The following events occurred in February 1966:
February 1, 1966 (Tuesday) West Germany bartered for the release of 2,600 political prisoners from East Germany by a transaction involving the export of $24,250,000 worth of West German consumer goods to their East German neighbors, in return for allowing the prisoners to depart the Communist nation. The New York Times described the agreement as "payment of ransom of up to $10,000 per prisoner". The goods, scarce in the East and abundant in the West, were items such as coffee, fresh fruit and butter, as well as fertilizer. In the United States, 19 employees of the John W. Campbell farms in Dade County, Florida, were killed when the bus they were riding in was struck by a freight train. The men were being brought home after a day's work of harvesting vegetables, and the Seaboard Lines train was on its way to the farm to pick up the cars that had been loaded with produce. All of the dead were migrant workers from Puerto Rico, and most of them were young men in their 20s."Florida Train Kills 18", Kansas City Times, February 2, 1966, p1"18 Killed In Miami Bus-Train Crash", Sarasota (FL) Herald-Tribune, February 2, 1966, p1 International pressure against the white-minority government of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was stepped up when three major airlines serving the nation— British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), British United Airways and Alitalia— made their last flights into the capital at Salisbury (now Harare), then departed and canceled further service.J. R. T. Wood, A Matter of Weeks Rather Than Months: The Impasse Between Harold Wilson and Ian Smith Sanctions, Aborted Settlements and War 1965-1969 (Trafford Publishing, 2012) p50
Died: Buster Keaton, 70, American film comedian known for his daring stunts, died from lung cancer. Hedda Hopper, 80, American gossip columnist, died from pleural pneumonia.
February 2, 1966 (Wednesday) American adventurer Nick Piantanida set off in the Strato Jump II from a park in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in an attempt to make the highest parachute jump ever, and inadvertently reached the highest altitude ever reached by a balloonist. When he reached his target altitude of , he prepared to jump and then discovered that the oxygen hose that tethered him to the gondola was frozen and could not be disconnected. While he struggled to set himself free, the balloon continued to climb until he was more than high. At , he aborted the parachute jump, separated the gondola from the balloon, and spent the next 32 minutes descending to Earth while the gondola's parachute system slowed his fall. Besides not being able to set the parachute record, he did not set an officially recognized altitude record either, because he had returned to Earth without the balloon. Three months later, on May 1, Pantanida would make a new attempt to set a record, but would suffer a fatal accident on Strato Jump III. At Belmore Park in Sydney, three young Australian men became the first people to burn their draft registration cards as a protest against Australia's participation in the Vietnam War. Wayne Haylen, Barry Robinson and Greg Barker stood before a crowd of 200 people and declared their intention to refuse the draft. A vulture collided with a Pakistan International Airlines helicopter, causing a rotor blade to tear off, and killing 24 of the 25 people on board. The accident occurred as the helicopter was approaching a landing in Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh. At a mission planning meeting for Project Gemini flights 9 through 12, held at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, the joint group decided on using the Agena target vehicle primary propulsion system the Gemini spacecraft into an unprecedented high elliptic orbit of up to . Since reentry from the high altitude would be unsafe, the Agena system would return the spacecraft to a circular orbit for nominal reentry. Go-Set, Australia's first pop music newspaper, was launched in Melbourne.
February 3, 1966 (Thursday) At 18:45:30 UTC (9:45 p.m. in Moscow), the uncrewed Soviet Luna 9 became the first object to make a controlled landing on the Moon, touching down in the Oceanus Procellarum to the northwest of the Reiner crater. It began transmitting signals four minutes later, and within 20 minutes of landing, sent back the first ground-level photographs of the Moon's surface. Although the arrival was not quite a "soft" landing— the capsule was ejected when the descent module was above the surface, and bounced several times before coming to rest— it was a more gentle descent than previous probes that had crashed into the ground. The pictures would yield an important discovery, demonstrating that the surface of the Moon was solid rock, rather than the accumulation of eons of dust deposits, and therefore would be suitable for a human landing.
February 4, 1966 (Friday) All 133 people on All Nippon Airways Flight 60 were killed when the airliner plunged into Tokyo Bay as it was making its approach to Tokyo at the end of a flight from Sapporo. At 6:59 p.m., the Boeing 727 jet had descended into the water short of the runway, broke apart and sank. At the time, the 133 deaths were the largest single-plane fatality and the second deadliest plane crash in history. Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, a featurette based on the first two chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, was released by Buena Vista Distribution as a double feature with The Ugly Dachshund. It was the first animated featurette in the Winnie the Pooh film series. It was also the last short film to be produced by Walt Disney, who died of lung cancer ten months after its release. Physicist Peter P. Sorokin and his colleague John K. Lankard demonstrated the first dye laser (and the first to provide output from a liquid solution) at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The augmented target docking adapter (ATDA) arrived at Cape Kennedy. Modifications, testing, and troubleshooting were completed March 4. The ATDA, which was intended to back up the Gemini Agena target vehicle (GATV), was placed in storage until May 17, when the failure of target launch vehicle 5303 prevented GATV 5004 from achieving orbit. The ATDA became the target for Gemini 9A. Died: Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, 90, American publisher who built the National Geographic Society into a worldwide institution through publication of its magazine National Geographic. Sir Lance Brisbane, 72, Australian industrialist
February 5, 1966 (Saturday) At the annual four-man bobsled world championships at Cortina D'Ampezzo in Italy, the members of the West German team were injured after their sled failed to negotiate a sharp curve and crashed. The driver, Anton "Toni" Pensperger, never regained consciousness and died of brain and spinal cord injuries at the local hospital. Rider Roland Ebert and brakeman Ludwig Siebert were unconscious, while the fourth teammate, Helmut Werzer, was only slightly hurt. The day after Pierre Harmel announced that he would resign as Prime Minister of Belgium because physicians had threatened to go on strike at midnight on Sunday, King Baudouin refused to accept the resignation and explained his reasons in a two-page letter. Harmel would finally step aside six weeks later in favor of Paul Vanden Boeynants. Born: José María Olazábal, Spanish golfer; in Hondarribia
February 6, 1966 (Sunday) In Oslo, Fred Anton Maier of Norway broke the world record in the men's 10,000 meter speed skating event in a five nation competition. Maier, who completed 10 kilometers in 15 minutes, 32.2 seconds, broke the existing mark, set by Jonny Nilsson of Sweden in 1963, by 0.8 seconds."Sets World Skate mark", Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1966, p3-1 The last original episode of the American TV sitcom Mister Ed was broadcast on CBS. In its first five seasons, from 1961 to 1965, the show about a talking horse had been telecast in the evening. In its final outing, it was moved to Sunday afternoons at 5:00 p.m.Tim Brooks and Earle F. Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present (Random House, 2009) p905 In elections in Liechtenstein, the Progressive Citizens' Party retained its narrow 8 to 7 seat lead over the Patriotic Union in the 15-member Landtag, as the two parties worked at forming a coalition for the ninth consecutive election in 30 years.Nohlen, D & Stöver, P (2010) Elections in Europe: A data handbook, p1165 Born: Rick Astley, English pop music singer known for his 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up"; in Great Sankey, Cheshire Died: Abdurrahman Nafiz Gürman, 84, Turkish general Narcisa de Leon, 88, Filipina film producer
February 7, 1966 (Monday) Television was broadcast in South Vietnam for the first time, as the United States Navy used "Stratovision", sending a C-121 Constellation airplane to carry transmitting equipment, videotape machines and a small television studio aloft. The C-121 took off from Saigon, climbed to , then flew in a slow oval pattern at , and, at 7:30 p.m., transmitted the first THVN programs to outdoor television sets that had been tuned to Channel 9; the United States and South Vietnam would set up four ground-based stations in the autumn. Paul Williams and other students at Swarthmore College published the first issue of the rock music magazine Crawdaddy!, starting with ten pages of material and 500 copies printed on a mimeograph machine. The publication, which preceded Rolling Stone by almost two years, would develop into a mass market publication lasting through 1979, and being revived by Williams from 1993 to 2003. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson and Premier Nguyễn Cao Kỳ of South Vietnam convened with other officials in Honolulu, Hawaii, to discuss the course of the Vietnam War. Born: Kristin Otto, German Olympic swimming champion who won six gold medals for East Germany in the 1988 Summer Olympics; in Leipzig
February 8, 1966 (Tuesday) The Tugu Nagara, Malaysia's National Monument to commemorate the lives of the 11,000 people who died in combat during the Malayan Emergency, was unveiled in a ceremony in near Kuala Lumpur, by Ismail Nasiruddin of Terengganu, the elected monarch (Yang di-Pertuan Agong).Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (National University of Singapore Press, 2012) pp237-238 The world's tallest bronze freestanding sculpture features seven statues of Malay fighters and has the inscription, "Dedicated to the Heroic Fighters in the Cause of Peace and Freedom— May the Blessing of Allah Be upon Them." Died: Paul Sophus Epstein, 82, Russian-American mathematical physicist and pioneer in quantum mechanics
February 9, 1966 (Wednesday) Sir John Paul, who had served as the Governor-General of The Gambia since the West African nation's grant of independence from the United Kingdom a year earlier, stepped aside in favor of a Gambian native, Sir Farimang Singateh. Singateh would preside as the Head of State on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II until 1970, when the Gambia would become a republic. The Board of Governors of the six-team National Hockey League voted to admit six expansion franchises, out of 18 candidates, for the 1966–1967 season, doubling the NHL's size. The existing teams in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York, and Toronto, would be joined by clubs at Los Angeles, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and San Francisco. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record level of 995 points, then gradually declined by more than 25% over the next seven months, closing at 744.32 on October 8. Died: Richard Raymond Willis, 89, Royal Army officer and one of six recipients of the Victoria Cross for heroism in the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915 Sophie Tucker, 79, Russian-born U.S. singer, comedian, actress, and radio personality
February 10, 1966 (Thursday)