From Umbrella Man to the Coughing Major, the truth is often very strange

Are you sitting comfortably and wearing your tinfoil hat? If so, open YouTube and watch a full-screen version of the Zapruder film, in particular the section after frame 215 where the presidential limousine passes behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. What you will see, partly obscured by the sign, is a man’s opened umbrella 30 feet from the presidential car when the first shot is fired. Yet it hadn’t rained in Dallas since early morning; Dealey Plaza was bathed in sunshine.

As you can imagine, many conspiracy theories formed around ‘Umbrella Man’ — who also appears in still photographs of the scene. Some theorised that the umbrella canopy concealed a gun or paralysing dart; others maintained the bearer of the umbrella, in league with a ‘dark-complexioned man’, possibly Cuban, formed part of a sniper team signalling that a second shot was needed.

The lesson of Umbrella Man is that the truth is often very strange

Only in 1975 did Louis Witt go public when he explained his actions to the Warren Commission. He was holding his umbrella as a protest to annoy the president — it was a Neville Chamberlain symbol, a dig at Kennedy senior’s appeasement.

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Umbrella Man fascinated John Updike. For him it suggested there was a kind of ‘quantum level’ to historical events. When you go beneath the surface of the ‘sense-making’ narrative and focus intently on ever smaller details, you begin to uncover things that make no sense, a hodgepodge of coincidences and actions that defy conventional explanation. (Had anyone suggested beforehand that Umbrella Man was a surrealist protester, they would have been ridiculed.)

This quantum level of weirdness will always emerge when 20,000 obsessives focus on the same 15 seconds of film. It is also a characteristic of criminal investigations, where no detail is too small to ignore: every true-life crime book I have read includes a coincidence or absurdity which would never be allowed in fiction.