Have you ever heard that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald? Or how about the fact that the United States government has been harboring extraterrestrials and their advanced technology at Area 51? Or—my favorite for its sheer lunacy—that the moon landing was staged in Hollywood? You might laugh at these theories, or, like millions of Americans, you might believe them wholeheartedly. Regardless of their veracity, they exist and proliferate each day, and the Internet has only helped to promulgate them.So where do they come from? Well, in a literal sense, they come from people asking questions and seeking answers. But in a more figurative sense, they come from the experience of not knowing, the great void created by a dearth of certainty. There are several questions about the Kennedy assassination, enough so that several government panels (most notably the Warren Commission) have investigated it; there have been several thousands of reports of UFO encounters (not to mention an equally absurd number of television shows about aliens); and there are aspects of the moon landing that seem too good to be true. But none of these questions necessarily hint at something nefarious or sinister. Rather, they demonstrate that these events are all too real. Nothing in life is certain, and nothing completely adds up. Sure, we’d all prefer major historic events to have the certainty of a sunrise, but there’s the rub: most of us do not really know why the sun rises or even, with certainty, that it will rise tomorrow. But a sane person does not question the sunrise, though that same person will wonder about the trajectory of a bullet in Dallas.None of this is to say that one should not ask questions. Rather, one should ask questions of everything! We should know who shot JFK, whether there are aliens, and whether the Illuminati control everything. Yet, this is impossible. We can no more know these things than we can know who specifically invented the wheel. So, rather than making up theories to explain away the lacuna of facts, we should simply accept the fact that we will never know absolutely everything about anything. Continue asking questions, but don’t make up ridiculous answers for them. Because the ultimate problem with conspiracy theories is that they don’t answer any questions; they merely explain away gaps of knowledge with pseudoscience.Put differently, no one is really sure why cats purr, but that doesn’t mean that cats do not purr. There does not need to be a why for every what.Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Vintage, 2008. Print.Ventura, Jesse & Dick Russell. American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011. Print.SubmitChallenge QuestionWhat's thisWhich of the following pieces of information, if added to the passage, would most strengthen the author’s argument?Aproof that Lee Harvey Oswald did not assassinate John F. KennedyBscientific theories explaining why cats purr, why the sun will rise, and whether aliens existCexamples of ancient theories explaining the sunrise and interactions with aliensDa survey suggesting that very few Americans actually believe in conspiracy theoriesEexamples of gaps in certainty about the Kennedy assassination, aliens, and the moon landing