Show of hands.
How many of you have, at some point in, say, the last week or so, either heard something from someone or told someone something that was, to the best of your knowledge, a secret of some kind?
Yeah. Me, too.
I mention it only by way of illustrating the comedy of the following news story that is "trending" on several major news sites today.
(News.com.au) A retired Australian detective says he believes a US secret service officer fired one of the bullets that felled US President John F Kennedy.
Weeks before the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, ReelzChannel will broadcast a docudrama that suggests the president was accidentally shot by a Secret Service agent.
JFK: The Smoking Gun, is based on the work of retired Australian police Detective Colin McLaren and the book Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK, by Bonar Menninger.
McLaren spent four years combing through evidence from Kennedy's death on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. He and Menninger also relied on ballistics evidence from an earlier book by Howard Donahue.
It suggests that agent George Hickey fired one of the bullets that hit Kennedy. Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy's limo that day.
"What we're saying is that we believe it was a tragic accident in the heat of that moment," McLaren told the Television Critics Association on Sunday.
When Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot, McLaren said Hickey responded by trying to fire back on Oswald's position using his Secret Service-issued rifle. But because he was inexperienced with the weapon and the car lurched forward, McLaren said the shot went awry and accidentally hit Kennedy, who was struck in the neck but quite possibly not fatally wounded by Oswald's second shot.
"We don't suggest that he was in any way involved in a conspiracy," McLaren said of Hickey.
The Warren Commission report in the 1960s concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman in officially explaining the assassination.
The two-hour docudrama will be broadcast in the US, Australia and Canada in November.
Okay, first, I wasn't in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963,
I did live in Houston and Kennedy had been there the night before, so there was a kind of feeling of being part of it all the next day when, shortly after returning from lunch at my junior high school, we heard the first radio reports of what would come to be known as the crime of the century.
If memory serves, by the way, the first of the conspiracy theories was being whispered about before I had finished digesting the Shepard's pie that was a staple of 1960's junior high school cafeteria fare.
Today, coming up close to fifty years later, John Kennedy is dead, Jackie Kennedy is dead, John Kennedy Jr is dead, but the theories are alive, kicking...and comic.
And for those who might be life time subscribers to the Hanging Out On The Grassy Knoll Is More Fun Than Getting A Life Club and who might be inclined to petulantly inquire as to my credentials to offer expert testimony as regards the assassination of the President of the United States.
I can only offer this.
I ain't got any.
But any third grader could probably tell you that in order for this latest, wacky, zany theory in what is now almost a fifty year long list of wacky zany theories, to be true, the cover up required to keep what happened covered up would be so massively staggering that even those folks who swear on a stack that they've been the victims of alien abduction and anal alienation would poo poo this conspiracy ca ca as, well, ca ca.
Because, you see, it works like this.
In order for the cover up to work, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people would have had to keep quiet about it.
For almost fifty years.
When, as we all know, that is pretty much an impossibility.
You just said so yourself.
When you thought back to that thing you heard and/or repeated that was, to the best of your knowledge, a secret of some kind.
A secret you would have had to keep for, say, only a week or so.
Not almost fifty years.
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