Patrick Block

The above link to frame #317 by Chris Davidson is a nice, clear look at this frame of the film. The black patch on the back of the President's head jumps right out at you, especially when you compare it to 312, to see JFK's true hair color in shadow. I invite everyone to give the above link from Chris a hard and long look. Thank you all very much for the kind welcome to the board- on both sides of the issue. Mr. Costella, I've used and appreciated your cobbled-together version of the Z frame for study for a long time, but I am not the one who shelled out a lot of cash to have the new copy made. I expect it will be published someday, and I think it is only morally decent to let the person who bought it to be the first to publish. Mr. Lamson, to answer your question, I have no idea when the images might be released online. As I said in my longish post, I'm just a guy who works in the same industry as the purchaser of the copy of the film who has had a long time interest in the case. I was lucky to see them. I respectfully disagree that the only sharp edge of the black patch is near the ear. There is nowhere that there isn't a sharp edge, and the brown of JFK's hair is remarkably light outside of the edge, as he tilts into the light. JFK's head is moving quickly and slightly blurred, but, the patch edge is in focus and sharp, which you would expect with painted art. Yes, there is a big change between frames 314 and 315, and only between those two frames. I sat for a long time bouncing between pairs of frames while studying the film. If you take frame 314 and 315, and cycle between them, you have brown hair/black patch over and over in a rather obvious manner. This happens no where else in the film and is quite dramatic in a neutral scan of the film. Before 315, throughout the entire film, JFK's hair is light brown. It's much lighter than say, Kellerman's very dark hair. From frame 315 onward there is jet black paint only on the back of the President's head. I suppose that if the film is otherwise unaltered, that a hole was not created in the rear of JFK's head until frame 315. As Mr. DiEugenio has noted, this alteration of Zapruder's home movie would be fairly easy to do. I suspect I could do it myself in a short period of time, if I was given a copy of the film blown up to a larger format. Mr. MacRae makes the observation that when you blow up images in the extreme, patches don't resemble paint. However, I might make the observation that when you get that large that you don't get things resembling President Kennedy, either. Sometimes the answers are right in front of us, and are much, much simpler than we try to make them. I know you guys have had endless discussions over all manner of perceived irregularities in the Z film, some crying bullxxxx, and others seeing fraud. I don't know about most of those things, but I am quite confident of this. All you need do is look with your eyeballs at one frame, 317, and compare with 312. It's obvious to this artist, and the link at the top of this post shows a nice image of this frame- a frame notably absent over the years from most of the magazines and books publishing images from the assassination.

Martin Hay has stated he would be interested in hearing my opinions on whether or not the Zapruder Film has been altered, and he has pointed me to this thread. I am new to the boards, and I think I should introduce myself as far as my "credentials" go for discussion on matters relating to old fashioned physical film. I've mostly been involved with drawing and writing the "classic" Disney characters for the past 20 years. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and their family members and antagonists. I work in pencil, pen and paint, all of it the non-computer, old school way. I have collected animation/comic art for almost 30 years. I've owned background art, cels, drawings, multiplane setups from the whole history of traditional animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur up to The Little Mermaid. I've worked to restore some of the early Snow White material. I am intimately familiar with paint on celluloid. I love movies, and early in my teens, I was torn between becoming a movie director or comic artist. The illustrator in me eventually won out, but in my teens, and in college, I was constructing super 8 films with friends, editing them on my own equipment. In college, I got my hands on 16 mm equipment by taking film classes. I took film history classes, made short films and belonged to the college film program while also staffing the college newspaper as the official cartoonist. In school I tested extremely highly in abstract reasoning and mechanical comprehension. I've always had the ability...the passion, really, for visualizing any three dimensional constructions in my head. This ability extends to written plans- I'm great with directions for putting that complicated toy together that frustrates everyone else. I have the knack for intuitively understanding what something on paper looks like when built. I have extremely good focus. Most important to this thread, because of my long interest in the Kennedy Assassination, and my working in the industry that I do, I was offered the opportunity nearly two years ago to view the exposure-neutral HD scan of the individual frames of the 35mm dupe negative created from the forensic copy of the Zapruder Film from the National Archives and Records Administration. I've compared frames from this new digital copy to frames from the Costella Edit, and also to the MPI Frames. Both of these older copies are inferior in that they apparently have been modified to make them more visually attractive and the details have been considerably muddied- they are much less crisp than in this new digital scan. I am frankly still amazed at the difference in visible detail, and I am quite surprised no other private researcher has not broken down and spent the money to have this done before in order to acquire the very best possible copy. It should be pointed out that I am not one the "Hollywood Group" mentioned in Doug Horne's book. I am just an independent party who happens to love film and work for Disney who lucked into this opportunity as a casual researcher. I spent many hours looking at the pertinent frames around 310-340 and after a lot of thought about it, I got permission from the owner of this splendid copy of the Zapruder Film to show frames from it in a casual setting to a friend of mine. This friend is the Director of what today is what is regarded as probably the finest special and visual effects film studio in the world. I've known him for ten years, and he is one of the most straightforward and sensible people I've ever met. I didn't ask him his opinion about the assassination. I gave him no background whatsoever about the medical witnesses and the hole on the rear of the President's head, or anything else. All I did was offer him a blind-look at a few frames of the new, digital copy of the Z film starting at frame 311 to see what he had to say as a neutral, but expert party. His reaction was exactly the same as mine. He was horrified at the obviousness of the black painted-in artwork present on frame 317. He went from interested professional casually examining a colleagues curious request to a man who suddenly was faced with alteration to this vital evidence which sits in the National Archives of the United States of America. He could see for himself that this jet black patch on the rear of the President's head still had straight edges. This artifact is present in the image that David Josephs has posted right here on this thread...it's just better defined, clearer and more obvious in the more recent neutrally scanned copy. I don't expect anyone here on the boards to take my word on something they haven't seen with their own eyes, but the image posted here on this board ought to be enough for you to remain open minded on the subject until the new and clearer images are published. Look at the image of 317. Look at Connally's head. Look at JFK in 312, before he is hit, and consider the fact that as he topples over to his left, into Jackie, that the entire right side of his face and head are falling into the light...not into shadow the way Jackie is, she is bent face down to the right and entirely in shadow. His entire head ought to be getting LIGHTER, not turn jet black inside of a geometric shape. By all logic, more sunlight is hitting this blacked out area than before when the President was sitting upright. The image makes no sense at all...the "edges" are profound. I've studied these new frames very closely. The "black patch" appears out of the blue, NOT on frame 313 or 314 as one would think it would, but in frame 315. Find a decent copy of the film and compare frames 314 and 315. The blackness simply appears magically in 315, it's extremely obvious in the new digital film. It doesn't take much imagination to know what you are looking at. It is artwork,-"painted effects", as my friend put it. This following is strictly my opinion, my observations of these frames outside the context of the assassination itself. It looks to me as if the painting in of the back of JFK's head starts at 315 and continues through most of the clearer fames that follow. Of those frames, there is an additional pass by a more artistic talent who blurs the edges of these blacked out areas so that they more closely blend in with the President's hair EXCEPT for frame 317. Frame 317 was neglected by the special effects man, and we are left with a strictly artificial, geometric edge all around this blacked out section. You are looking at the raw black patch, unretouched. It is obvious, and you dont have to be a film technician or artist to see it in the MPI film, though, it is much sharper in Wilkerson's new digitial scan, which isn't altered to be pleasingly colored. In other words, other copies of the Zapruder film available to researchers today have been altered to make them more "artistically pleasing" for an audience. This effectively muddys details. The frame I handled of 317 was huge in information content. 72.9 MB of content in the single frame by itself. The only explanations I have for the lack of polish on frame 317 is that it was accidentaly skipped over by the technicians working on the film, or, it was intentionally left in by someone who didn't care for the activity they were engage in, and wanted it discovered. The way the frames were constructed this way- a pass to add black patches where there was a big hole in JFK's head, and then, a second pass to fuzzy up straight and unnatural edges, suggests a team of film professionals working in an assembly line sort of fashion. Probably the lesser technician blackened in the frames, and a more talented hand did the final finish work. Earlier in this thread, respected author and long time researcher Josiah Thompson, (his book was the third I ever read on the assassination), describes a recent visiting of the 6th floor museum and examining the MPI 4" by 5" transparencies. These images certainly ought to come close or even surpass the clarity of these new digital frames. They ought to be a generation closer to the original film. If the "black edges" on frame 317 are not present in these images at the Sixth Floor Museum, a close comparison of the two pieces of evidence should certainly be possible in the future. If the MPI transparencies and the forensic copy of the film do not match exactly, it is evidence of additional alteration having taken place. Which frankly, wouldn't surprise me in the least, since the visual evidence in the case throughout the years has proven tamper-prone, starting with the 26 volumes blatant switching around of Zapruder frames to make the President appear to fall forward. I mean, how many times can brains be lost, autopsy reports go missing? How can sizable occipital bone from the back of the President's head evaporate into thin air? Tissue slides be vaporized? Just where does a mauser with a variable scope attached to it disappear to? In the course of this case, President Kennedy's rear entrance bullet wound to his skull traveled some four inches over the course of a few years, according to the official investigations that followed the death of the President. Oswald managed shots at a moving target under a specific, narrow time frame that the FBI and the America's very best riflemen could not duplicate on a still target with bench rests and all the time in the world for their first shot, using the exact same rifle with a scope that was adjusted by shimming to make it more accurate than when Oswald used it. Is evidence of a black patch on the rear of President Kennedy's head extant in Zapruder REALLY that hard to believe in, when it's visible to your own eyes? I suspect that the difficulties that long time researchers have with even contemplating this scenario is mostly psychological. We've studied these images for so long, and have come to base so many conclusions on them, that we have come to trust them like one trusts John Wayne in the movies. The covered up hole on 317 is just as much movie magic as the characters Mr. Wayne played. It's not the actual state of the back of the President's head. I don't need more evidence than these blacked out frames to come to a conclusion about this film. They stand there as evidence themselves, and are what they are. The more you know about film, the more likely you will recognize these images for what they are- but you don't have to be an expert to see it. And it's more blatant in the crisper digital frames, which surely will be published eventually. Further proof, that rather resoundingly buttresses the evidence of alteration are all the witnesses who saw the orange sized exit wound on the back of the President's head. Scores of witnesses saw it....most of them medical professionals. For a number of years the HSCA tried to hide the truth about the Bethesda witnesses, fibbing right in their report that the withheld testimony disagreed with the Parkland doctors about the wounds. The heads of the HSCA then sealed the records of these key witnesses until a point where a lot of us would be dead. Lo and behold, when the ARRB opened these Christmas packages early, these Bethesda witnesses mention the hole existing as well....which means, beyond a reasonable doubt by anyone's standards anywhere, that the HSCA lied to the American people to hide the truth about the wounds on the rear of the President's skull. Yet, here we are, in this thread, with the smoking gun of Zapruder alteration right in front of us, and many here argue that there is no black paint on the rear of the President's head. The Emperor wears no clothes. Long live the stealthy new kings, living in the wings of the Republic.

I am a member of that final group of people just barely old enough to actually remember the President's assassination first hand. I was five and sitting under my mother's ironing board, watching tv while sitting on the linoleum floor playing with a toy. The news came on, and my mother's crying...a rare thing in our household, is what made this such a never to be forgotten moment for me. Once my generation has died off, this event will become a part of history. I want the Truth to be admitted to, before that happens. I'm an artist/writer with Walt Disney. I've drawn Donald Duck professionally for 20 years. I am a voracious reader, and have made it through the requisite 26 volumes and the House set, along with the majority of important books on the assassination. Most of the major books I've read multiple times. Working as a cartoonist with Disney, I have particular expertise in classic animation/special effects work. My father is probably the best known ballistics expert/deer hunter in western Pa. giving me some practical and considerable experiance with firearms- I've handled the things since I was under that ironing board. I've gotten to the point, I guess, where I feel I am confident enough with the material to feel like I might make the occasional contribution. Thank you for having me aboard.