Upchurch’s post inspired other users who added to his questions with images from Google Earth of the Butler County fairgrounds where the shooting took place, posts that were soon being cited by well-known conspiracy theory accounts including SGT News on Telegram and on X by John Cullen, a self-described researcher who gained an audience posting wild and unproven theories about Covid and the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Cullen, who built further upon the theories with the help of his followers, has been making the rounds on YouTube and podcasts, including InfoWars, a far-right internet show, in the last few days, appearing as the expert of the second shooter theory. Cullen’s most popular proof is a shaky video of the blue water tower, a zoomed-in segment from a livestream of the rally from Right Side Broadcasting Network, a conservative media company that streams Trump rallies. The low-quality video, which Cullen said came from a QAnon believer with the username MAGA-JUICE, shows a black fuzzy spot at the top of the tower. Text on the video claims the spot is a “crouching agent.”
Cullen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Catalin Grigoras, director of the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado, Denver, said the video quality was too low for a forensic analysis.
Hany Farid, a professor who studies digital forensics at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed, and said nothing could be discerned from the video with any confidence.
“If you watch throughout the video, the entire tower and surrounding area changes dramatically due to compression and camera motion and so there is no reliable or consistent signal here,” Farid said. “Even for X, this is pretty dumb.”
NBC News analyzed other videos of the water tower, from the day of the rally and before, including a 2019 promotional video for the Butler County farm show. Magnifying a still from the videos showed the same dark spot on the tower’s right side as in the clips from conspiracy theorists, which suggests their evidence is a shadow, not a second assassin.
Sophistication notwithstanding, these posts on X alone have been viewed millions of times, and shared tens of thousands of times, acting as evidence in an evolving theory.
Uscinski, the University of Miami professor, noted that the evidence didn’t need to be particularly polished or convincing to become a building block for the conspiracy-minded.
“That’s the thing, you don’t need AI-generated video and you don’t need fake content,” Uscinski said. “You can have a video of anything and say, ‘Hey, that looks out of place.’ And of course, a two-second video of anything is going to look out of place if you’re inclined to think that something was funny to begin with.”
