On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer and conquistador, springs a trap on the Incan emperor, Atahualpa. With fewer than 200 men against several thousand, Pizarro lures Atahualpa to a feast in the emperor’s honor and then opens fire on the unarmed Incans. Pizarro’s men massacre the Incans and capture Atahualpa, forcing him to convert to Christianity before eventually killing him.

On November 16, 1821, Missouri Indian trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sells his goods at an enormous profit and makes plans to return the next year over the route that will become known as the Santa Fe Trail. It would become one of the most important and lucrative of the Old West trading routes across the Great Plains, helping to enable America's western migration. Merchants and other travelers continued to follow the trail blazed by Becknell until the arrival of trains in the late 1870s.

Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory collectively enter the United States as Oklahoma, the 46th state.

On November 16, 1957, the body of Bernice Worden of Plainfield, Wisconsin, is found, the final victim of infamous killer Edward Gein. His grave robbing, necrophilia and copious corpse trophies gained national attention, and may have provided inspiration for the characters of Norman Bates in Psycho and serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

On November 16, 1974, eight years before E.T. did the “Phone Home” thing on film, researchers send humanity’s first real-life, deliberate radio message into outer space to extraterrestrials. The message goes out from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, where the Arecibo radio telescope was getting a major upgrade and conducting a ceremony to mark the upgrades.