Today in History - August 16: Unlikely culprit blamed as hundreds of townsfolk fall ill, start hallucinating
More than 250 people fell ill and seven died in a mass poisoning event in the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit on August 16, 1951.
Over the next few days, locals suffered nausea, vomiting, cold chills, heat waves as well as hallucinations.
One man died because he believed he was in an aeroplane and jumped from a second storey window.
An investigation found that everybody affected by the poisoning had bought their bread from the one bakery.
Police then put the blame on flour miller Maurice Maillet, who had mixed wheat flour with leftover rye.
He was charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Rye is susceptible to a fungus called ergot, which when consumed can cause symptoms similar to LSD.
But in 2009, an investigative journalist claimed the CIA had tested LSD on the people of the town as part of its MKNAOMI biological weapons program.
That claim has been widely disputed.
On August 16, 1984, flamboyant American car maker John DeLorean was acquitted of all charges
After a videotaped FBI sting, DeLorean was accused of conspiring to sell US$24 million of cocaine to save his money-losing venture building futuristic cars.
DeLorean was eventually acquitted of all charges after two years, when a jury unanimously decided that the FBI had illegally entrapped him.
Following Presley's death, the role of his doctor, George Nichopoulos, came under scrutiny.
In 1980, the state of Tennessee stripped him of his medical licence for indiscriminately prescribing and dispensing controlled substances.
According to the charges, Nichopoulos prescribed more than 12,000 pills to Presley in the final months of his life. And when the singer went on tour, his entourage would take three suit cases of pharmeceuticals for his use.
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