Andrej Stancak

2 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

So I just had an e-mail exchange with Dr Rudin. As I suspected her software is not suitable for identifying Prayer Man. In fact, she wrote that

I guess that means we'll never know who Prayer Man is. There's just not enough information in the picture.

I guess it only means that Dr Rudin's method is not suitable for disclosing with certainty the true appearance of someone's face if the image is blurred. It would still be interesting to see what face would come out from their AI analysis if the face of Prayer Man would be used as input.

Mathias:

I wish you good luck with the AI analysis and hope you will update us about any progress.

10 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

I wonder if artificial intelligence could be used to improve the quality of Prayer Man's image. Software that could be capable of this has recently been developed.

 

So, Mathias, will you contact Cynthia Rudin regarding enhancing Prayer Man in Darnell? Will you implement their free Python code and run Prayer Man image as input? I can help you with identifying the still possibly having the best chance to reveal facial features if you decide to pursue this interesting line of research. 

Mathias:

I now know that one person who will not be convinced about the possibility that Prayer Man was Lee Oswald is you. It is also clear to me that you will spent zero effort in pursuing Prayer Man topic with your own research. Why then did you reopen this thread after 8 months since the last post?

On 8/20/2020 at 1:41 PM, Mathias Baumann said:

I have a question for those who believe that "Prayer Man" was Lee H. Oswald.

In your opinion, what role did Oswald play in the assassination?

I believe that Oswald did play some part in the assassination. Otherwise it would've been very difficult for the conspirators to make him the "patsy". And because of his Russian and Marxist background Oswald was the perfect scapegoat. I think the conspirators knew that his association to "Comrade Kostin" would make sure that the authorities would not touch any evidence for the involvement of other shooters. So Oswald had to be the fall guy.

But for that the conspirators needed to have some control over him. And they surely could not allow him wandering around outside the building. If one of them (Dark Complected Man? Umbrella Man?) had spotted him they would certainly have aborted the assassination. So they had to make sure they knew where he was. And what better way than putting him in the 6th floor window with a rifle?

I also think that we cannot discard the possibility that Prayer Man is not one of the TSBD staff at all but just a random bystander. Everyone was anxiously waiting for the motorcade to arrive, so I think it's not unlikely that they (the staff) would not have noticed a stranger looking for a good spot to take some photos (I think it has been argued that "Prayer Man" might be holding a camera in his hands).

Mathias:

all the questions of yours are valid. I have been contemplating those questions while working on different aspects of Prayer Man problem.

1. As far as Oswald's active role in the assassination is concerned, his role may have ranged from not knowing anything about the plot itself, to being part of a mock assassination attempt, to eventually being an essential and willing part of the assassination plot while realising too late that all the plausible denials that he was assured of have collapsed one by one on Friday afternoon.

The most "innocent" scenario, as many have suggested already, could be that Lee Oswald was asked to bring his rifle to the Depository on Friday morning to trade it. Lee had his lunch in the first-floor lunchroom and heard a wave of noise as the motorcade approached Houston street and decided to find out what was this excitement about. His decision to go out would accords Captain Fritz's notes and the handwritten notes of the FBI agent James Hosty uncovered recently by Bart Kamp. Lee would arrive to the doorway after President's limo passed the Depository (which explains the absence of Prayer Man in Hughes film) and within seconds of the last shot (which explains his presence in the doorway in the Wiegman film). The rifle trade scenario is supported by Gerry Patrick Hemming's statements who bragged about offering to Lee a price double of the purchase price.

The mock-assassination scenario has been elaborated quite well by Walt Brown. The presence of Lee in the doorway could have been a calculated plausible denial which would later serve to exonerate Lee Oswald after initially linking him with the assassination through his rifle. 

The most conspiratorial scenario would see Lee actively conspiring with Jack Ruby, anti-Castro Cubans and rogue CIA agents to kill President Kennedy only to find that the plan went different to what he was told. 

Whichever scenario was true, two aspects are the common denominators to all scenarios. First, Lee Oswald brought his rifle to the building, and second, he realised being a patsy right away, within seconds of the shooting. If Lee would not bring his rifle to the building and would he stand in the doorway, there was no way of  pinning any crime on him, at least not that quickly to make him flee the building. The moment of his realisation, in my view, is depicted in Darnell stills. One can see that all doorway occupants naturally adjust their locations and gazes to optimise their views of the Triple underpass area. Not so Prayer Man. He stares in direction of the Records building or similar. This is very odd and suggests he was frozen and spent time pondering what to do next. Interestingly, another person who also fails to optimise his view of Grassy Knoll/Triple underpass was Buell Wesley Frazier. 

2. The level of control over Lee Oswald's movements is a relevant aspect of the case. I would again refer to the three possible scenarios outlined above as the level of control depends on what was Lee Oswald's role. It is possible that, e.g., in the mock-assassination scenario, he was even asked to go out and let be seen by other employees as this would be used to exonerate him after all other leads would initially point to him.

3. It is also necessary to consider that Prayer Man was a random person from the crowd of people standing in Dealey Plaza area. I found only one hint that somebody may have walked into the doorway when the motorcade was passing through Houston and Elm street. Ronald Fischer made a peculiar remark in his November 22 affidavit:

"I do remember one peculair [sic] thing happened just at the time I saw the man up there. There was a girl walked in the Texas School Book Depository Building, a rather tall girl, and she looked to me like she might be an employee in that building. She was walking in while everyone else had been coming out."

   https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/fischer1.htm

However, Prayer Man was definitely not a female and therefore, Fischer's remark does not account for Prayer Man's figure. 

In order for someone from the crowd to walk up the steps and be photographed as Prayer Man, the person would have to possess all the features which Prayer Man shares with Lee Oswald. The likelihood of a random person from a sample of about 500-550 people showing the same features which Prayer Man shares with Lee Oswald would be extremely small. It would have to be a male, a Caucasian, a man sized 5' 9 1/2'', have a hairline of male baldness Type II,  have dark hair, someone who used to stand with his left foot in the front and the leg flexed in knee joint (and whose own brother used to stand this way too), he would have to wear worker type of clothes with shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the top one or two buttons open (as Lee Oswald used to do), with shirt likely being of maroon colour (this color converts into the grey seen on Prayer Man in Darnell), would wear grey pants (not black), with greys of the shirt and pants being identical to the shirt CE150 and pants CE157, and have the shirt pulled out of trousers. The likelihood of all these features occurring simultaneously by chance is very, very small.

There is one more aspect which promises to lower the random chance of someone from the crowd stepping in as Prayer Man - it is the distribution of dark specks on CE150, the maroon (light red) shirt which Lee Oswald wore on Friday morning. If the distribution of the dark specks fits with the dark area seen on Prayer Man's shirt in Darnell, the proof of identity would be indisputable. It is this aspect of Prayer Man's figure I am focusing at in my Tom Wilson project.

Thanks, Chris, this is very helpful. I hope to be able to to reproduce the exact body and head orientations in Z315 and Mary Moorman picture to check your estimate with a different approach.

However, I also see a good point in Joe's comment too - did the mass of the tissue really go off from the President's head in Mary Moorman picture? Could there be a double shot with Mary Moorman only capturing the first, maybe the less devastating head shot?

Chris:

I hope you will not find this message as too far from the main thread, however, I would like to know your opinion on the exact timing of Mary Moorman picture relative to Zapruder film. Did you have a chance to look into this? My estimate just from eyeballing the similarities of JFK's body posture in Moorman picture and Zapruder film is that Moorman picture could be equivalent to Z314 or Z315. Any thoughts would be very much appreciated.

On 6/20/2020 at 12:35 AM, John Butler said:

“Later on, he invited me to go to a party on Davis Street. Candy Barr’s party.

This part of Mrs. Hollies's recollection can hardly be true. Candy Barr was released from jail on April 1, 1963 and was not allowed to live, not to mention giving any striptease performances, in Dallas. She lived in Edna, Texas (about 5 hour drive from Dallas) during the time of President's assassination. How could Lee Oswald attend her party on Davis Street, Dallas in Autumn of 1963?

John:

thanks for posting the excerpts from Mary Hollies's Oral History interview. Her statements contain some mind-boggling data, of course, if her recollections are truthful. 

Below is her statement for the FBI. It is one of many statements the FBI took from the Depository employees, and all these statements are in CE 1381. The remarkable thing is that all the statements follow the same template and are as non-informative as possible. The FBI did not want to hear about any employees' encounters with Lee Oswald at all.

Regarding the thread itself, I believe that Lee Oswald rode a bus to work regularly but nobody, no even the first generation researchers, chose to ask the bus drivers about Lee Oswald. It is a shame, however, Oswald was likewise not asked about how he got from his room at North Beckley to the Texas Theater. Postal Inspector Holmes was asked by the Warren Commission about whether the interrogators have probed Lee Oswald on his exact route from North Beckley to the Texas Theater, and Holmes conferred he had assumed that this point was already clarified in previous interrogation sessions... There was no genuine interest in learning about Lee Oswald's way of life, his contacts and how he spent time. The most efficient way how not to learn anything of significance from a suspect is to allow him to be killed.

16 hours ago, Steven Kossor said:

In a very short span of space & time (unless the limousine stopped, in which case the time interval would necessarily be lengthened), it appears that so much head movement must have happened (a turn to the right before receiving the wound that caused the blowout at the back of the head to exhaust material onto the driver's side tail light and officer Hargis, then a turn to the left to be captured by Mary Moorman's photo).  Is anyone disagreeing that the physical evidence I'm citing necessarily requires the head movements I'm describing?

Steven:

your point regarding exact head orientation is a crucial one, and it is interesting how it aligns with Chris's comment. While Chris works on the reconstruction of the exact movements and locations of President's limo, the exact spatial location of President's head is equally important for any trajectory analysis. 

I took advantage from a photograph having a similar view angle of JFK's head and shoulders in one of the motorcade photographs, however, this is only a rough approximation of the exact orientation of President's head in MM picture. 

Sorry to boil my soup one more time, however, it appears necessary to build an accurate 3D model of President's body, especially of his head, and arrange the model head in the space to match President's figure in Mary Moorman picture and in several critical frames of Z film. This would also allow to understand the correspondence between Z-film and MM and it would also be an independent verification of the timeline provided by Chris and Mark.

16 hours ago, Chris Davidson said:

Andrej,

I think I have to correct that back to 2.379ft past the extant z313 location.

The 4.5ft mark was only part of the adjustment process which I will soon explain.

Irregardless, Tom was right about the syncing problems that he mentions in the interview.

This is an amazing progress, anyway. Knowing the precise timing and the exact location of the fatal shot is a prerequisite for any trajectory analysis. Sorry for not contributing to your thread, I am just busy with the image analysis method project.

10 hours ago, Chris Davidson said:

Tom was close at 4ft farther down Elm.

Documentation proves out to 4.5ft

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T_L-ofjszZmZnMK9raiElwQfYA9YjZqx/view?usp=sharing

 

Thanks for this update of the exact location of President's limo at the time of the fatal head shot. It is reassuring that two experts have independently arrived at a very similar estimate.🏆  

It would be a big loss for the Forum if Bart had left. I hope we will be able to see Bart's contributions on this Forum soon again. Personal animosities do exist among people, however, they are just Māyā and as such they should not disrupt our routes.

Thanks, Ray, for reading my posts and your comment.

Here is a mold of the head wound prepared by Tom Wilson. According to Don Phillips's book "A deeper, darker truth", Tom worked on this 3D representation of Kennedy's head wound, that he was able to see in Mary Moorman picture, for three months. Tom allegedly scanned the picture in a similar way as a CT or an MR would scan the brain. I would love to know what parameters of lighting and recording was Tom changing, obviously in some systematic manner.

The top panel shows the head wound (Tom's mold) whereby the missing space represents the lost tissue. This is a view posterior transversal view (as if you would have your eyes about behind the back of President's head and would look toward the wound. The right is on the right. The bottom panel is a 3D representation of the same wound (obtained from the same copy of Mary Moorman's picture) reconstructed from my experiments. 

Both reconstructions have a lot of common. There are two tunnels possibly due to two bullets or two fragments of one bullet, however, there is only so much detail one can extract from this image and it is also possible that one bullet caused one big wound with this geometry. The right tunnel is taller than the left tunnel but the left tunnel appears to be broader than the right tunnel. Both tunnels expand towards the rear. The two tunnels are separated by tissues which create a wall and that wall is orientated in about 15-20 degree angle toward the right.

If the two holes and the tunnels would be due to to particles (bullets or bullet fragments), the right particle would likely continue straight backward and the left particle would go leftward toward the two motorcycle officers riding at the left fender of President's limo.

To continue the exploration of President's head wound in Mary Moorman's picture and of course, to see if it would be possible to reproduce Tom Wilson's data, I made own photographic experiments by shooting Mary Moorman's picture under different light conditions (xenon flashes at 5 Hz with background light, produced by halogen lamps, varying in 5-s cycles) and recording video using a machine vision near-infrared camera. The camera has an expanded spectral range for wavelengths above visible light (>780 nm) up to about 1150 nm. I also use different optical band-pass filters.

This is the setup which I currently use. The camera is the small gadget on the massive tripod in the right-hand side part of this picture.

Here I would show data from plain recordings of Mary Moorman picture (no added lights) taken under a diffuse bright daylight using a slow frame rate of 10 Hz and allowing a long exposition time. These images have very little noise. Further, the recording was made using a 12-bit mono format yielding 4096 levels of grey instead of the standard 256 levels. This high dynamic range and recording images in the whole spectrum (up to about 1150 nm) allows to sample the levels of grey contained in the image with a much finer resolution of grey tones than a human eye can ever offer.

Here is an example of such recording. The top panel is the digital copy of MM picture and the lower panel is a cropped view of the printed MM picture after averaging 20 s of recording (200 images). One can see more signal at the location of the wound compared to the original digital copy and a couple more details which I could show next time.

This image as it is (so, no processing at all, just averaging the video frames) was then analysed using ImageJ program. One of the remarkable features of this program is that it allows to reconstruct the gradations of grey according to the brightness gradient and shows the gradations as a 3D volume. 

Here is a volume-rendered, brightness-coded (inverted), image of JFK's head in MM picture. Please note absence of any structure at a site which I delineated with red line in the lower picture. This is obviously the region where both the scalp and skull are missing. The blue line  tentatively delineates the total damaged area. 

I took this volume reconstruction and placed it onto the intact head of President Kennedy to see where approximately the damage would be. The blue line shows the entire damaged area and the red line shows the deep hole spot.

It is also possible to explore the detailed topography of the head wound. Here I prepared a coloured texture representation of the wound. In accord with Tom Wilson's data, there appear to be two tunnels expanding toward the rear suggesting exit of the missile. Whether there were two bullets (one entering in the frontal region of the head in the hairline behind and above the right eye and another in the right temporal region above and slightly in front of the right ear) or whether one bullet has split into two with each part causing one tunnel, I do not know. 

The JFKA pictures are often difficult to interpret. It may be useful to have a look on the natural structure of President's hair and copy some features onto MM picture. The picture below shows two natural paths in Kennedy's hair, traces of which can be recognised in the reconstructed MM picture. It is maybe only a detail but a useful one as it provides some orientation in what otherwise appears a non-structured mess in Mary Moorman's picture. The top pictures offers a full view of Kennedy's hair and the lower pictures contain lines corresponding to the two hair paths.

Thanks, Ray, for posting Tom Wilson's findings related to Mary Moorman picture. Tom was even able to prepare a 3D mold fitting the head wound based on extensive analysis of this picture. 

While my work on Tom Wilson's method is still ongoing, I can share some findings which actually do not require Tom Wilson's method and yet support his work.

First, I took a high-quality picture of President Kennedy that was recorded just briefly before the shooting (however, I do not know which film or picture was it). The picture was downloaded from a web site JFK Place (Deannie Richardson) which does not exist any longer but can be still visited via waybackmachine.org. This picture is the lower of the two in the montage below. The top picture is a cropped view of JFK and First Lady in a high-quality FBI version of MM. The bottom picture shows the President from a very similar angle as the MM picture while the head is intact. Therefore, I was able to cut the head from the bottom picture and overlay it onto MM. The purpose of this small exercise was to find out what are the true contours of JFK's head in MM and what would be the tissue loss in Kennedy's head in MM picture.

The next picture shows overlays of MM and the intact head from the picture above at different rates. 0% means that MM does not penetrate into the picture with intact head and the increasing  percentages point to a stronger propagation of MM from behind the intact head. The blending of 50% and 75% are especially useful for evaluation of the size of damage to President's head. 

In the context of this thread, the light-coloured flap on the right shoulder does not appear to be a part of President's body. I would not speculate at this stage about the origin of this shape.

On 5/16/2020 at 1:45 PM, David Lifton said:

When I was studying the image, probably using a magnifying glass, the person in charge said something like: "We don't save that stuff, so if you want it you can have it. Its yours."  (Really!  That's what he said.)  Obviously, I accepted the offer, and that's how I came to possess the San Francisco wire-service negative of the AP Wire photo designated "DN-22," a negative created (in San Francisco) when the Moorman photo was first transmitted -- nationally-- on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.  The shoulder patch --which I don't believe I was aware of at the time-- was right there on the negative, but so were the various images of "the men" behind the wall,  which was my main focus.  These were the images that had so excited me and started me down the path of my original research -- as described in Chapter 1 of B.E.

David:

it may be too much to ask, however, many people who are seriously involved in analysis of JFK photographic materials would appreciate very much the possibility to work with a certified copy of Mary Moorman's picture. Unfortunately, this photograph circulates in too many versions on Internet and no one would dare to draw any conclusions from such copies not knowing which version is valid.

If it would be possible, could you please have your negative of Mary Moorman be scanned digitally in colour mode (even if it is a black-and-white picture) with a resolution of at least 1200 dpi and saved in a TIFF format (in no case a jpeg format). One way of granting access to the digital copy of MM picture would be to post a link to Dropbox or a similar sharing service. The file, if prepared this way, may be very large (about 100 Mb) and could hardly be emailed.

Thanks for considering my request.

The conversation between Bill Lynch and James Curtis Jenkins in "At the Cold Shoulder of History" may be of relevance here. Bill Lynch used to assist at the autopsies at Bethesda morgue like Jenkins, however, November 22 was not Lynch's watch. The conversation raised the issues of a head block (Bethesda morgue did not use metal plates to support the head), tiles, the location of the phone and the stretchable phone cable. However, it seems that these two gentlemen discussed a different photograph than the one showed by David. It could be the photograph showing the President from the left profile. All in all, it seems entirely possible that the initial set of pictures (before the U incision was made on the chest) was taken somewhere else. 

Late edit: I just saw the picture posted by Sandy, that was the one I was thinking of.

Scepticism is a healthy attitude which protects against unwarranted conclusions based on poor evidence. The real problem is the lack of proper description of image analysis method by Tom Wilson himself which would allow straightforward verification of his findings. Only retracing Tom's steps would allow to say whether Tom's findings, some or all, were sound. However, this is not an easy task. It is certainly easier to say that that I believe Tom's method or results were not sound than going to the bottom of it, studying the theory of photonics, Tom's archive, reading books which were in Tom's possession, analysing his interim digital data, setting up specific lights, evaluating which type of camera sensor would do the same job as Tom's camera,  figuring out which of the current image analysis methods would be the closest to Tom's method, and a lot of experimenting and programming on top of it. Enter funds because the camera ,filters, lights, electronics and computer programs are expensive. I understand fully why people better say they do not believe in Tom's findings rather than attempting to reconstruct the method and replicating the findings.

2 hours ago, John Butler said:

I agree Andrej,

I will not say anything else about Altgens 6.  Except to explain why I thought your film imagery was bizarre:

The image of the Doorway Man looks like a female.  The Oswald figure with the Lovelady face mask is definitely male.  What I found was bizarre is the female figure looks like Thug Rose, a female MMA fighter.  Sorry.

 

 John: 

I only had a front view of Mrs Stanton's face and therefore, I could not sculpt all her facial and body features as you would wish. Mrs. Stanton was a huge lady, indeed, and this is reflected in her figure. You can say that her body looked like a body of a huge female you mentioned. I have contacted a member of Mrs Stanton family with a polite question if they would have some other pictures showing Sarah Stanton in her business clothes and from different angles, and I hope such pictures will be available in due course. This would allow to model Mrs Stanton even better than I managed to do so far. However, the exact facial features of Mrs Stanton are not required to test if a female like herself could stand in the space between Lovelady and Shelley and if there was, actually, any space between the two men. Altgens6 shows only a partial face of that person anyway.

However, I am afraid that you misunderstood my work completely as your sentence "The Oswald figure with the Lovelady face mask is definitely a male" says. My video says that if you model Lovelady's face and his body according to his photographs (and I used the FBI pictures showing him both from profile and front), there will not be any disparity between Altgens6 and my model which validates the presence of Billy Lovelady at that spot (he only erred in saying that he had stood on the top step - he could not stand on the top step as my model shows). The extra patches near his face belong to another person but that person was real - it was not a photographic manipulation.

I presented my video in a different thread and it may be more appropriate to continue the debate on my work there.

On a more general note, to the best of my knowledge, there is no other way of learning about the locations and body postures of people in the doorway than the 3D modelling. It is near impossible to re-enact the photograph for many reasons, and just staring on Altgens6 does not give you any more information than you have. That said, I am amazed by the collective blindness of generations of researchers who failed to spot and properly investigate the bright oval object seen next to Billy Lovelady's face. I surely must look like a fool for spotting it and investigating it for five years. The usual reaction of researchers facing this finding is: "It cannot be there because I saw this picture so many times in the past and did not see it, so how can it be there?".  Likewise, I could dismiss this shape by saying: "Thousands of people before me looked at the doorway in Altgens6 and no one said there was a bright object next to Lovelady's face, so I also do not see it, it is not there, it would have been reported long time ago". 

Anyway, this gives me some hope that other pictures may show similarly inconspicuous but clearly visible and maybe important details.

While I would also like to voice my recommendation for being cautious in claiming manipulations with JFKA photos and films, there is also a scope for revealing details in old  photographic documents using novel image analysis tools. Returning the thread to its origin, this is what Tom Wilson had in mind when he had applied his methods for non-destructive testing of materials to JFKA photographs. In fact, I believe that if there is any smoking gun out there, it would be in films and pictures because people back then in 1960' could not even figure out what information could be retrieved from visual data. 

15 minutes ago, Rob Clark said:

Actually my original question was about the BYP...the Tom Wilson image that showed what he found under the "mask".  Andrej hijacked the thread with his Altgens crap...

My reposte is above...

Not really, I just had to respond to John's post in response to my post in which John wrote that Altgens6 was manipulated the same way as backyard photographs. I had to resist and this is how Altgens6 got into this thread. 

This essay provides as close as possible picture of the group of anti-Castro Cubans and CIA operatives that eventually embarked on the Kennedy assassination mission. 

The question is whether some members of AMWORLD also took part in actual shooting or were they just around to provide a likely but false lead? I was intrigued by the appearance of Hal Feeney in one of the photographs shown in the article because his head bears some similarity to the partial human figure discovered by Robert Groden in one of Dillard pictures.

We have a thread about Hal Feeney on this Forum:

1 hour ago, John Butler said:

I based what I saw in Altgens 6 on the material in the photo and not some derived model interpreting what I believe to be there or want to be there.  This image is to bizarre to comment on and in no way depicts what is shown in Altgens 6..

This image is a 3D reconstruction of the doorway scene. Why would it be so bizarre? How else if not through the presence of a person standing behind Lovelady can you explain the bright oval object next to Lovelady face? And if you agree that the object was a partial face, there are only two candidate persons: Sarah Stanton and Pauline Sanders. The image you find bizarre refers to the preferred solution having Sarah Stanton as the person standing in the space between Shelley and Lovelady. Not sure why do you find it bizarre.