As the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination looms, a recent Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans are still convinced his death was not carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, USA TODAY reported.
The poll demonstrates 61 percent of Americans believe JFK's death was a conspiracy. Though the amount of people that believe in the conspiracy has hit it's lowest level yet, the public majority is still skeptical of the assassination.
Participants showed a variety of ideas behind who really killed the president, like the mafia, the government (including the CIA), Fidel Castro and Cuba, or special interest groups that disagreed with Kennedy's policies.
Despite several investigations into Kennedy's death, the only suspect that has come up is Oswald. Still, it's not convincing a majority of America.
"Could one man have fired three shots and killed Kennedy in a way consistent with his wounds? If Oswald actually acted alone at the Texas School Book Depository, was he funded or supported by others? These are some of the questions that have burned in the American psyche since that fateful day in 1963," the Gallup analysis explains.
Only 30 percent of Americans believe Oswald acted alone on Nov. 22, 1963.
"Americans were skeptical about the "lone gunman" theory almost immediately after Kennedy was killed. In a poll conducted Nov. 22-27, 1963, Gallup found that 29% of Americans believed one man was responsible for the shooting and 52% believed others were involved in a conspiracy. A majority of Americans have maintained that "others were involved" in the shooting each time Gallup has asked this question over the past 50 years, except December 1966, when exactly half of Americans said someone in addition to Oswald was responsible," researchers wrote.
Gallup added that any sort of conspiracy theory is unlikely to ever be proved, even if 100 percent of Americans believed it to be true.
"It is possible that new evidence in the Kennedy assassination will never materialize. The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, enacted in 1992, declassified 98% of the unreleased documents in the Warren Commission's investigation, with other unreleased assassination documents scheduled for release in 2017. Thus far, public documents not originally released in or part of the Warren Commission's report from 1964 have not demonstrated that there was any kind of conspiracy, yet clearly most Americans disagree with the official findings. Speculating about who was really responsible for Kennedy's death will likely remain a topic of fascination for the American public for many years to come," the poll read.
