re: Our most enduring conspiracy
Speaking of the TWA 800 disaster, Nelson DeMille, a decent author, wrote an intriguing fiction piece based on the surmise of a missing videotape of the incident. A great read.
The quirky point is that out of all these incidents there's a finite probability that we really don't know the real story on some few, not to say that the nutball conspiracy theories proposd are true but that there is a natural tendency to make embarrasing information unavailable. That tendency fuels the wilder conspiracy thoeries.