This Mitty-like inability to pull on two socks one after the other was, as it were, Oswald’s Fortean “wild talent.” The world, of course, is always looking for two-socked folk, those wearing one sock not usually regarded as being of great account.   Walls, borders, laws, are therefore transparent, irrelevant, or inoperative to those who do not obey the rules precisely because they do not see any rules.  The grain of the seeing of many and varied cultural filters, no matter how fine, remains coarse for the one-sockers. They enter the target system like minnows through a net, and one thing is certain: the killers of the two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon, and John Hinkley, Jr who tried to kill President Reagan were all dedicated one-sockers. That is, they were back-bedroom heroes who sprang out of their cartoon frame and, trailing wires and smoke, pressed the tinsel triggers of almost cut-out guns.

Trying to fit Oswald into a “real-time” frame is impossible.  From a Fortean point of view he is a wall-eyed tapestry figure; a living Escher drawing of a human being. We cannot square him off because a dimension is missing. Like Walter Mitty, he lives in perspectives that we have long discarded. A true anomaly is a one-sock event.

Oswald is thus a Fortean figure.  He illustrates how useful is the Fortean method of analysis.  Many of the essays in Assassinations try to reconstruct the basic common sense “real time” sequence of his simple physical progress from one week to another—they fail completely.  As an ex-marine radar operator, and dishonourably discharged from the Marine reserve, he practically walked into Russia, married a Russian girl, and calmly walked out with her back to America, even managing to avoid being debriefed when he returned.  During this utterly fantastic process (which very few twentieth-century characters ever came near to matching and which must have made him more obvious than any screaming siren) not a single sector of the American intelligence community admits to having targeted him as a possible threat to anything at all.  Here is Anthony Summers giving us some idea of the difficulties of trying to discover a kind of integrated, mundane baseline for the Oswald dimension:

Oswald’s progress is marked by visits to the employment office, the cashing of unemployment cheques, and the withdrawal of library books.  Even these are not necessarily valid for charting Oswald’s movements; the FBI was able to authenticate Oswald’s signature on hardly any of the unemployment documents. Of the seventeen firms where Oswald said he had applied for work, thirteen denied it, and four did not even exist.  [3]

And then there are the fake addresses of fake branches of extreme sections of the political spectrum; a series of fake change-of-address cards filed to various mail offices, but the most disturbing of all are the Oswald sightings made before the actual assassination took place.  On September 25, 1963, an “Oswald” walked into the Austin, Texas offices of the Selective Service System (the American military draft organisation) and asked if he could have his dishonourable discharge revoked on account of his two years’ good conduct.  The assistant could not help because the name Harvey Oswald was not on her records.[4] Two weeks before the assassination another “Harvey Oswald” visited a supermarket in Irving, Texas and tried to cash a cheque in the name of “Harvey Oswald.” Twenty-four hours before the assassination, the FBI received a report that a “Lee Oswald” had behaved strangely (making anti-government remarks) in a Dallas car showroom.

Of course these three reports are only of interest because they do not line up with the verifiable movements of the so-called “real” Oswald at the times concerned.  These examples are drawn from Summers’ book, and he goes on to give many more examples of strange Oswald appearances at shooting-ranges, gun shops; and even the good old YMCA had a visit.  But the mighty Oswald defeated even this mundane organisation; neither his telegrams nor his money orders could be traced, though witnesses swore that Oswald identified himself by his now famous “library card,” this wretched slip of paper being just about the only constant “fact” he ever had anything to do with.

Like Fort’s examples of Princess Cariboo and Cagliostro, Oswald seems to have put anything and everything he ever had contact with under a kind of enchantment: the space-time around the incident of the shooting of patrolman Tippit, only a few hours after the assassination, seemed hardly to be consistent. [5] Although the round(s) that killed President Kennedy, of course, were fired from an entirely different weapon. [6]  It seems that whenever Oswald pulled a trigger (as when he undoubtedly took a previous pot-shot at General Walker some time before the events in Dallas) [7] only one thing seemed rationally certain: that is, that the whole event would certainly dissolve into a kind of infinity of tragic burlesque.

There are times when Summers, a sober rationalist to the core, appears to be quite overwhelmed by the bizarre nature of the quest for Oswald.  As his investigation proceeds, he confesses that he just cannot account for the High Strangeness he experiences at every turn.  Deeper into the system, and yet deeper again, he understands less and less about how it works.  By refusing to accept anything but fact for his guide, in Fortean terms this superb investigator will understand less and less again.

Assassinations represents a crisis within the great Information Society, a society in which, paradoxically, there is surprisingly little information available.  Given the present situation concerning UFOs alone, nothing less than the validity of the entire rationalist complex is at stake, and rationalism will no doubt shame itself to death, booted off the cultural scene to universal laughter, a fate it has wished upon its Flat Earth opponents many a time.  In Assassinations, as each and every hour splinters, lesser investigators than Summers have no problem in introducing yet more clockwork.  One article even speculates that there may have been no fewer than three assassins acting in concert.[8]  Here, to resolve our cosmological inconsistencies we might suppose, then, that the possible Oswald “double” acted with the three supposed assassins, at which the entire situation becomes like Fort’s example of the millions of periwinkles scattered all over Worcester in one night by many hundreds of charitable fishmongers.  There comes a point when it might as well have been ten further assassins, five more doubles, or some equally fantastic delta-mouth of possibilities involving all the ghosts of every Western consumer’s Christmas past: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, or Elvis Presley.