Pat Speer

This is just pathetic. Why all this bullying to defend someone who can, and has, on numerous occasions, defended himself? I have not gone after him for a decade or so, except as responses to people insisting I should kow-tow to his nonsense. We had a cease-fire. What has spurred this recent series of attacks? David acknowledges that Angel, Riley, and numerous others are correct--that the Harper fragment bears little resemblance to occipital bone in the location where he places it. But he offers up the possibility JFK's skull bones were deformed by his Addison's disease as a get-around. 1. Where is his data? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, right? But here he offers no evidence beyond an unsupported maybe. As stated, even if one believes his ridiculous claim there is a giant hole on the back of the head apparent on the x-rays, we have little reason to believe the Harper fragment came from this hole. The guesses of three doctors at a glance do not compare to the conclusions of experts, and the obvious conclusion--shared by Mantik--that the bone does not resemble occipital bone. When one realizes both that newspapers reported that the back of the head was missing, and that Harper had found the fragment in a location he incorrectly believed was behind the President's location when shot, well, it's not hard to see how they could make this mistake. But there is no data or detailed analysis of the fragment in which it is shown to be occipital bone. 2. How is proving something doesn't look like what it's been claimed to be "specious and amateurish," especially when the one claiming as much agrees that that it doesn't look like it?

Respectfully, Greg, David has made a lot of mistakes he has never admitted. He only admitted he was wrong about the Harper fragment x-ray because he was worried I would bring it up at the Pittsburgh conference, and make him look bad in front of Cyril. BTW, Are you still pretending that you wrote that attack piece on me on your website?

Thanks, Micah. I think you know that I listed a number of Crenshaw's statements in chronological order, and noted that an evolution took place. I don't think he was lying, but when you see something disturbing and people ask you over and over again if you saw (fill in the blank), well, eventually you start thinking you saw (fill in the blank). This is one of the problems with police line-ups. When people are asked beforehand how sure they are they can make an identification, they are often quite conservative in their estimates. If they then make an identification, and are told or otherwise encouraged by the police to believe they made a correct identification, well, then their estimates change and they suddenly claim they got a really good look etc...even if the police were not telling the truth. In studies of this sort, moreover, the subjects are sometimes told that the police were incorrect in telling them they were correct, and that there is evidence suggesting innocence as well as guilt. And yet the subjects normally hold fast and insist they really did get a good look and that the person they ID'ed really was the culprit. Because numerous tests of this sort have been conducted, and always come to the same conclusion, it is now accepted within cognitive psychology circles that positive re-enforcement can not only lead people to make IDs when they really aren't sure, but can actually change the memories of those given the positive re-enforcement. We are not tape recorders. We are more like mud impressions on the bottom of a creek.

My recollection from my discussions with David was that Connally was not supposed to be shot, and that the plan was changed to try to save his life.

Shout out to Northridge. (I spent most of my life in the Granada Hills/Northridge area.)

FWIW, a large piece of bone, almost certainly the large triangular fragment, can be seen flying forward from the head into the limo in the Zapruder film. It seems possible that the tears on the forehead were created as this piece flew forward.

The book was supposedly lost in a computer crash, shortly before David's passing. While I believe efforts have been made to restore the book, or even put it back together from drafts, I'm not aware of any progress in that area. I can say that most everyone was looking forward to reading whatever David had on Oswald, as he had performed a number of interviews with Marina which should have proved enlightening. But I think a lot of us were dreading the release of his final ideas on the medical evidence, as he had come to accept a theory--that some of the Parkland doctors were in on the plot against Kennedy--that most researchers would find embarrassing, and the vast majority of the public would find reprehensible. P.S. I should note that while I disagreed with many of David's conclusions, I met him a few times and enjoyed our time together, and considered him a valued resource. RIP.

Oh God. A man says a dog is a lion. Experts on animals look at the creature and say no I'm sorry it's a dog. But the man says "But I've got data proving it's a lion! Do YOU have any data?" Even IF Mantik's data proves there was a hole on the back of the head, his placement of the Harper fragment in this location is silly. In his 2003 paper, he claimed that Angel's orientation for the Harper fragment suggested “a parietal entry (because the lead smudge is on the outside), an option that virtually no one would support.” When I seized upon this and said of course they would support an entry by the temple, he tried to claim that no, the smudge is at the top of the head in Angels' orientation, and not by the temple, and only admitted I was right after being asked by Wecht to debate me at the Wecht Conference. So, yes, he now admits the lead smudge on the Harper fragment is near the temple in the Angel orientation, which, by golly, is where he proposes there was an entrance. So his case for conspiracy would be much stronger if he admitted the Harper fragment was parietal, and not occipital. So why does he say it is occipital, again? Well, he once claimed it fit into the skull in the Mystery photo like a piece in a puzzle. But he then admitted later that there were missing fragments all around it. So there's that. And, as I've shown, his placement for the fragment in the Mystery photo is deceptive and makes no sense. There is an entrance wound apparent on the photo which he conveniently covers up in his presentations. And there is a drainage hole in the photo which he similarly conceals. Now here's the kicker. In my video series I present an argument for the proper orientation of the mystery photo. The director Brad and I measured the proportions of the drainage hole in the mystery photo, then measured the proportions of a round sticker in a number of re-enactments. IOW, we used data to determine the orientation for the photo. So how did David establish his orientation? Uhh, he found that the Harper fragment could only be occipital if he claimed the photo was taken with the skull tilted roughly 45 degrees in the image. So of course he claimed that as the orientation of the photo. This is all old stuff. Why bring this all back up? Does anyone out there really think that David's claims will win the day if that pesky Pat Speer would just stop saying this same old stuff? I suspect David has better things to do. I know I do.

1. The doctors who looked at the bone in Dallas and said they thought it was occipital were not experts in skull anatomy and were simply offering a quick opinion, at a time when the news reports were claiming the wound was on the back of the head. None of them wrote a report, or performed a detailed analysis. They were simply shown a bone fragment brought to them by Harper. And they looked at it and said "Yeah, that could be from Kennedy because it looks like a skull fragment from (what they believed to be his wound's location)." Dr. Angel was the top expert in the country when it came to forensic skull reconstruction--reconstructing skulls from broken pieces of bone. And Riley is a neuroanatomist. They are the equivalent to Chess Masters while the men who viewed the bone in Dallas are more like guys who play in a local chess club. 2. Mantik's claim about vascular grooves is smoke. There is a wide groove on the inner aspect of the occipital bone that is not present on the Harper fragment. There is instead a thin line. This is demonstrated on the slide below. 3. More problematic is that the inner aspect of the occipital bone is curved where Mantik places it, and the Harper fragment is almost flat. I have been on steroids for a few years now, and have read about the problems inherent with long-term steroid use, and nowhere is it said or even implied that taking steroids will flatten out the back of my head.

So you've returned to join in on the orchestrated stomp-fest. How not-at-all surprising! Mantik is wrong about the Harper fragment not because his data is wrong, but because his interpretation of his data is incorrect, and he is pushing something that everyone knowledgeable about skull anatomy knows to be untrue. Heck, he has admitted that the fragment does not look like occipital bone, and has tried get around this by proposing, without an ounce of "data" in support, thatJFK's occipital bone was deformed by Addison's disease. Do you believe that, Greg? Is that something you really want to get behind? That JFK's bones were deformed, and that we can't use our eyes or common sense to analyze his bones, and must rely on Mantik and his OD readings? Oh that's right. You claim Mantik has published quantitative data... Only this isn't exactly true, is it? He never published his control data. For his data to be properly analyzed, he would have to have had a large number of controls...x-rays taken by similar equipment of similar wounds. But he made no attempt to do this and instead compared the OD readings of JFK's x-rays to the OD readings on a handful of x-rays made on modern equipment. He compared Apples to Oranges and claimed the apple must have been a fake because it didn't match the orange.

So you admit there are circumstances that can lead to people not seeing things.

OK, what's going on here? 1. John Hunt shared the Harper fragment x-rays at the 2003 Wecht Conference. So it wasn't like he was a pipeline to Mantik and Mantik only. 2. Mantik did indeed convince himself that the beveled corner on the Harper fragment represented a snippet of the entrance defect. He then oriented the so-called mystery photo in a manner supporting this, even though this indicated a defect in the middle of the back of the skull, at the level of the ears, and not the right side of the back of the skull, above the ears, where a number of witnesses placed the wound. 3. And then I entered the picture, with a video series in which I used the shape of the drainage hole in the mystery to establish the angle of the camera to the table. Well, this disproved the interpretations of the Clark Panel and HSCA Panel, and moved the beveled exit in the photo from the coronal suture to near the top of the back of the head. Most everyone in CT land found my analysis convincing. But apparently not Mantik. 4. A few years later, I pointed out that the beveled entrance on the Harper fragment in Dr. Angel's placement of the Harper fragment puts it on the side of the head. And the hate mail pored in. Here I was offering up a piece of info helpful to the CT cause, and I am attacked because I dared second-guess the Wizard of Mantik. Well, years pass, and I come to realize that Dr. Mantik continues to show the Mystery photo in his presentations, but with text boxes or other obfuscations over the drainage hole he well knows I've claimed is the key to understanding the photo. And, even worse, he claims the debris on the Harper fragment is NOT by the temple in the Angel interpretation, and implies that I just can't read x-rays. 5. This goes on for years. Even though it's clear I'm right. And Mantik is wrong. But he won't admit it for some reason. So the Wecht family invites me to Pittsburgh to confront Mantik on this and other issues, and guess what? He goes first and admits I was right. I'm glad he did it. It was the right thing to do. It was just one issue and we both had other things to talk about. But it was nice to see an "expert" admit he was wrong and that a layman like myself could be right. So, no, Keven, I wasn't led astray by looking at bad images or whatever. Here is my slide on the lead on the Harper fragment, that finally proved conclusive. I used the Hunt x-ray.

So you agree that there was no entrance on the front of the head, then? I mean, there was some divergence among those seeing JFK's large head wound--some said low on the back of the head, some said high on the back of the head, some said side--but none of the Parkland witnesses said they saw an entrance on the front of the head, i.e., the part of the head they were actually looking at. No one saw it. And Clark, for one, actually looked for it. So it obviously didn't exist. I guess.

Thanks, Tom, for standing up. I'm glad to see someone gets "it." I have learned an awful lot from people I don't agree with, and have a hard time understanding why people can't just accept my ideas for what they are--my ideas--and leave it at that when they disagree. Underlying all this outrage and vitriol, it seems to me, is the idea that the evidence is clear and we now know what happened--and that any counter-argument is disinformation. Well, this would be news to most everyone who's done any real research, and that includes Dr. Mantik. Mantik, it should be known, went against the grain and argued against the validity of the acoustics evidence at a private conference put on by Aguilar. Some were upset by this, and thought maybe he had a screw loose, and said as much to others. But I stopped them short and said I pretty much agreed with him. Yes, I defended Mantik...to people who might very well agree with Mantik on a number of things with which I disagree. And that's how it is at these private conferences. There is no party platform. No one is expected to "toe the line." Why people think this forum should be different is beyond bizarre.

You claim I've libeled people. Who, exactly, have I libeled? If anything, I have defended people against libel. For decades, this forum and others have been littered with claims that men such as Clint Hill, Charles Carrico, and Malcolm Perry were lying when they pointed to locations other than the far back of their head, or said the autopsy photos were consistent with what they witnessed. I have defended them. And now you come along and libel me? By repeatedly suggesting I am one of "them", and engaged in a "limited hangout"? I have spent years of my life collecting evidence and building arguments demonstrating there was a conspiracy, a conspiracy in which elements of the government knowingly covered up evidence for both multiple shooters, and Oswald's innocence. How, on Earth, is that a "limited hangout"? Because I don't agree with Mantik and Horne and fill in the blank about their pet theories? Neither do you, really...

So now the mask has come off. Keven's not just here to try to make a name for himself by attacking me. He's here to defend the good name of Dr. Mantik, and to push that the Harper fragment is occipital bone. What nonsense! (And no, I'm not alone in this assessment. On this issue I am with the vast majority of "experts".)

What the heck??? What misinformation? I have always acknowledged that a lot of people pointed to the backs of their head. I have never tried to conceal that.

You can disagree with my conclusions. Fine. But I have not created a mountain of misinformation. I have simply presented information and analysis that challenges the pabulum fed the research community by unreliable sources. And that has pissed people off for the past 15 years or so. For example, it cannot be reasonably disputed that the bulk of the witnesses who've pointed to a location on the back of the head have pointed out a location above their ears, while some prominent writers have used this to suggest the wound was at a location inches lower. How does my pointing this out...make me the bad guy? If we really believe these witnesses, shouldn't we be claiming the wound was above the ears? And for another example. Dr. Robert McClelland originally described but one wound, a wound of the left temple. This report was subsequently published in a medical journal saying it was on the right side of the head. Months later, after learning what was claimed by others in there reports, he gave a detailed description to the Warren Commission, in which he placed it on the far back of the head. He later explained that he wrote left temple because he, alone among his peers, left Trauma Room One under the impression there were two head wounds, with an entrance wound on the left temple that he admits he never saw. IOW, his story evolved and people accept the last one because it fits their chosen scenario. But what about Dr. Carrico, or Perry, or Baxter, or Jenkins, or Jones? They described a wound on the back of the head but later said they actually never inspected the back of the head and believed they were or at least could have been mistaken, as the top and back of the head was essentially blood and brain-soaked hair. Well, people choose to dis-believe them and even hate them because it fits their chosen scenario. And continue to claim them as "back of the head" witnesses. The lack of consistency in what constitutes the "back of the head" and what constitutes a credible "back of the head" witness, is alarming, IMO.

FWIW, I'm conflicted about Epstein's passing. His first book got a lot of attention, and shook up a lot of people. One of its key points was that the back wound was too low to support the single-bullet theory. He was right..' It should be noted, moreover, that there was a pre-meditated effort to "flip" him that entailed having the doctors review the autopsy photos and announce that the back wound was in the location it is on the Rydberg drawings, and not where it is on the face sheet. This happened in November 1966. He may have fell for it. But it was a lie.

Sorry, you're right. I was thinking of Ben. Those pesky three letter first names!

Thanks for positing that quote from Humes. He specified that it wasn't punched out. Interesting. I was thinking of you the other day, Tom. I think you questioned whether the back wound was really a dead end, and thought maybe the wound track had collapsed or something like that. I was reading the autopsy report of the goat killed for the WC, in an effort to reproduce Connally's wound. The goat was fired upon by the rifle found in the depository, from a distance greater than that proposed for the assassination. And yet it left measurable holes through four different layers of muscle.

We're in a time loop. 15 years ago or so, Fetzer on this very forum claimed Mantik had proved the x-rays had been altered to hide a hole in the back of the skull. I then pointed out that Mantik had long claimed the very back of the skull on the x-rays is not altered, and that he claimed instead that his OD measurements in this area proved there was a hole. Fetzer then checked with Mantik and Mantik confirmed what I'd told him--that he thinks the white patch was added to cover missing brain and not missing skull, and that whoever added the white patch had actually not covered up the hole on the skull. It should also be pointed out that Mantik places this hole on the skull in the middle of the occipital bone at the level of the ears. So, no, a number of witnesses pointing to a location above the occipital bone on the right side of the head does not support Mantik's claims, and his claim the middle of the back of the head was blown out at the level of the ears does not support that their recollections were accurate. The back of the head gang has always tried to have it both ways... They have tried to claim that since people point to location C instead of location F then it was really at location A. It is a bait and switch. The reality of course is that the head wound in the photos is actually inches to the rear of where most think it is at first glance, and that it is really more like location D.

Oh my. It just gets worse and worse. Now it's 44 DOCTORS??? What, were these doctors lined up to get a look at the head wound, and did they all then independently write down the wound location on pieces of paper that were then sealed in a trunk only to be opened by ??? P.S. I hope you realize that none of these witnesses saw an entrance wound on the front of the head so...congrats, I guess--you've just proved there was no such wound! P. P.S. Proof the x-rays were altered? Says who? Not Mantik. He says the hole on the back of the skull is on the x-rays but that we just can't see it with our naked eyes.

Did you use all the Parkland witnesses? McClelland said the wound was of the left temple, and then days later that it was of the right side of the head. Burkley told Kilduff it was of the right temple. Jackson said the top of the head was gone. Jacks said it was on the top of the head. Greer said it was on the upper right side of the head. Salyer said the wound was on the side of the head. Giesecke said the wound was on the left side of the head. All these men saw the wound at Parkland and commented on the wound's location in the hours days and months after the shooting, and all placed the wound in a location other than the far back of the head. So, no, it's not unanimous. But the bigger problem is that you keep pretending you can cherry-pick one batch of witnesses--the Parkland witnesses-- and get a valid outcome. That would be like asking the people watching a basketball game from courtside seats if a player stepped out of bounds or not. A group decision from one select group--a rich family with courtside seats, so to speak--even if unanimous, which in this case it is not--is not a reliable way to referee an event, and that is why we have professional referees (autopsists) and replay (autopsy photos and x-rays). And yes I think the analogy holds, because as all sport lovers know, sometimes the officials, even with replay, get it wrong.

It's not about "winning." Is your ego that fragile"? Really? It's about establishing a probability. And you have relied upon men who have cherry-picked their witnesses to create a consensus...who have then taken what most would agree is a reasonable summary of the recollections of the cherry-picked witnesses--that they believed the wound was farther back than shown in the autopsy photos--and used that to sell the idea that the low back of the head was blown out and that the body or films were altered. You yourself have agreed with me on this point--that the statements of the cherry-picked witnesses suggest the top of the back of the head was blown out, and not the bottom of the back of the head (the back of the head at the level of the ears.) So why have I been singled-out as someone holding back the research community, or whatever, when it was not me but Lifton, Groden, Livingstone, Fetzer, Mantik etc who perpetuated this myth that the low back of the head was blown out--which even you agree is nonsense? Do I have a near-cult following? Have I sold millions of books? Have I been held up as a leading critic of the Warren Report, so I could then be shot down for pushing crazy theories that the public as a whole, and future historians, will never come to accept?