Pat Speer

The History Channel was home to the most prominent conspiracy TV series--The Men Who Killed Kennedy. But they received a ton of crap over that. So then they reversed course and only played Oswald did it stuff for the past few decades, while, at the same time, embracing tons of conspiracy stuff regarding UFOs and aliens. Now, it appears, they think it's safe to push a possible conspiracy re JFK--as long at they make it clear Oswald was the primary shooter.

I suspect the history channel will repeat this episode, at the very least.

Greetings. For the past decade or so I have had my TiVo record anything with the word JFK in the description. Most everything that comes up is related to JFK airport, or is a documentary I've already watched, usually something from the 50th anniversary. There was a recent recording, however, that I didn't recognize. It took me months to get up the gut-strength to watch it, but I finally did a few days ago. The program was an episode of a series called "History's Greatest Mysteries." It is now viewable online, here: https://play.history.com/shows/historys-greatest-mysteries/season-4/episode-3 I watched it expecting the usual Oswald-did-it stuff. But I quickly saw that Phil Shenon and Jeff Morley were among the talking heads, and knew that they both suspect there was more to it than Oswald acting alone. Well, sure enough, after mis-reporting what happened to prove Oswald was the shooter, the program went on to list various theories as to who else was involved. Not surprisingly, the program ends with a "We'll never know." This was bit of a surprise, as The History Channel, for the last 20 years or so, has been very much in the "Oswald did it all by himself" camp. So, yes, I think they've tweaked their stance. It is interesting, nonetheless, how badly they mis-reported the shooting itself. The program had a series of talking heads, Shenon, Morley, and three others who were probably friends of the producer (as they had no apparent expertise related to the case). While describing the assassination and evidence against Oswald, these heads blew some serious smoke. Deceptive at best, quite possibly deliberate disinformation. For example, after mentioning that some police stormed into the TSBD after the shots, Shenon said "they" found a paper bag in the sniper's nest. Well, as we know "they" did no such thing. The first cops on the scene did not see the bag, and the "bag" wasn't found until much later, after the first cops on the scene had left the building. One of the talking heads then said something about three shells being found "next" to the rifle. Not true. Shenon later says that Tippit stopped Oswald because he matched a description given for the sniper. But Tippit never told anyone why he stopped him, if he did, and the description only marginally matched Oswald. Still later, Shenon says Oswald's palm prints were found on the weapon discovered in the building. Well, hell's bells, this hid that the FBI found no such print, and that the only palm print purported to be found on the rifle appeared essentially out of nowhere days after Oswald's death. And yet, not surprisingly, the biggest deception involved the President's wounds. Although this program was clearly a low budget affair, it presented a profile shot of Kennedy in the limo to demonstrate the wounds he suffered. As one of the talking heads, a history professor with a lisp, reports "Two shots hit Kennedy. The first enters his upper back and comes out his throat. And then the second enters the back of his skull" the viewer is shown some animation of the shots passing through Kennedy, culminating in the image below. Well, as you can see, the first bullet doesn't hit the "upper back" and the second bullet hits at the cowlick entrance proposed by the HSCA, and not the WC. By continuing the line through JFK's head, moreover, the program, apparently inadvertently, reveals the laziness of the program's creators. I mean they would have to know the entrance location for shot one and the exit location for shot two were total nonsense. But they showed them anyhow. Because, to the History Channel, the medical evidence just doesn't matter. What matters is that Oswald did it...so let's move on to discuss who else might have been involved. Just awful.

I agree. I wrote my website for someone like myself, someone who was willing to swim through a lot of evidence and analysis. I am glad to see that has resonated with some. But I have also been attacked numerous times by those who want to have an opinion on the case, who refuse to earn the right to have an opinion. I remember one character who told me if ANY conclusion took more than one sentence to explain then it wasn't worth reading, and that he thereby refused to read anything from my website, or by Weisberg, Lifton, Newman et al. There were just too many words.

Oh my! To cite Spencer for anything is flat-out ridiculous. You have photos of a famous celebrity wedding. The bride, groom, preacher, and wedding photographer all agree the photos are authentic. But then some "researcher" goes back and finds the employee of the Photomat 30 years later, and asks her if they were the photos she remembered developing. And she says I think the photos I developed were different, in that the bride was wearing a different dress. This is not evidence. This is garbage. It's like going back to the hospital where you were born, and finding some old biddy who says she remembers when you were born, but that as she remembers it your mom gave birth to twins. So... I hate to tell you, the old biddy is not reliable. if your family says you're not a twin, and the birth records of the hospital say you're not a twin, guess what? You're not a twin.

You're correct. That's a tracing of the photo. It was entered into evidence in the HSCA hearings. When I said the photo has been entered into evidence I meant metaphorically, in that Humes Boswell Finck and Stringer have all testified to its authenticity, and that it was therefore a piece of evidence before the court of public opinion. Some would like to pretend that it would never be brought before a court, but it already has, metaphorically. It's important, moreover, that we realize that the HSCA's tracing was made public before the bootleg copy given to Mark Crouch by Fox was published by Lifton. Fox is presumed to have made his prints within days of the shooting. These prints were not shown to the commissioners or its staff, outside Warren and Specter, and were not published by the WC, as they basically disproved the SBT and in turn damaged the single assassin theory. As a result, it's drool on the floor stupid to think the print given to Crouch--which matched the HSCA's drawing and disproves the SBT--was a fake.

Yes, as I remember it, May tried to claim Roberts was a hack who didn't even know Hathcock. I was on that thread, however, and knew full well that Roberts had written a book about sniping years before he wrote a book about the JFK assassination, and that Hatchock had been a primary source for that book, and had actually contributed a chapter.

Well, thanks for the info, but you're still not seeing the point I was trying to make. When google first changed how it did searches, I received an email from John Simkin, creator of this forum and what was then one of the top historical sites, Spartacus. He told me about the upcoming change and said websites were being given a ranking--not based on any algorithm, but based upon some human's impression of the credibility of the site. He then said my website had been given a 4 or something like that, whereby it would only be credited with 40% of the hits. There was undoubtedly a human bias behind it all. For years and years McAdams' site came up first on many searches when it received far less traffic than this site. I've noticed, moreover, that there have been more recent changes involving image search. Images on my website used to be easy to find through image search but now they have been buried, as have the images on many other JFK research sites. Robin Unger's site used to come right up if I typed in "JFK assassination photos". Now dozens of dozens of news sites come. This is not a coincidence, IMO. Google--which makes a fortune off selling websites--has at the same time conspired with news agencies to make it harder for private websites to compete with old crap on news sites. I mean, no one but no one in research-land is going back and reading old articles in Town and Country Magazine, but many people--hundreds, maybe thousands, visit Robin's website on a weekly basis. And yet it no longer comes up near or at the top when you type in "JFK assassination photos" in image search. I remember a few years back when the government and mainstream media, rightfully upset by the rise of Trump, said they needed to crack down on conspiracy talk on the internet. I suspect this is what it looks like.

You have reminded me of some of what went down. I received numerous offers back in the day from people/companies offering to optimize my site for a price. I never did that as there was no need. On anything I cared about--say JFK's autopsy--my website routinely came up n the top ten searches. So I wasn't gaming the system or whatever by making comments here, and I was indeed the one victimized by the new policies as in fact there were no sites whatsoever that "should rank higher" Believe it or not, my website remains the definitive source on a number of topics, and google linking to a NY Times article from ten years ago in which something gets mentioned in passing instead of a detailed article on my website in which something is discussed in detail does no one favors, outside perhaps The NY Times.

OK, Cliff. We both have better things to do. But I saw that you implied the autopsy photos might not be admitted into a court of law because Baden et all lied about them to get themselves off the hook for their own lying about them, etc. This is one of your favorite talking points and it is absolute nonsense. Do the reading. To get admitted into evidence, those who took the photo or those present when it was taken need only say they took the photo and/or that it accurately represents what they remember. Bingo. It's been done numerous times. The photos have been entered into evidence. And would be entered into evidence without problem should a legal proceeding arise in the future.

I'm skeptical as well. Would a computer program be able to assess what is a credible source vs a non-credible source? I mean, there's all sorts of Oswald sightings no one takes seriously. Would a computer program try to make them all fit, where Oswald was in one state one day and another the next, like a traveling salesman? Or, what about the medical evidence? Many researchers make the mistake of relying upon what one witness said, as opposed to what all the witnesses said. Would a computer program know not to trust latter-day outlier statements made by octogenarians? Or would it give all statements equal weight no matter when they were made, and no matter how peripheral the witness? My point is that with any presentation of evidence, the sorting and presenting of the evidence can determine the viewer's response to the evidence. When I first created my website, google sorted by number of views. As a result, I could post something here and tell people to read more on my website, and a few days later my website would come up near the top of a google search of the topic. But then google--probably as result of complaints from mucky-mucks--started weighing views based on whether or not "google" (not really google but someone working there who probably knows next to nothing about anything, along with a computer program) found a site credible. At that point, searches which used to lead one to this forum or my website got rerouted to The NY Times or egads! John McAdams' site, etc. So...beware. If a program emerges in which you can access hundreds of JFK books and articles and then have summaries on certain subjects written by the program, dollars to donuts the program will have a human element--and it will be the same kind of human that is currently controlling google and wikipedia, etc.

Oh yeah, I forgot. In Cliff's world, the back wound photo--perhaps the single most damning piece of evidence ever made public by the government, as it proves the WC as a whole, and Specter and Warren in particular, as knowing perpetrators of a fraud against the American people (seeing as it proves the Rydberg drawings presented to the public and then re-presented to the public as accurate depictions of the President's wounds were a hoax) is itself a hoax. CBS could do a special on the medical evidence, and use the back wound photo to prove the WC's depiction of the wounding was a hoax, and that a former Senator and a former Chief Justice were behind this hoax, and Cliff would fill the forum with complaints about them using a back photo that doesn't show a face, and an autopsy protocol written in the wrong way, to distract and distract and distract and distract and distract from the truth presented by CBS. I mean anything--anything--but admit the truth. That the official evidence--the autopsy protocol, autopsy photos, x-rays, and photographic evidence, proves a conspiracy, that was then lied about. Nope can't have that.

I just checked in, and here we go. There must be 20 threads already in which you just make stuff up to attack me. As you well know, the bunching of 4 inches or so is required to lift the clothing hole to the back of the neck hole depicted in the Rydberg drawings. I have long proposed that the back wound was circa T-1, in line with the autopsy measurements and face sheet. The clothing hole would only need to be slightly elevated to reach that location. Back in the day I performed numerous tests where I put a mark on an old shirt at the clothing hole location, then sat with my arm and shoulders in various positions, while my wife poked toothpicks through the mark. The marks made by the toothpick were in line with the hole depicted in the autopsy photos. And yeah, I know it's coming. Once you start on your parade of nonsense, you never stop. Next you'll be saying the autopsy report is not "legal" or some such thing, because it was written in the wrong way, or some such thing. When this is something I've called you on in the past and you were forced to admit you just made it up. Autopsy reports--or autopsy photos, for that matter--are not legally admissible based upon whether they are written in pen or completely filled out, etc, but whether someone will swear under penalty of perjury that it is a report they've written and that it reflects their recollections. Well, that happens to be the case. No, what you miss because you just have to or your whole house of cards collapses is that Burkley's report in which he approximates a wound at T-3 would be given no weight in a court of law, since he never swore to its accuracy and never described even how he came to make such a claim. (I mean, did he get that from viewing the body itself or by looking at the face sheet--which had a misleading body outline? Who knows? Or did he even know basic anatomy? Who knows? A lot of doctors forget the basics after 30 or 40 years of listening to coughing patients and prescribing rest and/or expensive medications. And a lot of them probably suck at anatomy from the get-go.)

My recollection is that they really didn't out-maneuver anybody. They realized they could bring box-cutters onboard and that box-cutters could be used as a weapon. This allowed them to get into the cockpit. Once in, they crashed the planes. Almost anyone with a week of flight training could have done the same. As someone once quipped, flying a plane is fairly easy, the challenge is landing the sucker.

For some reason my earlier post didn't register as a new post and never appeared on the front page. Weird.

My understanding is that he did screw up his line. He meant to say "That's one small step for A man" but instead said "That's one small step for man."

To Gerry's question, I would say "no." Although I think myself and others have made discoveries that have crept us closer to the truth, I no longer believe people, as a species, give a rat's ass about the truth. On this event or on anything, really. I see this all the time. When people find out I've researched the case, they almost always ask "So who do you think did it?" When I then tell them I don't know but that the research of others and myself proves beyond a doubt that the government blew smoke and that the evidence actually suggests more than one shooter, their face goes blank, They are disappointed. They were hoping I would tell them something exciting like "a midget in the gutter did it on behalf of the mafia" or one of the agents did it. Not that they would have believed me. But they were hoping for something that would brighten up their day and not something that would confirm what they already know--that conspiracies happen and governments lie. Ho-hum. The truth is just too boring for most...people raised on TV and fantasy and sci-fi franchises. They crave something more exciting. We see this, moreover, internationally. People around the world are embracing autocrats because they prefer the excitement of having a "hero" fighting for them as opposed to the mundane reality of bureaucrats doing what is best, or easiest. They don't care much that these autocrats are most always corrupt, and bleeding their countries dry. The truth just doesn't matter. My cynical rant of the day.

To reiterate, the eyewitness evidence is conclusive on this issue. I compiled all the known witness statements and added probably a couple of hundred more, and it's clear that, of the three sounds heard by most witnesses, the first one corresponded to the first shot hitting Kennedy. In other words, there was no first shot miss. The evidence for such a miss was cherry-picked years later to give "Oswald" enough time to fire the shots. But it's nonsense. While some cite Connally's turn as "proof" for example, the reality is Connally himself viewed the Z-film numerous times and said he thought the first shot was fired circa 190 and hit JFK. He also said he had straightened out in the limo just before the first shot. The more telling fact is that a dozen or more witnesses, including Connally, described the limo's location at the time of the first shot, and they uniformly placed it where it was between Z-190 and Z-224. This is not something one can just ignore because one thinks one can see a missed shot on a silent film.

The evidence strongly suggests no shots were fired prior to Z-190. I go through hundreds of witness statements on my website, and it's quite clear no one saw JFK continue waving after the first shot rang out, and that the vast majority of those watching him at the time of the first shot thought he reacted to the first shot. In addition there are a number of witnesses whose position is now known who described JFK's location in comparison to themselves at the time of the first shot, and these witnesses routinely place JFK at his location Z-190--Z-224, and not at his location seconds before. The first shot miss is a hoax cooked up to sell the single-assassin scenario. It is as ridiculous as the SBT.

n The point is that only a handful of witnesses thought the first shot missed--and their statements all suggested the first shot hit when you compared their statements to the Z-film and photographic evidence--and that no one following the story thought the first shot missed. And then--oh my God--CBS performs their own analysis--which suggests the shooter needed more time--and--BINGO--they now pretended the first shot missed. This then became the go-to scenario for the Oswald-did-it crowd. But it wasn't written in stone. The LNs wrote it in stone, however, after Posner's book came out and cited the lapel flip, which suggested Connally was hit circa Z-224 and made the first shot circa Z-190 accepted by the HSCA enemy #1--so much that most if not all the key LN books to come out since the 90's have ignored that a panel of photographic experts determined JFK was hit before he went behind the sign in the Z-film, and not after. In short, then, the "miss" at Z-160 is garbage, a hoax. Numerous witnesses saw JFK come off the right side of the limo in response to the first shot, and none saw him continue waving for seconds and then respond to a second shot. The Warren Commission/Specter knew damn well they couldn't claim the first shot missed so they just threw a potential first shot miss into the mix. But no one took it seriously. Until a few years passed. And people forgot about all the witnesses claiming they saw him respond to the first shot. But people with an interest in history know better.

Except you're wrong about the 6 seconds. The first shot did not miss. That was offered up as a possibility by the WC when they knew it was unlikely and offered up as a likelihood by CBS in order to give "Oswald" enough time. It is, essentially, a hoax. The reality is that most LNs assume JFK and JBC were hit by the same shot at Z-224, AND that most if not all LNs assume JFK was hit by the last shot, at Z-313. This means their favored scenario is actually not three shots in 6 seconds, but three shots in...4.9 seconds.

Farewell, Michael.

As I recall Bush 41 left office and proceeded to make appearance after appearance for Wall Street firms--at a million bucks an appearance. it seemed obvious it was a payoff for the Wall Street friendly policies he'd kept in place throughout his term.

That lift is supposedly from the barrel, but yes, you are correct--there was a print on the right side of the trigger guard when Day carried the rifle through the press corps that subsequently disappeared. The trigger guard prints photographed by the DPD--that were later purported to be Oswald's prints--were on the left side. P.S. Now that I think about it, I think you convinced me of this--what--ten or twelve years ago!

Thanks, Kathy. At quick glance, I see that I wasn't hallucinating. Tink was indeed hired as part of a lawsuit against Silverstein, and he did indeed make Fetzer look silly.