CFZ-USA

Happy National Science Fiction Day! Events selected for today's This Day in Weird include:

January 2, 1818: Lord Byron completes "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (4th canto), future inspiration for Stephen King's Gunslinger series of novels.

January 2, 1855: J. W. McHenri allegedly captures an 18-inch-tall hairy humanoid near Waldoboro, Maine.

January 2, 1890: Hunter E. A. McIlhenny kills a record 19' 2" alligator in Louisiana.

January 2, 1903: President Teddy Roosevelt closes the Indianola, Miss., post office after local officials refuse to accept a black postmistress.

January 2, 1920: Future sci-fi author Isaac Assimov is born in Russia. Now celebrated as National Science Fiction Day.

January 2, 1923: White rioters led by KKK members attack the black settlement of Rosewood, Florida, wiping it off the map during a week of carnage.

January 2, 1972: Railroad engineer Justin Phelps reports seeing a 6-foot-tall grayish-brown Sasquatch in an unnamed Idaho canyon.

January 2, 1975: The U.S. Department of the Interior declares grizzly bears a threatened species.

January 2, 1995: Hawaii's Keck telescope discovers the most distant galaxy yet known, ca. 15 billion light-years from Earth.

January 2, 2004: The Stardust robotic space probe flies past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples that it will return to Earth in 2006.