1969
1969 was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1969th year of the Common Era and Anno Domini 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.
The year's most prominent event is often considered the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, where astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.
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.
- January 12 – The New York Jets defeat the Baltimore Colts 16–7 in Super Bowl III.
- 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 between Soviet craft Soyuz 5 and Soyuz 4.
- January 18 – Failure of Soyuz 5's service module to separate correctly causes a near-fatal re-entry but the module makes a hard landing in the Ural Mountains.
- 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 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as president of the United States of America.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- 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 25 - Ayub Khan resigns as President of Pakistan and transfers the power to Yahya Khan.
- March 26 - Yahya Khan imposes Martial Law on Pakistan.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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 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 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. 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.
- 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.
- June 28 – The Stonewall riots, a milestone in the modern gay rights movement in the United States, began in New York City.