Welp, my story about the flight attendant was subsequently repudiated by one the scientists who reported it; anyway, here's a part of an article about the origin of HIV and the first cases of AIDS:
"Much was made in the early years of the epidemic of a so-called 'Patient Zero' who was the basis of a complex "transmission scenario" compiled by Dr. William Darrow and colleagues at the Centre for Disease Control in the US. This epidemiological study showed how 'Patient O' (mistakenly identified in the press as 'Patient Zero') had given HIV to multiple partners, who then in turn transmitted it to others and rapidly spread the virus to locations all over the world. A journalist, Randy Shilts, subsequently wrote a book based on Darrow's findings, which named Patient Zero as a gay Canadian flight attendant called Gaetan Dugas. For several years, Dugas was vilified as a 'mass spreader' of HIV and the original source of the HIV epidemic among gay men. However, four years after the publication of Shilts' article, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts' had misrepresented its conclusions.
While Gaetan Dugas was a real person who did eventually die of AIDS, the Patient Zero story was not much more than myth and scaremongering. HIV in the US was to a large degree initially spread by gay men, but this occurred on a huge scale over many years, probably a long time before Dugas even began to travel."
Shilts wrote a critically acclaimed book about AIDS called "And the Band Played On." Evidently though he misrepresented Dr. Darrow's conclusions.
Anyway, this particular article says that there are four known early instances of HIV infection: a man in 1959 (the Congo); a woman in 1960 (the Congo); an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969; and a Norwegian sailor who died around 1976.
This article is pretty interesting; here's the link: http://www.avert.org/origins.htm