Above is a cover of the tabloid Midnight published today in 1968. The idea that someone stole JFK’s corpse was aired pretty much right after the murder, and to this day some people believe he was snatched off Air Force One sometime before the plane landed in Washington D.C. It’s a pretty farfetched theory, one not necessarily interesting on its own merits, but because it’s a good example of one of the most important factors that makes conspiracies work. And that is simply that in the absence of convincing facts people concoct multiple theories and those help obscure actual discrepancies about the event. Once you’ve heard enough crackpot theories you tend to forget the original, crucially pertinent questions. If one were conspiracy-minded one would almost suggest that the perpetrators of conspiracies count on this to happen. But that would be only if one were conspiracy-minded. We are not.