Question about that JFK connection to the CIA that took me 3 weeks to verify

So I got deep into this rabbit hole about the JFK assassination and the CIA's possible involvement. I kept seeing this one photo of a guy near the grassy knoll who looked like a known CIA operative. It took me 3 whole weeks to track down the original photo in a Dallas archive, not even counting the time I spent cross-referencing names with declassified documents. The thing is, the guy in the photo turned out to be a random tourist, not the operative everyone claims it is. But now I'm wondering if the whole debate is just smoke and mirrors to hide something else. Has anyone else spent way too long chasing a conspiracy lead that ended up being a dead end?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia_gonzalez1mo ago

My great uncle spent about six months in the 90s trying to prove the moon landing was faked. He had this whole wall in his garage covered with photos he took of the lunar surface through his telescope, convinced he found a studio light reflection. Turned out he was just tracking a weather balloon that floated into his frame one night. He ended up donating all his research to a local library and now just talks about gardening instead.

knight.felix1mo ago

Wow @patricia_gonzalez that weather balloon story is honestly hilarious.

uma_williams1mo ago

My buddy Mike spent about 2 full years trying to prove that the government faked the Apollo 13 "failure" as a cover for an alien crash retrieval. He got really into it, bought some old NASA flight manuals off eBay, started cross-referencing transcript gaps, the whole deal. Eventually he tracked down a retired engineer who worked on the mission control software, drove six hours to meet him at a diner. The guy just laughed, told him the gaps were from a tape recorder that kept skipping, and offered to show him the original error logs from the archives. Mike came home, boxed up all his notes, and now he barely talks about conspiracy stuff anymore. That kind of thing can really burn you out, especially when you invest that much time and come up empty.