Woody Allen once joked, back in his stand-up days, that he was working on a nonfiction version of the Warren Report. The resulting laughter is a little overeager, like a valve for national hypertension in the wake of the JFK assassination. A decade later the line showed up in Annie Hall . By then Robert Kennedy had been shot and G. Gordon Liddy had bungled his DNC phone tapping operation at the Watergate complex. It didn’t really seem like a joke anymore.

For almost 40 years, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was for many the non plus ultra proof of a cabalistic America. And even though 9/11 has surpassed it in terms of conspiratorial scope and violence – perhaps even in the volume of individual conspiracy theories generated – November 22 is still the pro’s conspiracy, still the one that sticks in the craw of even the most ardent supporter of the Warren Commission’s findings. Now that the dust has settled on the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination (which, in spite of gloom and doom media frenzy, did little to impact turducken sales or Black Friday profits), there is a bit of elbow room to offer my own modest JFK conspiracy theory.

Begin with the facts, right? But to begin with the facts is an absurd imposition – it is no exaggeration to say that there are just too many. It is, of course, the overdetermination of the events in Dealey plaza and the impossibly numerous tangents that lends the assassination so well to conspiracy theories. Oswald was a mediocre marksman with a comically inaccurate rifle and an obstructed line of site. Kennedy knew about, and probably signed off on, Operation Mongoose. An incognito David Atlee Phillips may have met Oswald in Mexico City. How deep were Jack Ruby’s connections to the Mafia? And what about all those bizarre attendant deaths – bystanders at Dealey Plaza and people with weird connections to the CIA, Cuba, and the Mafia all seemed to be dying at an alarming rate and in strange circumstances in the years after ’63. Perhaps the only indisputable truth of the JFK assassination is that it has generated an unmanageable amount of data. There is a certain protean demographic in America which loves unmanageable data and overdetermination, loves the emergent narratives which spring from them. But no, it can’t be…

There is a common gripe among Warren Report skeptics: why haven’t the national media given more attention to certain ‘facts’? The subtitle of David Talbot’s recent article was ‘CIA and New York Times are still lying to us’ . Talbot, the founder of Salon , is hardly a JFK extremist; the piece itself is part survey of the slew of new books and articles and part dip into Talbot’s massive subject knowledge. It was in Talbot’s piece that I thought I would finally find a reference to a part of the story I suspected was being overlooked. But I didn’t find it. He’d griped that the national media were still watering down their accounts, but was he himself hedging?

Some time ago I’d come across a story which may or may not have caused a stir in the world of JFK buffs. I had been googling ‘David Atlee Phillips’ after a friend and I had met his daughter at a piano bar in Oakland, California. She was in a rather flattering number, having descended from some gala or other in the hills. There was no way for me to appreciate the irony of it at the time, but I thought she looked like Marilyn Monroe. Her sparkly, low-back evening gown. And the hair! Dead on. The next morning I quickly found my way to accusations of her father’s involvement in the JFK assassination. had done a piece on E. Howard Hunt’s alleged devolvement of a conspiratorial hierarchy to his son, Saint John, which confirmed not only the CIA’s involvement but fingered officials all the way up to and including Lyndon Johnson. Of course, the story would be full of problems if intended to throw serious gas on the conspiracy theory fire. Saint John comes off as a waif, whose only significant moment with his father came when he’d been asked to help destroy files related to Watergate, and whose subsequent drug problems make him a hard sell as sole source – Hunt had demanded his notes back before he died. Hunt himself is no less a tainted character who’s excommunication from the CIA was vendetta-inspiring stuff. Months after he was indicted, his first wife was killed in a suspicious plane crash carrying $10,000 in cash, and in 1973 when he was sentenced to prison he said he felt betrayed by the country whose biding he had done. Even so, Saint John’s sensational allegations stuck in my head for a long time. This was my first taste of JFK conspiracy theory, but as I became acclimated the Rolling Stone story became far more significant for what at first had been an unremarkable detail. E. Howard Hunt wrote spy novels.

Several fictional accounts of the JFK assassination have appeared since 1963; Don DeLillo’s novel Libra , Oliver Stone’s film JFK , and more recently Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 . Literary types have scarcely been known to shy away from the conspiratorial, and the line between life and the letter is easily obscured. In 2001, novelist Paul Limbert Allman glibly (not to mention posthumously) accused Donald Barthelme of perpetrating a bizarre attack on Dan Rather fifteen years prior. Then there is the strange and convoluted tale of William Gaddis, ‘jack green’, Wanda Tinasky and Thomas Pynchon.

The last on that list is perhaps the greatest writer of conspiracy fiction in American history and the one about whom we know the least (for a while, in fact, it was suspected that Gaddis and Pynchon might be the same person). But what we do know is that Pynchon revels in data; massive, indigestible data. We also know that he had an early taste of the cabal. From 1960-62, he worked for Boeing on the Bormac guided missile, a failed project but a direct legacy of Operation Paperclip in which more than 700 Nazi rocket scientists were brought to the U.S. after WWII. The Raketen-Stadt is no metaphor! But get this: the next year, Autumn 1963, Pynchon is in southern California where he is the best man in Richard Fariña’s wedding to Mimi Baez. Heading back to Mexico, where he was living, he would have taken the bus from Texas to Mexico City around the same time Lee Harvey Oswald did, en route to a Cuban visa and that fateful meeting with Phillips. From here we can only speculate, but nobody summons a cabal, no one can tame undomesticated data, quite like a novelist can. Saint John makes it clear that his father’s novelistic tendencies extended beyond his writing. But a CIA operative would have a steady supply fuel for his fiction. For Pynchon, datamancer and trafficker of the uncut paranoia, what lengths must be gone to in order to supply the necessary amounts of data? Might he have whispered a magic word in Oswald’s ear on that long bus ride and let Brennschluss do its work, spewing kinetic data in its wake?

But Pynchon never wrote about the assassination, not directly. And here is the hole in the theory, the hole which gives it vitality. For that which is unseen is the force at work behind all theory, that single piece of data which validates the structure, animates the organism. In 2017 another set of JFK files is set to be released. Will these hold the essential datum? Was it the CIA? The Cubans? The Mafia? Was it Thomas Pynchon? Die-hards are out there right now, still analyzing the Zapruder film. Maybe they are living off the data. Maybe an answer is not really what they are looking for.

Richard Bosch is a writer and vagrant.