HAUNTED TAKEOVER: Hidden History | The JFK Assassination

Something has crept into this feed…For Halloween, Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat has slipped through the walls to haunt your feed with an episode just for you. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Within days, the government named Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman...but more than sixty years later, most Americans still don't accept that verdict. This episode walks through the physical evidence, the major conspiracy theories, and what the newly released classified files actually reveal. Enjoyed your ghostly takeover? Follow Dr. Harini Bhat back to where she came from and follow Hidden History for more episodes: https://pod.link/1895066656

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Vanessa Richardson?

  Hi everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus Connor's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Happy Halloween serial killers and murderous minds listeners. Don't be alarmed, but something has crept into your feed. My name is Dr. Hurney Bot and this Halloween, I'm haunting the show with an episode of my show, Hidden History. I usually spend my time on Hidden History, digging up the real historical events that still defy explanation, but tonight I've slid through the walls to leave you a little treat. Tonight, I brought you what might be the most argued about crime of the last century, assassination of JFK. On November 22nd, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Within days, the government named Lee Harvey Oswald the lone gunman. More than 60 years later, most Americans

• 1:13Speaker 01

  still don't buy it. So what really happened? And what do the newly released files review? The episode is coming up right now, so if you enjoy and want more, you can follow me back to where I came from, Hidden History with Dr. Hurney Bot. Follow on your favorite podcast app or subscribe on YouTube at Hidden History Pod.

• 1:32Vanessa Richardson?

  This is Rewind.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  November 22nd, 1963, was a clear sunny Friday in Dallas, Texas. John F. Kennedy rode through downtown in an open top car, smiling, waving at a crowd that had come out to see him. And then, in about six seconds, three shots rang out, and the president was gone. The official answer came fast. The killer was a former Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, acting entirely alone, firing from a sixth floor window. But more than 60 years later, after two federal investigations and the release of six million pages of records, most Americans still don't believe that simple story. So was it really a lone gunman with

• 2:23Speaker 01

  a mail order rifle? Or did someone want JFK dead and a range to make it happen? And now that a fresh wave of long secret files has finally been made public, do they actually tell us anything new? Today, I'm walking through all of it, the official story, the evidence, the witnesses, and every major theory, so you can decide for yourself. I'm Dr. Hurney Bot and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained, and examining all the different theories, from science

• 3:03Speaker 01

  to the supernatural and everything in between. From vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to life. Just search at Hidden History Pod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about one of the most contested events of all time, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On November 22nd, 1963, the president was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Within

• 3:48Speaker 01

  days, the government said it was the work of a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. But that verdict never satisfied the country, and for many, it still doesn't. So what really happened in Dealey Plaza? Was it one man or something much bigger? And why can't we seem to agree, even now? Let's talk about it.

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• 6:14Speaker 01

  To understand what happened that day in 1963, you have to understand why President Kennedy was even in Dallas in the first place. And the answer is pure politics. By the fall of 1963, JFK was already gearing up for his reelection campaign the following year. He was young, he was charismatic, and his presidency had taken on this almost mythical glow. The press would later call it Camelot, after the legend of King Arthur. But behind the glamour, the politics were getting ugly. And one state mattered more than almost any other, Texas. In the 1960 election, Kennedy had barely squeaked out a win, and Texas's

• 6:56Speaker 01

  electoral votes had been a huge part of that victory. A big reason he carried it at all was because of his running mate, a Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson. Putting Johnson on the ticket was widely seen as a move that delivered Texas in 1960. The plan was to do it all over again. So JFK came out to shake hands and shore up support. There was just one problem. Not everyone in Texas was happy to see him. Dallas especially had a reputation as a hotbed of hostility towards the president. Just that morning, handbills were circulating around the city with Kennedy's face on them, styled like an old "Wanted"

• 7:36Speaker 01

  poster, accusing him of treason. But JFK wasn't the type to hide, and that brings us to the other person you need to understand. Because while the president was planning his trip, a restless young man was drifting through life on what would turn out to be a collision course with history. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald. And I want to be clear upfront, we're not going to do his entire backstory here. What matters is how he ended up at that window and how his life fits into the crime he's accused of. So here's what we know. On the day of the assassination, Oswald was 24 years old. He'd joined the Marines

• 8:16Speaker 01

  as a teenager, where he trained as a rifleman. In December of 1956, he qualified as a sharpshooter, the middle of the three Marine marksmanship rankings. And here's a wrinkle that feeds into the mystery at play here. Oswald's shooting actually got worse over time. On his final qualifying test in 1959, he barely scraped into the lowest rank, marksmen. A Marine officer later told investigators that score put him in, quote, "rather poor shot" territory. So yes, Oswald was a trained shooter, but was he the kind of crack shot who could pull off what happened in Dallas? That part is genuinely disputed, and we'll come back

• 9:01Speaker 01

  to it. But first, let's talk about why he'd want to kill the president in the first place. In 1959, Oswald did something almost no one did at the height of the Cold War. He defected to the Soviet Union. He renounced the United States, moved to the USSR, married a Russian woman named Marina, and lived there for about two and a half years. Life there wasn't all as cracked up to be, though. After getting burned out by working hard labor in a factory, he changed his mind and came back to America in 1962, wife and baby in tow. But things weren't any better back home. Oswald couldn't hold down a job, and he threw himself into

• 9:41Speaker 01

  radical politics. He became a vocal supporter of Cuba's communist leader, Fidel Castro, and in the summer of 1963, he was in New Orleans handing out pro-Castro pamphlets for a group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He even posed for photos in his backyard, holding a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other. And it seems like he wasn't afraid to use it. In April of 1963, about seven months before the JFK assassination, someone fired a rifle shot at a controversial retired Army general named Edwin Walker in Texas, narrowly missing him in his own home. At the time, that shooting

• 10:22Speaker 01

  went unsolved. But after Kennedy was killed, Oswald's wife Marina told the authorities that Lee had confessed to her that he was the one who pulled the trigger. So here's the picture. Oswald was a trained marksman, a former Soviet defector with intense political grievances, and was possibly already willing to shoot a public figure he hated. All while flying under the radar, or at least it seemed like it. And in October of 1963, Oswald took a new job. The building was a book warehouse in downtown Dallas called the Texas School Book Depository. Just days before the president's visit, the route of the motorcade was printed

• 11:03Speaker 01

  in the Dallas newspapers, and the route ran right past Oswald's new workplace.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Before we go on, a quick heads up. This next part describes the moment of assassination itself. I'm going to stick to just the facts and keep it brief. No graphic detail, but if it's something you'd rather not hear, this is a good moment to skip ahead a minute or two. The morning of November 22nd, 1963, started in Fort Worth, Texas, where Kennedy gave a speech in the rain. Then a short flight brought the presidential party to Love Field in Dallas, where the skies had cleared. It was warm and bright, so the clear bubble top was left off the president's limousine. He wanted the crowds to be able to see him. Beside him sat the first lady, Jackie Kennedy. In the seats just in front of them rode the governor of Texas,

• 11:55Speaker 01

  John Connally, and his wife. The motorcade wound slowly through downtown Dallas toward an open area called Dealey Plaza. And despite all the grumbling about JFK, the crowds were friendly. At around 12:30 in the afternoon, the limousine made a sharp, slow turn onto Elm Street, passing directly below the Texas School Book Depository. And then the shots came. In the span of roughly six seconds, the president and Governor Connally were both struck. Kennedy was hit in the upper body and then fatally in the head. The car sped to the nearest hospital, Parkland Memorial, where doctors fought to save him. There was nothing they could do, though.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  At 1:00 PM, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. He was 46 years old. Governor Connally was seriously wounded, but he survived. Before we move on, there's one more thing you need to know about that day, because it became the single most important piece of evidence in the entire case. As the motorcade passed by the book depository, a local dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder was standing on a concrete ledge filming the president with his home movie camera. He captured the whole thing, 26.6 seconds of color film. That footage, known forever after as the Zapruder film,

• 13:22Speaker 01

  would be studied frame by frame for decades. It's known as the most analyzed home movie ever made. And as we'll see, people would look at the very same frames and come away with completely opposite conclusions. But back to the afternoon. The second those shots rang out, a manhunt to find the gunman was underway. It wasn't long before the police had a description of a man seen at the depository. And about 45 minutes after the assassination, in a neighborhood a few miles away, a Dallas police officer named J.D. Tippit stopped a man on the street who matched that description. Moments later, Tippit was shot dead.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  The suspect ducked into a nearby movie theater without paying, a clerk noticed, and called the police. At around 1:50 PM, officers swarmed in and arrested the man inside after a brief struggle. That man was Lee Harvey Oswald. Within hours, Oswald was charged with killing both Officer Tippit and the president. He was paraded in front of reporters at the police station, bruised from the scuffle, insisting he hadn't done it. And he said the words that would echo for the next 60 years. Pushed in front of the cameras, he declared that he was being set up, that he was, in his words, quote, "just a patsy",

• 14:48Speaker 01

  meaning someone framed to take the blame for what other people did. It was a stunning claim. And here's the thing, it was something the world expected to see tested. Oswald would stand trial, there would be evidence, cross-examination, and a verdict. The American people would get answers. That trial never happened.

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• 16:29Speaker 04

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• 17:14Speaker 04

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• 17:29Vanessa Richardson?

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• 18:49Speaker 01

  While Lee Harvey Oswald sat in a Dallas jail, the world was still turning. And the moment John F. Kennedy died, the United States had a new president. Just over two hours after the shooting, aboard Air Force One on the tarmac at Love Field, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the oath of office. A local federal judge named Sarah Hughes administered it, and standing right beside Johnson, still wearing the suit stained with her husband's blood, was Jackie Kennedy. It's one of the most haunting photographs in American history. As Johnson took up the presidency, a shaken country was desperate for answers. Arriving back in Washington that night, the new president spoke briefly to the nation,

• 19:32Speaker 01

  calling Kennedy's death a deep, personal tragedy. But beneath the mourning, the pressure was immediate and enormous. Find out who did this and make sure they face justice. Which brings us back to Oswald. Two days after the assassination, on the morning of November 24th, the police were moving him through the basement of their headquarters to transfer him to the county jail. The whole thing was being broadcast live on television. Millions of people were watching. And then a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby stepped out of the crowd of reporters, pulled out a pistol, and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the stomach at point-blank range.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Oswald died soon after at the very same hospital where Kennedy had died two days earlier. The one person who could explain everything was now dead, silenced on live TV by a man with connections to the criminal underworld. If you wanted a single moment that guaranteed the country would never stop asking questions, that was it. To get to the bottom of what happened, President Johnson appointed a high-powered investigation led by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren. For 10 months, the Warren Commission gathered testimony and evidence. And in September 1964, they delivered their verdict. Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy,

• 20:59Speaker 01

  firing three shots from the sixth-floor window of the depository. He acted alone. Jack Ruby also acted alone. There was no conspiracy. But almost immediately, the commission's findings ran into problems, and the trouble centered on a few stubborn clues. The first is what critics nicknamed "the magic bullet". To explain all the wounds in both Kennedy and Connally with just three shots, one of which missed entirely, and another of which was the fatal headshot, the commission concluded that a single bullet had passed through Kennedy's neck and then caused all of Connally's wounds, his back, his chest, his wrist, and his thigh. To a lot of people, that sounded impossible.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  One bullet caused all that damage? And it was recovered in nearly perfect condition? They didn't buy it. The second clue is in the Zapruder film. At the moment of the fatal shot, the president's head moves backward, back and to the left, as it's often described. For many people, that looks like the obvious sign of a shot from the front, not from the depository behind him. And the third is the witnesses. A number of people in Dealey Plaza swore they heard shots coming from a small, grassy rise to the front and the right of the motorcade, a spot that's been famous ever since as the "Grassy Knoll".

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Over the next few years, those whispers got louder and louder until they couldn't be ignored. So in the late 1970s, the US Congress reopened the entire case with a new body called the House Select Committee on Assassinations. After reexamining the evidence, they reached a conclusion that stunned the country. Based largely on a Dallas police audio recording that seemed to capture a fourth gunshot, they declared that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, likely involving a second gunman. It was a bombshell for sure, but here's the catch, and it's a big one. That audio evidence didn't hold up.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  A panel of top scientists from the National Academy of Sciences later reviewed the recording and concluded those gunshot sounds were probably just noise or most likely recorded about a minute after the assassination when the motorcade had already moved on. In 1988, the Justice Department reviewed it all and effectively walked the conspiracy finding back. So that leaves us with an official record that contradicts itself, a public that overwhelmingly distrusts it, and a mystery that does not get tied up with a nepo. And that doubt has only deepened with time. In 1991, film director Oliver Stone released a hit movie, JFK, that wove together the biggest conspiracy theories into one gripping story.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  It was hugely controversial and highly influential. After the movie came out, polls showed that enormous numbers of Americans were convinced there was a cover-up. The public pressure was so intense that Congress passed a law in 1992 ordering the government to release its secret assassination files. That process has dragged on for decades and is still going as of this recording with tens of thousands of newly unsealed pages released as recently as 2025. So let's layer the theories, science, history, and everything stranger, and see where the evidence actually points. I want to start with the official answer because it deserves a fair hearing,

• 24:39Speaker 01

  and the science behind it is a lot stronger than the "magic bullet" nickname suggests. The case that Oswald acted alone rests on physical evidence. Up in that sixth floor corner of the book depository, police found a rifle, a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher Carcano, an Italian military rifle. They traced it by mail order to Oswald, who'd purchased it under a fake name. Next to it were three spent shell casings. His palm print was on the rifle. Fibers consistent with his shirt were found there, too. In other words, the gun that fired the shots was his, and he was the one up there. Now, what about the timing? Could Oswald really have fired three accurate shots that fast?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  This is one of the most hotly contested points in the whole case. So let me give you both sides. On one hand, marksmen testing that same model of rifle have reproduced the feat within the available time window. It's tight, but it's been done, especially against a target moving slowly and predictably away from the shooter. On the other hand, a lot of people, including some expert marksmen, simply don't buy it. They point to Oswald's own score slipping to the bottom rank by the end of his Marine years. And at least one celebrated Marine Corps sniper went on record saying he didn't believe Oswald could have done it. So the question of whether he could physically make those shots is a real one,

• 26:07Speaker 01

  and a reason why people land on opposite sides of it. But the real sticking point has always been that magic bullet. So let me actually break down the science because this is where modern technology has completely changed the conversation. In 2013, for a PBS Nova documentary called Cold Case JFK, two forensic scientists, a father and son team named Luke and Michael Haig, used 3D laser scanners to recreate Dele Plaza and the exact positions of Kennedy and Connally. And here's the key insight that the original investigators got wrong. Connally wasn't sitting directly in front of Kennedy. He was lower and offset to the side on a fold-down jump seat. Once you line the men up the way they actually were,

• 26:52Speaker 01

  a single bullet passing through Kennedy's neck lines right up with Connally's wounds. No magic required, just geometry. And the bullet's condition? When that stable rifle bullet passed through Kennedy first, it got destabilized. It started to tumble. One of the scientists put it perfectly. A bullet like that normally flies straight like a well-thrown football, but after passing through a body, it wobbles end over end. A tumbling bullet does exactly the kind of damage Connally suffered. It can still emerge largely intact. The magic bullet turns out to be ordinary physics. But what about the head moving backward, that back into the left motion?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Scientists who study wound ballistics point to a neuromuscular reaction. A violent shot to the head can trigger the body's muscles to clench, snapping the head back even when the bullet came from behind. Amazing counterintuitive, but it's well documented. And then there's Oswald himself. The question isn't just if he could do it, but if he would do it. To support that argument, all you have to do is point to the General Walker shooting attempt, which the Warren Commission concluded was Oswald, based largely on his wife Marina's account. And if that's right, then you've got a guy who'd already tried to kill a political figure he despised entirely on his own.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Which means you don't need a grand conspiracy to explain his willingness to do it. Working with just that information, you can see why the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed JFK all on his own. But it doesn't settle everything. That single bullet path still strikes a lot of people as too easy. The autopsy that night was rushed, and by many accounts, it was sloppy. A peer-reviewed study in the 2000s even challenged some of the lab analysis that supposedly proved only two bullets were involved. And dozens of witnesses who were there swore they heard a shot coming from the knoll. Which is why we have to look at other possibilities.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  If you don't believe Oswald acted alone, the next question is obvious. Who would want a president dead and have the power to pull it off? And in 1963, the unsettling answer is quite a few people. Let's start with organized crime. The Kennedy administration, driven by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had launched the most aggressive war on the mafia the country had ever seen. Powerful mob bosses, men like Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, Santo Trafficante of Florida, and Sam Giancana of Chicago, had every reason to hate the Kennedys. There was even a sense of betrayal because certain mob circles felt like they'd helped Kennedy win in 1960 only to get hunted by his brother.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  And here's the detail that makes people's eyebrows shoot up. Jack Ruby, the man who silenced Oswald, had his own ties to the underworld, which is a big reason why the lawyer who later led the House Select Committee on Assassinations came to believe the mob was involved. In this version of events, Oswald wasn't a lone radical at all. He was a pawn. People point out that he spent the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, a city Carlos Marcello effectively controlled, and that he brushed up against people in that world. The theory goes that the mob used a disposable figure like Oswald to get to Kennedy, and then, when he was caught alive and might start talking, they sent Jack Ruby to silence him.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  But for all the eternal logic at play here, no hard evidence has ever surfaced to show the mob actually recruited Oswald or sent Ruby to kill him. But what if the kill order didn't come from the criminal underworld at all, but from inside Kennedy's own government? After the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, a bossed CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, a lot of Cuban exiles and some hardliners in the intelligence world felt like Kennedy had abandoned them. Some believed he'd gone soft on communism and was a danger to the country. And one popular theory is that they were willing to kill him to get him out of the way.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  The most famous version of this idea came from a New Orleans district attorney named Jim Garrison. He actually brought a local businessman named Clay Shaw to trial, accusing him of being part of a CIA-linked plot. The case was thin, though, and the jury acquitted Shaw in under an hour. But the seeds of the theory were there, and since then, people have run with it. But if it wasn't the mob and it wasn't rogue insiders in his own government, what about America's enemies abroad? The CIA had genuinely been plotting to assassinate Castro. So the theory goes maybe Castro struck first, or maybe the Soviets were behind it. After all, Oswald had lived in the USSR and had gone to both the Soviet and the Cuban embassies in Mexico City

• 32:01Speaker 01

  just weeks before the assassination. But before we get carried away with this idea, the House Select Committee on Assassinations did investigate the Cuban and Soviet governments and cleared them both. An historian, Max Holland, had documented something sneaky. The Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, ran its own quiet campaign to push the idea that the CIA had killed Kennedy. It was Cold War disinformation designed to turn Americans against their own government.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Now historians debate just how much that effort actually moved the needle. Plenty of the doubt was homegrown. But it does mean that at least part of the CIA did it narrative was the result of a real conspiracy, just not the one most people imagine. I think what makes all these theories so persuasive is that the outlines are all there. And because the government genuinely did lie, we now know the CIA hid what it knew about Oswald's activities in Mexico City. And we know the FBI rushed to the lone gunman conclusion partly to cover up its own failures to flag Oswald as a threat. When you catch the authorities hiding some things, it becomes very easy to believe they're hiding everything.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  And yet, after more than 60 years and 6 million pages of documents, no one has produced a single verifiable smoking gun. There's no order or payment or confession that holds up. The coverups that we can prove seem to be more about hiding embarrassments like the Castro plots and the intelligence failures, not about hiding a murder plot. And notice how Oswald's background cuts both ways. His time in the Soviet Union and his Cuba activism give every faction a convenient reason to use him or frame him. But they're equally consistent with a lone radical who acted out his own politics. The same facts fuel the conspiracy in the lone gunman case.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  That is the maddening heart of this thing. It's probably a big reason why, all these years later, we don't have a concrete answer.

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• 36:39Speaker 06

  The police closed my sister's case in 2019. Last month, her killer commented on my post. On Reddit, true crime doesn't come from journalists. It comes from the victims, the witnesses, and sometimes the suspects themselves. People post the things they'd never say out loud, anonymous, unfiltered, and completely real. And every Tuesday, on Crimes of Reddit, we read them out loud. I'm Sabrina Deanna-Roga from Two Girls, One Ghost.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And I'm Alexis Linkletter from The First Degree.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Each week, one of us brings the most unhinged true crime stories the internet has to offer.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And the other goes in completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, reacting in real time, same as you. And then we swap.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  And we pull every thread until the whole twisted picture comes into view.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It's dark, it's messy. And the scariest part is that these are real stories posted by real people.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow Crimes of Reddit, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Now we get to the strangest corner of the JFK story. Because some of what keeps this case alive isn't evidence at all. It's the uncanny, our very human hunger to find meaning in tragedy. Let's start with the most famous list in American folklore. The eerie coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Two presidents assassinated almost exactly 100 years apart. Some of these are genuinely true. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846, Kennedy in 1946. Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were shot on a Friday seated next to their wives.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And both of the vice presidents who succeeded them shared the same last name, Johnson. Spooky, right? But here's where I have to put on my skeptic hat. A lot of the other coincidences on that famous list are simply false. For example, people love to say Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. There is no record that he ever did. Although Kennedy did have a secretary named Lincoln. And the claim that the two assassins were born exactly 100 years apart, also not true. So what's really going on? There's actually a name for this. The psychologist Michael Shermer calls it "patternicity", the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. We are wired for it.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And to prove the point, a skeptics magazine once ran a contest challenging readers to find spooky coincidences between other presidents. One reader found 16 eerie parallels between Kennedy and a former president of Mexico. All to say, you can find a hidden pattern between almost any two people if you look hard enough. The Lincoln-Kennedy list isn't evidence of a curse. It's evidence of how our minds work. Speaking of curses, there is a persistent legend that people connected to the assassination died in suspiciously high numbers, mysteriously silenced, one by one. It's a genuinely chilling idea, a lot like the missing scientist conspiracy going on right now.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  But statisticians have looked at it, and it falls apart. When you consider the hundreds of people connected to a case this size and the decades that have passed, the number of deaths is exactly what you expect by ordinary chance. Then there's the shadowy characters at the edge of this case who don't fit neatly into any of our theories. One of them being the Umbrella Man. In the films of the assassination, you can spot a man standing right at the spot where Kennedy was first hit, holding a black umbrella, open, and pumping it up and down. On a clear sunny day. For decades, this was treated as deeply sinister. Some have speculated that he was signaling the shooters,

• 40:33Speaker 01

  or even that the umbrella was a disguised weapon that fired a paralyzing dart. And then, in 1978, the mystery just ended. A man named Louis Stephen Witt came forward and identified himself as the Umbrella Man. His explanation was that he did that as a protest, a weird, personal heckle. The umbrella was a reference to the appeasement politics of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, and to the fact that Kennedy's own father had supported those actions. So the most sinister-looking detail in the entire Sabrina film had the most absurdly mundane explanation imaginable. If you ask me, that's the perfect lesson of looking too deeply into fringe theories.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Strange does not mean sinister. But at the same time, that doesn't mean they should be ignored completely. I'll leave you with the most far-out theory of all. There's a small but devoted group who believe Kennedy was killed to keep a secret about UFOs. Here's the basis for it. There's a memo supposedly dated November 12, 1963, just 10 days before the assassination, in which Kennedy allegedly asked the CIA to organize his intelligence files on UFOs and brief him on all the "unknowns". Believers say he was about to force the government to reveal what it knew about alien contact and was killed to stop him.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Some tie it to a notorious document called the Burnt Memo, which surfaced in the 1990s and supposedly links a secret UFO oversight committee, nicknamed MJ12, to the assassination itself. So what's the truth? I have to be honest with you, there is no credible evidence for any of it. The Burnt Memo is widely regarded by researchers as a fake. It even uses a codename for Kennedy that a real insider wouldn't have used. And while that November 12 memo about UFOs has been talked about, investigators couldn't find a matching copy in Kennedy's own carefully-kept files. And even the researcher who promoted it admitted they were perfectly ordinary reasons a cold-blooded president

• 42:45Speaker 01

  might ask about strange objects in the sky. Like worrying the Soviets would mistake a UFO sighting for an American aircraft. Ultimately, there's nothing tying any of this to his death. But the theory tells us something true about us. When a loss is this enormous, people feel like the secret behind it must be enormous too.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  When I step back from all of this, I don't think the JFK case is really about a rifle, or a bullet's trajectory, or an audio recording. I think it's about two very deep human needs. The first is our need for the size of a cause to match the size of an effect. It's almost unbearable to believe that one ordinary bitter young man with a cheap mail order rifle could erase a president, and with him, a whole country's sense of its own future. That feels too small, too random, too senseless. As strange as it sounds, a conspiracy is comforting. It means the world makes sense, that an event this enormous would have a reason just as big.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  And the second need is even simpler. We need to be able to trust the people in charge. The real tragedy of the Kennedy's investigation isn't just that mistakes were made, it's that the institutions meant to give us the truth got caught hiding things. And once you catch someone lying about anything, it is profoundly human to assume they're lying about everything. Okay, so after all that, what do I actually think happened? As much as the conspiracy theories are enticing, the physical evidence keeps pointing back to the same place. The rifle was Lee Harvey Oswald's, his prints were on it, and if the Warren Commission was right that he'd also taken that shot at John Walker months earlier, then he'd

• 44:35Speaker 01

  already shown a willingness to kill a political figure entirely on his own. And after 60 years and millions of pages of records, no one has ever produced a verifiable smoking gun proving anyone else was involved. So if you're asking me, the likeliest explanation is the simplest and the saddest one: a lone angry man with a rifle. But I don't think that makes the doubters foolish, not at all. Because the distrust was earned. The CIA really did hide what it knew. The FBI really did cover for its own failures. The first investigation really was rushed. When the people you're supposed to trust behave like they have something to hide, suspicion

• 45:17Speaker 01

  isn't paranoia, it's a reasonable response to being lied to. And do I think we've heard the absolute final word? Honestly, no. The autopsy was a mess, some of the forensic debates aren't fully closed, and history has a way of surprising us. The most likely answer is one man at one window. It's not the most satisfying explanation, but the truth really is. Now, at the end, I usually imagine how the event would unfold if it happened in our modern world. But imagining political violence in detail isn't a thought experiment I want to run. So instead, let's talk about the thing that actually echoes from Dallas into today.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  And it isn't the violence, it's the secrecy, and what secrecy does to people. Think about it, in 1963, the conditions that let the conspiracy theories grow weren't really about the grassy knoll, they were about an information vacuum. The CIA, hey, what it knew about Oswald, the files got sealed for decades, the investigation was rushed, and it didn't answer everyone's questions. And when you leave people with a vacuum like that, they don't just carry on and calmly conclude that nothing happened. They rush in to fill the silence, and they tend to fill it with the very worst thing they can imagine. Now fast forward to right now, we live in a world where a sealed document doesn't read

• 46:40Speaker 01

  as routine, it reads as proof of something. That's exactly why those recent document releases matter so much. After all these years, the government finally started putting the unredacted files out in the open. Now, on one hand, full transparency may still not satisfy everyone, some people will always believe what they want. But on the other hand, secrecy absolutely guarantees the doubt festers and grows. Sunlight isn't a magic cure, but hiding things in the dark, that's poison. So if there's one thing the Kennedy assassination can teach us, it's this: transparency is how a society earns back trust.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And when institutions choose silence instead, when they decide the public can't handle the truth, they don't make the questions go away, they create the perfect conditions for conspiracy, misinformation, fear, and a public that no longer believes anyone at all. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History. I'm Dr. Herne-Bott, join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. What did you think about the Kennedy assassination? Do you believe the lone gunman conclusion, or do you think there's more to the story? And now that the files are finally coming out, do you think we'll ever get the full truth? Let me know in the comments, and I might talk about it in a future episode.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And be sure to subscribe on YouTube, or rate, review, and follow if you're listening on audio, so we can keep building this community together. And I'll see you at our next episode. That's all for today's Haunting, thanks for letting me take over your show. If you want more mysteries like this one, follow Hidden History with Dr. Herne-Bott on your favorite podcast app, or subscribe on YouTube at @HiddenHistoryPod. And now slip back to my show and return this feed to Vanessa and Dr. Ingles. Happy Halloween.

• 48:38Vanessa Richardson?

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• 49:09Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Connor Tomlinson, you might know me from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I have been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Every week, three facts, each one with a whole story behind it. The worst years anyone has ever lived through, the golden age of pirates, the movies that almost never got made, the discoveries that rewrote everything we thought we knew. Carter sets the scene, Connor brings the facts, the tangents, and the genuine belief that this is the most interesting subject in the world. It is. The wildest stuff is real, and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Follow What the Fact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 50:05Vanessa Richardson?

  If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.