RFK Jr once claimed he was shot at with arrows in Peru. His traveling companions tell a different story

Independent presidential candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr has said many wild things over the years.

And now, a claim he once made four decades ago appears to be a total fantasy.

In the 1984 book The Kennedys: An American Drama, the political dynasty heir regaled a story about a time he said he was shot at with bows and arrows by Indigenous people while traveling in Peru.

RFK Jr claims that the ambush unfolded while they rafted along a river.

One of his friends was almost hit in the leg by an arrow, he claims – prompting him and his cousin Christopher Kennedy Lawford to heroically leap into action.

RFK Jr and Mr Kennedy Lawford lit a stick of dynamite and threw it at their attackers, causing them to retreat, the story goes.

“Lawford was standing there holding it, telling me to hurry,” Bobby recalled later, the book reads.

“We could hear the Indians coming at us through the bush. We put a blasting cap and a fuse on the dynamite. As the Indian who’d shot at us stepped out on the bank of the river, I lit the dynamite. Lawford held it until the fuse had almost burned down, then threw it. It landed in the water right next to the Indian.

“Then it exploded, sending water thirty feet in the air. He and all the rest of them took off.”

But RFK Jr’s traveling companions have told a somewhat different story.

As HuffPo first reported, Blake Kenneduy – a longtime friend who was on the rafting trip with RFK Jr – dismissed the tale almost as soon as the 1984 book was published.

Mr Fleetwood told The Washington Post at the time that the attack “never occurred” and that many of RFK Jr’s claims in the book were “just fantasy”.

Lawford, who died in 2018, also offered a far less dramatic version of events in his own 2005