Indeed. Two years after the assassination I wrote a paper on it for a summer school history class. I researched in the local public library, where I read a bunch of magazine articles and Mark Lane books, blissfully unaware of ideological agendas and bad faith, and believed there was a conspiracy--though I didn't know which theory was correct because there were so many and they only increased in the ensuing years. At one point I had a shelf of JFK conspiracy books and then I met the author of one, an ex-boyfriend of friend ... he was very sincere about his incredibly looneytunes claims (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Evidence-Disguise-Deception-Assa...)

It wasn't until usenet came along and I encountered debates between physicists and conspiracy cranks that I started to question it--the physicists would calmly present solid-seeming arguments and the cranks would accuse them of working for the CIA and post malarkey. But I still wasn't sure--a bad argument for something isn't a good argument against it. My biggest breakthrough was when I was dating a law professor whom I greatly respected, very liberal (as am I)--she was the cofounder of the Women's Studies program at UCLA--and she was bemused by my entertaining the conspiracy theories as at all likely (no one in her academic, legal, and feminist circles did), and she casually mentioned that one of the first things she learned in law school was that people are highly unreliable in judging the direction that a sound comes from, so people talking about shots coming from the grassy knoll didn't really mean anything. Her attitude drove me to dig deeper, and when the web came along I found https://www.jfk-assassination.net/ (it was located elsewhere back then). I started seeing all the counterarguments to the misrepresentations in those books and articles I had read, and this was before Bugliosi's 1600 page https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-History-Assassination-Pres...

I now know about as well as one can know any historical event that LHO, a man who had defected to the USSR, possibly planning on giving them information about the U-2 (for which he was denounced by U-2 pilot Gary Powers) and had been on TV representing the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" (of which he was the only member), was the lone gunman. That doesn't mean that his story was simple--it wasn't, and that's part of the fuel for appallingly ignorant and intellectually dishonest conspiracy theories.

It's sad to see on HN claims that no one believes what is believed to be actually true by rational informed people, along with questions like

> What do you believe? The news?

(I haven't had a TV for at least 20 years; what does he believe, YouTube? I know how to gather and weigh information; he doesn't) grossly dishonest assertions that

> pizza gate was corroborated by the epstein emails

and nonsensical ignorant claims about UFOs that are supported by terrible reporting by ignorant sensationalist journalists. It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.

A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era