While federal authorities investigating the Oklahoma City bombing search for connections among Timothy McVeigh, John Doe 2 and the Nichols brothers, suspicious minds are casting a wider net.
Was it retaliation by the Japanese? A federal attempt to discredit militias? A scheme to rub out presidential bodyguards who knew too much? A byzantine United Nations plot to institute a New World Order?Then there's the multiple-bomb theory, a notion well on its way to becoming the 1990s version of the two-shooters theory in the John F. Kennedy assassination.
"Theory? Hoo boy," Bob Fletcher, a Militia of Montana member, said shaking his head. "Right. Theory."
Conspiracy theories developed fast and thick following the Oklahoma City bombing. Shared on the Internet, talk radio, on fax and at militia meetings, the accusations take on new twists daily, as those with a deep mistrust of the government try to fit tenuous connections and coincidences in the April 19 bombing to their own world view:
- In late April, two Michigan Militia Corps leaders blamed the Japanese government. Norman Olson and Ray Southwell contended the government was retaliating for the nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway system. The attack, they said, was orchestrated by the U.S. government.
Olson and Southwell claimed their information came from a computer analyst from California with intelligence contacts. The two later resigned their posts for ignoring the will of other militia members and going public with the theory.
- Another theory making its way around the country holds that the bombing - and the shootout at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, two years ago - both eliminated former bodyguards of President Clinton who knew too much about the president.
One of the Oklahoma City casualties was Alan Whicher, a Secret Service agent recently transferred from Washington to Oklahoma City. Clinton attended Whicher's funeral.
And Robert William, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Little Rock, Ark., where Clinton was governor, was killed in the raid at Waco.
"Can I point out how this bomb benefited Bill Clinton?" Bill Trowbridge asked after a U.S. Militia Association meeting in Twin Falls, Idaho, last week.
"That makes four different bodyguards killed," he said. "Three in Waco and this one. Sure did benefit Bill Clinton, didn't it? Check that out."
But ATF officials said there was no evidence that William or the other agents killed at Waco ever had direct contact with Clinton.
"It's paranoid fantasy," said one ATF official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The concept that the government killed our own people is delusional."
- A widespread theory places the United Nations' hand in the bombing. Militia groups and conservative organizations - going back to the John Birch Society - have long warned of an interlocking conspiracy by the United Nations and foreign policy groups to absorb the United States into a world government.
Pam Beesley, who operates an information service called Gate Keepers from Kansas City, Mo., has called various media outlets to link allegations of two bombs to the possibility of a U.N. plot.
"This is what the U.N. does when they go in and overthrow a country," she said. "They produce unrest in the country first."
Beesley said her conclusions come from discussions with other researchers. Her own background?
"I'm just a mom," she said. "I don't advertise fancy credentials. We just try to put information out to common folk."
The theory that two bombs destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building originated from an Oklahoma Geological Survey seismograph that recorded two major events - 11.6 seconds apart - during the bombing.
James Lawson, the chief geophysicist with the state agency, initially said the record could be explained by two separate blasts. He quickly discounted that theory after witnesses in the area reported hearing only one explosion.
Now Lawson says the second tremor was likely the federal building collapsing.
Lawson said copies of the seismograph are being sent around the nation via fax and the Internet. The soft-spoken scientist has been inundated with calls.
"A lot of them are anxious to explain to me that our government committed mass murder," he said. "They are disappointed that I'm not saying it was two blasts. I don't think anybody's mind is changed by what I say."