The 103rd episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone airs on CBS. George Grizzard and Gail Kobe star in the fourth season premiere. Though technically cancelled at the end of its third season, CBS offers Rod Serling the chance to revive the series at midseason to replace – ironically – the hour-long series that took its place on the schedule. This necessitates a brief experiment, for the remainder of the shortened fourth season, in making The Twilight Zone an hour-long show over Serling’s protest.
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British broadcaster ABC airs the 41st episode of Sydney Newman’s spy series The Avengers, starring Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman. This episode is written by future Doctor Who writers Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke.
Actress Alex Kingston, a familiar face in both British and American television, is born in England. With a variety of roles on UK TV throughout the 1980s and ’90s, she will make the leap to American television in 1997 with a regular role on the hospital drama ER through 2004. In 2008 she will make her first appearance as Professor River Song, occasional companion and gadfly to the Doctor in 
Meetings commence at the BBC to hash out ideas for a new children’s science fiction series to be produced in-house, possibly involving a time machine, an aloof old man, a younger “man of action” character, a female scientist, and a younger woman. As the creative lightning rod of this series development, Sydney Newman begins to weed out ideas he considers unsuitable – such as giving these characters the roles of “science troubleshooters” working for the government – and homes in on the time travel idea, as well as the old man character, who emerges as a man of mystery. These are the first creative meetings from which the BBC’s Doctor Who will emerge.
An unmanned Soviet lunar lander, Luna 4, is launched from the USSR’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. Unlike Luna 2, which intentionally crashed into the moon with no attempt to slow its approach, Luna 4 is the first atempt at a vehicle intended to survive its descent to the lunar surface and make observations from the ground. A failed course correction engine burn leaves the 3,000-pound vehicle in a wide, looping orbit around the Earth, unable to reach the moon at all. The Soviet Union, after several more attempts, will eventually achieve the first unmanned soft landing on the surface of the moon three years later.