Six months after he was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Mr. Obama continues to be bedevilled by a hard-core group of skeptics who contend his Hawaiian birth certificate is an elaborate fake and that, well, he may not be the legitimate president of the United States.
On right-wing Internet sites, in nuisance lawsuits brought by former political opponents, and even in the confines of White House press room, activists who dispute Mr. Obama's American citizenship are pressing demands for the president produce yet more evidence he was, in fact, born in the U.S.A.
Several lawsuits questioning Mr. Obama's citizenship, including one claiming he was actually born in Kenya, have been dismissed over the past year as frivolous. The Supreme Court in December 2008 refused to hear one of the cases.
But early this week, a U.S. district court judge in Santa Ana, Calif., agreed to listen to "the merits" of a suit brought against Obama by Alan Keyes, a conservative Republican who lost to Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senate election.
In Georgia this week, a U.S. soldier, Army Maj. Stefan Cook, refused deployment to Afghanistan as a conscientious objector, arguing he could not serve overseas under a "foreign-born" commander in chief.
The Obama citizenship controversy was also the inspiration for a bill a Republican congressman introduced recently in the House of Representatives, which would require future presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate to prove they are constitutionally qualified to serve in the White House.
Texas Representative Randy Neugebauer, one of the bill's seven Republican co-sponsors, last month stunned his constituents by telling a radio host he wasn't sure if Obama was an American citizen.
"You know, I don't know," Mr. Neugebauer said. "I've never seen him produce documents that would say one way or the other."
The emergence of a movement that questions Mr. Obama's citizenship has come as little surprise to academics who have studied conspiracy theories.
But conspiracy theories also abound on the political left, says Fenster, author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture.
"Conspiracy theories have been a part of American politics since the revolutionary theory. The fact a president is being targeted by conspiracy theory shouldn't surprise us," says Mr. Fenster.
"It is a way of framing a populist argument against your opponents," Mr. Fenster says, "that they must be corrupt and that there are secret groups behind them."
