John Costella

G'day Dave, It's probably best to go straight to the current issue, http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v5n1.html I'll be going through it in fair detail next Tuesday, December 11 (US time) on Jim Fetzer's radio show on gcnlive.com. A special treat will be a brand new Smoking Gun of film alteration (no Physics required!) which should leave even you speechless. John

Thanks for that Jack. That pretty much wraps up most of the Dealey Plaza witnesses. It would help if we knew who of those witnesses are still alive. BK I suspect there aren't many. Clint Hill was still alive earlier this year. I believe Bill Newman is too, and Mary Moorman was recently. Let me know if you get to talk to any of them. John

John Costella was born in Australia. After graduating with honors degrees in both electrical engineering and the sciences from the University of Melbourne, he completed a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. After three years of postdoctoral research and lecturing at the University of Melbourne he was appointed as a teacher of Mathematics, Physics and Information Technology at Mentone Grammar. Costella has researched the assassination of John F. Kennedy and has undertaken a sophisticated analyses of the Zapruder Film. Two of his articles, A Scientist's Verdict: The Film is a Fabrication and Mary Moorman and Her Polaroids appeared in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (edited by James H. Fetzer).

[Editor's Note: Research on the recreation of the home movie of the death of JFK attributed to Abraham Zapruder continues to this day. Here, the leading technical expert on the film provides an introduction to some of the most important indications of fakery. Those who would like to pursue this complex and fascinating subject may want to consult the studies found in THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX.] http://www.users.bigpond.com/costella/jfk/intro

Sorry, a glitch at this end caused me to post a reply twice. I can't find the "delete" button so this is my replacement text. John PS Let me mention something I glossed over in Martin's post. The Zavada Report does a good job of proving that the strip of film that the US Government paid US$16,000,000 for, stored in their National Archives, is a genuine strip of Kodak celluloid of 1963 vintage. Roland Zavada himself takes great pains to emphasise that he was NOT authorised, empowered or qualified to determine whether the IMAGERY on that celluloid is genuine or not. Indeed, he pulled out of appearing at the May 2003 Zapruder Film Symposium in Duluth, Minnesota when it became clear to him that his position was becoming untenable. Zavada has since distanced himself from Martin and the other researchers who place divine faith in the Zapruder film. His most recent hilarious antics in trying to distance himself from the issue are detailed on my website, http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~jpc

Hi all, Just popping my head in to say that I am here, some of the time anyway. I'm spread pretty thin at the moment, so please understand that. I'm not sure yet how much of The Great Zapruder Filx Hoax has been summarised here, so I won't repeat everything in the book, but will just address specific issues. (I will usually refer to the book as "HOAX" for simplicity.) So far I see the Nix and Muchmore films being mentioned, and Martin Shackelford (gday Martin, long time no see) espousing the "unbroken chain of custody" line. Both of these are covered in some detail in HOAX, but I'll give an outline here. The most time-critical task in the fabrication of the photographic evidence was the creation of the Zapruder film. Poor quality black and white images of individual frames were published within two days of the assassination; high quality colour images followed within a week. No section of the film was published in its entirety until the continuous sequence of frames published in the Warren volumes, a year after the assassination. Until then, it was just individual photographic images, which were alleged to be from a motion picture film taken by Zapruder. The Nix and Muchmore films received far less attention, and the time restrictions on their alteration or fabrication are much looser. David Healy's chapter in HOAX (together with my own observations) demonstrate that the fabrication of the Zapruder film in 1963 was well within these constraints. Creation of the other two films (which are much shorter and of much poorer quality) would be much easier. It has been emphasised by all authors in HOAX -- without exception, I think -- that the fact that the Zapruder film has been fabricated by logical necessity implies that the Nix and Muchmore have been altered or fabricated, based on what we believe actually happened in Dealey Plaza. David Mantik also provides in HOAX some evidence that the Muchmore film seems to be a complete fabrication, based on anomalies in the way that the frames are blurred, although this is a statistical argument, rather than the direct violation of the laws of physics that I demonstrated for the Zapruder film frames. It is logically absurd to claim that the authenticity of the most tightly-controlled film (the Zapruder film) can somehow be "proved" by showing its agreement with other, less tightly-controlled films. Rather, the logic flows the other way. If the Z was fabricated, then the other two films needed to be brought into agreement. As for Martin's "unbroken chain of custody", this argument is a favourite of those who like to place their complete faith in the Zapruder film, while at the same time admitting that most of the other physical evidence in the assassination has been altered or fabricated. It is an appealing argument, until it is broken down and analysed. It relies on blurring the distinction between VIEWING copies of the film and PUBLISHING copies of the film to millions of readers. The latter is a "toothpaste out of the tube" exercise: once you've published something in LIFE or the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, it's distributed on paper to millions of readers and you will never be able to retract them all. Viewing a copy of the film, in contrast, is completely different. As I note in HOAX, those who viewed it once, or a few times, or even a dozen times, in the days after the assassination would not have "retained" more than the basic scenario of what happened, and that they saw the President's head almost blown right off. For the purposes of people VIEWING the film, it was relatively simple with 1963 technology to alter the gross aspects of what is depicted in the film, within a matter of hours at most (see David Healy's chapter in HOAX). What those early viewers saw (including, famously, Dan Rather) was probably something intermediate between genuine footage of the event, and what we now have as "the Zapruder film", which is probably why events were described differently by those early viewers of the film. (Dan Rather describes the President's head being blown FORWARD, not "back and to the left"; surveyors using frames from the film for a reconstruction reported a number of frames showing blobs of bloody matter ejected from the REAR of the President's head, which of course are no longer in the film; and so on.) Even Abraham Zapruder himself insisted that he filmed the limo as it turned the corner onto Elm, but this is not present in the extant "Zapruder" film. There are many more issues that we could go into, covered in HOAX, namely, that there are serious doubts as to whether Zapruder was even filming, or at least whether he was filming for the whole duration of the shots; that Zapruder's thick spectacles would have made it almost impossible to look through the viewfinder of the camera, and there was no optical correction; that he claimed that the viewfinder gave him a zoomed view of the event, whereas it actually doesn't; that the only known photograph of Zapruder using his camera shows that his eye is not looking through the viewfinder at all; that there are three fundamentally different versions of Zapruder's signature in existence, one of which appears on an FBI statement and one on his alleged contract with Time-Life, which cannot have been signed by the same man; and so on. The can of worms really is endless. You really gotta read the book. I'm not trying to make royalties (I don't get a cent from it) -- borrow it from the library and read it for all I care. Hope that gives members here a flavour of what the Z film arguments are about. John