30 years later, this technology is widely used in digital cameras).
October 20 – Experimental research showing that protons were composed of smaller particles, the first evidence of quarks, is published.^[15]
October 21
- Willy Brandt becomes Chancellor of West Germany.
- General Siad Barre comes to power in Somalia in a coup, 6 days after the assassination of President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke.
October 25 – 1969 Australian federal election: John Gorton's Liberal/Country Coalition government is narrowly re-elected with a sharply reduced majority, defeating a resurgent Labor Party led by Gough Whitlam. Prime Minister Gorton survived a leadership challenge by his deputy William McMahon as well as David Fairbairn in the immediate aftermath of the election.
October 29 – The first electronic message is sent between two computers connected via ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and SRI International in California at around 10:30pm local time, the initial forerunning technology to the Internet.

November

November 3 – Süleyman Demirel of AP forms the new government of Turkey (31st government).
November 10 – The television series Sesame Street premiered on National Educational Television, becoming the most famous preschool television series of all time.
November 14
- Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, Alan Bean), the second crewed mission to the Moon.
- The SS United States, the last active United States Lines passenger ship, is withdrawn from service.
November 15 – Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.
November 17 – Cold War: Negotiators from the Soviet Union and the United States meet in Helsinki, to begin the SALT I negotiations aimed at limiting the number of strategic weapons on both sides.
November 19
- Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum ("Ocean of Storms"), becoming the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
- Professional footballer Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
- Vietnam War: A Cleveland, Ohio newspaper, The Plain Dealer, publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
- Richard Oakes returns with 90 followers to Alcatraz Island and begins a 19 month long occupation, lasting until June 1971.
November 21
- U.S. President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Satō agree in Washington, D.C. to the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. retains rights to military bases on the island, but they must be nuclear-free.
- The first ARPANET link is established (the progenitor of the global Internet).
November 24 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 spacecraft splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second crewed mission to the Moon.

December

December 1 – Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States since World War II is held. September 14 is the first of the 366 days of the year selected, meaning that anyone born on September 14 in the years from 1944 to 1951 would be the first to be summoned. On January 4, 1970, The New York Times will run a long article, "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random".
December 2 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet makes its first passenger flight. It carries 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, from Seattle to New York City.
December 3 – Air France Flight 212, a Boeing 707 registered as F-BHSZ, crashed shortly after takeoff from Venezuela killing all 62 occupants onboard. The cause of the accident is not yet known since the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) did not publish an investigation report. It will not be released until 2029, sixty years after the accident.
December 6 – Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by Hells Angels at the Altamont Free Concert, an event which came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the de facto conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture.
December 12 – The Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, Italy, kills 17 people and injures 88.
December 24
- Charles Manson is allowed to defend himself at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.
- The oil company Phillips Petroleum made the first oil discovery in the Norwegian sector of North Sea.
- Nigerian troops capture Umuahia. The last Biafran capital before its dissolution becomes Owerri.
December 27 – The Liberal Democratic Party wins 47.6% of the votes in the 1969 Japanese general election. Future prime ministers Yoshirō Mori and Tsutomu Hata and future kingmaker Ichirō Ozawa are elected for the first time.

Date unknown

Summer – Invention of Unix under the potential name "Unics" (after Multics).^[16]
Common African, Malagasy and Mauritian Organization (OCAMM) (Organisation Commune Africaine Malgache et Mauricienne) is established.
International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, a maritime treaty, is adopted.