Conspiracies

... Are fun, because they’re usually overly intricate, doubling over themselves at times like a bad murder mystery, but still they hold a lot of sway for a lot of people.  Lee Harvey Oswald shot officer J.D. Tippit four times, killing him after Tippit stopped Oswald 45 minutes after JFK was shot.  Four witnesses identified Oswald as the killer, and seven others saw Oswald fleeing the scene.  I’ve heard conspiracy theorists rage against the supposed stupidity of believing that Oswald killed JFK, in fact one did a presentation at my High School, but I’ve never heard one even mention Tippit’s name.  They tendentiously leave out mention that minutes after JFK was shot, Oswald acted like a desperate man who was attempting to flee the scene of a crime, and in doing so committed another.

The topic of conspiracies recently came up when my good friend John found some 9/11 conspiracy videos and sites.  They make some disturbing claims and they raise some interesting questions, but many of their own assertions don’t make sense and there are resources that do an adequate job of refuting their claims.  

One inconsistency I keep coming back to are the assertions that both flights that hit the WTC were being remotely controlled and were instead military cargo planes while the object that hit the Pentagon was not a plane at all but was a missile of some kind.  Why would those responsible for such a well planned an elaborate charade get two planes to hit the WTC but not get one to hit the Pentagon, requiring them to confiscate and suppress all videos from buildings surrounding the Pentagon and to supposedly intimidate witnesses who didn’t see a plane?  Were they afraid that the plane wouldn’t be totally destroyed and thus investigators would discovered that it wasn’t a commercial airliner?  But, with the resourced needed to pull off such a stunt, couldn’t they simply acquire a commercial airliner, paint it to look exactly as it should, and remotely fly it into the Pentagon?  

Hell, Marc Ecko recently hoaxed the military into thinking that he’d stray-painted graffiti on Airforce One.   “Ecko acknowledged Friday that his company had rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernardino's airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made.”  Surely the oft-speculated teams of government black ops specialists could have done even better than Mr. Ecko and his crew.

I’m reminded of Carl Sagan, who researched alien abduction claims.  He found it truly disturbing that there were elements that he couldn’t easily refute, not the least of which being the people he personally interviewed who sincerely believed that they had been the victims of alien physical abuse.  But Sagan returned to his adage, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  The majority of claims he was able to debunk, and those anomalies that remained didn’t constitute extraordinary evidence.