Today in History - July 30: 30,000 people show up for cancelled rock festival
Thirty thousand people showed up to a ski slope for a rock festival that had been cancelled on July 30, 1970.
The Powder Ridge Rock Festival featured some of the biggest names in music at the time, and was expected to draw a massive crowd.
But locals were fearful of a mass influx of hippies and the council cancelled the event.
Well before the internet, there was no way to tell ticket-holders the festival had been cancelled.
And tens of thousands of people showed up expecting a show.
The only performer on the bill to show up was Melanie.
The folk singer sang for the crowd powered from the batteries of several ice cream trucks.
Ticket-holders never got a refund for the cancelled concert, with promoters skipping town with the money.
The Pyrenean ibex became the first animal to be brought back from extinction on July 30, 2003.
A living clone of the last living ibex was born on that day, three years after the species had gone extinct.
The animal was common across Spain, France and Portugal in the Middle Ages, but was gradually hunted to extinction.
Unfortunately the clone born in 2003 had several fatal defects, and died a few minutes later.
Making the Pyrenean ibex the only animal to go extinct twice.
A landslide at the Thredbo ski resort in New South Wales on July 30, 1997, killed 18 people.
At 11.35pm that night, a landslip swept away two buildings.
The Bimbadeen and Carinya ski lodges were demolished when about 1000 tonnes of liquefied earth and debris came down the slope.
Witnesses described hearing screeching and creaking sounds "not unlike a steam train coming to a halt" before a terrifying roar as the ground gave way.
Returning from a mission to deliver the first nuclear bomb across the Pacific, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945.
About 300 of the 1195 sailors aboard the cruiser went down with the ship.
The shipwreck gave the scent of blood in the water, which drew hundreds of sharks.
After feasting on the dead sailors, the sharks then took to attacking living sailors clinging to flotsam.
Over the course of four days, nearly 600 sailors died of dehydration, hypothermia and shark attacks.
Meanwhile, the Navy had assumed the Indianapolis had reached its destination and never looked for it.
The wreckage was spotted on August 2. Only 316 sailors survived the ordeal.
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