Dec 4 1872 sailing ship Mary Celeste found abandoned in the Atlantic, ship had little damage & no obvious reason for abandonment. Has become famous as a ghost ship, the crew, all expierienced sailors, were never found despite good weather @ the time.

December 4Th Events

1996 NASA's 1st Mars rover launched from Cape Canaveral
1990 Due to Persian Gulf crisis gas hits $1.60 per gallon price in New York City
1990 Iraq announces it will release all 3,300 Soviet hostages
1982 China adopts its constitution
1978 Dutch War criminal Pieter Menten freed
1961 Museum of Modern Art hangs Matisse's Le Bateau upside down for 47 days
1952 Killer fogs begin in London England, "Smog" becomes a word
1941 Nazi ordinances places Jews of Poland outside protection of courts
1918 President Wilson sails for Versailles Peace Conference in France, 1st chief executive to travel outside U.S. while in office
1899 Webb Hayes son of President Rutherford Hayes receives medal of honor

Dec 5
1933 Prohibition ends in the US
1945 Flight 19 vanishes in the Burmuda Triangle.

December 5Th Events

2009 Tens of thousands in Rome, Italy, participate in a demonstration demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi
1990 Salman Rushdie, author, ordered to death by Iran for blasphemy, appears in public for 1st time in 2 years
1989 France TGV train reaches world record speed of 482.4 kph
1974 "Monty Python's Flying Circus" final episode shown on BBC
1955 Historic bus boycott begins in Montgomery Alabama in support of Rosa Parks
1944 German troops rob all the silver coin in Utrecht, Netherlands
1893 1st electric car (built in Toronto) could go 15 miles between charges

Originally Posted by George

Dec 5
1933 Prohibition ends in the US
1945 Flight 19 vanishes in the Bermuda Triangle.

Additional info:
December 5: General Interest
1945 : Aircraft squadron lost in the Bermuda Triangle

At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.

Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6:20 p.m., apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel.

By this time, several land radar stations finally determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast, and at 7:27 p.m. a search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its home base that its mission was underway. The Mariner was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion seen at 7:50 p.m.

The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.

Although naval officials maintained that the remains of the six aircraft and 27 men were not found because stormy weather destroyed the evidence, the story of the "Lost Squadron" helped cement the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to disappear without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from the southern U.S. coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo Domingo.

December 6Th Events

1994 Maltese Falcon auctioned for $398,590
1992 300,000 hindus destroy mosque of Babri India, 4 die
1982 11 soldiers and 6 civilians die by bomb planted by Irish National Liberation Army exploded in a pub in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland
1976 War criminal Pieter Menten arrested in Zurich
1969 300,000 attend Altamont California rock concert feature Rolling Stones
1957 Indonesia begins nationalizing Dutch possessions
1941 Dutch and British pilots see Japanese invasion fleet at Singapore
1940 Gestapo arrest German resistance fighter/poster artist Helen Ernst
1922 1st constitution of Irish Free State comes into operation
1768 1st edition of "Encyclopedia Brittanica" published (Scotland)

December 7Th Events

2004 After popularizing the PC in the '80s, IBM sells its PC business to a Chinese company
1988 Mikhail Gorbachev cheered by Wall St. crowds upon arrival in New York City
1970 West Germany and Poland normalize relations
1968 Richard Dodd returns a library book his great grandad took out in 1823
1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, a date that will live in infamy
1941 1st Japanese submarine sunk by a U.S. ship (USS Ward)
1934 Wiley Post discovers jet stream
1917 U.S. becomes 13th country to declare war on Austria during World War I
1912 Bust of Queen Nefertete found in El-Amarna, Egypt

Dec. 8 1980 John Lennon murdered

December 8TH Events

2009 At a ceremony in eastern Shan State, Burma, authorities burn $93 million in seized narcotic drugs
1993 30 killed at religious rebellion in Algeria
1987 Occupied Palestinians start "intefadeh" (uprising) against Israel
1987 President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev sign a treaty eliminating medium range nuclear missiles
1976 U.N. General Assembly re-elects Kurt Waldheim secretary-General
1967 Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" album is released in UK
1962 Funeral for Queen Wilhelmina of Holland (New Kerk, Delft)
1952 1st TV acknowledgement of pregnancy (I Love Lucy)
1941 U.S. and Britain declare war on Japan, U.S. enters WW II
1936 NAACP files suit to equalize salaries of black and white teachers
1902 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. became Associate Justice on Supreme Court
1776 George Washington's retreating army crosses Delaware River from New Jersey

Originally Posted by George

Dec. 8 1980 John Lennon murdered

John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, the rock group that transformed popular music in the 1960s, is shot and killed by an obsessed fan in New York City. The 40-year-old artist was entering his luxury Manhattan apartment building when Mark David Chapman shot him four times at close range with a .38-caliber revolver. Lennon, bleeding profusely, was rushed to the hospital but died en route. Chapman had received an autograph from Lennon earlier in the day and voluntarily remained at the scene of the shooting until he was arrested by police. For a week, hundreds of bereaved fans kept a vigil outside the Dakota--Lennon's apartment building--and demonstrations of mourning were held around the world.