For the record, I dearly
love conspiracy theories.
United Airlines Flight 533 from
Washington to
Chicago crashed a few miles short of Chicago's
Midway Airport on December 8, 1972, killing two people on the ground and 43 of the 61 people on the
plane. Among those killed was
Dorothy Hunt, the wife of
CIA agent/
Watergate plumber/
accused Kennedy assassin E. Howard Hunt. Within days of the crash (conspiracy theories took longer to form back then), Chicago
activist Sherman Skolnick began claiming that the plane had been
sabotaged in order to kill Mrs. Hunt. Why? According to Skolnick, Dorothy Hunt had allegedly received some of the million dollars that
Richard Nixon had allegedly promised E. Howard Hunt to keep quiet about his alleged role in the
Kennedy assassination -- and it was feared that Mrs. Hunt might be willing to
spill the beans about what she had learned from her husband.
Among the
suspicious circumstances alleged by Skolnick and others:
Fifty FBI agents arrived at the scene of the crash almost immediately, although the nearest
FBI office was a 40-minute drive away -- additionally, fifty FBI agents would seldom be in one office, even in Chicago; they were usually out in the field, unless they had gathered together for a
special project.
The
pilot had a significant amount of
cyanide in his blood. Although some said he could have inhaled cyanide from chemical reactions in the crash, others say that the 3.9 micrograms per milliliter in the pilot could only be the result of deliberate
poisoning.
Nixon also appointed two of his close associates to the
investigation, and another Nixon friend was soon after named to a position with United Airlines and was involved in every phase of the investigation.
After the crash, the
flight recorder disappeared and then was allegedly returned by the Chicago Sanitation Department, which said it had picked it up by
mistake at the crash site. Why the
garbage haulers were carting off fresh
debris from a
crash site was never explained...
Of course, the obvious
argument against this whole conspiracy theory is that
no one in the
government would kill that many people just to
eliminate one inconvenient
witness to a crime that may never have occurred and then work so hard to cover it all up.
But the best argument against the
theory is that Nixon had no real
motive to
assassinate Kennedy -- he disliked Kennedy for
defeating him in the election, but only
comic book supervillains hold
grudges like that. In addition, if Nixon had ordered the deaths of JFK, Dorothy Hunt, and all the other people on Flight 533, why didn't he have
Woodward and Bernstein killed...?
But hey, ain't
conspiracy theories
fun?