The KM ekranoplan, 'Caspian Sea Monster'
The world's largest aircraft skimmed the sea and was a 'ship'
Rostislav Alexeyev's ekranoplan, 92 m long and up to 544 tonnes, flew a few metres above the water and from 1966 to 1988 was the largest aircraft in the world. Registered as a ship, it had champagne broken on its nose before its first flight. US intelligence spent years puzzling over the 'monster'.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 19 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 18 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 17 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 14 years later
- 1981 AIDS first described — 15 years later
Europe
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 25 years earlier
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 13 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 2 years later
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 23 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 23 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 18 years earlier
- 1953 Iranian coup against Mosaddegh — 13 years earlier
- 1978 Camp David Accords — 12 years later
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 13 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 14 years later
Africa
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 8 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 6 years earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 3 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 1 year later
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 1 year later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 21 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 13 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 2 years earlier
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — same year
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 9 years later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 6 years earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 4 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 3 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 4 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 17 years later
Oceania
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 25 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 24 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 12 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 7 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 85)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 77)
- Mao Zedong (aged 73)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 48)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 37)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 36)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 32)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 82)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 77)
- Ho Chi Minh (aged 76)