JFK Assassination Article: Primer for Roswell

Adam Gopnik, one of our favorite New Yorker writers/reporters, has a piece in the November issue of the magazine, Closer Than That: The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later [Page 100 ff].

While the article is strictly about JFK’s murder, Mr. Gopnik makes salient points that may illumine the Roswell incident, for skeptics and believers alike.

A connecting thread about patterns in the JFK theories (conspiratorial and “authoritative”), patterns that seem to co-habit views of Bruce Duensing, a regular at this blog.

Writing about a compulsive “hyperperspicacity” JFK assassination researcher, Gopnik says that the motif of the time [1963] caused the researcher to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide. [Page 102]

“But there are ways in which the pattern-seeking is a meaningful index of the event, and gives us more insight into its hold fifty years on than the evidence does.” [Page 102]

“The pattern-weaving and unweaving in front of our eyes, [places] unlikely people in near proximity and then removing them again – is its own point.” [Page 107]

 “Where the proceduralists believe that the truth is in there, buried in some forgotten file folder, the fantasists believe, ‘X Files’ style, the truth is out there…” [Page 104]

“It is … possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly detailed, on its own terms, and yet utterly delusional.” [Page 104, Italics mine]

“The [Roswell] conspiracy theorists are the first and hardiest of those movements … in which the old American paranoid style, once largely marginal and murmuring, married pseudoscience and became articulate, academic, systemized, and loud.” [Page 204, I replaced Roswell for JFK in the sentence.]

“No matter how improbable it may seem that all the hard evidence could have been planted, faked, or coerced – and the hundreds of the distinct acts of concealment and coercion necessary would have been left unconfessed for more than half a century – it does not affect the production of [Roswell] literature, which depends not on confronting the evidence but on discovering new patterns of connection and coincidence.” [Page 104]

“And this is true, any fact asserted can be met with counter-fact – some of them plausible, many disputed. Most creating contradictions that are unresolvable…All Facts in all inquiries come at us with their own shakiness, their own shimmer of uncertainty.” [Page 105]

“… you may not know the answer to a question, but that does not mean that the question is unanswerable.” [Page 105]

“…though, every fact in the case, no matter how solid-seeming, can be countered by some other fact, however speculative. Facts provoke new patterns even as they disprove old ones.” {page 105]

“… the foundational sense that there were bizarre forces at work in the period, paranoid … and tightly interlocked in the strangest imaginable ways, and by their nature resistant to the common-sense impulses of ordinary explanation …is, as far as one can tell, true.” [Page 105]

“Again and again, the investigation discloses bizarre figures and coincidences within a web of incident that seem significant in themselves.” [Page 107]

(Again, I’ve selected segments from Mr. Gopnik’s piece that seem to pertain to the Roswell thing, then and now. For those who are JFK assassination buffs, Nick Redfern has provided a link to a piece in the Dallas Morning News about him and the link between UFOs and the JFK murder:

http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/10/dallas-author-investigates-connection-between-jfk-assassination-and-ufos.html/?nclick_check=1

  

Nick also has an article about the JFK assassination in the December issue of Penthouse, upcoming.)

RR