United Airlines Flight 173  was a Douglas DC-8 en route from Denver to Portland International Airporton December 28, 1978. When the landing gear was lowered, only two of the green landing gear indicator lights came on.The plane circled in the vicinity of Portland while the crew investigated the problem. After about an hour the plane ran out of fuel and crashed in a sparsely populated area near 158th and East Burnside, killing 10 and seriously injuring 24 of the 189 on board the aircraft.

           A United Airlines Douglas DC-8-61, similar to Flight 173

           The Apollo 8 Astronauts, from left to right,were mission Commander
            Frank Borman, Lunar Module Pilot William Andres, and Command
            Module Pilot James Lovell. After coming out from the back side of
            the Moon,the crew read ten verses of the book of Genesis from the
            Bible. This was during a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, a portion
            of this broadcast is below.

                    

        The crew members of Apollo 8 were the first Americans to directly
        see the far side of the Moon and the first humans to see the planet
        Earth from beyond it’s low orbit.

 
         Howard Hughes, industrailist, movie producer and aviator. 

The United States Air Force terminated Project Blue Book, a series
of studies of Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings, after it was determined that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceship
activity behind thousands of reports. The project, which started in
1952, ceased all activity in January of 1970.

The Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, made the first successful
man-powered airplane flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.