[music] In December 1967, John Updike was writing “Talk of the Town” for The New Yorker. And he spent most of that “Talk of of the Town” column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research, there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research where things sort of obey natural laws. And usual things happen. And unusual things don’t happen. And then there’s this other level where everything is really weird. On November 22nd, it rained the night before. But everything cleared by about 9:00 or 9:30 in the morning. So if you were looking at various photographs of the motorcade route and the crowds gathered there, you will have noticed nobody’s wearing a raincoat. Nobody has an open umbrella. Why? Because it’s a beautiful day. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. And then I noticed, in all of Dallas, there appears to be exactly one person standing under an open, black umbrella. And that person is standing where the shots begin to rain into the limousine. Let us call him the Umbrella Man. “Did you name the Umbrella Man?” Yes. You can see him in the certain frames from the Zapruder film, standing right there by the Stemmons Freeway sign. There are other still photographs taken from other locations in Dealey Plaza, which show the whole man standing under an open black umbrella, the only person under any umbrella in all of Dallas standing right at the location where all the shots come into the limousine. Can anyone come up with a non-sinister explanation for this? Hmm? Hmm? So I published this in “Six Seconds [in Dallas]” but didn’t speculate about what it meant or got into any of the conspiracy theories, because everybody else got into the conspiracy theories. There was one wingnut who published a book with a diagram of the umbrella. The umbrella was rigged so that there was a — aiming device. And there was a rocket tube that you could fire a flechette directly into Kennedy’s throat. “The Umbrella Man is the real assassin.” That was the idea. That was the source of the hole in the throat, folks. Right? Um-hmm. Well, I asked that the Umbrella Man come forward and explain this. So he did. He came forward, and he went to Washington with his umbrella. And he testified in 1978 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He explained, then, why he had opened the umbrella and was standing there that day. The open umbrella was a kind of protest, a visual protest. It wasn’t a protest of any of John Kennedy’s policies as president. It was a protest at the appeasement policies of Joseph P. Kennedy, John Kennedy’s father, when he was ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1938 and ‘39. It was a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella. I read that, and I thought, this is just wacky enough. It has to be true. And I take it to be true. What it means is that if you have any fact which you think is really sinister, right, is really obviously a fact which can only point to some sinister underpinnings, hey, forget it, man, because you can never on your own think up all the non-sinister, perfectly valid explanations for that act. A cautionary tale.