Anybody Have This Tom Wilson Image?

[Vince Palamara]

I met Tom Wilson when Harry Livingstone and I filmed autopsy x-ray technician Jerrol Custer on 11/22/1991 (myself, Wilson and Custer all come from Pittsburgh, PA, with Wilson and Custer living just a street away). The contents of this interview ended up in High Treason 2 (and, to a lesser extent in Killing The Truth). Wilson was quite a curmudgeon. I would use another word, but I don't want the moderators to block me haha.

Wilson, as you will see on the tail end of this video, freaked out and did not want to be filmed. He just presented in Dallas at the first A.S.K. conference (which was filmed before a fairly large audience) and would end up appearing on episode 6 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy in 1995 (I was on episode 7, but I digress). For some reason, he did not like this one bit.

On a personal note, I found his stuff fascinating but unconvincing. It seemed pretty far-fetched, to be honest.

Postscript: Custer (who I would end up filming again--this time with author William Law in March 1998---died in 2000 and Wilson died soon after!)

 

 

Edited May 1, 2020 by Vince Palamara

[Jonathan Cohen]

2 hours ago, Vince Palamara said:

On a personal note, I found his stuff fascinating but unconvincing. It seemed pretty far-fetched, to be honest.

Precisely. I do not believe it is possible to do with the assassination images what Wilson claimed he could.

[Andrej Stancak]

Scepticism is a healthy attitude which protects against unwarranted conclusions based on poor evidence. The real problem is the lack of proper description of image analysis method by Tom Wilson himself which would allow straightforward verification of his findings. Only retracing Tom's steps would allow to say whether Tom's findings, some or all, were sound. However, this is not an easy task. It is certainly easier to say that that I believe Tom's method or results were not sound than going to the bottom of it, studying the theory of photonics, Tom's archive, reading books which were in Tom's possession, analysing his interim digital data, setting up specific lights, evaluating which type of camera sensor would do the same job as Tom's camera,  figuring out which of the current image analysis methods would be the closest to Tom's method, and a lot of experimenting and programming on top of it. Enter funds because the camera ,filters, lights, electronics and computer programs are expensive. I understand fully why people better say they do not believe in Tom's findings rather than attempting to reconstruct the method and replicating the findings.

 

 

Edited May 1, 2020 by Andrej Stancak

[Chris Davidson]

On 4/27/2020 at 2:10 AM, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Jonathan and Matt are correct.

When you have many photographs and films of the same event, an alteration to one image is likely to produce an obvious contradiction with some of the other images. If you're going to alter one photograph or film, you will almost certainly need to alter several others too.

Those alterations, in turn, will require that alterations are made to yet more images. To eliminate all the contradictions you've created, you'll end up having to alter pretty much all of the hundreds of photographs and films taken in Dealey Plaza.

Some people don't seem to have worked this out, so keen are they to see a conspiracy in every aspect of the assassination story. They should read this illustrated article by Josiah Thompson:

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Bedrock_Evidence_in_the_Kennedy_Assassination.html 

If anyone is going to claim that this or that image has been materially altered, they need to account for the practical consequences, and answer a few questions. When was the alteration done? How was the alteration done? How long did it take? Which other images needed to be altered in order to eliminate the contradictions you've just created? When and how were those other images altered?

Alteration enthusiasts need to ask themselves a couple of other obvious questions before launching into accusations of fakery. Does the supposed fakery have an everyday, non-conspiratorial explanation, such as a common or garden artefact of the photographic process? If so, why invent a conspiracy to explain it? If a photograph or film already contradicts the lone-nut theory, why do you feel the urge to think that it is a fake?

The paranoid may get a nice tingly feeling by proposing the most elaborate conspiracy they can think of, but the real world doesn't work like that. The more elaborate the proposed conspiracy, the less credible it is.
 

I read Josiah Thompson's essay, this is his summation quote:

“The efforts of those who sought to show the Zapruder film was a fake have produced unanticipated results. The failure of their effort has disclosed a region of evidence in the case which is incontrovertibly genuine. This evidence, in turn, can be used to test the authenticity of other evidentiary elements. In the photographic record from Dealey Plaza, we have available to us a single fabric of self-authenticating evidence which can be used as bedrock for reconstructing the event.”

My response is:

“The downfall of this statement is/was the assumption that the Zapruder film is/was the self-authenticating “gold standard” for all reconstructions. An altered film falls far short of confirming other film authenticity when those same alterations were aptly applied. That “bedrock” status is about to change.”

 

[Matt Allison]

Trying to suggest every film and photo taken in Dealey Plaza was altered is easily one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

[John Butler]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

Trying to suggest every film and photo taken in Dealey Plaza was altered is easily one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

Trying to suggest that films and photos were not altered is easily one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

[John Butler]

2 hours ago, Chris Davidson said:

“The downfall of this statement is/was the assumption that the Zapruder film is/was the self-authenticating “gold standard” for all reconstructions. An altered film falls far short of confirming other film authenticity when those same alterations were aptly applied. That “bedrock” status is about to change.”

 

Nice statement.

[Chris Davidson]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

Trying to suggest every film and photo taken in Dealey Plaza was altered is easily one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.

You have already misread/misinterpreted the quote.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

4 hours ago, Chris Davidson said:

I read Josiah Thompson's essay, this is his summation quote:

“The efforts of those who sought to show the Zapruder film was a fake have produced unanticipated results. The failure of their effort has disclosed a region of evidence in the case which is incontrovertibly genuine. This evidence, in turn, can be used to test the authenticity of other evidentiary elements. In the photographic record from Dealey Plaza, we have available to us a single fabric of self-authenticating evidence which can be used as bedrock for reconstructing the event.”

My response is:

“The downfall of this statement is/was the assumption that the Zapruder film is/was the self-authenticating “gold standard” for all reconstructions. An altered film falls far short of confirming other film authenticity when those same alterations were aptly applied. That “bedrock” status is about to change.”

 

Chris - are you suggesting that the "same" alterations made to the Zapruder film were made to every other motion picture taken in Dealey Plaza?

[Chris Davidson]

3 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Chris - are you suggesting that the "same" alterations made to the Zapruder film were made to every other motion picture taken in Dealey Plaza?

Jonathan,

My answer is provided by editing your question.

 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Chris Davidson writes:

Quote

“The downfall of this statement is/was the assumption that the Zapruder film is/was the self-authenticating “gold standard” for all reconstructions. An altered film falls far short of confirming other film authenticity when those same alterations were aptly applied. That “bedrock” status is about to change.”

Thompson's point is not that the Zapruder film is the self-authenticating 'gold standard' against which other evidence must be compared. The self-authenticating 'gold standard' is the whole of the photographic evidence from Dealey Plaza at around the time of the assassination.

Thompson's argument went something like this:

(a) There will be a lot of overlap among the photos and films that were taken in Dealey Plaza. Often, more than one image will have been taken of the same scene at the same time. An example of this would be JFK's head at around the time of the fatal shot, which is shown in the Zapruder, Muchmore and Nix films, as well as the Moorman photo. Altering one of these images is likely to produce obvious discrepancies when the altered image is compared to the unaltered images.

(b) To prevent such discrepancies, those who wanted to alter an image would probably need to alter other images of the same scene. They would also need to be sure that no other images of the same scene would come to light. But they didn't do this: there was no attempt to identify all the photographs and home movies, and images and photographers kept turning up even years after the event. The bad guys had no way of knowing that their alterations would not be exposed in the future.

(c) No such discrepancies have been demonstrated. All the attempts to do so (e.g. the 'Moorman in the street' nonsense that Thompson mentions) have failed for obvious reasons.

(d) The absence of discrepancies shows that one of two things happened: either almost all the images were altered, or none of them were. Of course, we can rule out the former. Photograph A matches what we see in photograph B; other elements of photograph B in turn match what we see in photographs C and D; and so on. The entire body of photographs and home movies forms a self-authenticating whole.
 

Edited May 8, 2020 by Jeremy Bojczuk
Got my Moormans and Muchmores mixed up!

[Paul Bacon]

Frame removal, which was one of the major alterations in the Zapruder film, will create no discrepancy with other photographs.  Only the Nix film, where it overlaps the Zapruder film, would have had to have been also altered.  And we all know the provenance of that film is in question.

The conspirators were not stupid.

[Chris Davidson]

1 hour ago, Paul Bacon said:

Frame removal, which was one of the major alterations in the Zapruder film, will create no discrepancy with other photographs.  Only the Nix film, where it overlaps the Zapruder film, would have had to have been also altered.  And we all know the provenance of that film is in question.

The conspirators were not stupid.

Paul,

Add a few other overlapping films to your list and you've hit paydirt.

Yours is a most appropriate response to Thompson's review by Jeremy.

 

[Matt Allison]

There are those that actually study the assassination, look at documents, rely on facts, and then there are those that like to play with the pictures and make up stories.

Edited May 7, 2020 by Matt Allison

[John Butler]

And, there are those that do neither, but present themselves as the one who really know what is real or not.