"The following program presents theories about a historical event that is shrouded in mystery. It contains archival footage, reenactments, and dramatizations which invite you, the viewer, to draw your own conclusions."
-Disclaimer that begins each episode of Conspiracy?

Here's my confession: I love conspiracy theories. It's not the kind of thing that one broadcasts, since it conjures up the image of a paranoid lunatic, feverishly blogging from his mother's basement between multiple re-readings of The Catcher In The Rye. But I find conspiracy theories just plain fascinating--and not because I buy into all of them (in fact, I think most of them are probably bunk), but because of the kind of dedication and obsession with minutiae that is required. Conspiracy theorists don't just know the story--they know every single tiny detail, all of the minor players, all of the jargon-y nicknames for the memos and executive orders and so on. I'm ashamed to say that I can't tell you any of my cousins' birthdays, but I can hold forth for a good ten minutes on the "single bullet theory."

My point is, I'm kind of the target audience for Conspiracy?, the History Channel's 12-part 2004 series examining a series of the most notorious conspiracy theories in modern history. A&E Video is now releasing Conspiracy? on DVD, so you can break out your tinfoil hats and soak up three discs of unanswered questions, wild suppositions, and "official versions."

The show's structure is fairly consistent. Each episode begins with the facts of the historical event, as commonly perceived. It then lays out the questions and issues taken by conspiracy buffs, laying out their possible hypothesis with on-screen text ("Theory: U.S. Military Cover-Up"), interviews with historians, experts, and theorists, and the aforementioned archival footage and reenactments. Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, narrator Tom Kane turns to the official record ("But not all experts agree..."), and the "other side" explains away the questions, attempts to puncture the theories, and embraces the official version. Neither side is given more weight than the other, so the show is well-balanced and seldom condescending.

So how is the show? Well, there are pluses and minuses. Its primary problem is the reenactments, which are sometimes skillfully done (as in the "Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?" episode), but more often than not verge on silliness. It's hard to do reenactments well (Errol Morris can do it, and few others), but these are frequently hampered by the low budgets of the series; desks of important government officials are suspiciously bare, and the Civil War battles of the "Lincoln Assassination" episode look like they were shot on about an acre of land with a dozen or so Civil War re-enactors (a group nearly as feverishly dedicated to their obsession as conspiracy theorists). The show's structure is sound, though the shows do occasionally (and irritatingly) repeat information at chapter breaks (presumably in order to "catch up" viewers who surfed by during the commercials). The narration is mostly effective, although it does occasionally veer close to self-parody--in the "Princess Diana" show, for example, poor Kane has to ask, "Did Diana die in a tragic accident... or was it murder?"

The show's weaker episodes tend to be those furthest in the past (such as "FDR and Pearl Harbor" and the aforementioned Lincoln episode), as they rely less on first-hand accounts and period footage, and more on the reenactments. Its stronger installments are those in our more recent history. The show on "TWA Flight 800" is quite fascinating, detailing the extensive disputes between the NTSB and FBI during that crash's investigation (which later fed much fuel to the fires of theorists). "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination" is also intriguing, examining the questions of conflicting, missing, and destroyed evidence that haunt a presumably open-and-shut case.

The producers are also wise enough to realize that they can't possibly do justice to the mother of all conspiracy theories, the JFK assassination, in one of their 45-minute shows (The six-part Men Who Killed Kennedy series is still the definitive Dealey Plaza doc), but they do tackle the connections of "Jack Ruby" in one of their most intriguing episodes. This reviewer was also absorbed by the three shows relating to UFOs ("Majestic 12: UFO Cover-up," "Area 51," and "Kecksburg UFO"), all of them rich with audio recordings, elaborate theories on government cover-ups and potential hoax documents, and creepy amateur film and video of suspicious objects in the sky.

Also of note is an episode on "The CIA and the Nazis," detailing the poaching of Nazi scientists and intelligence officers, many of them war criminals. That show eschews the regular format of pro-conspiracy and anti-conspiracy argument; this is one disturbing moment in history that everyone agrees did, in fact, happen. It's an informative hour, though a bit of a divergence from the rest of the series.

The 12-episode series comes on three DVDs with four episodes per disc (totaling about three hours of content on each disc). They are: "TWA Flight 800," "Majestic 12: UFO Covee-up", "FDR and Pearl Harbor," and "Area 51" (disc one); "Who Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.?," "Princess Diana," "Lincoln Assassination," and "Oklahoma City Bombing" (disc two); and "The CIA and the Nazis," "Jack Ruby," "The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination," and "Kecksburg UFO" (disc three).

Each disc is packaged in its own clear plastic ThinPak case, with a simple cardboard slipcase housing the three individual cases.

The full-frame image is merely adequate. The archival material is often in rough shape, but that's too be expected, while most of the reenactments utilize digital scratches and excess grain for an "aging" effect. But many of the new interviews are fairly noisy, with some softness, color bleeding, and occasional compression artifacts.

As with the video, the 2.0 audio track does the job but that's about it. The interviews are perfectly clear and audible, if occasionally thin, while the filmmakers are at the mercy of the original elements in the archival material. That said, there is occasionally inventive use of the stereo spread (as with the sound effects of the WWII footage in "FDR and Pearl Harbor").

No extras have been included for the series.

Conspiracy? is a tad uneven, with the cheese factor of the reenactments and melodrama of the narration occasionally pushing the show into unintentional comedy. But the series is also packed with information and fascinating footage, it is compulsively watchable, and its even-handedness--even in the face of some of the less credible theories--is admirable. And nuts like me won't be able to resist it. Recommended.

Jason lives in New York. He holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU.