Pat Speer

I did a ton of research on x-rays and found that much of what we've been told, by LNs and CTs alike, is nonsense. I have chapters about this on my website. In short, I discovered that, as with the rest of the medical evidence, the CT notion it was all fake is wrong and incredibly counter-productive. The story as pushed by CT-world has been that the official medical evidence points to a single-shooter, and that it must have been altered to do so. I found that this was wrong on both points. The official medical evidence is and has always been proof of more than one shooter. It's just that the autopsy doctors mis-interpreted it (probably on purpose while under pressure to claim there was but one shooter). No, to me, the bigger scandal begins when CT-world got its wish, and civilian doctors were granted access to the medical evidence. They moved the bullet entrance on the back of the head, and found a 6.5 mm fragment on the back of the head, etc. All of which helped them sell the single-assassin conclusion. It was bs, of course. Pure smoke. Unfortunately, there remains a bias among most of those who've studied the medical evidence, whereby they tend to believe the findings of the Clark Panel on down, and assume Humes, Boswell, Finch, etc, were incompetents, who couldn't even figure out on what bone they discovered and measured a bullet hole. There's an old saying about following the money. I've found that if one follows the "corrections" made by the Clark Panel on down one will find the true story of the medical evidence--how the autopsy doctors told the truth about what they saw but misrepresented what it meant, and how subsequent panels realized the true implications of what the autopsy doctors said they saw, and decided to say they must have been blind idiots. I mean, ANYTHING, but admit the truth: that the official evidence--the autopsy protocol, x-rays, and photographs--is clear-cut evidence for more than on shooter. As far as white and black on x-rays, it's not what most people think. It's not as simple as white being bone and black being no bone. What is shown on the x-rays is RELATIVE density. An inch of brain might be as white as a thin slice of bone, etc. Making matters worse, moreover, is that the relative density changes based on the voltage of the x-rays, the length of exposure, and the distance between the x-ray tube and subject . So...two x-rays taken on the same machine only moments apart can look quite different. Here are two slides from my website demonstrating this point.

Everyone to study the x-rays including Mantik has concluded that the X-rays are of Kennedy's skull, and show brain inside. So the x-rays were taken on 11-22-63. The incident described by Custer was at a later date, and involved him x-raying a skull with a bullet taped to it, or something like that.

Thanks. I was able to find his drawing of the "6.5" fragment, in which he shows what he thinks is a real fragment beneath it. It's basically half the large fragment cut vertically, making it roughly the same height. So I was correct in remembering that it was much smaller in its width, but had forgotten that it was about the same in its height.

My disagreement with Mantik's conclusions aside, I don't recall his ever saying the small fragment on the back of the head was 6.3 mm. That's basically the size of the "fragment" he thinks is a fake. As I recall the small fragment he sees on the lateral x-ray is fair smaller than the so-called 6.5 mm fragment. Can you point me to something where he says the "real" fragment and "fake" fragment are nearly the same size?

Yes, that's true. This is important for two reasons. 1) it demonstrates that it is as I said--that his report claiming the wound was of the left temple was either a mistaken reference to the right temple, OR a reference to a wound he never saw, whilst simultaneously failing to mention the wound he did see. And 2) it demonstrates that those citing him as a forehead entry witness are full of beans. He would ultimately tell people he THOUGHT there had been a wound on the forehead...that went unseen at Parkland, And he marked this wound on drawings demonstrating what he THOUGHT were the President's wounds. But he was clear about never seeing such a wound, and only coming to believe there had been such a wound much much later.

I am not aware of anyone's disputing McClelland's presence in the room or his seeing brain, etc. The doubts about his latter-day claims stem from his earliest statements. On the day of the shooting he wrote that the President's death was due to a wound of the left temple. He made no mention of a wound on the back of the head. While he later tried to cover by saying he'd been confused by Jenkins and thought Jenkins had pointed out an entrance wound on the left side of the head, this makes little sense to me. Doctors DON'T write reports claiming what they thought someone else saw, while neglecting to report what they themselves saw. Well, this leads me to conclude he saw a wound on the right temple--where it was observed by Newman, Zapruder, Buckley, etc--and got confused as to left and right. In any event, within a few weeks of the shooting he told a journalist that there was nothing about the President's head wound to make him think the shot came from the front. I have seen him interviewed, furthermore, in which he admitted believing the fatal shot came from behind until seeing the Zapruder film on TV. In short, then, his actual statements don't support what many believe about him. Most CTs believe he was an unimpeachable truth-teller, who saw a blow-out wound low on the back of JFK's head, and KNEW the shot came from the front from day one. They assume then that he took decades to come forward out of fear. And that is why I asked him if he'd ever felt pressured to lie or go along with a story, etc. And he said no. While, in his final years, his impressions of the President's wounds were at odds with those of some of his colleagues, he agreed with them that Crenshaw was blowing smoke in his implication they all were pressured to lie or go along with the official story, and did so out of fear.

Oh, I agree. It's hard to find an innocent reason for this guy's behavior. But there's still a lot that we don't know.

I am fairly certain that the Secret Service does not provide security to everyone running for President prior to the primaries, outside those considered a front-runner. I don't think any of the Republican candidates outside Trump have Secret Service protection at this point. As I recall, they only started guarding candidates after RFK was killed, and Nixon shat all over that by using the Secret Service detail to spy on Ted Kennedy in '72. As a consequence, some candidates refuse protection.

FWIW, I saw an article in which the brother was interviewed, and denied any animosity towards RFK Jr. He said as well that his brother HAD worked as a security guard. So it seems possible the whole thing was a bit of a miscommunication. But we can suspect otherwise.

By the time I met McClelland--only briefly, while he was walking down the hall after a presentation--I had studied his statements and had come to doubt the accuracy of some of his claims. So I just asked him a few questions no one else had thought to ask. I remember asking him if anyone had ever threatened him or pressured him to change any of his impressions. He adamantly denied this. I believe I nodded my head as he did so. He seemed in a bit of a hurry, and was soft-spoken, so I felt guilty pushing him further. So I thanked him for coming forward and sharing his recollections. My impression at the time, and largely still, is that he was a nice man, and that the inconsistencies in his statements were the work of Father Time and peer pressure. Shortly before he died, however, I noticed that there were dozens of drawings of his for sale on eBay, showing what was purported to be his impression of JFK's wound locations. These drawings showed wounds he never saw and wounds in locations where he had once said there was no wound. The placement of the head wound, to be clear, seemed to be an attempt at replicating the drawing made for Six Seconds in Dallas. The people selling these drawings were asking for large sums. I want to believe that people approached him at conferences, and asked him to make a drawing, and then decided to sell them at a profit, without his knowledge. But I am forced to conclude that he created the drawings for his own profit and was simply giving his customers what they wanted.

As far as missed opportunities. I met a number of witnesses while in attendance at conferences. I chatted with most of them. As most of them at one point got up and told their story, it felt wrong to grill them off-stage. But in retrospect I wish I'd had a hand-held recorder and a prepared list of five to six questions to ask these witnesses--people like Newman, Frazier, Tague, Moorman, Rike, McLain, McClelland, Sawyer, Oliver, Baker, etc. I can't say anything ground-breaking would have come of it, but having a prepared list can be quite helpful. Unfortunately, it can also be intimidating to the witnesses, who just want a nice visit and chat, as opposed to a grilling. At one point, I was asked to prepare some questions to ask Gerry Hemming on camera. He backed out, citing his health. Although I believe he was in poor health, I can't help but suspect that he knew--based upon my behavior on this forum--that I wasn't gonna just let him get away with saying whatever sounded good at the time--and that this was more than what he'd bargained for. .

I believe the reality is that the world is not as big as most think it is, and that most people are connected to historical events in one way or another. This is demonstrated by my own trip down the rabbit hole. At one point I became intrigued by Robert Maheu. He was the cut-out between the CIA and the Mafia for the attempts on Castro, was Howard Hughes' public face for a decade or so, and was quite possibly the reason Nixon's men bugged the DNC. While reading his auto-bio, however, I received a surprise. At one point he mentions meeting a Texas oilman on a plane, and becoming friends with this man for life. This is if I recall the only personal friend mentioned in the book. Well, this oilman was my dad's boss when I was growing up, someone I had met a number of times. Shortly thereafter I read a book about Hughes, in which the theft of documents in his possession relating to a top secret spy ship he'd built on behalf the CIA, using Maheu's connections, was discussed in great detail. While reading this I discovered another connection. One of the men involved in this theft was a former actor, who had testified against the security guard. Well, upon reading this book, it became clear that this actor was actually the ring-leader of the gang who'd ripped off Hughes. Now get this. This man was a buddy of my mom's ex-boyfriend, whom she'd met and hung out with on several occasions. On reading through the book, moreover, it became clear to me that one of the unidentified members of the gang who'd ripped off Hughes was my mom's ex-boyfriend, who'd sold his house and moved in with us around the time of the robbery.

It's worse than that. The Ambassador Hotel was on Wilshire.

Jack Ready was JFK's bodyguard. He stood in front of Landis on the right side of the Queen Mary. He started to step off and race up to the limo but was called back when Hill beat him to it.

The reality is that everyone's memories change over time. It's been proven over and over and over again. I have chatted with Bill Newman about this, and he kinda throws up his hands. He said he now remembers hearing three shots, and has no idea why he initially said he'd heard but two. He said he could understand why someone would look at that old footage and conclude he'd only heard two., and that he might even agree with them...Except for the fact that he now clearly remembers three.

OUCH!!! That was painful. Well put together, but gutless, and a bit of a con. The ending presents this false dichotomy where one is supposed to choose between thinking the sloppiness of the evidence is part of a vast conspiracy or not, accent on the not. Our 30 year old wunderkind also asks why go to the trouble of killing JFK in a complicated plot when someone could have just walked up and shot him. He seems oblivious to the possibility 1: the killers wanted to get away with it; and 2. they wanted to blame someone else. Yes, OBVIOUSLY, 90% of conspiracy talk is nonsense and a distraction. But this young techie attitude that well we'll never know, kinda interesting, huh? is just pathetic. For example, the video gets into the weeds of the Vickie Adams story and then just kinda throws up its hands. Well, he said, she said, let's move on. It doesn't delve into Ball/Belin's refusal to get to the bottom of this beyond noting that they failed to do a reconstruction. Similarly, it discusses the problems with the size of the bag, and that it wasn't filmed in situ, without noting that NONE of those first on the scene, including Fritz, saw such a bag. No, instead, it quotes a motorcycle cop, Brewer, who wrote nothing and said nothing about the bag until more than 4 months after the shooting...when Belin realized he needed SOMEONE ANYONE to say they saw the bag in the sniper's nest, seeing as EVERY officer who'd been questioned on the matter had denied seeing it during the initial investigation. It goes on and on. Style over substance.

Let's be clear. The bullet broke the skin and broke the fascia. It did not "enter" the underlying muscle. Entering implies the whole bullet entered the body and was surrounded by tissue. Many "experts" have pushed that the bullet must have transited, because it "entered" and bullets don't just work their way out once in the body. Some even say that it is purported to have turned around within the body. What they miss, or refuse to see, is that Humes' testimony strongly suggests that the bullet never entered the body. I think Specter knew this, moreover. He took Humes' claim there was bruising on the front of the neck and spun it into their being brushing high on the back of the back, where the bullet slid between two muscles. This is a deception. Beyond that Humes noted no such bruising, there is only one muscle in the presumed location of the wound.

It's in Humes' testimony. He said it was a defect in the fascia that did not continue into the muscle. The fascia is the layer just below the skin. IOW, the "hole" they observed was just a few millimeters deep. Later, after finding out about the throat wound and realizing they couldn't come to a single-assassin solution if the bullet failed to transit, they conjured up that the bullet somehow magically passed through the back and exited the throat without making a hole in the Trapezius muscle. It was a magic bullet, long before Specter came along and made it even more magical.

The bullet never entered the back. That is what Humes observed. It left a divot at the surface. But did not enter.

It should also be noted that Baden has long pretended Finck had no hands-on experience. This is a con he pulls so that people will believe his colleagues' claim the autopsy doctors were idiots, and incorrectly placed the bullet entrance on the back of the head. Finck lived a long time after Baden started playing this game. Unfortunately he moved to Switzerland and washed his hands of the matter. If he hadn't, and had confronted Baden on his slander, well,, that would have been interesting.

The pointy-headed bullet comes from Thompson's book, and has been repeated many times in many places. Thompson got it from one of the guys who handled the bullet at Parkland. If you were someone who'd worked at Parkland and you were trying to ingratiate yourself with the "research" community, a quick mention of a pointy-tipped bullet would do the trick. As for Landis, my impression is that he thinks the bullet he picked up was CE 399.

He doesn't really debunk Landis. He just expresses doubt. That's only natural. It's like two college buddies having a 70 year reunion, whereupon one "admits" he'd had sex with the other guy's girlfriend in the dorm when the other guy was sleeping. And the other guy says "Nope, you were dreaming!"

But her story makes no sense. I have spent a lot of time in hospitals, and my family is largely nurses and bio-med techs. Nurses don't just throw themselves into emergency situations unless no one else is there or they were asked to do so. That's someone else's job. It would be like a coach going out to hit in the bottom of the ninth. It could happen. But someone would notice. Nowhere in her statements does she mention what would be the one thing that could give her credibility--that another nurse or doctor asked her what she was doing there and that she said she was told to help... and that they then told her to go away. There's an old expression--extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And yet when it comes to the JFK case, we have numerous people making extraordinary claims with no proof at all. And getting accepted anyway just because their claim is something people want to believe. We see this on both sides of the conspiracy/no conspiracy divide. A few years back an old SS agent came forward and said something about Oswald's address book--that there was a kill list in it or something like that. Some LNs jumped right on it. But most LNs and CTs alike dismissed his claims as nonsense. Audrey Bell's claims about JFK's wounds and Hall's claims about everything should similarly be dismissed, IMO. But not Landis. He has mentioned seeing a fragment for 40 years. So it seems he saw something, and that his story/memory changed over time.

A couple of points. 1. All the details offered up by Hall that conform to the official record were well-known and published prior to her ever coming forward. 2. I'm fairly certain all the televised interviews you mention appeared AFTER the 50th anniversary, where she appeared out of nowhere to be included in a number of articles and on a number of programs. How did this happen? Did she join this forum? Did she ask to speak at Lancer? No, she went straight for the main stream media and they gobbled her up without double-checking anything she said with those who might know better. It's just nard to see her as anything more than an attention-seeker.

She said she saw the bullet in the hall. It does not confirm Landis. It doesn't discredit him either, seeing as someone may have moved the bullet from Trauma Room One to the stretcher in the hall. Hall, strangely enough considering her name, is another story. We have no reason to believe anything she's said.