The Dangerous Rise of Coincidence Theorists in America

In 1976 19% of Americans stood by the preposterous findings of the Warren Commission. By 2019, that number had grown to 40%. (Audio Track below)

This article is a repost with the kind permission from the author

A Coincidence Theory is an explanation which attributes an observed outcome to luck or random chance. Because it is impossible to ignore the reality that sometimes stuff just happens, Coincidence Theories are the default explanations when there are no others.

For the purposes of this article I define Coincidence Theorists as those who irrationally defend a Coincidence Theory as the best explanation even when more plausible and substantiated alternative theories that implicate the machinations of powerful, self-serving interests exist.

Obviously, gratuitous defense of authority and power is a tendency that has always existed in our collective psyche to some extent. However in recent decades this attitude has grown in intensity and breadth, infiltrating what were once credible news agencies and now social media and holiday dinner conversations.

The first significant Coincidence Theory was introduced to America to explain the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

JFK and the rise of Coincidence Theorists

President Kennedy was enormously popular among his supporters in this country and abroad. For good reason. He was young. He was handsome. He was a war hero. He wanted to motivate Americans to shoot for the moon and embody the ideals upon which their country was founded.

Kennedy wanted to put this country and the world on a path to peace. Addressing the country for the first time as President, he exhorted Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”. A few months later the Peace Corps was formed. By establishing a way of connecting American youth and ingenuity with the problems faced by the rest of the world, Kennedy offered his vision of what a powerful America would look like. Our nation’s strength would be in its commitment to empower people everywhere, not just within our borders. It was the antidote to the cold war.

Bay of Pigs

Just six weeks later, the young President got a taste of what he was up against. Though peace, prosperity and cooperation was an easy sell to the public, it wasn’t to the folks who really ran the country. Operating outside of Kennedy’s knowledge, a CIA operation to overthrow Cuba’s populist leader, Fidel Castro, was launched on April 15, 1961. Cuban airfields were destroyed by American B-26 bombers supplied by our Central Intelligence Agency. Two days later, a ground force of 1,400 paramilitaries landed on the beaches of Playa Giron on the east bank of the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) and overwhelmed local militias.

By this time, Kennedy learned of the unauthorized mission and refused to supply any naval and air support to the attempted coup. The stranded CIA fighters surrendered and were publicly interrogated and incarcerated. The mission to overthrow Castro failed and threw suspicion over Kennedy’s peaceful overtures and raised doubts over his ability to oversee the country’s fighting force as the Commander in Chief. This was the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Kennedy’s decision to abort the mission was a courageous and principled one. He knew that his public image would suffer while at the same time firmly establish an intensely adversarial relationship with his own Chiefs of Staff who were outraged that he left their operatives stranded.

Cuban Missile Crisis

With a nuclear superpower just 90 miles away that was controlled by rogue interests and power that sought to overthrow his government, Castro had no choice but to seek support from the U.S.S.R. This led to the next test of Kennedy’s mettle one year later.

Aerial surveillance confirmed that Cuba was building missile sites capable of launching ICBMs into U.S. territory. His Chiefs of Staff, ravenous for an all out invasion of Cuba, were incensed by the President’s unwillingness to at least call for airstrikes to destroy their missile capabilities. Kennedy averted a nuclear showdown through the use of a naval “quarantine” on the island and savvy backchannel negotiations with Soviet Premier, Nikita Kruschev.

Operation Northwoods

Much later the public discovered that he kiboshed a diabolical plan proposed by his Chiefs of Staff earlier in 1962 to trick the public into thinking that Cuba attacked a chartered plane of innocent civilians. This was the infamous “Operation Northwoods”.

In the Northwoods ruse, CIA operatives under aliases would charter a private plane. While in flight, a military drone aircraft indistinguishable from the plane would begin transmitting the private plane’s transponder signal. The plane would land secretly at a military base while the drone aircraft, flown remotely, would be intentionally crashed over Cuba. American fighter jets disguised as Russian made MiGs would be in the area. Reconnaissance aircraft and ground tracking systems would all report the same thing: the plane was taken down by an unprovoked attack by Cuba. The public would be forced to accept that a full-scale invasion of the island nation was necessary.

Kennedy rejected the ploy out of hand. The plan was never executed, but we, the public, eventually got a sense of the kind of people who were surrounding the young President (and likely all Presidents since).

Three years after Kennedy was murdered, the New York Times published an article on the fifth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs which cited an anonymous source in his administration:

And President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he “wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

It’s impossible to confirm whether Kennedy made such a remark. But it’s also impossible to deny that the words conveyed what he must have been thinking at the time. He knew that America’s real enemies occupied seats of power and operated outside of any real oversight.

Peace Speech

Just five months before his death, Kennedy gave a stirring commencement address at American University. His “Peace Speech” made it abundantly clear to the war hawks that he would not compromise or be deterred:

“I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived–yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

…

“Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles–which can only destroy and never create–is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.”

When President Kennedy’s motorcade meandered into Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, he was again under intense pressure from his adversaries. This time it was over how to respond to what was happening in a far off country called Vietnam. Enemies of Democracy were threatening to annex more territory and more minds into their collective. Once again, Kennedy was unwavering in his commitment to keep the country out of military entanglements. He refused to deploy Americans in any combat role to the area.

What must have been going through the heads of his war hungry advisors after having their devious plots thwarted, time and time again, by the youthful President with an impeccable pedigree and Hollywood looks?

The point is that there were a lot of powerful people that would have seen some benefit in having a different President. Brother and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy didn’t help endear JFK to the more unsavory elements of society. The AG’s intense and relentless attack on organized crime probably didn’t sit well with some who were likely associated with those who were stranded during the Bay of Pigs incident.

The Presidential motorcade took a lazy turn into Dealey Plaza at a mere 10 mph, according to the official record. The first reports of gunshots came from a reporter in the motorcade who said that the police were responding to shots fired from “a grassy knoll”. Multiple other witnesses also reported that shots were fired from the modest hill just in front of the President’s open convertible limo.

According to some witnesses, forty-five minutes later a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippet was shot by a man who matched the description of a person fleeing the Dealey Plaza scene. That man was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was eventually apprehended on the balcony of a movie theater. Twelve hours later he was charged with both the murder of Tippet and Kennedy. Oswald denied both charges.

Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn into office on Air Force One, the plane carrying the slain Kennedy’s remains to Washington D.C. so that an official autopsy could be conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside the public view.

What exactly happened?

Warren Commission: A Coincidence Theory

Johnson formed an investigatory panel, the Warren Commission, to answer that question. The commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President from the sixth floor of a building, The Texas Book Depository, not the grassy knoll.

Oswald immediately claimed innocence and was recorded emphatically stating that he was only a patsy, or a fall-guy for a crime that he didn’t commit. Oswald never appeared in court to tell his story. Two days after the assassination, Oswald was shot dead in the basement of the Dallas County Jail. His assailant was Jack Ruby, a night club owner.

The Warren Commission believed Jack Ruby when he said he killed Oswald impulsively because he was angry that Oswald took Kennedy’s life. Needless to say, they didn’t feel the same way about Oswald’s pleas for leniency until things could be sorted out. In the end, with the only suspect in murders of Kennedy and Tippet dead, the commission’s job was done.

Less than a year later an apparent attack on the US ship Maddox by North Vietnamese torpedo boats occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea. Six months later President Johnson deployed the first combat troops in Vietnam in response.

Somebody got their wish. They had a new President and their war.

Years later, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Gulf of Tonkin incident and through three years of the Vietnam conflict admitted that the North Vietnamese never attacked the Maddox. Says McNamara at the end of the clip below, “Events afterwards showed that our judgement that we’d been attacked that day was wrong.”

Nearly 60 thousand American soldiers and over a million Vietnamese lost their lives over a kind of lie commonly known as a false flag event. A fake or staged attack is used to stoke anger and fear in the population. This leads to support of retaliatory action against a nation which correctly sees it as an unprovoked attack upon them. What better way to pick a fight? What better way to sow the seeds of enmity between two countries? What better way to create an income stream for a military complex through massive public expenditures sold as “defense spending”?

The official explanation of the assassination of the 35th POTUS was the first big modern coincidence theory. According to NBC, polls taken immediately after the assassination demonstrated that 52% of the public believed that Oswald did not act alone. A slim majority felt that there were simply too many events to swallow as mere coincidence.

Why did Johnson appoint Allen Dulles, the ex-CIA Director to sit on the Warren Commission? Two years earlier, Kennedy forced Dulles and two of his Deputy Directors to resign following the Bay of Pigs, but now Dulles, with no official role in the CIA or the government is appointed as a commissioner into Kennedy’s assassination? Was it just a coincidence? Or was it to steer the Warren Commission away from suspicions that the CIA, the only organization capable of a conspiracy to kill the President, was somehow involved?

Why did Oswald, the lone assassin, scramble from Dealey plaza on foot with no apparent escape plan after meticulously formulating and executing a presidential assassination single-handedly? Did he think he could outrun authorities after killing the President of the United States? Or did it quickly dawn on him that he had been set up to take the fall for the crime of the century and needed to get away long enough to get his head together?

Why couldn’t the authorities holding Oswald protect him in one of their own buildings? Why was he killed so soon after the President’s death, eliminating the possibility of ever hearing from Oswald himself? More unfortunate coincidences.

Why did Oswald claim he was just a patsy while Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, have possible ties to organized crime? The Warren Commission’s official report states:

“From the time that Ruby arrived in Dallas in 1947, he was friendly with numerous underworld figures.”

But concludes:

“Based on its evaluation of the record, however, the Commission believes that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime.”

Are we to accept that the investigatory panel would believe that such an individual would kill Oswald, while he was already in police custody, because of his love for the President?

If there were a conspiracy to kill JFK, Ruby would have been a central figure in it. Unfortunately, Ruby died in prison in 1967 at the age of 55 from a pulmonary embolism.

By 1966 polls demonstrated Americans were still evenly split about what really happened. But in 1976, 81% of those polled believed that Oswald was not involved or did not act alone. Why? That was when the country finally got to see the most important evidence the Warren Commission had had all along.

It turns out that the murder of the sitting President was captured on camera by a private citizen. Abraham Zapruder’s 26 second long film became the most famous home movie in history. The public never got to see this film until 13 years after JFK was murdered.

To the unbiased eye, it is obvious Kennedy was shot through the front of his throat and then a few seconds later another bullet destroyed the right side of his head sending a part of his skull to the rear of the car which for some reason seemed to have come to a halt before speeding away to Parkland Hospital.

The bullets were fired from the front of the President. Oswald had to have fired from above and behind. Why would a person believe the ballistics analysis from an investigatory panel with a potentially huge conflict of interest and not their own eyes? A panel that kept the most damning evidence away from the public for 13 years? A panel who pinned the murder on a person who denied involvement and was murdered while in police custody?

I am interested in the 19% who continued to believe the official tale about what happened on that day in Dallas. They are, for discussion purposes, “Coincidence Theorists”. What is behind the mentality of those who cling to the idea that those with the greatest motive to kill the president, the means to do so and the final say into the investigation could not, under any circumstances, be guilty of a coup d’etat?

I speculate that it is fear, the fundamental disruptive force when it comes to sense making. The possibility that there could be those who wield such power and use it for such deceptive and dastardly means is too scary to accept.

Fear suppresses curiosity. Why ask hard questions when the answers may be very uncomfortable? Furthermore, a loss of curiosity leads to apathy. Curiosity, after all, requires care and interest to blossom.

Perhaps this is why belief in Coincidence Theories around the JFK assassination has tended to grow. Polls show that for decades 24% of the population believed in the Coincidence Theory propped up by the Warren Commission. According to NBC, by 2019 that number was a whopping 39%.

9/11 Commission: Another Coincidence Theory

Disquietingly, Coincidence Theorists dominate the public’s response to the official findings of the 9/11 Commission report too. Coincidences cited in the official 9/11 explanation dwarf those in the JFK assassination. Yet polling results indicate that anywhere between 50 to 60% or more of the public believe them. Here are just a few:

1. The purported terrorists coincidentally chose a morning when multiple military exercises involving our air defenses were taking place.
2. Accounts by first responders describing explosive events prior to the collapse of the three skyscrapers in Manhattan were ignored.
3. Human remains and multi-ton building components were thrown hundreds of yards away from what was explained as gravitational collapses of the twin towers.
4. Despite the fact that terrorists had attempted to destroy the WTC with explosives less than a decade earlier, no search for explosive residues were ever conducted by the investigatory agency on 9/11.
5. The hijackers were below average single-engine pilots in training but were able to fly multiengine jet planes with pinpoint accuracy the first time they sat in cockpits of such aircraft.
6. Building 7 which fell in exactly the manner of a controlled demolition was instead deemed to be the first (and last) steel structured building to fall from office fires.
7. NIST’s explanation of WTC7’s fire induced collapse is backed only by a computer model which in actuality proves the building could not have been destroyed by fires.
8. World Trade Center Complex lease holder, Larry Silverstein, coincidentally purchased a massive insurance policy on the property which included a multi-billion dollar payout in the event of a terrorist act less six weeks before 9/11.
9. Debris from ground zero was immediately removed before any analysis could be conducted. This was blatant tampering of the biggest crime scene in history by authorities themselves.
10. Hundreds of thousands of tons of steel from the buildings were sold and shipped to China at a time where steel prices were at an all time low.
11. No footage from the numerous security cameras on the Pentagon was ever released to the public, yet we are told that the Al Qaeda hijacker was able to perform a brilliant, corkscrew descent, skimming the ground and fly directly into the Office of Naval Investigation that had been tasked to investigate a missing 2.3 trillion dollars from the Pentagon budget. Career jet pilots have been unable to duplicate this aerial maneuver on flight simulators.
12. Remarkably, a Saudi Passport belonging to one of the hijackers was found intact a few blocks from the pulverized concrete and dismembered steel in the rubble at ground zero.
13. The events, as officially explained, justified the invasion of both Iraq and Afghanistan under false pretenses. Both wars were monumentally expensive and highly destabilizing to the regions but served America’s war machine well.

Ten years after 9/11 Osama bin Laden, the proposed mastermind behind the events, was apparently killed at a residence in Pakistan before he could be questioned. His remains were buried at sea without any independent confirmation of his identity.

Why in 1963, with no access to any footage of Kennedy’s assassination, did the majority of Americans see through the Coincidence Theory offered by the Warren Commission, but in 2001, with extensive media coverage of three skyscrapers disintegrating in front of the public’s eyes did 60% of Americans accept the proposition that these buildings actually fell to the ground under their own weight?

Is this a building falling down or blowing up?

If it is falling down, how then would a building being blown apart from the top down look like? Are we truly unable to see that this is a picture of a building exploding and not collapsing?

Obviously, the only way to know for certain is to check for explosive residues. This was deemed unnecessary by those who have the final say in the matter. Ground zero was scrubbed clean a full year before an official investigation began. The existence of explosive residues on 9/11 is like the Oswald testimony following JFK’s murder. It would have been helpful. Too bad it wasn’t sought in time.

Even after a fruitless search for WMDs in Iraq, destabilizing military action in Afghanistan and government sanctioned surveillance of private communication under the Patriot Act, polls in 2023 found that even more (66% !) Americans believe the 9/11 Coincidence theory.

What is behind this alarming trend? Are we too distracted by amusing cat videos these days? Has propaganda become more convincing? Have we collectively lost our bearings, wits and sense-making abilities?

Once again I speculate that fear has blinded the public from reality. It was hard enough to accept that powerful, hidden forces could mortally wound the President in broad daylight and get away with it. But killing nearly three thousand innocent people in building demolitions which were set up over months?

It’s simply too hard to ponder and too frightening to accept. We are now faced with an even more frightening prospect. It seems the more audacious and psychopathic the true perpetrators are, the less likely the public will be to hold them accountable or at the very least be skeptical of their tales. Where will this lead?

Covid-19

Would the public accept that a global pandemic had to have resulted from a zoonotic spillover event in a wet market in Wuhan while a virology lab doing questionable research funded by our NIH was situated in the same locale, coincidentally?

Would we swallow the idea that the remarkably prescient Event 201 tabletop exercise which closely matched the pandemic response taken just a few months later was just a coincidence? Was it pure good fortune that Bill Gates, the individual who most benefited from the global deployment of technology, novel or otherwise, happened to have funded Event 201 merely to help humanity prepare for such a catastrophe?

All the major mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and adenovector (J&J and AstraZeneca) vaccines stimulate our cells to synthesize the SARS-COV2 spike protein, which has been repeatedly demonstrated to have toxic effects that are clinically difficult to distinguish from “long-Covid”. Was this an excusable blunder made by all major Covid vaccine manufacturers coincidentally?

And now with billions of human beings vaccinated, would we accept that the unprecedented rise in all-cause mortality in nearly every age group began when the Covid-19 vaccine was introduced was just another coincidence?

The majority of the population does. This is a problem, and it takes a substantial amount of clarity and courage to see it at such. This has been made even more difficult by the Coincidence Theorists who paint those who question the official positions as paranoid, unpatriotic and pseudoscientific, and they attack the rational minded with the kind of vitriol associated with defense mechanisms.

Those who question the Warren Commission are not paranoid. Those who reject the 9/11 Commission report are not being unpatriotic. Those who are critical of the pandemic response and the mRNA technology injected into several billion arms are not anti-science.

One cannot force Coincidence Theorists to reject their illusions around these matters by denigrating them or mocking their naivete. But neither will censoring, shadow banning and social exclusion quiet the clear minded and open-eyed. It’s simply not possible to unsee something.

Is there a way through this apparent impasse? There is. Whether they are aware of it or not, Coincidence Theorists fiercely defend their position out of fear. We are in difficult times, and these difficulties can only be transcended if we are able to identify their cause.

We who can see coincidence theories for what they are—cloaks over the eyes of the fearful which simultaneously serve to hide the machinations of powerful interests that create the calamities and perpetuate the fear—must realize that ours is ultimately a message of liberation and not of disdain and frustration.

Imagine a world devoid of wars sparked by devious false-flag events and the brutal assassinations of messengers of peace. Imagine a world without bioweapons and authorities who can whimsically and heedlessly impose medical interventions and restrictions on our way of life. Are we ready to create such a planet? Maybe. But in order to create that kind of world we must hold that vision in our minds and hearts before engaging with those who see the world differently or choose not to look.

Hope is as infectious as fear. We can make it go viral.