These Sites Are Mentioned in the Story:

For the Paranoid or Curious
There's a Web of Conspiracy

Beyond the rainbow of entertainment, sports and sex competing for the Internet's elusive pot of gold, the true potential of the global network can be sampled in one distinctly noncommercial arena -- the unknown.

Unsolved crimes, unexplained events, inconsistencies in historical accounts, perceived disinformation, coverups and -- I whisper now -- conspiracy, all come to life in the virtual world with a churning immediacy.

The horrible mass suicide last week by Internet-literate members of a UFO cult has driven home to Americans that cyberspace can be a forum for some unusual views.

But long before that, there were plenty of other sites devoted to subjects outside the mainstream: the theory that a U.S. Navy missile shot down TWA Flight 800, alleged coverups of Gulf War syndrome, government involvement with the crack cocaine epidemic, to name a few.

If you're game, try out 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, which was recently upgraded from 50 "because weird things keep happening". There you can read information of varying reliability about the Aum cult in Japan, alien autopsies, O.J. Simpson and the Hale-Bopp comet and perhaps find a connection there somewhere.

You can use the Yahoo directory's conspiracy section to reach more than 150 sites, including several that suggest that Tupac Shakur isn't really dead. Or visit Lisa Pease's Real History Archives. where some radical views of controversial topics going as far back as Alger Hiss are documented and linked to other locations on the Web.

"Real history" is the phrase that these sites' fans like to use. Their interest began long before the Internet made publication of individual research and speculation so easy. Back then, it depended on an underground of self-published journals and newsletters and annual conferences devoted to alternative investigations.

Nowhere on the Web is this depth of interest and variety of speculation more evident than on the scores of sites devoted wholly or in part to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Freed from the costs of print publication and the editorial decisions of established news organizations, assassination theories and research are easily shared and discussed.

Marquette University Associate Prof. John McAdams offers a Kennedy Assassination Home Page with extensive annotated links to essays and documentation. This is a good place to search archives of the newsgroup alt.conspiracy.jfk and its milder offshoot, alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated.

Historical researcher Bill Adams's site, called The Truth is Redacted, offers the best of the continuing investigations into the JFK murder and other "unsolved crimes".

A site run by author A.J. Weberman contains a large searchable database of information from his book "Coup d'Etat in America" and more than 100 pieces of "photographic evidence" -- including scanned photos of Lee Harvey Oswald's address book.

The Internet also has a slew of Webzines created to disseminate the latest essays and news from the JFK assassination research community. These online publications include Deep Politics, Fair Play and selected articles from Probe, the official newsletter of Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination, yet another assassination site.

You can read the entire report of the Warren Commission, the official body of inquiry that concluded Oswald acted along, online (from Germany!), or search the really, truly official JFK Assassination Records Collection database at the U.S. National Archives in Bethesda.

A gopher site run by theorist Deanie Richards has an enormous historical collection of text and multimedia files.

At other sites, you'll find acoustic evidence (how many shots were fired?), computer-assisted designs and animations of the crime scene, frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film, scanned images from long-gathered and newly revealed evidence, lively newsgroup discussions and flame wars, hypertext linkages and postings of original documents and research.

A lot of the sites I looked at in writing this column I found downright goofy. But many of those devoted to the JFK assassination struck me as models of the Internet's potential as an educational tool.

These days we often focus on the Internet's commercial future. But let's not forget what we used to say it was all about: a means for many-to-many communication of ideas, a forum for unfettered discussion, an inexpensive publishing tool for a wide range of unheard voices.

Margot Williams's e-mail address is williams@washpost.com.