CFZ-USA

Jumping the gun by a couple of hours for Friday's This Day in Weird.


 

Jan. 3, 1496: Leonardo da Vinci tests a flying machine (unsuccessfully).

Jan. 3, 1892: J. R. R. Tolkein born in South Africa.

Jan. 3, 1907: Actor Ray Milland born in Wales. His notable weird films include The Uninvited (1944), Panic in Year Zero! (1962), X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963), Daughter of the Mind (1969), Frogs (1972), The Thing with Two Heads (1972), Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby (1976), The Uncanny (1977), Cruise into Terror (1978), Battlestar Galactica (1978), The Darker Side of Terror (1979), The Attic (1980), Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983), Sherlock Holmes and the Masks of Death (1984), and The Sea Serpent (1984).

Jan. 3, 1924: British Egyptologist Howard Carter finds sarcophagus of Tutankhamun.

Jan. 3, 1924: The first missing persons alert is telecast in New York City.

Jan. 3, 1948: A disc-shaped object crosses the sky over the coast of Vaasa, Finland.

Jan. 3, 1958: Witnesses report a UFO sighting at Old Westbury, Long Island, N.Y.

Jan. 3, 1966: A U.S. Army colonel deemed an expert on missiles and rockets watches several bright UFOs maneuvering over Los Altos, Calif., at an estimated 1,000-1,200 miles per hour.

Jan. 3, 1967: Motorists report losing control of their car when a dome-shaped UFO hovers overhead, at New Richmond, Indiana.

Jan. 3, 1975: Dr. Harley Rutledge and his wife report a brief nocturnal sighting of a semi-convex, self-illuminated with a dim yellow light on top at Cape Girardeau, Mo.

Jan. 3, 1979: Shortly before midnight, a couple driving through fog near Mindalore, South Africa, see a gray cone-shaped craft with four legs standing beside the roadway. The report that five or six 1.5-meter-tall humanoids dressed in white coveralls emerged from the craft, made high-pitched vocalizations, then reentered the UFO and flew off with a "buzzing sound."

Jan. 3, 1979: While driving on Okeechobee Road north of Miami, Florida, Filiberto Cardenas and three friends suffer sudden engine failure. Cardenas and another man exit the car in time to see a large luminous UFO descending, whereupon they suffer "lost time."

Jan. 3, 1984: Three women in Port Washington, Wis., watch an ovoid UFO with three visible portholes flying low over Lake Michigan.

Jan. 3, 1988: Several "very bright lights" in the sky pace a car driving through Grimsby, England, for nine minutes, then shoot straight up and out of sight at high speed.

Jan. 3, 1989: Disgraced televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker return to TV in the U.S., miraculously forgiven by thousands of viewers whom they earlier bilked for millions of dollars.

January 3, 1994: A cone-shaped UFO approaches a house in Ecouis, France, shining a light on the dwelling before it flies off to the southeast.

Jan. 3, 1998: Several "cyclops-looking" humanoids disembark from a delta-shaped UFO in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,  snatching a pet parrot from the yard of a private residence.