Steven Kossor

There are so many influences that shape a person's outlook and sense of optimism for the future. It has been widely recognized that our children have become more pessimistic; their beliefs about heroism and the value of risk-taking have become tainted. When my son was in 5th grade, he had to do a science project, so like most parents I suggested some ideas for an interesting project. The one he liked best was a sinister black covered box with a hole cut in it a little bigger than a fist. The project was to show the box to students in the 1st grade and compare their responses to students in the 8th grade when they were told "There is something inside here that may make you uncomfortable. Will you put your hand into the box?" The hypothesis was that the younger children would be less likely to put their hand into the black box and that the older children would be more likely to explore the box (a stopwatch was used to measure the delay in sticking the hand into the box), but the exact opposite occurred! The older children were less willing to explore the box. The 1st graders hadn't learned to be afraid, but by the time they were in 8th grade, the message had gotten through! Once courage is subverted, it can't be retrieved or revived, and the society we've created has done a phenomenal job at undermining and subverting courage. That was the point of my essay on "Emotional Memories" and why I think it's so important to give children "corrective emotional experiences" in their lives that thwart the message of fear and cowardice that are otherwise directed at them in school and the social media in all its forms. Thanks for your encouragement and I look forward to future helpings of inspirational viewing/reading!!!

If we agree that the microphone responsible for recording shots fired in DP as the JFK limo traveled on Elm Street was itself moving on Elm Street, then that traveling microphone should be on film shot there (presumably a three-wheel police motorcycle). With no visual record of any three-wheel motorcycle in evidence, and the high probability that the dictabelt recordings were composites (manufactured after-the-fact), the gunfire sounds must have been recorded by a different microphone that was traveling on Elm Street and those gunshot sounds had to have been added to the dictabelt mix for some obscure reason, probably unintentionally.

Wasn't the Harper fragment found a good distance (30 to 40 feet?) in front (and far onto the grass to the left) of where the limo was at Zfilm 313? How did it get there? It is definitely large enough to have been filmed in motion by one or more of the movie cameras operating at the time.

Greg Burnham was able to reconnect the links to the essay I updated at his site in 2018: http://assassinationofjfk.net/emotional-memories/ He's collected a wide array of material there, readers of this thread will probably appreciate his collection of contributions. I just finished reading The Politics of Obedience and found it to be as thought-provoking as any recent reading I've done. There really is a terrific depth of knowledge in this thread; so glad to participate!!!! Steve

Gary Aguilar did a video presentation on the Confirmation Bias a while ago and addressed it pretty well, I thought. It's the tendency to overlook things that you believe have already been looked-at enough while you pursue other areas of inquiry - or work to defend your previous conclusions. It's the bane of researchers everywhere, but given the competitiveness of the JFKA territory and the defensiveness that lots of researchers display toward their own theories, the confirmation bias seems to be particularly prevalent here. I understand the necessity to play one's cards close to one's chest when you're anticipating "a big reveal" in a forthcoming publication but you'd think that the relationships between researchers would be less fratricidal at this point, given the common enemy we're all up against, right? Keep smiling and stay sane!!!

There have been a couple of outfits, including Scientology, that have tried to target Hinckley and medication in general for the attempted assassination of Reagan. I haven't looked into it too deeply, by any means. It's never a good idea to dismiss seemingly coincidental linkages between victims and perpetrators since most victims knew the people who killed them, right? I look forward to lots of future conversations since we share similar perspectives and backgrounds! Best wishes for the future!

I didn't think Carrico was involved in Lee Oswald's care at Parkland. I've heard the report of an air embolism being involved in Lee Oswald's death and also that he received "cardiac compression" in the ambulance on the way to Parkland, which certainly could have exacerbated his internal hemorrhaging from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. That he survived so long after the JFK assassination is amazing in and of itself, given the level of planning that obviously went into the operation. The plan went off the rails while the limo was still on Elm Street and came within a hair's breadth of being exposed before it was finally finished at Bethesda and endured relatively successfully for the past 50+ years. As more time is spent, and more sophisticated analyses of evidence are performed, and additional evidence is discovered (including material that has been "laying in plain sight" all these years and overlooked or misunderstood because of the "confirmation bias" of the researchers), a clearer understanding of "what was supposed to have happened" on 11/22/63 is becoming possible, as well as a more thorough understanding of "what actually happened." I've watched David's progress with Final Charade over the past 10 years or so and I can confirm that he has weighed facts and evidence very carefully and sought corroboration conscientiously from multiple sources before adopting or rejecting any new hypotheses. He is a cautious scientist and is making contributions to the Education Forum and elsewhere as time permits and I look forward to his completion of Final Charade as much as anyone!

Lisa Pease's book on Sirhan (A Lie Too Big to Fail) is a definitive treatise that confirms, for me, the fact of his being a recipient of hypnotic treatment. The connection between JFK and RFK was substantial on many levels, and their deaths share the fingerprints of the same cabal, as far as I can tell. The common understanding that "people can't be hypnotized to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise" is incorrect in that people can be hypnotized to have private perceptions of things that lead them to do things that would otherwise be repugnant to them. The clearest brief example is the hypnotized person taking a big bite of an onion and reporting that the "apple" tastes delicious and sweet. Based on descriptions of Sirhan's behavior during the shooting, and his subsequent lack of coherent memories of it, it appears that he was operating on the basis of some post-hypnotic suggestion (his examiners over the years have reportedly found him to be an extraordinarily responsive hypnotic subject). Like Lee Oswald, he was "the right person for the job" because of his own personal attributes and interests (which were expertly manipulated by persons with substantial skills and resources in the art of strategic deception). Your video selections from the Academy of Ideas are terrific resources! The thoughtful review of my essay by Dr. Niederhut was much appreciated as well. Thanks!!!

The winking man is Congressman Al Thomas, at whose behest/intimidation JFK flew to Texas to participate in a fund-raiser for his interests there. If memory serves, he directed that all of his files be destroyed upon his death but someone reportedly found a document among the remainder about a pardon for someone named "Carrico." You'll recall that the doctor who stuck an endotracheal tube down JFK's throat upon his body's arrival at Parkland was named "Carrico" and that he did this medical procedure claiming that JFK appeared to still be alive upon arrival at Parkland, even though there was no pulse, no detectable respiratory activity for several minutes (he was blue from anoxia as a result), his pupils were fixed, dilated and divergent, etc. Al was a peach, for sure, and a good friend of Lyndon's as this startling picture reveals. I believe that David Lifton was the first to publish this picture in Best Evidence, and he reportedly got a stunned inquiry from the photographer, Stoughton, who reportedly wanted to know "Where did you get that picture?!"

Chris, thanks so much for resurrecting my essay from 2012. I hope the updated version from 2018 that Greg Burnham posted on his website becomes available again. We seem to have been reading many of the same books! If you haven't examined Chris Wylie's book Mindf*ck about Cambridge Associates and the orchestration of the 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit vote in the UK, you should definitely check it out. The extent to which people are suggestible is wildly under-estimated by the general public. I've had over 100 hours of training in clinical hypnosis technology and when you combine that awareness with the ability to selectively target minds that are exquisitely vulnerable to subtle psychological persuasion, you will realize exactly how powerful Facebook and Twitter are in the realm of consensus-building and driving the behavior of targeted individuals toward particular actions. Trump was more of a "trojan horse" for the people who orchestrated his run for the Presidency and his legacy of Supreme Court appointments and other bureaucratic activities was the true purpose and value of his Presidency, after all is said and done. We were played by those people and more than a few of us were swayed in critical decision making at a specific point in time to put him over the top and into office. That play will certainly happen again and again in the future (the past is the best predictor of the future, after all). I am thankful to find myself among the JFK research community and deeply appreciate the extent to which people have found my perspective and analyses to be helpful! Best wishes always!!!

I'm no mastermind, and the puerile ad hominem attacks that pop up periodically on this thread reflect badly on the sender, yet they persist, unfortunately. Very nearly a laugh, but they're really a cry. I do think that Jamey is absolutely correct as to the motivation of the plotters to "send a message" to the world at large. There are lots of ways to get rid of someone you don't like. To do it in the way that they did it to JFK can only be interpreted as viciously vindictive. His killing was far from an amateur affair; it was grotesquely configured that way and that underscores both the depth of the planning that went into it and the power behind it.

Greg Burnham had published an essay I'd written back in 2018 called "Emotional Memories" that described some of the psychological processes, including those documented by Perkins in his Confessions of an Economic Hitman that resulted in the growth and flourishing of the corporate surveillance apparatus and infrastructure in the US. The basic idea is that emotions color memories, and that the persistent presentation of memes that provoke fear and the value of timidity as a virtue, result in greater tolerance of confusion in the pronouncements of authorities, and encroachments on civil and human rights. The brutal treatment that whistleblowers receive (think of Edward Snowden) at the hands of wrongdoers and their government supporters who invoke The Espionage Act to capture and silence them is a potent source of these "keep your head down and your mouth shut and everything will be fine" memes that foster compliance and complacency, and deter courageous investigatory work. The essay has become inaccessible on Greg's website for some reason but I posted an earlier version on this forum in 2012: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/18871-the-power-of-emotional-memories/

The descriptions of JFK's head wound at Parkland was more in the Occipital (back) area than in the Parietal (side) area of the skull. The cerebellum is located at the back, bottom part of the brain. Several doctors reported seeing pieces of the cerebellum on the table (cerebellar tissue is dramatically different in appearance than other brain tissue), so if it fell out of his head, the hole it came through had to have been at the lower back of the head, where it was not immediately noticed by the doctors who attended him as he arrived at Parkland. When neurosurgeon Kemp Clark arrived at the ER, he looked at the hole and the apparent damage to Kennedy's brain and said that the wound "was not compatible with life." He later said that he thought JFK had actually died in Dealey Plaza (at 12:30 pm), although he signed the official death certificate stating a time of death at 1:30 pm, for reasons that remain obscure. Jenkins (the anesthesiologist who hooked JFK's tracheal tube up to a respirator) eventually testified that he knew he was connecting the device to a corpse, but that he did it so the family might be comforted by thinking the last rites were administered to a living person. When Dr. Perry started to perform the tracheotomy, JKF had no pulse, was cyanotic (turning blue) from a lack of respiration for several minutes (during the ride from DP to Parkland), had fixed and dilated, divergent pupils and no detectable heartbeat, but he recognized that the endotracheal tube that Dr. Carrico had previously installed wasn't working efficiently and went forward with a surgical procedure to install a tube directly into JFK's trachea. Without appreciable blood pressure, the surgical incision would not have bled, starkly revealing the patient's expired condition, but the doctors reportedly pressed on with their resuscitation efforts (chest compressions, etc) anyway, until Kemp Clark called it all off with his pronouncement of JFK's death. Perry's press conference around 2:00 pm disclosed Carrico's installation of an endotracheal tube in JFK's throat through his mouth (specifically spelling out e-n-d-o-t-r-a-c-h-e-a-l), but didn't mention his own performance of a tracheotomy surgical procedure (cutting JFK's trachea open) until he was called by Humes, et al in Bethesda about it. Perhaps he didn't want to call attention to what he had done during the 2:00 pm press conference, or just didn't think it was important to mention that there were two different medical doctors' attempts at giving respiratory aid to the President after he had died, not just one. Later, Perry would testify that he'd cut through the throat bullet wound, that he'd made his incision above the wound, and that the incision was below the bullet wound. The poor guy was in a terrible bind as soon as he mentioned in his 2:00 pm press conference that the throat bullet wound looked like one of the 100 to 200 bullet entrance wounds he'd treated up to that point in his career.

Neil Postman's Entertaining Ourselves to Death is another good read about the effects of the entertainment media that came into existence in the 1950s and 1960s. Devotees of early television were called "vidiots" by those who disdained Uncle Miltie and all of his descendants. Another great survey on the subject of money and power in America is Noam Chomsky's Requiem for the American Dream that appears as a 2015 video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZnuc-Fv_Tc Greg Poulgrain's books on the connection between Indonesia's President Sukarno and JFK are illuminating as to the incredibly enormous amounts of money at stake for the Rockefellers and their minions (Allen Dulles, for example) if only JFK could be moved out of power before he screwed it all up for them. Sukarno himself was killed in a coup in 1965 that drew the circle closed as Poulgrain explains. Oliver Stone wrote an introduction to the latest Poulgrain book JFK vs Allen Dulles (2020) and Jim DiEugenio gave a thorough and favorable review of it recently as well.

John Taylor Gatto and I shared the stage a couple of times in the 1990s talking about the history and probable future of the American education system, and you're 100% correct about its pernicious influence on children and adults. We could not have had the election results in 2016, or the wholesale abandonment of rationality and reverence for the truth, that we have seen in America since then, without a strong foundation supplied by the American education system (replacing the study of history with "social studies" and reporting on scientific discovery and the "scientific method" with the "Earth Science Curriculum Project" in the 1960s). Gatto's An Underground History of American Education is a must-read summary of where our education system came from in the 1800s and what it intentionally and deliberately does to people (turns them into "consumers" and obedient participants in an exploitative capitalistic oligarchy that yields a tremendous and perpetually growing economy for the oligarchs). We have entered a time of contempt for intelligence, a new "dark age" of superstition and reverence for fantasy in lieu of science, culminating in the election and persistence of a puerile reality show personality impersonating a national leader, and I'm not sure the plunge toward the bottom is something we can recover from.

The stellate fracture pattern shown on the Bethesda X-Rays is indicative of a blow to the had that struck from the top, not a bullet of any sort, according to the medical doctors' reviews I've read, although some attribute the "exploded" appearance of the bones to an "exploding" bullet inside the head. The separation of so many bones, and all of the missing bone could not have supported the skin/scalp of a head that looked (from the front) as if it was "intact" as Jackie Kennedy described it. That's why I think the shot from the Knoll opened up a "pressure relief valve" in JFK's head almost instantly after the exploding bullet hit his head, so that the explosion erupted from the back of his head, rather than tearing it open completely. If JFK's head looked, upon arrival at Parkland, like it looked at Bethesda, they would have lifted the jacket covering it and dropped the jacket back in place and called the priests. Several doctors believed JFK was actually still alive when he arrived at Parkland - they claimed he was breathing (not likely, but that's what they said), intubated him, connected the throat tube to a respirator device, and then performed a tracheotomy incision over the wound in his throat. None of that activity is compatible with receiving an obviously dead body looking like the horror depicted at Bethesda. The tracheotomy incision was turned from a small incision made to admit a round one-inch tube, into a ragged gaping gash with irregular edges three times larger (that exposed the esophagus which lies behind the trachea). The desecration of JFK's body started when the stellate fracture pattern was created and his throat was torn open, and was finished in Bethesda when Humes, et al sutured the throat wound so it could pass for a "tracheotomy incision" until it was needed as an exit wound. There is much more to this fact set that David Lifton introduced to the world in Best Evidence and will complete as soon as possible in the sequel, Final Charade.

This thread has really sparked a debate among experts, hasn't it. Kind of like the field of psychology - for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.... The problem is that experts choose their "underlying undeniable facts" and proceed with their analyses. In the case of the film creation experts, it was the nature of the film itself (Zavada's experience and analyses are exhaustive in that realm). But the "laws of physics and geometry" are the "underlying undeniable facts" for other scientists, and those facts undeniably lead to the conclusion that the Zfilm is a fabrication. For example, frame 313 is the only one with a show of bloody tissue exploding from the vicinity of the head, meaning that the material erupted and then disappeared in just 1/18 of a second -- it didn't slow down or linger in the air as it certainly must have, to be captured on frames 314, 315, etc (if it was real material and not a painted-in special effect for that one frame for the purpose of blaming Lee Oswald for shooting JFK "from above and behind"). To determine if Zavada is correct, or incorrect, about the authenticity of the Zfilm, you have to compare his findings with the real world of physics and geometry, and his conclusion as to authenticity fails on several points. The head isn't ever turned in the direction it had to face to exhaust material onto the driver's side taillight/officer Hargis, for example. I don't want to dispute a film expert in his realm of expertise, and he doesn't want to dispute the laws of physics/geometry so the two paths to truth never converge and you ultimately have to choose the path that requires the least amount of reality compromise, and for me, that's the path that honors physics and geometry: the Zfilm is a composite, a fiction. In the Moorman photo, the holes found through MRI analysis are located too far toward the top of the head to have exposed cerebellar tissue that was observed at Parkland, so there must have been another hole created farther down at the back and right side of JFK's head in order for the observations of the Parkland doctors to be based on a real body they examined. Moorman's photo doesn't show it, so it wasn't yet created at the time her photo was taken, and that's a rock solid foundation upon which you can place Moorman's photo on a time line (thereby revealing exactly what happened before and after it was taken). Or so it seems to me.

I think Abe got an initial payment from Life magazine of $25,000 for the print rights and then a renegotiated payment from Life of an additional $50,000 for all rights (including motion picture rights), on Saturday 11/23/63. Long before the payout approved by Congress relatively recently ($16,000,000.00) Abe gave a portion to the widow of JD Tippitt; I don't recall any payment from Abe to Marina. And then the family donated the film to the 6th Floor Museum which administers the copyright and asks gets an enormous amount for permission to reproduce each of the 486 individual frames. That's why most people use drawings or "re-enactments" to depict what the Zfilm contains in publications or films. David Lifton's Pig on a Leash is a good source on the background of the Zfilm, I believe.

Please remember that it is not necessary to create an Academy Award winning suite of movies with spectacular, undetectable special effects, to create one (1) film that can be pointed to as "the clock" of the assassination, to the exclusion of all others that show the same content, as long as the critical material is removed from all of the films - the car stop sequence especially. There were just three films to fix, and all of the others besides the Zfilm simply needed a splice to cut out the frames showing the car stop (and whatever else was happening during that time which could not find its way into the history books). From the perspective of officials who could control access to the movie films for decades, and dodge questions about splices and missing film as if none of it mattered, the Zfilm has done it's job magnificently. Look at how hard it is still today, with all of the modern analyses and technologies being used to study it, to convince people that the Zfilm is a work of fiction and can't be relied upon except to document the extent to which people prefer comfort over conscience.

I stood on that pedestal myself a few years ago and videotaped cars coming down Elm Street, so it was absolutely clear what the camera had to do in order to track the cars, and keep them in the middle of the frame, from the corner at Houston St to the Overpass. Not at all difficult, but having walked all around DP, there is no doubt that the view from that pedestal is singularly perfect to take a movie of the limousine traveling down Elm Street. Through the use of an optical printer and other hardware that was certainly available at a high-end movie production company like Jamison's in 1963 Dallas, I believe that it would be possible for a skilled film editor to use the "missing" 4th copy that they printed on 11/22/63 to create the floating mat needed to separate the limo image from the background image, remove the necessary frames and add some painted-in effects (black out the back of the head, add a moving blob to the area of the right side of the head, etc) within a few hours. And the rest is "history." The fact that Abe profited immensely ("obscenely" would be a better word) for his work on 11/22/63 doesn't necessarily implicate him in the planned use for his work.

The Zfilm we have today shows the condition of JFK's head at the Bethesda autopsy, not the condition of JFK's head at Parkland Hospital. When Abe Zapruder was on camera on 11/22/63 describing the movie he shot, he uses a gesture to indicate the opening-up of the right side of JFK's head (exactly what appears on the Zfilm we have today, but not what JFK looked like at Parkland). Maybe Abe was foreseeing the future and describing what his movie would eventually look like, during that filmed TV interview. Maybe he found his way onto that pedestal and the plotters took full advantage of his high-quality camera and modern film, and had their way with it. The way the images are captured on the existing Zfilm, it looks like the camera panned left-to-right but did not also pan downward as the limo traveled down Elm Street, so the image of the limo almost went off the screen (Abe was much too skilled cameraman to have done such a poor job of framing his subject in the film that the US citizens eventually paid him $16,000,000.00 for). For these reasons and more, I believe that an "official" movie film had an intentional role in JFK's killing - to create memories of "what happened" and to suppress dissenting opinions - and that Abe's movie was a better foundation for the "official" version than any amateur could probably have delivered.

I'm a psychologist after all, right? Thanks for your encouragement!!!

It looks like Jeremy is quoting me saying "This can't be true, because..." but those are actually his words, not mine. My words were: The idea is that confusion, all resolved to the Zfilm as the “official record,” results in the confirmation of the lone nut solution to all mysteries, and that’s the value of the Zfilm to the plotters (and why I believe an official movie of the killing was a planned part of the operation). Even with all of its flaws, the Zfilm has been used to "show" what happened in Dallas, even to this day. At first the authorities only used frames from the movie (and even presented them out of order to have the intended effect), but even with the release of the motion picture, they apply it to the same purpose (knowing that the vast majority of people will seek comfort untroubled by conscience), ignoring the flaws as if they didn't exist, or were irrelevant.

The idea is that confusion, all resolved to the Zfilm as the “official record,” results in the confirmation of the lone nut solution to all mysteries, and that’s the value of the Zfilm to the plotters (and why I believe an official movie of the killing was a planned part of the operation).

Thanks to David, we know more about what actually happened on 11/22/63 than through any other source, by far, and I am indebted to him for having shared so much of his work with me over the past 10 years or so. Jamey is positively correct in saying that it isn't necessary to make every film alteration an academy award winning special effects triumph in order for the Zfilm to be held out as the definitive truth about "what happened" -- even the Zfilm has its obvious flaws, but the authorities have conscientiously and successfully ignored or dismissed all of them because the vast majority of people at any time in history are content to be comfortable. It is left to the scientists to study things to make sense of them, especially when the laws of physics and the necessity for continuity in a sequence of time slices are violated, and that's the antithesis of being comfortable. I haven't dedicated nearly as much time to the study of the JFK assassination as many of the contributors to this forum (especially Mr. Lifton!) but I am thankful for the opportunity to lay out things as I understand them and receive a substantial amount of support for my understanding. I'll keep trying to get it all right, and "the truth will out" because the scientists among us will keep looking for it.