0:03 conspiracy many Americans still use that
0:04 word when talking about the
0:07 assassination of President Kennedy 55
0:09 years ago this past Thursday and while
0:11 we're talking conspiracy what about the
0:13 moon did we really land there
0:16 there are plenty who think not so why
0:18 after all these years do all these
0:21 conspiracy theories persist our cover
0:27 story is reported by Susan Spencer spy
0:30 novelist Gail Linz has made an entire
0:34 career out of conspiracies
0:36 how many conspiracies do you think
0:38 you've dreamed up in your lifetime a
0:44 couple hundred for office at home near
0:47 Portland Maine is a breeding ground for
0:52 conspiracies its shelves filled to
0:55 bursting with evil secrets and nefarious
0:58 plots military technology special ops
1:02 war tactics strategy Wow do you have any
1:10 what's wrong with you her espionage
1:13 novels have sold millions of copies and
1:17 they all start with one unbreakable rule
1:20 hope you enjoy music the conspiracy has
1:24 to be believable that's not hard in fact
1:27 there are and have been genuine
1:30 conspiracies I shall resign the
1:32 presidency effective at noon tomorrow
1:35 there's Watergate there's iran-contra
1:37 they're wonderful to write about and
1:40 read and talk about we look for
1:43 conspiracies everywhere
1:45 according to a recent CBS News poll more
1:48 than half of Americans still believe
1:51 there was an official cover-up connected
1:53 to the assassination of President John F
1:56 Kennedy roughly one in three say the
1:58 government is hiding the truth about
2:01 9/11 and one in ten thinks the moon
2:05 landings were faked so if you want to
2:07 know how important conspiracy theories
2:09 are to people just bring up a few next
2:11 time you have Thanksgiving dinner with
2:11 your family
2:13 they do it after a few bottles of wine
2:16 and after the arguing is over you
2:17 probably won't be invited back the next
2:20 year 25 percent continue to think that
2:22 9/11 was a hoax Joseph Kosinski is a
2:24 professor of political science at the
2:27 University of Miami conspiracy theories
2:30 are ultimately about power there's never
2:31 a conspiracy theory about you know the
2:33 homeless guy with no arms and no legs
2:36 conspiring against us so how does a
2:39 conspiracy theory start a lot of times
2:41 what happens is people will just come up
2:43 with some of these ideas on their own
2:45 for example one of my favorites is that
2:48 the CIA created lesbianism Jews insky
2:52 gathered roughly 100,000 New York Times
2:54 letters to the editor a hundred and
2:57 twenty years worth dealing with various
2:59 conspiracy theories what we find is that
3:02 beliefs aren't really going up but what
3:03 we can say is that they're playing a
3:06 much bigger role in our political
3:09 discourse sometimes with potentially
3:12 tragic results after he became the
3:13 subject of conspiracy theories
3:17 billionaire George Soros was targeted by
3:20 a pipe bomber and critics of the
3:22 president worried that his views often
3:30 I wouldn't be surprised I wouldn't be
3:32 surprised I wouldn't I don't know who
3:34 but I wouldn't be surprised a lot of
3:37 people say yes what does your basic
3:40 conspiracy theorist look like if I ask
3:42 people to close their eyes and imagine
3:44 who that person is mm-hmm most of them
3:46 are gonna think of a white male
3:49 middle-aged look a lot like me
3:51 tinfoil hat perhaps living in the
3:54 mother's basement with a ham radio
3:57 but conspiracy thinking cuts across race
4:00 gender political party this vast
4:02 right-wing conspiracy that has been
4:05 conspiring against my husband since the
4:07 day he announced for president almost
4:10 everybody believes some kind of
4:12 conspiracy theory at some point
4:15 psychologist Rob Brotherton says human
4:17 beings are skeptical of coincidence and
4:21 think in terms of cause and effect the
4:22 one of the main jobs that our brain has
4:25 is to spot patterns in the world to spot
4:27 things where ie seems to be connected to
4:32 be and when something big happens like a
4:34 terrorist attack or a mass shooting we
4:37 assume there must be an equally big
4:41 explanation for it like the JFK
4:43 assassination a lone gunman
4:45 assassinating the president changing the
4:47 course of history that's a very small
4:50 explanation for such a big event we want
4:52 a much more complicated explanation than
4:54 there is like a vast conspiracy
4:56 involving hundreds or thousands of
5:03 especially since some experts believe a
5:06 JFK conspiracy is not out of the
5:09 question there's kind of good reason to
5:11 be suspicious of the Warren Commission
5:14 report it was kind of rushed mm-hmm and
5:16 it didn't cover everything it did leave
5:18 some things aren't more than half of all
5:20 Americans think there was a cover-up of
5:23 the Kennedy assassination I'm inclined
5:24 to think that there might have been at
5:27 the Mafia killed JFK I'm not sure it was
5:29 the Mafia maybe it was the Cubans maybe
5:32 it was the Soviet Union such theories
5:36 persist no matter how improbable a lot
5:38 of these depend on huge numbers of
5:39 people keeping us
5:42 secret so workplace romances fall apart
5:45 fairly quickly and that's to people with
5:48 low stakes for talking hundreds or even
5:51 thousands of people with very high
5:53 stakes information and it's been decades
5:56 and decades and decades but no one's
5:58 come forward to say I was the other
6:01 shooter and if you don't buy the JFK
6:06 series what about this guy is he alive
6:09 in this one you've seen those little
6:11 crawly things I'm this but we're big
6:14 curly things poor Paul McCartney has
6:16 been rumored to be dead since people
6:18 played Beatles records backwards in the
6:23 late 60s what is your all-time favorite
6:26 conspiracy theory so the
6:28 inter-dimensional lizards I think hard
6:31 is a good one in dimensional lizards I'm
6:33 not familiar with this one yeah so all
6:36 the rich families the monarchy all the
6:38 presidents are all related to these
6:41 transdimensional shape-shifting lizards
6:44 I'm looking at your eyes you might be
6:47 one of them by now
6:50 you two may be looking nervously over
6:52 your shoulder so how's the average
6:54 person supposed to distinguish any of
6:55 this well the best thing to do is to
6:58 listen to independent experts you know
6:59 that's not good nobody's gonna do that
7:02 you know we could start some sort of
7:04 rumor that you were actually a spy I was
7:08 never a spy what you would say that
7:10 conspiracy thinking is the spectrum some
7:14 of it is ludicrous and some is quite
7:16 reasonable governments do keep things
7:20 from us and perhaps for that very reason
7:22 professor use insky thinks a little dose
7:25 of conspiracy thinking actually may be
7:29 good for democracy conspiracy theorists
7:30 have for decades pushed for the release
7:33 of more documents relating to the JFK
7:35 assassination that's a good thing
7:37 conspiracy theorists push for the 9/11
7:39 Commission that was a good thing
7:41 a world without conspiracy theories
7:44 might be a very dangerous one because at
7:46 that point no one's able to question
