Before Donald Trump jumped on the bandwagon, suspicions have long surrounded some of America's biggest stories.
How many people can keep a secret before it completely explodes? Two, three? A couple of hundred? Maybe thousands plus a few government agencies? How about successive governments of both stripes for decades?
What about today with the rise of mobile phones and instantaneous communication making sharing all the more tempting — never mind the foreign hackers who might be listening in? Keeping a government-wide conspiracy secret would involve a brain-melting quota of self-restraint from one of the most social species on the plant.
Well before Donald Trump came along in the social media age, conspiracy theories captured the attention of Americans — and become bound up in politics.
Even the death of one of America's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton himself, who died in a duel in 1807, was entangled in what became known as the Burr Conspiracy.
Now, as Trump settles in as US president for the second time — his supporters convinced of another conspiracy, that the 2020 election was stolen from him — Americans may be on the brink of learning the truth about "the mother of all conspiracy theories": Who killed JFK?
Trump — the man who allegedly paid women to lie about their relationships with him when he was running for office and refuses to release his tax records — is promoting the move as his government's commitment to transparency.
In one of his first acts as President 2.0, Trump followed through on a pre-election promise to release all remaining classified documents relating to the death of John F Kennedy, who served as the US president between January 1961 and November 22, 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald shot him in the head as toured Dallas in a convertible.
"Everything will be revealed," Trump said as he signed the order.
If JFK's assassination wasn't shocking enough, Oswald was arrested and then fatally shot just two days later by mafia-linked nightclub owner Jack Ruby. (Why did Ruby kill Oswald? One explanation says Ruby was motivated by his own conspiracy — a belief that Jews would be blamed for JFK's death and if Ruby, himself Jewish, killed Oswald that story would be obsolete.)
The death of Oswald, aged 24 at the time, is as significant in the JFK conspiracy theory as the death of the president himself.
Oswald was the only known person who could have explained why JFK was killed. Without his testimony, rumour and speculation was uncontained, morphing into one of America's biggest and most enduring conspiracy stories that has survived six decades and counting.
The Warren Commission, set up to investigate the killing, found Oswald acted alone. Yet suspicion of a second gunman and a secret plot just won't go away.
Over the decades conspiracies have looped in everyone from the mafia, an anonymous second shooter concealed on the "grassy knoll" (a slope of lawn adjacent to the location of the assassination) and the CIA, to violent ambition from then-aspiring president Lyndon B Johnson and even a settling of scores by former Cuban leader Fidel Castro or the south Vietnamese government, whose president was assassinated, three weeks before JFK.
And JFK conspiracies do not reside with a loopy fringe, they are positively mainstream.
A 2023 YouGov survey suggests 40 per cent of Democrats and a whopping 68 per cent of Republicans still believe Oswald did not act alone.
Even Trump has propagated his own JFK conspiracy: back in 2016 when he was vying for the presidency for the first time. Trump suggested the father of his opponent Ted Cruz had been seen with Oswald, a former Marine and communist activist who had lived in the Soviet Union, shortly before the shooting.
In classic Hollywood style, it was Oliver Stone's 1992 Oscar-winning film JFK that led US Congress to pass the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act and trigger the release of the files by the National Archives and Records Administration.
In 2017 during Trump's first term, the first classified files relating to JFK's death began to be drip fed into the public arena.
Most recently in 2023, a further 2693 of about 5 million documents were released by former US president Joe Biden and joined documents released in 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2022.
But so far none delivered the rumour mill with sufficient evidence to prove, nor disprove, the many theories purporting to confirm the true identity of JFK's assassin and solve the conspiracy.
Is the truth about to be revealed?
Trump's executive order, signed on January 23, means the director of national intelligence and the US attorney general now have 15 days to announce a plan to release the remaining JFK files, believed to include 4684 fully or partially withheld photos, video, sound, artefacts and documents.
The files themselves may not hit the public domain for quite some time as they must first undergo an intelligence review. Some information may be redacted. And concern is already building that Trump's announcement is so full of caveats and loopholes the release of the files could be delayed indefinitely.
Classified documents relating to the assassinations of JFK's brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy, in 1968 and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr in the same year, will also be released, with a plan due in March. MLK's family have spoken out against the move. However RFK's son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a former Democrat and now Trump's pick for health secretary despite what are widely considered to be conspiratorial views about vaccines, backs the release.
But for now, all eyes are on February 8 — the latest date the next instalment of the decades-long JFK story is due to drop.
Conspiracy theories run rampant in the US with research suggesting 50 per cent of Americans believe at least one.
They can be funny: Aliens built Egypt's pyramids. Linked to celebrities: Elvis Presley is still alive. Tragic: The 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was staged to promote gun control. Kooky: Aircraft condensation trails are part of a secret government policy to spread toxic chemical and biological agents. And weird: Michelle Obama is trans and was born with the name Michael.
Americans love an Obama conspiracy. The story that Barack Obama was not born in the United States is believed by 31 per cent of Americans.
It doesn't stop there.
As many as one-in-five Americans believe COVID-19 vaccines were used to microchip the nation, 41 per cent believe a secret group of elites, separate to any government, rule the world together and 18 per cent believe the 1969 moon landing was faked (not helped by movies like Fly Me To The Moon that take the conspiracy and runs with it).
But if you think Australia is immune to such things, don't be fooled.
Our own version of the JFK conspiracy is the disappearance of former prime minister Harold Holt who vanished while swimming in Victoria in 1967 sparking theories he faked his death, was picked up by a submarine and taken to China because he was a Communist spy and even that the CIA was involved.
In 2022 Pauline Hanson kicked off #Pencilgate in the lead-up to the federal election.
The conspiracy, which originated in the UK, suggests using pencils to mark a ballot paper allowed the British spy agency MI5 to change results. Voters were encouraged to use pens to make it harder for votes to be changed.
The theory was so entrenched that the Australian Electoral Commission added a note to its website, explaining why pencils were preferred but encouraging anyone who felt safer with a pen to BYO.
It might be easy to laugh off such beliefs, but almost one in five of Australians and New Zealanders believe pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer in order to protect their profits.
And unlike the US where the same number believe COVID vaccines contained microchips only 2 per cent of Aussies and Kiwis believed the same.
There is an algorithm that governs how a conspiracy develops and the specific personality types that are most likely to lean in.
Conspiracies rely on a combination of power, a secret shared between at least two people, plus self-interest, in order to take flight.
The Obama citizenship conspiracy demonstrates the algorithm like this: a powerful figure (Obama) + suspicion of a secret (he has actually faked his citizenship) + self interest (he wants more power by becoming president) = conspiracy.
But not everyone who comes across this equation will believe the conspiracy. Why not?
Some of it is timing.
A conspiracy theory thrives in times of uncertainty — political, social and economic upheaval are perfect — and will be more successful if it confirms what people want to believe or find offers a satisfying conclusion to a messy question.
The JFK conspiracy emerged as confidence in politics and the government was falling in the US. McCarthyism — a political tactic to repress left wing ideas, labelling them Communist propaganda and named after US senator Joseph McCarthy who had led the lobby — dominated the 1950s in the US. At the same time the rise of civil rights protests generated social tension as America was forced to confront its history. A climate of mistrust brewed. When the 1960s ended, the 1970s delivered the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.
It was in the middle of this upheaval that JFK, RFK and also MLK were killed, each spawning conspiracy stories.
People became less willing to accept the public version of events and anxious that they were not being told the truth. It was a crucible in which conspiracy could grow.
The result is that the most straightforward answer in the case of JFK — that Oswald was the shooter — did not offer sufficient closure on a shocking event like a political assassination that is difficult to comprehend.
The attempted assassination of Trump in 2024 veered close to conspiracy as rhetoric swirled around an "inside job".
Another part of the reason why some people believe a conspiracy while others don't comes down to personality and psychology.
A sense of superiority towards others is a characteristic known to influence conspiratorial thinking. This includes a need to feel safe by identifying with a community of believers where the conspiracy helps to make sense of the world.
One explanation is what's called teleologic thinking whereby it is believed that the outcome (let's say the assassination of JFK) is not random or accidental, it was always part of a plan. Another is what's known as hypersensitive agency detection, where agency, or power to influence, is given to something that probably doesn't have it in the first place: The CIA was really behind it; there was a second shooter; the mafia was involved.
The conspiracy plot is designed to unmask the puppet master.
It's easy to blame social media and the internet for the rise of conspiracies but history tells a more nuanced story.
Letters published in The New York Times newspaper between 1897 and 2010 show people have always found conspiracy theories persuasive, peaking during the global depression of the 1800s and the fear of communism in the 1950s. The timing, once again, reflecting periods of uncertainty which are known to contribute to conspiratorial thinking.
But another reason is that conspiracies have always been a tool of politics. They are effective for maligning opponents, deflecting blame and creating "us" and "them" narratives. While modern political ethics typically calls a halt to these kinds of conspiracies and prevents them becoming rampant, the Trump era has been less coy about pushing the line.
A recent example is Trump's 2020 election loss, framed as a conspiracy to deny him rightful votes, led some supporters to riot at the Capitol.
Another is how QAnon's rhetoric of the "Great Replacement", that claims a powerful political clique is out to replace white Americans by encouraging non-white immigration to the US, sounds suspiciously like Trump's new immigration policy and the conversation around birthright citizenship.
While the internet and social media don't create conspiracies they do facilitate their spread simply by making conspiratorial arguments more visible and widely available. More recent research has also shown that the way a person consumes news can impact how likely they are to believe conspiratorial stories.
With so many sources of information accessible online it's easier than ever to find like-minded communities willing to back up a view even if it is not true. The conspiracy equation — requiring at least two believers — has no trouble filling that number as echo chambers fuel confirmation bias and the conspiracy takes off, frequently uniting far right views with a conspiracy plot, as in the Great Replacement.
But back to JFK.
Files already released paint Oswald as deeply interested in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He visited the Soviet and also Cuban embassies in Mexico in the weeks before the shooting to apply for a visa and while there spoke with a KGB officer. Oswald had previously lived in the Soviet Union.
But despite the theories, those who have seen the secret files, claim there is no "smoking gun" but rather "puzzle pieces that will be put back in that will tell a more robust and rich story — although some have argued that the CIA — who had Oswald under surveillance for six weeks before he assassinated JFK — should have realised how unstable he was when he returned to the US from Mexico.
With around 99 per cent of the 5 million files in the JFK assassination archive now in the public domain what do we already know about the day he died?
There is nothing in the existing documents to suggest that a grand conspiracy involving the CIA, a plot by Russian agents or the mafia. Existing documents do include a memo from FBI director J Edgar Hoover asking the government to release a statement backing up the Oswald story. It was released following Oswald's death. Another document notes discussions about whether JFK was killed in retaliation by supporters of assassinated south Vietnamese leader who the US had not backed in a coup.
The archive also includes notes about calls to international media, plans to assassinate Cuba's leader Fidel Castro and information allegedly implicating Lyndon B Johnson.
What are the remaining 2140 partially redacted files and 2500 other documents withheld for other reasons, often privacy, really likely to tell us?
Whether these documents will be released soon after February 8 when the plan for release is due, how much will be redacted, or whether their content will lay conspiracy theories to bed or merely provide fodder for new ones, is yet to be understood.
Jack Schlossberg — who is the son of JFK's daughter, former US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy — believes he already knows.
He posted on X that his grandfather's death was "not part of an inevitable grand scheme".
"The truth is a lot sadder than the myth," he wrote. "A tragedy that didn't need to happen. Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he's not here to punch back."
Credits
Words and production: Catherine Taylor
Editor: Leigh Tonkin
Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar
Photographs: Getty Images, AP, Australian Film and Sound Archive
