The following events occurred in August 1969:
August 1, 1969 (Friday) After a hunt for a suspect who had killed five female students in the area since March in what had been dubbed as the "Co-ed murders", police arrested Eastern Michigan University student John Norman Collins in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and charged him with the July 23 murder of EMU freshman Karen Beineman.
The Vallejo Times Herald and two San Francisco newspapers (the Chronicle and the Examiner) received letters from a man who would claim responsibility for the murder of 22-year-old Darlene Ferrin on July 4, and the December 20 murder of two high school students in Benicia. The letters, from a man who would later become known as the "Zodiac Killer", contained three parts of a cryptogram (a separate part for each newspaper) and a demand that the news dailies publish the letters to prevent more murders. To date, the Zodiac Killer has never been identified.
A retroreflector, deployed by Neil Armstrong on the Moon at the Apollo 11 landing site on July 21, was tested successfully for the first time as part of the ongoing Lunar Laser Ranging experiment. Astronomers at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California, had been trying for 12 days to strike the diameter unit, deployed as part of the mission in order to make precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, before finally striking it with the laser and receiving the reflected beam at 2:00 in the morning local time. The first laser measurement concluded that, at the time sent, the Moon was "226,970.9 miles, give or take 150 feet" from San Jose. NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine told a crowd that a crewed mission to both Mars and Venus would be feasible in the 1980s. Paine told a San Francisco audience that November 12, 1981, would be "a particularly good date" for the launch of two rockets (and a total of 12 astronauts) powered by the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) under development. With Mars, Earth and Venus in ideal positions relative to each other, Paine said, the astronauts could enter orbit around Mars by August 9, 1982, then send "reusable stages much like jet planes" to ferry astronauts back and forth to the surface, before departing on October 28, 1982, toward Venus and then using the Venusian orbital motion for a gravity assist or slingshot on August 14, 1983, to return to Earth. The possibility, however, would depend on whether the American public was willing to commit to a cost of $24 billion. On September 15, Paine and U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew, both advocates for a human landing on Mars, would present their task force report to U.S. President Richard Nixon, who accepted their recommendations "subject to budgetary considerations". Died: Donald Keith, 65, American silent film actor and co-star with Clara Bow
August 2, 1969 (Saturday) Richard Nixon became the first incumbent U.S. president to visit the capital of a Communist nation, arriving in Bucharest, Romania, as the guest of Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu. Born: Jan Axel "Hellhammer" Blomberg, Norwegian heavy metal drummer; in Trysil Fernando Couto, Portuguese footballer with 110 matches for the national team; in Espinho
August 3, 1969 (Sunday) All 55 people on board Aeroflot Flight H-826 were killed when a propeller blade came loose from the Antonov 24B 11 minutes after it had taken off from Dnepropetrovsk on a flight to another city in the Ukrainian SSR. When the plane reached an altitude of , part of the blade on the left side engine punctured the fuselage and severed the elevator and the aileron controls that allowed the plane to descend and to bank, respectively. The plane descended then spun before crashing into the ground. The long Coronado Bridge over San Diego Bay, high enough to allow U.S. Navy ships to travel beneath it, was opened to traffic at one minute after midnight. The toll bridge (which cost 60 cents to cross) had been dedicated the day before by California Governor Ronald Reagan, and pedestrians were allowed to walk its length between San Diego and Coronado, California, until midnight.
August 4, 1969 (Monday) In Paris, U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger secretly met with North Vietnam's former Foreign Minister, Xuan Thuy, to discuss a means of settling the Vietnam War at the Paris Peace Talks. The meeting followed a personal letter sent on July 16 by U.S. President Richard Nixon, to North Vietnam's President Ho Chi Minh, by way of France's diplomatic representative in Hanoi, Jean Sainteny. A Vietnamese historian would later note that "The secret dialogue was eventually to become more significant that the formal talks at Avenue Kleber," site of the Paris negotiations.