January 12 - In one of the biggest upsets in sports history, the New York Jets of the AFL defeat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts of the NFL in the third AFL NFL world championship game.
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.)
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.[1]
The
Longhopelife-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.[2]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Apollo programMoon 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.[7][8]
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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.[12][13]
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).
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.
1969 – Headlines A report from Rich Lamb of WCBS Newsradio 880 (WCBS-AM New York) Part of WCBS 880's celebration of 40 years of newsradio.
1969 – The Year in Sound An Audiofile produced by Lou Zambrana of WCBS Newsradio 880 (WCBS-AM New York) Part of WCBS 880's celebration of 40 years of newsradio.
January 12 - In one of the biggest upsets in sports history, the New York Jets of the AFL defeat the heavily favored Baltimore Colts of the NFL in the third AFL NFL world championship game.
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.)
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.[1]
The
Longhopelife-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.[2]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Apollo programMoon 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.[7][8]
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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.[12][13]
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).
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.
1969 – Headlines A report from Rich Lamb of WCBS Newsradio 880 (WCBS-AM New York) Part of WCBS 880's celebration of 40 years of newsradio.
1969 – The Year in Sound An Audiofile produced by Lou Zambrana of WCBS Newsradio 880 (WCBS-AM New York) Part of WCBS 880's celebration of 40 years of newsradio.