December 17 in History

Twelve seconds of powered flight over a North Carolina sand dune ended humanity's oldest dream and began its newest era. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted the Wright Flyer for 120 feet at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, achieving the first sustained, controlled, powered heavier-than-air flight. Three more flights followed that morning, the last covering 852 feet in fifty-nine seconds before a gust destroyed the aircraft. Orville and Wilbur Wright, bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, had spent four years systematically solving the problems that defeated every other aviation pioneer. They built a wind tunnel and tested over 200 wing shapes. They invented wing warping, a control system giving the pilot authority over all three axes of motion. They designed their own propellers after discovering marine propeller theory was useless for air. When no engine manufacturer could build one light enough, their machinist Charlie Taylor fabricated a twelve-horsepower aluminum engine in six weeks. After a failed attempt on December 14, the brothers repaired the Flyer and waited for suitable conditions. On December 17, with winds above twenty miles per hour, they laid their launching rail on flat ground facing into the wind. Orville took the controls at 10:35 AM while five men from the local lifesaving station watched. John T. Daniels, who had never operated a camera, captured the iconic photograph of the Flyer just after liftoff. The brothers took turns for four flights, each growing longer. The final flight ended when the elevator control jammed, bringing Wilbur down hard but safely. Before they could attempt a longer flight, a gust flipped the Flyer, damaging it beyond repair. The Wrights sent a telegram to their father. The world barely noticed. Only a handful of newspapers reported the event, most inaccurately. Two years passed before the brothers demonstrated publicly, and several more before the magnitude of December 17 became clear.

After two decades of investigating flying saucers, the United States Air Force decided there was nothing to see. On December 17, 1969, Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans announced the termination of Project Blue Book, the military's official UFO investigation program. The closure followed a University of Colorado study concluding that UFO reports offered nothing of scientific value. Project Blue Book was the third in a series of Air Force UFO programs, following Project Sign in 1947 and Project Grudge in 1949. The modern UFO phenomenon began in June 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine unusual objects near Mount Rainier, Washington. A newspaper account coined "flying saucers," and reports flooded in from across the country. Blue Book operated from 1952 to 1969 under several officers, most notably Captain Edward Ruppelt, who coined "unidentified flying object," and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who served as scientific consultant. The project investigated 12,618 reported sightings. Of these, 701 remained "unidentified" after analysis. The Condon Report, produced by physicist Edward Condon at the University of Colorado, provided the Air Force its exit strategy. The report concluded that twenty-one years of study had produced "nothing that has added to scientific knowledge" and recommended ending the program. Critics, including Hynek himself, argued that Condon approached the study with a predetermined conclusion and ignored the most compelling cases. Blue Book's files were declassified and transferred to the National Archives in 1976. The closure did not end public interest or government involvement. In 2017, the Pentagon acknowledged a successor program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and in 2020 the Navy began formally documenting what the military now calls "unidentified aerial phenomena."

After nearly three years behind barbed wire, 120,000 Japanese Americans were told they could go home to lives that no longer existed. On December 17, 1944, the U.S. Army announced the rescission of its West Coast exclusion orders, effective January 2, 1945, allowing Japanese Americans to return from the internment camps where they had been confined since 1942. The announcement came one day before the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government could not detain loyal citizens. The internment began in February 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the military to designate "exclusion zones." In practice, the order targeted only Japanese Americans, including over 70,000 U.S. citizens. Families were given days to dispose of homes, businesses, and possessions before reporting to assembly centers, then transported to ten remote camps from the California desert to the swamps of Arkansas. Conditions were harsh. Families lived in tar-paper barracks, shared communal bathrooms, and endured temperature extremes. Armed guards patrolled perimeter fences. Despite this, internees organized schools, newspapers, and community institutions. Many young men volunteered for military service, and the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated unit of its size in Army history. The Army's announcement was carefully timed to follow Roosevelt's re-election. The administration had known for over two years that Japanese Americans posed no security threat, as a secret Office of Naval Intelligence report concluded in 1943. Political calculations, not military necessity, prolonged the internment. Returning families found their property stolen, farms foreclosed, and communities hostile. Full redress came only in 1988, when the Civil Liberties Act apologized and authorized $20,000 payments to each surviving internee.

Kim Jong-il died in December 2011 on his private train, according to the North Korean government, which announced it two days later. He had ruled North Korea since 1994, when he succeeded his father Kim Il-sung. His regime presided over a famine in the mid-1990s that killed somewhere between 240,000 and 3.5 million people, the range reflecting how little outsiders could verify. He accelerated the country's nuclear program, met with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in 2000 in the only inter-Korean summit of his era, and maintained a regime with no free press, no political opposition, and no legal emigration. Power passed to his youngest son Kim Jong-un. Born Yuri Irsenovich Kim in 1941 in the Soviet Union, where his father was living in exile, Kim Jong-il was raised in the mythology of the Korean revolution and groomed for succession from the 1970s onward. He oversaw the regime's propaganda apparatus before taking full control, developing a cult of personality that credited him with supernatural abilities. His personal life was lavish: a wine cellar worth reportedly $800,000 per year, personal chefs flown to Tokyo for sushi training, and a film library of 20,000 movies. He kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his wife to make films for the North Korean cinema industry. The famine that devastated North Korea from 1994 to 1998 was caused by the collapse of Soviet aid, catastrophic agricultural policies, and the regime's refusal to accept international assistance until starvation was already widespread. His nuclear weapons program produced the country's first nuclear test in 2006.