Web of conspiracy surrounds JFK Jr's death "Ne

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Web of conspiracy surrounds JFK Jr's death

"Never attribute to malign intelligence what can be laid at the feet of gross stupidity."


Patrick Barkham
@patrick_barkham

Wed 21 Jul 1999 03.46 EDT First published on Wed 21 Jul 1999 03.46 EDT

As the latest tragedy to afflict the Kennedy family sinks in, many Americans are taking to the internet to sound off and seek answers.
Internet newsgroups are buzzing with the chatter of a thousand different conspiracy theories which purport to explain the death of John F Kennedy Jr.

Many internet conspiracists cite the evidence of a reporter for the Vineyard Gazette newspaper, who told a US TV station that he had seen a "big white flash in the sky" near where JFK Jr's plane went missing.

Some interpretations are predictably outlandish. But even the rather wistful postings about aliens have an element of self-parody about them. On Deja News - its motto is "share what you know, learn what you don't" - "Grey Alien" argues that the white flash must signify an alien abduction in keeping with the history of "UFO activity in the Montauk, Long Island area".

Apart from aliens, the US military and the scientific community are deemed the prime suspects. JFK Jr's crash occurred at a similar time in the evening and exactly three years after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island, which killed 230 people.
Many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the TWA crash blame the US navy which, Ian Williams Goddard alleges, was involved in a "pyrotechnic exercise" at the time.

One newsgroup user reports that the disappearance of JFK Jr's plane occurred at the same time as the test-firing of a nuclear accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), on Long Island.

After media reports that scientists had expressed fears that such a machine could create sub-atomic particles possessing the power to convert anything they touched into "strange matter", the Brookhaven National Laboratory issued a statement denying such a possibility.

This move is unlikely to stem the tide of theories suggesting that a black hole accounted for JFK Jr. But the conspiracy theorists may listen to fellow news group users.

On the air disasters newsgroup, experienced pilots point out JFK Jr's inexperience. With the force of the plane's descent, "only the most experienced and stoic pilot would have been able to make a distress call", explained one.

Others offer more general criticism of the frenzied speculation. "The point is, for many of you all feeding off the inexhaustible monster called conspiracy, it's just time to close the book and move on," said Zippy. "Let the man rest in peace."

Or, in the words of Tom Davidson on the alt.conspiracy.jfk forum: "Never attribute to malign intelligence what can be laid at the feet of gross stupidity."

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