Keven Hofeling

Kevin Balch wrote: It appears to me that the bullet trajectory calculated by former criminalist Sherry Fiester solves the problem you are highlighting: Kevin Balch wrote: You seem to be suggesting that there is uncertainty about the existence of the large avulsive head wound in the occipital-parietal region of the right side of the back of JFK's head, but as all of the earliest medical reports of the doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital (See in particular the first day Admittance Notes of Drs. Kemp Clark, Charles Carrico, Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, Robert McClelland, and Marion Jenkins [ https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm ]) reported the occipital-parietal wound with extruding cerebellar brain tissue, and roughly a total of FIFTY witnesses attested to the existence of that wound (See Dr. Gary Aguilar's witness calculations below) it is, as JFK researcher @Sandy Larsen has demonstrated elsewhere, a mathematical impossibility that the large avulsive head wound was located anywhere other than in the right lower quadrant of the back of JFK's head: This is a link to Dr. Gary Aguilar's compilation of the earliest testimony of the Parkland Hospital AND Bethesda autopsy witnesses -- http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm -- and the following chart is in part based upon the the witness accounts outlined in the article by Dr. Gary Aguilar: -------------------------------------------------- DR. GARY AGUILAR'S APPENDIX - TABLES AND FIGURES: https://history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/How5Investigations/How5InvestigationsGotItWrong_tabfig.htm Kevin Balch wrote: First of all, can you see that this supposed "shadow" is a D-max black hexagon shaped blotch with sharp edges? Does that really appear to be a "natural shadow" to you? Secondly, are you able to see the pink color of Jackie's dress in the Z-317 below? If you can see pink in shadow, then why not the bloody occipital-parietal wound in "shadow"? And finally, if we can see Jackie's red roses in the same images, then why are we not also vividly seeing the blood, brain and skull that was blasted out of the back of JFK's head? Kevin Balch wrote: Dino Brugioni's hand gestures were very imprecise, and off hand. The point he was trying to make is that he and the NPIC technicians saw brain matter flying through the air, and that they were all very shocked when seeing it. More particularly, he was describing something that no longer appears in the extant "original" Zapruder film today: "...Brugioni's most vivid recollection of the Zapruder film was "...OF JFK'S BRAINS FLYING THROUGH THE AIR." (emphasis not in original) He did not use the term 'head explosion,' but rather referred to apparent exit debris seen on the film the night he viewed it. Dino had no other specific recollection about content during the 2009 interviews..." Furthermore, Dino Brugioni makes virtually the same statement while being interviewed by Doug Horne at 57:42 of the interview: https://youtu.be/J_QIuu6hsAc?t=3463 (Video is cued to 57:42 in advance for you). And note that the bulk of the witness testimony indicates that blood, brain and skull was blasted out the back of JFK's head, to the rear, and to the left: __________ "...BLOOD, BRAIN MATTER, AND BONE FRAGMENTS EXPLODED FROM THE BACK OF THE PRESIDENT'S HEAD. THE PRESIDENT'S BLOOD, PARTS OF HIS SKULL, BITS OF HIS BRAIN WERE SPLATTERED ALL OVER ME -- ON MY FACE, MY CLOTHES, IN MY HAIR..." Secret Service Agent Clint Hill (in his 2012 book "Mrs. Kennedy and Me: An Intimate Memoir"). __________ "...I HAD BRAIN MATTER ALL OVER MY WINDSHIELD AND LEFT ARM, THAT'S HOW CLOSE WE WERE TO IT ... IT WAS THE RIGHT REAR PART OF HIS HEAD ... BECAUSE THAT'S THE PART I SAW BLOW OUT. I SAW HAIR COME OUT, THE PIECES BLOW OUT, THEN THE SKIN WENT BACK IN -- AN EXPLOSION IN AND OUT..." Secret Service Agent Samuel Kinney (3/5/1994 interview by Vince Palamara). __________ "...WHEN PRESIDENT KENNEDY STRAIGHTENED BACK UP IN THE CAR THE BULLET HIT HIM IN THE HEAD, THE ONE THAT KILLED HIM AND IT SEEMED LIKE HIS HEAD EXPLODED, AND I WAS SPLATTERED WITH BLOOD AND BRAIN, AND KIND OF A BLOODY WATER...." Dallas Motorcycle Patrolman Bobby Hargis (4/8/1964 Warren Commission testimony). __________ "...I CAN REMEMBER SEEING THE SIDE OF THE PRESIDENT'S EAR AND HEAD COME OFF. I REMEMBER A FLASH OF WHITE AND THE RED AND JUST BITS AND PIECES OF FLESH EXPLODING FROM THE PRESIDENT'S HEAD..." Dealey Plaza witness Bill Newman interviewed about the JFK assassination -- 0:13-0:27 -- https://youtu.be/EEhlbAwI7Zg?t=13 __________ "...THE HEAD SHOT SEEMED TO COME FROM THE RIGHT FRONT. IT SEEMED TO STRIKE HIM HERE [gesturing to her upper right forehead, up high at the hairline], AND HIS HEAD WENT BACK, AND ALL OF THE BRAIN MATTER WENT OUT THE BACK OF THE HEAD. IT WAS LIKE A RED HALO, A RED CIRCLE, WITH BRIGHT MATTER IN THE MIDDLE OF IT - IT JUST WENT LIKE THAT...." Dealey Plaza witness Marilyn Willis from 24:26-24:58 of TMWKK, Episode 1, at following link cued in advance for you https://youtu.be/BW98fHkbuD8?t=1466 ). __________ "...Charles Brehm: 0:21 WHEN THE SECOND BULLET HIT, THERE WAS, THE HAIR SEEMED TO GO FLYING. IT WAS VERY DEFINITE THEN THAT HE WAS STRUCK IN THE HEAD WITH THE SECOND BULLET, AND, UH, YES, I VERY DEFINITELY SAW THE EFFECT OF THE SECOND BULLET. Mark Lane: 0:38 Did you see any particles of the President's skull fly when the bullet struck him in the head? Charles Brehm: 0:46 I SAW A PIECE FLY OVER OH IN THE AREA OF THE CURB WHERE I WAS STANDING. Mark Lane: 0:53 In which direction did that fly? Charles Brehm: 0:56 IT SEEMED TO HAVE COME LEFT AND BACK...." Dealey Plaza witness Charles Brehm interviewed about JFK assassination by Mark Lane for the 1967 documentary "Rush to Judgment": https://youtu.be/RsnHXywKIKs __________ "...I SAW THE HEAD PRACTICALLY OPEN UP AND BLOOD AND MANY MORE THINGS, WHATEVER IT WAS, BRAINS, JUST CAME OUT OF HIS HEAD...." Testimony of Dealey Plaza witness Abraham Zapruder -- who filmed the assassination -- at the Clay Shaw trial -- https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/testimony/zapruder_shaw2.htm __________ "...I also asked him if he saw the explosion of blood and brains out of the head. He replied that he did. I asked him if he noticed which direction the eruption went. He pointed back over his left shoulder. He said, "IT WENT THIS WAY." I said, "You mean it went to the left and rear?" He said, "YES." Bartholomew then asked him, "Are you sure that you didn't see the blood and brains going up and to the front?" Schwartz said, "NO; IT WAS TO THE LEFT AND REAR...." Excerpt from interview of Erwin Schwartz -- Abraham Zapruder's business partner -- who accompanied Zapruder to develop the camera-original Zapruder film, and saw the camera-original projected more than a dozen times. Bloody Treason by Noel Twyman. __________ "...Brugioni's most vivid recollection of the Zapruder film was "...OF JFK'S BRAINS FLYING THROUGH THE AIR." He did not use the term 'head explosion,' but rather referred to apparent exit debris seen on the film the night he viewed it. "...AND WHAT I'LL NEVER FORGET WAS -- I KNEW THAT HE HAD BEEN ASSASSINATED -- BUT WHEN WE ROLLED THE FILM AND I SAW A GOOD PORTION OF HIS HEAD FLYING THROUGH THE AIR, THAT SHOCKED ME, AND THAT SHOCKED EVERYBODY WHO WAS THERE..." Excerpt from interview of Dino Brugioni -- Photoanalyst at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center -- who viewed the camera-original Zapruder film the evening of 11/23/1963. Douglas Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board" , 2009, Volume IV, Chapter 14, page 1329. Yet we see none of that in the following slow motion Zapruder film footage of the head shot. Instead, we only see the D-max black hexagon shaped blotch with sharp edges: Kevin Balch wrote: Just what exactly is it, really, that you are seeing in the extant "original" Zapruder film headshot sequence? What I see depicted as the large avulsive headwound is a cantaloupe sized crater in JFK's forehead which is not present in the autopsy photographs, and which none of the witnesses at Parkland Hospital and at the Bethesda autopsy ever reported. And why exactly is it that in Z-335 and Z-337 we are seeing Jackie's pink shoulder pad where we should be seeing JFK's forehead?: And why isn't the cantaloupe sized hole in JFK's forehead that we see in the extant "original" Zapruder film in the autopsy photographs?

To explain the head damage that the bulk of the testamentary and documentary evidence from Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital and the Bethesda autopsy indicates was caused by the headshot at Zapruder frame 313, this is the trajectory we must have: The team that conducted the assassination had trained to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro by triangulated ambush gunfire, so the analysis of the trajectories must take into account that it was a triangulated fire team that shot at President Kennedy from multiple directions: The following is the best information available about the paramilitary unit that carried out the triangulated ambush assassination of President Kennedy. There are multiple corroborating witnesses for this evidence. It also corroborates the revelations made by Santo Trafficante to his lawyers, In this article, Bill Kelly makes cryptic references to a living person knowledgeable about these events who Kelly does not name. My assumption is that he is referring to Carl Jenkins: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'PATHFINDER - PARTS 1 - 5 THE PLAN TO KILL CASTRO REDIRECTED TO JFK AT DALLAS' William Kelly | JFKcountercoup | Saturday, December 22, 2018 | https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/12/pathfinder-parts-1-5-plan-to-kill.html https://www.facebook.com/groups/politicalassassinationsresearchgroup/posts/6051134211609264/ "...As Bill Turner put it, “the mechanism was in place” to kill Castro, and they just switched targets, and instead of shooting Castro they redirected their fire to JFK at Dealey Plaza...." "...[W]e have now narrowed down the covert operational plans to kill Castro to a few – including Pathfinder that may have been the specific plan that was redirected to “snuff” JFK in Dallas. If it wasn't Pathfinder, it was one very much like it. Now we will soon know the names of the shooters – the five first-class Cuban mechanic-snipers who were paid and trained by the CIA to kill Castro but one or two of whom shot JFK in the head instead...." "...“I took high powered rifles with scopes to Cuba,” Eugenio Martinez said, “and they weren’t going to be used to hunt rabbits.” “Chi Chi” Quintero was a shooter, said Wheaton, who also names five or six other Cubans who were on that team, that maritime crew of anti-Castro Cuban commandos who were paid and trained to kill Castro. But when that mission was scrubbed – “disapproved” by “higher authority,” and they learned of the JFK- Castro backchannel negotiations at the UN (from Henry Cabot Lodge), they redirected the Pathfinder target to JFK at Dealey Plaza. And considered themselves patriots for doing so...." "...The U.S. Army Rangers are called Pathfinders, and two U.S. Army Ranger Captains - Bradley Ayers and Edward Roderick were assigned to the CIA by USMC General "Brut" Krulak to train the Cuban Commandos at JMWAVE. While Ayers trained the Cubans in small boat maneuvering at Pirate's Lair, Roderick trained the snipers at Point Mary, off Key Largo. The original anti-Castro Cuban Pathfinders were the best of the lot sent to Guatemala to train for the Bay of Pigs, and were commanded by US Marine Captain Carl Jenkins, whose specialty was infiltration and exfiltration of commandos while John "I.F" Harper trained the Cubans in explosives and sniper tactics...." The fire plan of the hit team probably looked something like the following: Immediately following the assassination, many witnesses (including DPD motorcycle patrolmen who had been flanking the limo, and Secret Service agents from the follow up cars [when the motorcade stopped]) ran up the grassy knoll chasing the sound of gunshots, but as you have pointed out, there are problems with this trajectory being the explanation for the right temple entry wound and large avulsive occipital parietal exit wound, and the trajectory from the sixth floor of the TSBD is even worse. However, note the trajectory from the South Knoll (lower left side of diagram), which appears more feasible: Also immediately after the assassination, many witnesses (including a DPD police officer) ran up to the corner of the picket fence and triple overpass cement railing chasing the sound of gunshots, but there are also problems with this trajectory being the explanation for the right temple entry wound and large avulsive occipital parietal exit wound: JFK assassination researcher Sherry Fiester, a former Certified Senior Crime Scene Analyst and court certified expert in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, totaling in over 30 Judicial Districts and Louisiana State Federal Court https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00B4TSUV2/about , has made a convincing case that the shot through the windshield of the Presidential Limousine, and JFK's right temple and occipital-parietal wounds were caused by gunshots from an assassin located at the South Knoll, as diagramed below: As diagrammed in the following, a gunshot trajectory originating from the South Knoll appears to be a solution to the problems you have pointed out: The following is a very helpful video which showcases Sherry Fiester's evidence for the gunshots which penetrated the limousine windshield and the headshot to the President having originated from the South Knoll: In short, the existing evidence (much of which I have not presented here) to me strongly suggests that there was a triangulated fire team shooting from multiple directions, and that President Kennedy was shot in the throat (either by the limousine windshield bullet of a glass fragment from the windshield shot), and in the right temple (exiting from the rear right quadrant of JFK's head), and that numerous nearly simultaneous gunshots missed the mark, doing other damage to the limo and to Govenor Connelly.

I think that David Boylan is absolutely correct that Carl Jenkins and Felix Rodriguez are the two living people who are most intimately knowledgeable about the inner-workings of the assassination operation that actualized the 1963 coup d'état at Dealey Plaza. An intriguing coincidence relevant to this topic occurred this last February shortly before a podcast interview with Felix Rodriguez. The interviewer, Danny Jones, was speaking with constitutional law professor and lawyer Danny Sheehan, who was discussing the S-Force - the paramilitary unit which carried out JFK's assassination - and mentioned "Operation 40." This led Danny Jones to inquire, "Do you know who Felix Rodriguez is?" Sheehan responded, "Felix Rodriguez was a shooter; he was one of the individuals involved in the President's assassination." Surprised, Danny Jones mentioned that he was set to interview Felix Rodriguez the next day. Sheehan then spent the next 45 minutes recounting the S-Force story and advising Danny Jones on how to conduct the upcoming interview with Rodriguez to potentially elicit new information. Here is a link to the Sheehan interview, with the relevant segment already cued up for your convenience: During the final half-hour of the Felix Rodriguez interview, Danny Jones attempted to ask questions aimed at uncovering Rodriguez's cover stories, but without success. Rodriguez's cover stories, however, revealed some information. When questioned about the JFK assassination, Rodriguez stuck to the standard CIA narrative implicating Fidel Castro as the mastermind behind the event. He even suggested that Castro's intelligence chief, Fabian Escalante, was the one who pulled the trigger. This is intriguing as a retaliation ploy by Rodriguez, given that Escalante on numerous occasions fingered Rodriguez as a potential participant in the assassination in his books and interviews. Felix Rodriguez also denied other unpopular personal achievements of his, such as his participation as a CIA interrogator in the the 1985 death of DEA Agent Kiki Camerena, and although he did admit his involvement in the assassination of Che Guevara, he tried very hard to minimize the brutality involved in the affair. The following is the link to the Rodriguez interview cued up for you to the relevant segment in advance: The following is the best information available about the paramilitary unit that carried out the triangulated ambush assassination of President Kennedy. There are multiple corroborating witnesses for this evidence. It also corroborates the revelations made by Santo Trafficante to his lawyers, regarding whgat Daniel Sheehan refers to as "the S-Force." In this article, @William Kelly makes cryptic references to a living person knowledgeable about these events who Kelly does not name. My assumption is that he is referring to Carl Jenkins: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'PATHFINDER - PARTS 1 - 5 THE PLAN TO KILL CASTRO REDIRECTED TO JFK AT DALLAS' William Kelly | JFKcountercoup | Saturday, December 22, 2018 | https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/12/pathfinder-parts-1-5-plan-to-kill.html https://www.facebook.com/groups/politicalassassinationsresearchgroup/posts/6051134211609264/ "...As Bill Turner put it, “the mechanism was in place” to kill Castro, and they just switched targets, and instead of shooting Castro they redirected their fire to JFK at Dealey Plaza...." "...[W]e have now narrowed down the covert operational plans to kill Castro to a few – including Pathfinder that may have been the specific plan that was redirected to “snuff” JFK in Dallas. If it wasn't Pathfinder, it was one very much like it. Now we will soon know the names of the shooters – the five first-class Cuban mechanic-snipers who were paid and trained by the CIA to kill Castro but one or two of whom shot JFK in the head instead...." "...“I took high powered rifles with scopes to Cuba,” Eugenio Martinez said, “and they weren’t going to be used to hunt rabbits.” “Chi Chi” Quintero was a shooter, said Wheaton, who also names five or six other Cubans who were on that team, that maritime crew of anti-Castro Cuban commandos who were paid and trained to kill Castro. But when that mission was scrubbed – “disapproved” by “higher authority,” and they learned of the JFK- Castro backchannel negotiations at the UN (from Henry Cabot Lodge), they redirected the Pathfinder target to JFK at Dealey Plaza. And considered themselves patriots for doing so...." "...The U.S. Army Rangers are called Pathfinders, and two U.S. Army Ranger Captains - Bradley Ayers and Edward Roderick were assigned to the CIA by USMC General "Brut" Krulak to train the Cuban Commandos at JMWAVE. While Ayers trained the Cubans in small boat maneuvering at Pirate's Lair, Roderick trained the snipers at Point Mary, off Key Largo. The original anti-Castro Cuban Pathfinders were the best of the lot sent to Guatemala to train for the Bay of Pigs, and were commanded by US Marine Captain Carl Jenkins, whose specialty was infiltration and exfiltration of commandos while John "I.F" Harper trained the Cubans in explosives and sniper tactics...." ___________________ SANTO TRAFFICANTE REVEALED MUCH IN CONFIDENCE TO HIS LAWYERS... Listen to this video about Santo Trafficante confidentially providing the details about the origin of the S-Force to his legal counsel under the protection of attorney/client privilege. Trafficante did not do so to seek publicity or sell books. He only did so in the utmost confidentiality, expecting that it would never be divulged to anybody. I've cued the video to the relevant segment for you. ---------------------------------------------------------- RE: THE S-FORCE In 1960, once VP Richard Nixon came to believe he was going to win the presidential election and decided to send a hit squad after Castro, he called upon Howard Hughes on whose behalf Robert Mayheu contacted Johnny Roselli who contacted Santo Trafficante (because Trafficante was the Don over Cuba). Trafficante insisted upon proof that VP Nixon was authorizing it, so Nixon sent the CIA Chief of Security to a meeting with Trafficante and Roselli to confirm. They then assembled a 15-man team made up of anti-Castro Cuban mercenaries, Italian organized crime assassins (who had worked for Trafficante in Cuba), CIA operatives (such as Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, David Morales, etc.) and special forces operators. This "S-Force" was funded by a skim off Las Vegas casinos, and was trained on U.S. military bases and Clint Murchison's ranch in Mexico to conduct triangulated crossfire ambush assassinations, and they were deployed to conduct such an operation against the President of the United States during the weekend of November 22, 1963. This information is primarily derived from what attorney Daniel Sheehan has divulged about the attorney/client privileged communications between James McCord and Santo Trafficante and F. Lee Bailey while Bailey was representing them on CIA retainer during the period of the Watergate Hearings. Video is cued for you in advance to 45:39 where Professor Sheehan describes Santo Trafficante's confidential attorney-client privileged explanation of the relationship between Operation 40 and the "S-Force" which was originally constituted under the auspices of VP Nixon to off Castro, but was instead ultimately deployed to assassinate President Kennedy: Also see detailed account of the origins of the S-Force as presented in Daniel Sheehan's autobiography via the following link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/politicalassassinationsresearchgroup/posts/6787297377992940/

Here is a very recent additional example of the variety of deception Pat Speer employed in the case of James Jenkins, and in the cases of every other JFK back of the head wound witnesses on this forum, and on his web site. Speer had to have done this within the last three months, because it was not on his web site the last time I was fact checking his Ed Forum claims. It is a screenshot of ex-Secret Service Agent Paul Landis responding to a question asking him "where the head wound was located" by placing his hand onto the right rear quadrant of his head, with commentary from Speer advising his readers not to trust their own lying eyes: https://www.patspeer.com/chapter-19f-reason-to-doubt Note that Speer is claiming that Landis "is pointing at the right side of the head just above the ear," which is not at all what we see in his screenshot of Landis with his hand clearly outstretched on the back of his own head (Unlike those of Dr. McClelland and James Jenkins, Landis's gesture did not provide Speer with a sufficient opportunity to cherry pick a screenshot of Landis's hand elsewhere). Speer then goes on to write that Landis's hand gesture was "just back of the ear -- which is not the middle of the very back of the head at the level of the ear, where do many prominent "theorists" place the wound." But it is not true that "so many prominent theorists" place the wound in "the middle of the very back of the head at the level of the ear." The researchers that Speer is constantly railing on against -- Horne, Mantik, Law, Livingstone, etc. -- place the wound consistent with the vast majority of the witness testimony, in the lower right quadrant of the back of the head, just as is demonstrated by the following witness sketches: The only witness I can think of that places the large avulsive wound in the middle of the back of the head at the level of the ears is mortician Tom Robinson, who is anything but "a prominent theorist," and who, according to Speer, only placed it there because that was where it ended up after skull fragments were inserted and the head was "reconstructed" by the morticians (though in my opinion, Robinson merely misremembered it as being in the middle, rather than on the right side): Adding insult to injury is that when we view the actual video of Paul Landis which Speer has taken his screenshot from, we see that it is completely unambiguous that Landis is locating the large avulsive wound in the right quadrant of the back of the head and not, as Speer claims in his descriptive commentary, "at the right side of the head just above the ear." In fact, while demonstrating the location with his hand Landis clearly and unequivocally states: "Not knowing medical terms, right, rear head." Does Pat Speer believe that all his readers are suckers who will not fact check his claims? Apparently, he does.

The following is from Doug Horne's last minute "Addendum: The Zapruder Film Goes to Hollywood," in "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board": "...But frame 317 provides the most damning evidence of apparent film alteration.31 As David Lifton pointed out in his article in Fetzer’s anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, when he first saw a Moses Weitzman 35 mm blowup of the Zapruder film in 1970 (a positive projection print), and again when he was using an Oxberry optical printer in 1990 to copy the Moses Weitzman high-quality 35 mm internegative of the Zapruder film loaned to him by documentary producer Robert Richter, he noticed that the back of JFK’s head in the frames following the head shot seemed unusually dark, and wondered if it had been ‘blacked out’ somehow during the film’s alteration. He was left with a very strong visual impression resulting from many, many hours of work with the film in 1990, during which he was often looking at magnified images of President Kennedy’s head. He talked about this repeatedly with me, and no doubt with others over the years, but no oral conversation could adequately impart the subjective impact of his visual experience. More than once I asked Lifton if his impression that the head had been blacked out could have been caused by looking at deep shadow on the back of JFK’s head, and each time he impatiently insisted: “No way! It was a patch! The back of the head is blacked out in the Zapruder film.” As the old adage says, “seeing is believing,” and in June of 2009, when Sydney Wilkinson forwarded to me a JPEG image of the HD scan of frame 317, I had my own epiphany. (See Figures 87 and 88.) The image of the limousine’s occupants in the HD scan of frame 317 forwarded to me by Wilkinson was not nearly as dark, or rich in color, as versions I had seen on television over the years, in documentaries. My initial impression (as a non-film person) was that the HD scan image of Z-317 was somehow washed out, or underexposed. As it turns out, I was incorrect; I was looking at a “flat” or “exposure neutral” scan of frame 317 from Sydney’s dupe negative of the extant film in the Archives. It had simply not been adjusted for purposes of aesthetics to make it more pleasing to the eye. What I saw was stunning. The lower half of the back of JFK’s head—hair that was very light brown, or perhaps a cross between auburn and light gray in the HD scan—was covered up by a jet black patch with very straight, artificial looking edges that appeared to be artwork to me, like opaque black paint placed on top of the natural image of his hair. It was as if a trapezoid (the black patch) with impossibly straight edges had been wrapped around the back of JFK’s head, in exactly the area where the Parkland medical staff had seen the exit wound behind the right ear in the posterior skull. My subjective reaction was that frame 317 was so obviously a composite image of artwork superimposed on top of a real film image that I literally expostulated “Holy xxxx!” when Sydney Wilkinson first brought it to my attention. Furthermore, when compared to the part of Governor Connally’s head that was in shadow in the same frame, the portions of the images of the two men’s heads that were supposedly in shadow were totally dissimilar. The portion of Connally’s head in shadow looked gray, and you could still see details inside the shadow; the black “patch” over JFK’s head was jet-black, with no details visible whatsoever. And guess what? You can actually see this patch with artificially straight edges on the MPI product sold in 1998, Image of an Assassination. It is best seen in the Close-up Frame view, using the ‘frame-by-frame advance’ feature on your remote. Even though the contrast of the image has been adjusted by MPI and the overall image appears much darker, with brighter and more vivid colors than the exposure neutral scan of Sydney’s, the curved trapezoid with improbably straight edges wrapped around the back of JFK’s head can still be seen! Take a look for yourself at home. In the surrounding frames on the MPI product, however—frames 313-337—the back of the head is so muddy and dark that the viewer cannot detect whether there is any overt, or blatant evidence of artificiality (i.e., straight edges associated with the black region on the back of the head) or not. The same is not true of the HD scans of the frames beginning with 313 (the ‘head explosion’), and continuing well past frame 337. The back of JFK’s head in all of these HD frames, beginning with 313, looks impossibly dark compared with the remainder of the image. The “black patch” on the HD frames, when viewed in extreme closeup on a high resolution video screen or monitor, appears to ‘hang in space,’ an impossibly dark mask supported by...NOTHING. Words are inadequate to convey how artificial this area of his head looks from frames 313 to 337 in particular, and even beyond that, until Jackie Kennedy pushes her husband’s head down out of view of the camera’s lens as she crawls out on the back of the limousine to retrieve part of his brain from thetrunk lid of the car. Frame 317 is just the most obvious of all of these frames, probably the one frame where the aerial imaging artist forgot to ‘fuzz up’ the edges of the black patch with his airbrush. The HD scan of frame 313 (the ‘head explosion’) also looks particularly bad when viewed in extreme closeup on a high-resolution video monitor: the ‘black patch’ actually comes down over the top of, and covers, the back of JFK’s shirt collar—and the so-called ‘head explosion’ seems to be coming from an area in space that is actually in front of President Kennedy’s head, rather than on his head. In other words, the aerial imaging artist who altered this frame screwed up twice, and in both respects depicted things that cannot be. One reason I am confident, even at this early stage in this investigation, that I am looking at the result of aerial imaging on an animation stand (such as described by Professor Fielding in his 1965 textbook), and not at a traveling matte, is that upon extreme magnification on a high-resolution screen, I believe I can see the real exit wound in the right rear of JFK’s head bleeding through the black patch in frame 313. This is a subjective impression that most (but not all) people see when I show the extreme close-up of the HD scan of Z-313 to them on the high-resolution screen (1200 x 1920 pixels) on my laptop computer. I believe I am correct because the darker ovoid shape that I see “coming through the black mask” is in exactly the location where the exit wound was described by the Parkland treatment staff, and is also the same size they described—about the size of a baseball (or slightly smaller). For any part of an original image at all to be seen through a patch of black artwork means that we are looking at a composite created by aerial imaging, in which the black paint used by the animator was not completely opaque, and where the light projecting the original film frame up through the condensers onto the animation stand was a bit too bright—so bright that part of the original image could be seen through the non-opaque black paint employed by the visual effects artist on his animation cell. A matte insertion could not, by its very nature, allow any of the original image to “bleed through” the matte, since when a matte is inserted into a film frame that portion of the original image has already been optically excised. Aerial imaging seems the likely method employed to alter all frames of the head wound for two other reasons, as well. First, the area being covered up (the back of the head) is so small—it would even be small on a 7.5 x 10 inch animation stand in an aerial imaging set-up on an optical printer—that registration problems would surely have occurred if a 35 mm traveling matte had been employed to cover up the real exit defect. (No such registration errors are seen in the HD frames.) Second, aerial imaging artwork is ‘self-matting’ by its very nature, since the animation cell is superimposed over the top of the image being projected through the condensers in the optical printer—which means that the new, composite image can be captured on the first pass by the process camera, resulting in less contrast buildup than would be the case in a traveling matte, which would be two generations farther down the line. This aerial imaging hypothesis is the most likely explanation for the altered frames of the head wounds that will be tested throughout the Los Angeles investigation as it proceeds. And if the back of the head has been blacked out, it necessarily follows that the so-called massive head wound, seen most vividly in frames 335 and 337, is artwork also. (See Figures 89 and 90.) If one wound has been covered up, a substitute wound must be created to take its place. In her Warren Commission testimony—testimony that was deleted from the 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits published in 1964, and only released by the U.S. government circa 1975—Jackie Kennedy said to J. Lee Rankin: “...from the front there was nothing...” when describing the head wound under oath. The full quotation of this section of her suppressed testimony is provided below: I was trying to hold his hair on. But from the front there was nothing. I suppose there must have been, but from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on. [author’s emphasis] It should be no surprise to my readers that this testimony was suppressed! At a time when the Warren Commission, using the frames carefully selected by the CIA’s assets at LIFE magazine, was attempting to persuade the American public that JFK had an exit wound in the right-front of his head, our citizenry couldn’t be allowed to read graphic testimony like this that cast doubt upon the official cover story, or upon images from the Zapruder film published by LIFE. Jackie’s testimony, of course, was consistent with that of the Parkland medical staff in Trauma Room One, who overwhelmingly testified that the exit wound they saw was in the right rear of his skull, and consistently mentioned no damage to the right-front of JFK’s head. In later years, as pointed out elsewhere in this book, Dr. Peters, Dr. Crenshaw, Dr. Jones, and Nurse Bell all specifically stated that the right-front of President Kennedy’s head was undamaged when they saw him at Parkland hospital...."

In my opinion, you are absolutely right. It is the only option we seem to have to counter the dark forces that continue to seek to conceal the truth, as exemplified by the following which has happened to Sydney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead's efforts to make their documentary about the Zapruder film entitled "Alteration." To me, it appears that the Sixth Floor Museum, operating as a CIA front, is having some success suppressing the documentary, as outlined below: ____________ In November 2010, Sidney Wilkinson encountered a problem with the Sixth Floor Museum -- that should raise some eyebrows -- which derailed her production plan for her documentary. The short version of that story is told by Dr. David Mantik in the following video: VIDEO IS QUEUED TO 27:46 WHERE DR. DAVID MANTIK TELLS THE STORY OF SYDNEY WILKINSON AND THEIR VISITS TO THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM TO EXAMINE THE 5 x 7 TRANSPARENCIES FROM THE ORIGINAL ZAPRUDER FILM https://youtu.be/hlGaFMvZEI8?t=1666 ____________ Doug Horne, Dr. David Mantik, and Sydney Wilkinson on apparent fraud in Zapruder film transparencies committed while in the custody of the Sixth Floor Museum: 'MASQUERADE AT THE MUSEUM' Excerpt from 'THE JFK ASSASSINATION DECODED: Criminal Forgery in the Autopsy Photographs and X-rays' by David Mantik, MD, PhD. April 15, 2013 Revised November 2021 David W. Mantik (DM) and Sydney Wilkinson (SW) INTRODUCTION (DM) Within several years of the JFK assassination, David Lifton had been captivated by the Zapruder images81 following frame Z-313 " ...because the back of the head seemed all blacked out."82 Curiously, this was several years before he began to suspect that the entire film had been (illegally) edited. He recalls that when Wesley Liebeler (in 1967) had ordered the 4x5 inch transparencies from LIFE magazine for his class (see further discussion of these below) the back of the head still lacked detail.83 In June 1970, under the ruse of a possible purchase, Time-Life permitted Lifton and colleagues to examine multiple film items at their Beverly Hills office. These included 4x5 inch transparencies, an 8 mm film, a 16 mm film and a 35 mm film.84 The back of the head still seemed blacked out to Lifton, which was also consistent with the LIFE magazine images. On that occasion, Lifton viewed the frames after Z-334 (the last one published by the Warren Commission) and discovered that the supposed right facial wound of JFK (not seen by anyone at Parkland) was enormous-and that it appeared merely to be artwork. Provoked by this, Lifton then studied "Insert Matte Photography" and suggested that the "blacking out" effect might also be artwork. The blacked-out posterior skull was radically inconsistent with the recollections of the Parkland physicians. More to the point, though, it was also thoroughly inconsistent with their contemporaneous notes, which are included in the Warren Report. These professionals uniformly recalled a right posterior skull defect about the size of an orange. These doctors also (uniformly) disagreed with the autopsy photographs, which, like the Zapruder film, showed no posterior skull defect. In fact, this disagreement (about the hole in the back of the head) was so scandalous that I listed sixteen Parkland physicians85 who stated that the autopsy photographs86) were distinctly different from what they recalled. On the contrary, no physician who saw the autopsy photographs (of the back of the head) immediately recognized them. Based on my own viewing of the autopsy photographs and X-rays on multiple occasions at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and greatly assisted by optical density measurements made directly on JFK's X­ rays at NARA, I proposed a skull reconstruction87 with a large upper occipital defect. In addition, an adjoining site just to the right of this defect) appeared to be a bone flap that could swing open or closed, which was consistent with the recollections of Dr. Robert McClelland. In fact, McClelland had approved a sketch for Josiah Thompson, which was accompanied by his own pertinent quotation about the bone flap.88 Based on these considerations, even if one accepted an intact (or nearly intact) posterior scalp (i.e., just the soft tissue), a fairly large posterior skull defect could no longer be denied. Curiously enough, such a bony defect was in fact, also consistent with the drawings by autopsy pathologist J. Thornton Boswell.89 So now the question became obvious: How could the scalp appear so intact in the Zapruder film (and in the autopsy photographs), while an obvious defect was seen at Parkland Hospital (at least in the bone, but probably also in the scalp)? Actually, the problem lay even deeper than that: The ancillary autopsy personnel (at Bethesda) agreed with the Parkland witnesses-they also recalled a large hole in the posterior skull.90 Photographs of these witnesses--from both Parkland and Bethesda--consistently illustrated the hole and were compiled by Robert Groden.91 The issue of a posterior skull defect is not a mere curiosity--on the contrary, it goes to the very heart of the JFK assassination case. Such a defect clearly implies a frontal shot, and therefore unavoidably means conspiracy. If the forensic evidence had to be altered (to cover-up a conspiracy), then this posterior defect was an indispensable target for alteration. The remainder of this essay is a first-person account of our mutual attempts to decipher this paradox of JFK s posterior skull especially as seen in the Zapruder film. A BRIEF HISTORY OF OUR 35MM DUPLICATE NEGATIVE OF THE ZAPRUDER FILM (SW) In 2008, my partner (and husband), Thom Whitehead, sold our startup editing company to Deluxe Film Labs. Thom was hired to oversee their newly created editorial department in Burbank, and I chose a new path. After spending over twenty years in sales and development in the post-production industry, I was ready for a new challenge. I have been interested in the JFK assassination history for decades. In 1978, I spent a memorable college semester in Washington, D.C., working as a congressional intern and studying the activities of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). One of the key subjects that piqued my interest was the iconic Zapruder film. In 2008, I rekindled my interest and began to read about the film with a renewed vigor. I was surprised to discover there were serious concerns about its authenticity. Most notably, there had never been a truly independent, forensic, imaging study---one that was not connected to a government or private entity. It suddenly dawned on me that I might have a golden opportunity to delve deeper into the film imagery by utilizing the resources of Deluxe Labs92--one of the largest and most prestigious professional film labs in history. We knew they would allow us to use any/all of their state-of-the-art film and digital technology. Additionally, considering that Thom and I had spent years working with the top film restoration and post-production experts in the world, I felt confident we would be able to solicit their professional, unbiased guidance. With the absolute best technology and talent available at the time, all we needed was the best possible film element to study. In November 2008, we purchased a 35mm duplicate negative (dupe neg) of the "forensic version' of the Zapruder "camera original" 8 mm film housed at NARA. It is a US government authorized and certified, third generation film copy. To our surprise, and to the best of our knowledge (as of 2018), it is the only third generation 35mm dupe neg acquired for the purpose of an independent, expert evaluation since NARA made such elements available to the public in 2003. The following is a brief timeline of the steps I had to take to acquire our 35 mm dupe neg from NARA. It took eight months, and they certainly did not make it convenient, or cost effective in 2008. I hope they have simplified the process since then. According to NARA, the film element used to complete my transfer was their 35mm Intermediate (or "reproduction") copy, which is an interpositive,97 silent, color film descended from the direct blow-up 35mm Internegative. NARA considered it to be a "preservation master." At that time, they offered two versions to the public: (1) a "forensic” version--a 35mm, direct optical blow-up Internegative (without any image improvement) from Zapruder's 8mm camera "original,"98 and (2) a “de-scratched" version--a 35mm film element that has been "cleaned up" to look visually appealing. The latter effectively removes dirt and scratches via "a diffused light source in analog printing instead of using a traditional wet-gate method.99 We chose the forensic version because we wanted to work with unadulterated images--as close to the "original" as possible--where nothing had been done to enhance or improve them in any way. TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF OUR 6K SCANS (SW) We scanned our 35mm dupe neg directly to 6k files using a Northlight film scanner. At the time, the Northlight scanner was instrumental in the production of Hollywood films and was considered state-of-the-art technology in post­ production.100 It created digital files from the optical image of a film. Great care was accorded to this process in a post-production environment because the introduction of any artifacts or discontinuities could ruin the day for a film director or director of photography. The digital file that is created must replicate exactly the image on the film and reveal all the information present on each film frame. Due to the relatively small size of the original 8mm Zapruder film (when viewing the entire 35 mm frame on the dupe neg) we decided to scan at Northlight’s maximum available scan size of 6k. The 6k refers to a size of 6144 x 4668 pixels with an effective size of 114.7 Mb of digital data per frame. To put this into perspective, a home HDTV only presents 1920 x 1080 pixels with about 9.7 Mb per frame. Therefore, our scans have more than ten times the resolution and data size as an HD television image. This additional resolution allowed us to electronically zoom into the image without any apparent loss of detail or fidelity. Finally, we could see down to the grain of the 8mm film with complete sharpness and detail--including all of the inter-sprocket and edge areas. As far as we know, the Zapruder film had never been reproduced or studied at this level of digital resolution. Another important aspect of our scanning process was the use of logarithmic color space, rather than linear color space. This is critical because the use of logarithmic color allows all the color information of the image to be present in the scans, preserving all of the highlight and shadow information. Linear color is what we are accustomed to seeing on TV and computer screens. Although linear color looks correct/normal and lifelike to our eyes, very bright and dark areas of the image must be "clipped" in order to make the majority of the image appear correctly. Logarithmic color, although looking to the untrained eye as "muddy" or "flat," is actually the best way to retain all of the color information in the film. Finally we used the film industry standard "DPX" (Digital Picture eXchange)101 format to allow easy transfers between various professional workstations. One of the state-of-the-art workstations we continue to use is an Autodesk product called Smoke.102 THE MPI IMAGES (DM)103 In 1997 with Douglas Home of the ARRB staff serving as a neutral observer, MPI's designated film contractor, Mccrone Associates, photographed each frame of the extant Zapruder film at the NARA, using large format (4 x 5 inch) Kodak 6121 color positive transparency duplicating film. Those MPI transparencies constituted first generation copies of each frame in the extant film. The extant film is considered to be generation zero. This MPI process had its own shortcomings104 but following their creation these images should have been the best available to the public. (Later, MPI digitized, manipulated, and reassembled the in1ages as a motion picture, creating a product titled "Image of an Assassination" on both VHS tape and DVD, which has been available for purchase by the public since 1998.) The so-called “MPI transparencies" created by McCrone associates were physically transferred to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas in January of 2000. This followed the donation and legal transfer of the film's copyright, and the LMH Company's film elements, from LMH Co. to the Museum in December of 1999. From 2000 through 2009, upon appropriate request, these MPI transparencies--true first-generation copies (of the extant film), in large format-were available for public viewing at the Museum. INSIDE THE ARRB, A 5-VOLUME MASTERPIECE BY DOUGLAS HORNE (DM) Appearing in late November 2009, this five-volume encyclopedic work by a former staff member of the ARRB contained images of several Zapruder frames--based on Wilkinson's 6k scans. In particular, Figure 88 in Volume I (an image of Z-317) showed a black geometric patch over the back of JFK's head. (See the image below.) Even in the low-resolution format of a paperback, its borders were preternaturally sharp and well defined, far more than would be expected of a normal shadow. Several months before publication of his book, Home advised me that he planned to visit Thom and Sydney in Los Angeles, so in August 2009, he invited me to their joint viewing.105 While in the film laboratory for several hours, they explained their 6k scans to us. Horne had also viewed them on a prior occasion with three Hollywood professionals. I was particularly fascinated by how unnatural the black patch looked: • After frame Z-313, this area was clearly darker than before Z-313; before Z-313, JFK's hair looked auburn. • The edges of the patch were unnaturally sharp. • Before and after frame Z-313, the back of Connally's head (in a similar shadow as JFK's head) did not show anything like a black patch. SYDNEY SEES THE MPI TRANSPARENCIES AT THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM (SW) On Friday, November 20 2009, during the weekend of the annual JFK symposium meetings, David Mantik and I met for an appointment at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. I was very excited because we were going to view the first generation Ektachrome transparencies created by MPI in 1997. We were told they were made directly from Zapruder's 8mm camera "original," which meant they were first generation and should have been sharper than our 35mm dupe neg (third generation). According to the Museum, these MPI transparencies were included in a deed of gift from the Zapruder family in December of 1999, along with the copyright to the Zapruder film (and other important Zapruder film elements) from Time-Life, Inc. My primary goal was to determine if the MPI transparencies showed the same anomalies seen on our scans. I was prepared for either outcome. David and I were given a loupe and light box to carefully look at each transparency. Words cannot describe how stunned I was when I viewed the head shot, frame Z-313, and the frames immediately following. The resolution was beyond anything I expected. Especially, in frames Z-317, Z-321, Z-323, Z-335 and Z-337, the solid, black' patch" that is clearly seen on our 6k scans--covering the right rear area of JFK's head--was even more egregious on the MPI transparencies. It was all I could do to muzzle my emotions. There was no doubt the MPI transparencies corroborated the obvious anomalies seen on our scans. Most importantly, they clearly depicted what should be on the extant Zapruder film housed at NARA. DAVID REPORTS ON THE SAME VISIT (WITH SYDNEY) IN 2009 (DM) While Gary Mack sat nearby, my first impression was the same as Sydney's--the resolution and color were so incredible that I felt as if I were seeing these frames for the very first time. But the greatest emotional impact came on seeing the black patch in Z-317. It was so blatant, so childishly done, that I almost laughed aloud. Whether I did or not is in some doubt, but I retain an image of clapping my hand over my mouth to prevent such a laugh.106 I was also easily able to verify the other abnormalities that Home had reported in his book, published just a week later in November 2009. SYDNEY RETURNS TO THE MUSEUM IN 2010 (SW) The following year, in November 2010, I returned to the newly finished Sixth Floor Museum reading room in order to view the same MPI transparencies. Thom was able to join me and I was excited to show him the stunning clarity of the back of JFK's head i.e., the "black patch," on the frames we had been studying for months. This time, I was definitely not prepared for what I saw when I looked through the loupe. Not only were the transparencies much larger in size physically, than the ones I had viewed the previous year with David, but none of them were as clear and sharp. Not even close. Most importantly, and suspiciously, the flagrant image of the black "patch" was gone. Instead, the back of JFK s head appeared to show a natural shadow--what Thom called "fuzzied up"--without the straight and well-demarcated edges I had seen in 2009. We were both stunned. Furthermore the black patch was not nearly so obvious in this supposed first generation copy as it was in our third generation 6k copy. That made no sense whatever to me. Despite being assured by the museum they were the same transparencies that David and I saw the previous year, there is absolutely no doubt that they were not. To this day, Thom and I wonder if those transparencies had been altered. INTO THE FRAY: DAVID RETURNS TO THE MUSEUM IN 2012 (DM) Shortly after her 2010 visit to the Museum, Sydney telephoned me, sounding anguished and upset. She described the overwhelming shock caused by her most recent visit. I assured her that I stood by the impressions we had both received in 2009, particularly of the black patch. I promised to visit again--to assess her most recent impressions. During this several-year hiatus (2009-2012) at least two other individuals visited the Museum and saw no black patch. The Museum will not disclose the names of any visitors, but Sydney had met retired Kodak film chemist Roland Zavada outside the viewing room on that same day in 2010. (Zavada had lectured at a JFK symposium that day.107) And author Josiah Thompson reported on his visit, which occurred at about that same time--if not the same day. My second opportunity finally arrived during the annual JFK symposia meetings in November 2012. On the chance that the black patch might re-appear I asked author Peter Jaruley to accompany me on November 16, so that he could serve as another witness. (Sydney was not in Dallas at the time.) The verdict came quickly-the patch in Z-317, and conspicuously present in other frames such as Z- 321 and Z-323, had vanished. Neither Peter nor I saw it. The back of JFK's head appeared little different from all those images I had seen before (excepting for Sydney's 6k images). The powerful emotional response of 2009 did not recur. Furthermore, the back of JFK's head did not show the patently obvious patch I had seen on Sydney's 6k scans. Unlike Sydney, I did not perceive the transparencies I viewed in 2012 to be larger in size than those I viewed in 2009; my impression is that they were simply displayed differently, i.e., in different mountings. The important thing is that we both noted that the anomalies present in 2009 had disappeared in the MPI transparencies we viewed in 2010 and 2012. Before leaving the Museum, I pointedly asked Megan Bryant (Gary Mack was absent) if these were the same images that she had shown me in 2009. She claimed they were. MPI SUMMARY (SW and DM) It is most likely that the images shown to Josiah Thompson and Roland Zavada were the same ones that Sydney and Thom saw in 2010 and that David saw in 2012. If so, then neither of these men has ever viewed the images that Sydney and David saw together at the Museum in 2009. It would have been most enlightening if either Thompson or Zavada could have joined us in 2009. Of course, the relationship between the release date of Horne's book (late November 2009), and our Museum visit in late November 2009 is most peculiar. Our 2009 visit had occurred about one week before the release of Horne's book! In retrospect, this timing appears noteworthy (if not ominous): Was the Museum caught off guard by our visit? Was the Museum's staff oblivious to the purpose of our visit-possibly because they were still unacquainted with Sydney and Thom's research and because they had not yet seen Figure 88 (Z-317) in Horne's book? Even more to the point: It is our impression that we were the first to see these MPI images at the Museum. What strikes both of us as most anomalous is the wonderful clarity of Sydney's 6k scans--which are only a third generation--versus the (currently) less impressive "first generation" MPI images now housed at the Museum (but present only after our 2009 visit). This discrepancy makes no sense to either of us. It would be most useful if Sydney's 6k scans could be taken into the Museum viewing room to be compared side by side with the MPI images, but that is not allowed. Nor were we permitted to record any images of the MPI transparencies, either via camera or scanner--so we have only our memories. A POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE -- THE TIME/LIFE TRANSPARENCIES (DM) The Time-Life transparencies might resolve this paradox. Josiah Thompson had worked with these images and had photographed them while working for LIFE magazine. He used them as models for the sketches in his book, Six Seconds in Dallas. He was kind enough to loan these negatives to me, which I converted into prints. Oddly, Z-317 is missing from my set,108 although Thompson has posted an image of Z-317 online, presumably from his own set. The other images in my Thompson set do not show an obvious black patch. On January 26, 2000, the Dallas Morning News published an article, "Zapruders Donate JFK Film, Rights," written by reporter Mark Wrolstad, who stated: The article notes that Mack was actually (contemporaneously) examining these images--not that he expected to do so at a later time. Mack also stated: Now, however, we are left to wonder: Had Wrolstad merely invented this story?109 We are confronted with this bizarre question because the Museum (see e­ mail below) explains what supposedly happened: "From [a] misunderstanding, the Museum issued an inaccurate press release on January 25, 2000." Curiously, Mark Wrolstad has not responded to Doug Horne's two written attempts in 2011 to clarify this critical misunderstanding. So here is the problem: the Museum now claims that they never received the 1963/1964 Time/Life transparencies--and also that they don't know where they are now. Here are responses that I received from Megan Bryant (at the Museum). It is my impression that the following statements are for public consumption. DM: So today no one knows where these Time/Life transparencies are located. On April 10, 1997, Doug Home saw a large stack of 4 x 5-inch color positive transparencies of the Zapruder film (with each frame surrounded by a black border) in the office of Jamie Silverberg,110 while working for the ARRB. The transparencies sighted by Doug Home in 1997 were not on Silverberg's typed inventory list of film elements and were only produced after persistent inquiries by Home about their possible existence. But now none of these men--not Home, not Zavada, not Thompson, nor even Gary Mack--can point to their location. 111 Before surrendering, I wanted to ascertain whether or not the Time/Life transparencies had, after all, been donated to the Museum. So, I asked the Museum one last question: Could I see the Deed of Gift (circa December 30, 1999) or the complete inventory (or catalog), which was probably prepared in 2000-or any copies of these two items? The Museum, however, responded that these were private documents and were therefore not available for my review-nor could I see copies! CONCLUSIONS (DM and SW) Even if both of us had suddenly lost our senses (oddly at the same moment) in 2009 Sydney's 6k scans still exist--and so does the quite obvious "Mask of Death" in Z-317. Furthermore, anyone can still purchase their own copy via NARA. To our knowledge, at least two other documentarians have done so. Sydney has graciously shown her 6k scans to friend and foe alike. Alarmingly some foes have unexpectedly declined to view them saying that they already know what they will see! This reminds us of Galileo's enemies, who likewise refused to look through his telescope,112 but instead chose to believe that theological reasoning, based on texts of Scripture (a la the Warren Report), was the only road to reality. In effect, the truth was out there, but they preferred blindfolds. In short, this mindset persists today--even though we oxymoronically (and self­ referentially) label ourselves as Homo sapiens. ------------------------------------------------------- WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Douglas Horne 113 What is at stake here is nothing less than historical truth. When an institution that presents itself as a museum--purportedly a guardian of history-­ replaces vital film evidence of President Kennedy's assassination (which apparently contained prima facie evidence of that film's blatant alteration) with substitute evidence (in which the blatant alterations have disappeared), a willful attempt has been made to alter history. The authentic MPI transparencies were available to the public from 2000 until late 2009, a long interval during which the museum's staff was apparently oblivious to what they owned. Following the publication of my five-volume set, Inside the ARRB, in late November of 2009, just one week after David Mantik and Sydney Wilkinson examined the MPI transparencies, the public (and presumably key members of the Museum's staff) awoke to what was at stake here. Here is what likely triggered this aggressive Museum response: Just prior to publication, I had added an addendum to my Zapruder film chapter about the anomalies discovered in Sydney Wilkinson's scans and had actually included an image of Z-317 in my book, as well. (See this image below.) Was the Sixth Floor Museum, the unapologetic and ardent defender of the Warren Commission's conclusions (that a lone malcontent murdered President Kennedy), going to keep on display powerful evidence of the alteration of the single most important assassination record, the Zapruder film? This was the operative question after my book was published. The implications of the obvious alterations found in the 6k scans, and in the MPI transparencies in 2009 were clear: the true exit wound on President Kennedy's head (in the right rear, just where the Parkland Hospital treatment staff had reported it) had been intentionally obscured in the Zapruder film (likely during 1963), in an attempt to hide evidence of crossfire in Dealey Plaza and therefore of conspiracy. (An exit wound in the rear of JFK's head pointed to a fatal shot from the front and therefore multiple shooters, i.e., conspiracy.) Powerful evidence that the Zapruder film had been altered for the purpose of hiding this exit wound-anomalies in the film that provided virtual proof of the Zapruder film's alteration-would also constitute evidence of a cover-up of major proportions soon after the assassination occurred, something almost as disturbing as the assassination itself. Restating the question above, “Was this institution, the Sixth Floor Museum, willing to display powerful evidence that would invalidate the Museum's own conclusions about the assassination, or would they instead abandon the interests of historical truth and pursue their own longstanding bias?" In 2010 and in 2012 Sydney Wilkinson and David Mantik received the answer to this question. The events described in this essay call into serious question the true purpose of the Museum, and cause us to ask "Is the Museum a repository of truth, or an agent of political and historical spin, i.e., a mere disseminator of propaganda?" Two specific Museum employees (Gary Mack114 and Megan Bryant) were in charge of the Museum's film holdings and were in responsible positions when the MPI transparencies and other film elements from the LMH Co. were received in January of 2000 (as evidenced by the Mark Wrolstad article in the Dallas Morning News). Those same two employees were present in 2009 when Sydney and David both observed the same anomalies in the MPI transparencies that were present in the 6k scans. In 2010 and 2012, while Gary Mack apparently no longer felt a need to be present, after what I shall call the "big switch," Megan Bryant was again present. Is it truly plausible that Gary Mack 'misunderstood' the contents of the Deed of Gift to the Sixth Floor Museum from the LMH Company, in addition to "misinterpreting" a verbal comment from Zapruder lawyer, Jamie Silverberg and then carelessly released an inaccurate press release? Sadly, it's unlikely we will ever know. This release had been exhibited on the Sixth Floor Museum website until Doug Home began questioning Mark Wrolstad in 2011 and David Mantik began corresponding with Megan Bryant about it in 2012. What do the events described above say about these two Sixth Floor Museum employees and their integrity? As each reader answers to this question for himself, keep in mind that the best evidence outside of NARA that corroborated the stunning image content in the 6k scans has now disappeared. It has been switched out. We don't know who switched if out, but we certainly know where the switch took place. Meanwhile, this substitute evidence has been shown to two of the foremost defenders of the Zapruder films authenticity: Roland Zavada and Josiah Thompson. And the sanitized images in the substitute MPI transparencies have reinforced the longstanding opinions of these two men-namely, that the film has not been altered. Now both Thompson and Zavada are more certain than ever, based on their viewing of the altered MPI transparencies, that nothing is amiss with the Zapruder film. A former high-level official at Archives II in College Park, Maryland (Leslie Waffen) informed Sydney Wilkinson (circa 2008) that the extant film in cold storage "would never be removed from the freezer again" and there it sits today, further deteriorating with the passage of time. In view of the events described above this policy must change. There is only one way to definitively determine the authenticity of the 6k scans commissioned by Sydney Wilkinson and studied by so many in the Hollywood film industry: compare the 6k scans with the extant film at NARA. A travesty has occurred in Dallas, and it has historical repercussions. The extant 8mm Zapruder film at NARA must be compared to both the 6k scans of the 35mm dupe negative in Hollywood and with the MPI transparencies (currently available for viewing) at the Sixth Floor Museum. Sydney and David and I are not afraid to conduct this test--in fact, we insist on it. The American people should insist on it. Let's do the three-way comparison, with ample witnesses present, movie cameras running, and let the chips fall where they may. The American people deserve to know their true history not a falsified story. END ____________ As for when exactly Alteration will be released, I was very hopeful it would be soon when in 2020 I published the following as a Facebook post: Technical analysis is on its way in Sydney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead's documentary, "Alteration". I don't know the release date, but they provided a screening of a preview of the documentary at the 2019 CAPA Conference and at the 2019 Judyth Baker Conference which is described in this podcast interview of Doug Horne (there is about an hour of very fascinating information on the topic starting at 138:30 https://midnightwriternews.com/?powerpress_pinw=1749-podcast ) In short, the documentary contains the analyses of Hollywood professionals Paul Rotan, Garrett Smith and Ned Price who are "absolutely convinced that a black patch -- an overlay -- has been added to the back of JFK's head in frame 317 and in other adjacent frames" using an optical printer and aerial imaging process. I won't be able to do justice in a brief FB comment to all the fascinating information that is presented on the topic during the podcast, but for those who are interested in this subject matter I can definitely assure you that it will be worth your time to listen to it. I believe that with the release of the "Alteration" documentary we will be seeing the onset of a paradigm shift concerning the Zapruder film and the issue of authenticity, and am very much looking forward to the debate in the JFK research community that will ensue. I had a brief text exchange with Tom Whitehead that same year, and he was keeping his cards close to his vest regarding a release date at that time. My assumption is that they are still working on technical details, such as finding a distributor.

Doug Horne told the story of how Sidney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead became involved in Zapruder film research in his "Addendum: The Zapruder Film Goes to Hollywood," of his 2009 "Inside the ARRB," Chapter 14, Vol. IV, as follows: "...On June 3, 2009 I exchanged introductory e-mails with one Sydney Wilkinson, an accomplished professional in film and video post-production in Hollywood—specifically, in the marketing of post production services within the motion picture film industry. She has decades of experience under her belt in dealing with editors, experts in film restoration, and film studio executives. She lives and breathes the professional culture of the motion picture film industry, and has working relationships with many of the major players involved in post-production in Hollywood. When she first introduced herself to me she insisted that she was neither a researcher, author, nor a historian; and in spite of her continued self-deprecation, I have explained to her on numerous occasions since that day that she is now indeed a JFK assassination researcher, by simple virtue of what she is doing, whether she ever publishes a word or not! We are what we do, and what Sydney Wilkinson has done is truly extraordinary. Sydney revealed to me in short order that she had purchased a dupe negative on 35 mm film of the Forensic Copy of the Zapruder film created by the National Archives. She did so purely for research purposes, to satisfy her own curiosity about whether or not the extant film in the Archives was the authentic out-of-camera original, or whether it was an altered film masquerading as the original. She had already purchased a copy of the Zavada report from the National Archives and knew its contents backwards and forwards, and was also familiar with the interviews of Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter of NPIC conducted by the ARRB staff in 1997. She was aware of my former role as the ARRB’s liaison with Kodak and Rollie Zavada, and was also very familiar with the existing literature about the film’s possible alteration. In short, she was simply a very curious American citizen who, out of both natural curiosity and a sense of patriotism, wanted to know the truth about this famous film. She had literally “put her money where her mouth was” by forking out $ 795.90 for a 35 mm dupe negative of the Zapruder film from a source whose honesty and integrity could not be challenged by any future researchers: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Counting the extant film as zero, she had obtained a fifth generation copy (as explained earlier in this chapter). If she had requested a projection print (i.e., a positive) she would have purchased a fourth generation copy; but the preferred medium for studying film characteristics in Hollywood is a motion picture negative, so she settled for a dupe negative of a fourth generation projection print. She wanted a dupe negative because her intent from the beginning was to subject the Zapruder film to the serious, professional scrutiny of Hollywood film professionals in an attempt to resolve the ongoing debate about its authenticity. Sydney’s attitude going into this effort was similar to my own attitude about the Zapruder film when I began working for the ARRB in 1995; she was very curious about the issues that had been raised about the Zapruder film’s authenticity, and simply wanted to know the answer, one way or the other. I was stunned by the simplicity and power of the concept behind her ongoing research effort: only Hollywood visual effects technicians or other film professionals familiar with the optical effects techniques of the 1960s would be truly qualified to say whether or not there was evidence of alteration in the Zapruder film’s image content! While Rollie Zavada was a film chemist and a Kodak project manager (and was eminently qualified to study film density and edge print), he had no practical experience with the creation of motion picture visual effects, and I therefore viewed him as unqualified to make a final determination as to whether or not the Zapruder film was an altered film. (The ARRB’s senior management understood this also, which was why he was not asked to comment upon the film’s image content in his limited authenticity study.) I immediately wondered: Why hadn’t anyone ever attempted this before? If anyone had attempted it before 2003 (the year that Monaco in San Francisco made the Forensic Copy of the extant film for NARA), the only tool available for study in Hollywood would have been a multi-generation bootleg copy of one of the Moses Weitzman blowups (from 8 mm to 35 mm) made circa 1968; because the provenance of the bootleg copy would have been suspect, so would any results obtained from such a study. If anyone had attempted this subsequent to 2003, neither Sydney nor I was aware of such an effort. Intuitively, I felt that this was a “first.” A big first. For about thirty years, from 1963 to 1993, the Zapruder film’s authenticity was assumed, and went largely unquestioned, and the principal arguments about the film had been about what its image content depicted. For about the past fifteen years, most of the arguments pertaining to the film had been about its authenticity, not about its image content. The beauty of Syd Wilkinson’s research effort was not only that qualified Hollywood professionals would now be assessing the extant film’s image content to determine whether any frames showed evidence of alteration, but that the provenance of the film being studied could not be questioned! She was not going to be asking Hollywood to study a bootleg copy: she had a bonafide, genuine, guaranteed, unaltered copy of the extant film in the Archives. Truth is often the daughter of time. Conducting this kind of study was an idea whose time had come, and such a study was now overdue. I could hardly believe my good fortune at being included in her research effort. Sydney then stunned me by saying that someone close to her who was an editor had arranged for an HD (high-definition) digital scan of each frame on her dupe negative, and that the HD scan was already completed. The HD scan of each 35 mm frame contained 1080 pixels in the vertical dimension and 1920 pixels in the horizontal direction, literally a wealth of information. Furthermore, the HD scan performed of each frame was a so-called “flat” or “exposure neutral” scan, in which the film’s images were NOT manipulated to make them more pleasing to the eye (as MPI did with its Ektachrome transparencies taken of each frame in 1997). Wilkinson and her editor friend instructed the person who performed the HD scan not to “clip the whites” or “crush the blacks” when conducting the scan. Such practices are commonly employed by video editors during post-production to make films more visually appealing, but when this occurs detail and valuable information is lost. The HD scan created of the dupe negative of the Zapruder film was neutral, meaning that it was not shaded or manipulated for artistic or aesthetic purposes, and that there was a maximum of detail to study from each film frame. And in two frames in particular, those details were apparently stunning, and quite damning. Sydney e-mailed to me JPEG images of two of the HD scans—frames 220 and 317. What I saw was electrifying, and certainly appeared to me at first blush (as they had to Sydney and a close associate of hers who is a video editor) to be evidence that the extant Zapruder film was an altered film, something I had just concluded, for a host of reasons, earlier in this chapter...." And Doug Horne provided a synopsis with additional details in his online essay entitled "The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration" "...Altered Head Wound Imagery: California resident Sydney Wilkinson purchased a 35 mm dupe negative of the Zapruder film from the National Archives in 2008—a third generation rendition, according to the Archives—and with the assistance of her husband, who is a video editor at a major post-production film house in Hollywood, commissioned both “HD” scans (1920 x 1080 pixels per scan) of each frame of the dupe negative, as well as “6K” scans of each frame. Because the Zapruder film’s image, from edge to edge, only partially fills each 35 mm film frame obtained from the Archives, the so-called “6K” scan of each frame is therefore ‘only’ the equivalent of a “4K” image, i.e., 4096 x 3112 pixels, for each Zapruder frame imaged. Each Zapruder frame scan still constitutes an enormous amount of information: 72.9 MB, or 12.7 million pixels per frame. These “4K equivalent” scans of the Zapruder film used by this couple to conduct their forensic, scientific study of the assassination images are 10-bit log color DPX scans, otherwise known in common parlance as “flat scans.” These logarithmic color scans bring out much more information in the shadows than would the linear color normally viewed on our television screens and computers. Therefore, much more information in each Zapruder film frame is revealed by these logarithmic scans, than would be revealed in a linear color scan of the same frame. As reported in the author’s book, numerous Hollywood film industry editors, colorists, and restoration experts have viewed the “6K” scans of the Zapruder film as part of the couple’s ongoing forensic investigation. In the logarithmic color scans there are many frames (notably 317, 321, and 323) which show what appear to be “black patches,” or crude animation, obscuring the hair on the back of JFK’s head. The blacked-out areas just happen to coincide precisely with the location of the avulsed, baseball-sized exit wound in the right rear of JFK’s head seen by the Parkland Hospital treatment staff, in Dallas, on the day he was assassinated. In the opinion of virtually all of the dozens of motion picture film professionals who have viewed the Zapruder film “6K” scans, the dark patches do not look like natural shadows, and appear quite anomalous. Some of these film industry professionals—in particular, two film restoration experts accustomed to looking at visual effects in hundreds of 1950s and 1960s era films—have declared that the aforementioned frames are proof that the Zapruder film has been altered, and that it was crudely done.[35]If true, this explains LIFE’s decision to suppress the film as a motion picture for twelve years, lest its alteration be discovered by any professionals using it in a broadcast. The extant Zapruder film also depicts a large head wound in the top and right side of President Kennedy’s skull—most notably in frames 335 and 337—that was not seen by any of the treatment staff at Parkland Hospital. The implication here is that if the true exit wound on President Kennedy’s head can be obscured in the Zapruder film through use of aerial imaging (i.e., self-matting animation, applied to each frame’s image via an animation stand married to an optical printer)—as revealed by the “6K” scans of the 35 mm dupe negative—then the same technique could be used to add a desired exit wound, one consistent with the cover story of a lone shooter firing from behind. The apparent alteration of the Zapruder film seen in the area of the rear of JFK’s head in the “6K” scans is consistent with the capabilities believed to have been in place at “Hawkeyeworks” in 1963. In a recent critique of the author’s Zapruder film alteration hypothesis, retired Kodak film chemist (and former ARRB consultant, from 1997-1998), Roland Zavada, quoted professor Raymond Fielding, author of the famous 1965 textbook mentioned above on visual special effects, as saying that it would be impossible for anyone to have altered an 8 mm film in 1963 without leaving artifacts that could be easily detected. I completely agree with this assessment attributed to professor Fielding, and I firmly believe that the logarithmic color, “6K,” 10-bit, DPX scans made of each frame of the 35 mm dupe negative of the Zapruder film have discovered just that: blatant and unmistakable artifacts of the film’s alteration. Critics of this ongoing forensic investigation in California have tried to dismiss the interim findings by displaying other, dissimilar images from the Zapruder film that have been processed in linear color (not logarithmic color), and in some cases are also using inferior images of the Zapruder film of much poorer resolution than the 6K scans, or images from the film in which the linear color contrast has been adjusted and manipulated (i.e., darkened). Saying that “it just isn’t so” is not an adequate defense for those who desperately cling to belief in the Zapruder film’s authenticity, when the empirical proof (the untainted and raw imagery) exists to back up the fact that it is so. Anyone else who purchases a 35 mm dupe negative of the Zapruder film from the National Archives for $795.00, and who expends the time and money to run “6K” scans of each frame, will end up with the same imagery Sydney Wilkinson has today, for her scans simply record what is present on the extant film in the National Archives; she and her husband have done nothing to alter the images in any way. Their scans simply record what is present on the extant film...." https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/

Just as interesting when it comes to Zapruder frames 335 and 337 is that we are seeing Jackie Kennedy's pink shoulder pad where JFK's forehead should be. As you are pointing out, the stills and film footage show that Jackie is concerned about the large avulsive wound in the back of the President's head, but if JFK's forehead were actually missing as depicted below, then her attention should have been on that anterior head damage instead, right? Note Jackie's white gloved hand probing the margins of the back of the head wound (covered by the black patch in the film) here: And the following are Z-335 and 337 in which we see Jackie's pink shoulder pad where we should be seeing JFK's forehead: ZAPRUDER FRAME 335 ZAPRUDER FRAME 337

Dino Brugioni Commenting on Z-313 and Z-317 -- Heretofore Unseen Footage From Doug Horne Interview https://youtu.be/VpwldcYcAv4?si=YzBT-339A7FCVbA3 'NEW, "Director's Cut" of French Zapruder Film Documentary "L'image 313" Now Up on YouTube!' insidethearrb | November 22nd, 2023 | https://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/21743.html insidethearrb November 22nd, 2023 Greetings, on this sad 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. America experienced a coup d'etat in 1963; the galactic center of the plot was in the Pentagon, and those angry men, the true power and impetus behind the conspiracy, were aided and abetted by willing handmaidens in the CIA (and some private sector individuals, one of them a former government official). Kennedy was murdered by his enemies---plural. The causes were his refusal to bomb and invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his subsequent attempts to end the Cold War---which included not only detente with the USSR, but withdrawal from Vietnam by 1965, and his secret attempts in the fall of 1963 to pursue a rapprochement with Castro's Cuba. I am proud to announce that the NEW, Second Edit, or "Director's Cut," if you will, of the French documentary released back on October 18th, is now UP on YouTube. HERE IS THE LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZed8cNAu10 There are almost 8 minutes of new material added to this interesting documentary, directed by Yannick Rolandeau, and edited by his collaborator, Theo Bonaccio. For those of you who have not read my original posting about this film, I will simply say that it is about the Zapruder film's diverted chain of custody the weekend following JFK's assassination---and what happened to the film during its diversion on Saturday evening, 11/23, from Chicago to the CIA in Washington D.C.; then on to Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, N.Y. on Sunday morning, 11/24, where the film was modified using visual special effects, and edited; then back to the CIA in Washington, D.C. late on Sunday night, 11/24. The new material added to this "Director's Cut" of L'image 313 is of two types: -good images of some of the high resolution Hollywood scans of the Zapruder film (digitally scanned at both 2K and 6K resolution), clearly showing evidence of alteration; and -new video footage, that the world has not yet publicly seen, of the world's foremost imagery analyst, NPIC's Dino Brugioni, as he views some of the Hollywood scans, and as he views the Zapruder film as a motion picture for the first time since he saw the unaltered film on November 23, 1963. I highly encourage all of you to watch this new, improved version of Yannick Rolandeau's film. We can honor the 35th President not only by studying his policies and actions during his administration---understanding the key decisions he made and their context---but we can also honor him by not succumbing to the continuing lies told about his assassination, and by uncovering different elements of the U.S. government coverup. This French documentary is an important new part of that effort. END

"The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration" by Douglas P. Horne https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/ Next to the Zapruder film chapter in Volume IV of Doug Horne's book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, I think that the online essay linked above is the best and most comprehensive tutorial on the Zapruder film that exists. From the available testimony of CIA NPIC officials Homer McMahon and Dino Brugioni, it would appear that Hawkeyeworks in Rochester, New Your, was a highly classified joint CIA/Kodak film lab that was, in addition to NPIC, in possession of the camera-original Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination, and all but a few documents from the second briefing board session at NPIC remain classified. I don't know why this would still be the case after all of these years other than that something highly nefarious took place, namely, alteration of the Zapruder film. When Homer McMahon was interviewed by the ARRB in 1996, and divulged the name of the facility, "Hawkeyeworks," the CIA immediately informed the ARRB that even the name of the facility itself was classified. The following is a memo from Doug Horne memorializing that communication: For me, it is the alterations in the Zapruder film itself that are the surest indications that it was modified that weekend (we know it happened that weekend because the same alterations are present in the NPIC briefing boards made on November 24, 1963, and in the Zapruder film stills that were published in the November 29, 1963 assassination edition of LIFE magazine). In particular, the headshot sequence scenes depict damage to JFK's head that was not reported by any of the Parkland Hospital and Bethesda autopsy witnesses, and which is not present in the autopsy photographs; namely, a cavernous hole in the President's forehead, that is approximately the size of a cantaloupe, as we can see in the following stills from the 1998 MPI "Images of an Assassination" digital copy of the "original" Zapruder film which are highlighted to make the forehead crater clearer to the naked eye: That wound is somehow -- perhaps magically? -- missing from the autopsy photographs: The closest witness to the head wound, Jackie Kennedy, of course described to the Warren Commission a wound completely different than what we are seeing in those Zapruder stills above: "I was trying to hold his hair on. From the front there was nothing -- I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on...." In the Zapruder film we can see Jackie feel the margins of the back of the head wound that she later described to the Warren Commission (and which roughly twenty Parkland Hospital doctors and nurses reported), just before she went out onto the trunk to retrieve a piece of brain that had been blown out of the back of her husband's head that she would turn over to Dr. Marion Jenkins upon her arrival at the hospital: Notice above that what Jackie Kennedy appears to be feeling with her white gloved hand has the appearance of a large black blob instead of a bloody blow out wound. Zapruder film authenticity apologists of the variety that admit the existence of the large avulsive wound in the back of JFK's head generally claim that we are not seeing the blood, brain and skull we should be seeing because "Zapruder's camera just couldn't pick up such details"; but note that in the same footage WE ARE seeing Jackie's red roses, so WE SHOULD also be seeing the blood, brain and skull associated with that wound. So what is the deal with that black blob that appears where the occipital-parietal wound should be? It is most clearly seen in frame 317 of Sydney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead's 6K scans of the Forensic Copy of the "original" Zapruder film that they purchased from the National Archives in 2009, in which we more clearly see that the black blob is a hexagon shaped D-max black patch with sharp edges that has been inserted over the occipital-parietal wound, and is definitely not the "natural shadow" that Zapruder film authenticity apologists claim that it is: And when we look at the clearest Zapruder film stills from the headshot sequence that follow Z-313 (the frame of the headshot) also from Wilkinson and Whitehead's 6k scans, we see that same black patch covering the back of the head wound morphing in shape from frame to frame: What would professional cinematographers who are familiar with the special effects of 1960 era films think of this? We don't have to wonder, because Sidney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead have already solicited opinions from some of them, and the following is what they had to say: https://www.fff.org/2023/08/16/the-evidence-that-convicts-the-cia-of-the-jfk-assassination-part-4/ "...I’m going to present one last piece of evidence to complete my case. That evidence consists of expert testimony from three witnesses — Paul Rutan, Jr., Garrett Smith, and Dr. Roderick Ryan. In my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, I include a partial transcript of an interview of Rutan and Smith, both of whom closely examined a high-quality copy of the extant Zapruder film — that is, the film that is in the National Archives that is purported to be the original film but that is actually the altered, fraudulent copy of the film that the CIA secretly produced at its top-secret Hawkeyeworks facility in Rochester, New York. I was fortunate to be able to include a portion of that interview in my book. The interview was conducted by Thom Whitehead, a Hollywood television and feature-film mastering editor specializing in motion pictures. The interview was conducted as part of a documentary on the Zapruder film that is being produced by Whitehead and his colleague Sydney Wilkinson. Douglas Horne, the author of the watershed book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board and who served on the staff of the ARRB, requested permission from Whitehead and Wilkinson to include a portion of the interview in my book, and they graciously agreed. As far as I know, my book is the first and only place where that portion of the interview has been published. Rutan and Smith The following are excerpts from the partial transcript of that interview that I included in my book: Smith: .…Now, as to my credibility, thirty-seven years in the movie business, I’m not sure how much lower you can go than that; and [I] just got done with nearly twenty-five years at Paramount, where I basically ran their mastering for most of those years and spent the last few years investigating new digital production technology. Rutan: [I’ve] been doing this since 1968, I was delivering film in New York City; and then full time from ’74 I got hired to work for my Dad, and I worked for him for 12 years — started out as janitor, and then shipping, and then film cleaning, and then film repair, and then optical lineup, and then optical printing. So, ever since then I’ve worked for a couple of companies, set up a department at COMPAC video, and I had my own company for 14 years doing restoration. Whitehead: Do you see any signs of alteration? Rutan: Yes. Whitehead: Where do you see them? Rutan: Well [speaking while pointing at frame 313 on a large HD monitor], in the — this explosion right here doesn’t look, it’s, see [pointing] — it’s got defects on it — but it just doesn’t look real, it doesn’t look like blood, it just doesn’t look real…. Rutan: I think you’re looking at a patch, at a photographic patch that they put on the back of his [JFK’s] head. It’s crude, but if you run the film you’ll see that it moves — differently than his head does, as well. So, it’s an optical, some sort of an optical [effect] that they put on there, to not show the back of his head. Whitehead: In your opinion, what do you think would have been the most likely way this would have been accomplished? Rutan: With an optical printer, with an aerial optical printer…. Rutan: Well, the only thing I can see really is how predominant the black patch is in this particular frame [pointing]. I mean, it’s clear to me that that is not the back of his head, that that is some kind of a [sic] optical effect, that has been laid on the back of his head by an optical house. And this [pointing at the large pink “blob” on the right side of JFK’s head] is also an optical effect. But the back of his head is what always — what I’m always drawn to, because you — it’s almost like he’s wearing a toupee, because there’s the top of his head [pointing at JFK’s auburn hair on the very top of his head] and that’s basically the color it should be, and then it’s black, it’s just solid black. Smith: You know, the density doesn’t match — the shoulders don’t match that [meaning that the shadow on the back of JFK’s shoulders does not match the black patch on the back of his head] and [the black patch] doesn’t match the top of his head [pointing to JFK’s auburn colored hair on top]…. Smith: It just seems really obvious that the frames where they’ve matted out the back of the head, and added in the pink splash, the pink water-balloon — whatever it is that’s supposed to be the blood — it’s just not even believable … maybe fifty years ago that might have passed muster, but for anybody — I mean — my impression is if I showed it to a 12-year old kid, they would say it was a cartoon…."

1998 MPI "Images of an Assassination" still of Z-317 https://youtu.be/Xorv0YCCRno?t=2506 The black patch is even more obvious in the crop of the 1998 MPI scan of Z-317 presented in Hany Farid's article which attempts to debunk the black patch thesis: https://farid.berkeley.edu/downloads/publications/tr10a.pdf ------------------------------------------------------ Z-317 from Hany Farid article https://farid.berkeley.edu/downloads/publications/tr10a.pdf Z-317 from Hany Farid article https://farid.berkeley.edu/downloads/publications/tr10a.pdf The black patch is equally evident in Jack White's presentation of the 1998 MPI scan of Z-317: And the black patch is also visible in this 9/2/2020 letter written by Rollie Zavada which includes Z-317: https://www.ebay.com/itm/403700159791 But for sure, Wilkinson and Whitehead's 6k scan of Z-317 from the "Forensic Copy" of the Zapruder film they purchased from the National Archives is superior to all of the above: And why are Wilkinson and Whitehead's 6k scans superior even to the 1998 MPI "Images of an Assassination" stills? The answer has to do with the distinction between and utility of logarithmic color versus standard colorization. The scratches and mold that you can see on the film are because the 6k scans were made in log color. Sydney Wilkinson explained this to Doug Horne in a letter that he read while being interviewed on the 1/7/2019 Midnight Writer News, Episode 107, https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-107-douglas-horne-on-the-zapruder-film-alteration-debate/ , as follows: ---------------------------------------------------- SYDNEY WILKINSON WROTE: "Our scans show everything in the frame, the good, the bad, and the ugly." By that they mean the scratches and the mold on the film. They wrote "There is so much detail that individual grains of 8mm film stock are evident in the 6k logarithmic scans. It's hardly pretty, but the images are glaringly sharp. That is why we see all the scratches, mold, dirt, stains, and other film anomalies. Linear color is what we view on our TVs and computers, the color looks right to us. The versions of the Zapruder film we see on television documentaries or DVDs like "Images of an Assassination" sold in 1998 or on YouTube have been cleaned up and color corrected. Much of the scratches, dirt, mold, etc., have been removed along with color correcting each scene to create a much richer looking element. The processes used to do this can be grueling and take a long time depending upon how much money and how much time the producers want to spend on it. But we did not want to make our images look prettier. We did not want to touch anything because our goal was to conduct a forensic scientific study of the film. We wanted to see what was really there in every frame not what might have been hidden or obscured by cleaning or color correcting. So logarithmic color, or log color for short, is what professionals use when coming from or going to film because it brings out much more detail in blacks and mid-blacks by stretching the blacks into grays. However, without color correction, which we have not done, the image looks a little washed out, but the amount of information in the blacks is substantially increased. The primary reason we want log color space was to see all the information in the shadows, and what we saw was astounding. If our transfer was linear color we never would have seen the patch on the back of the head in frame 317 or it would have looked like a shadow. Most importantly, log shadow space does not make a shadow look like a patch." Because Sydney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead are professionals working within the film industry, they have been able to enlist true Hollywood experts in cinematography and post production who have performed content analysis of the Zapruder film. Among them are genuine cinematography professionals such as Ned Price (https://studentfilmreviews.org/?p=17707 ) and Paul Rutan, Jr. (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0751876/ ) who had the following to say about the Zapruder film. Look them up, they are the real deal. ------------------------------------------------ FILM INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS COMMENTING ABOUT Z-317 ------------------------------------------------ "...This extreme close-up from the HD scan of Zapruder frame 317 is what prompted one noted Hollywood expert in post production -- Ned Price, the Head of Restoration at a major motion picture studio -- to say: "Oh that's horrible, that's just terrible. I can't believe it's such a bad fake." His film industry colleague, Paul Rutan, Jr., proclaimed we are looking at artwork in this frame (i.e., aerial imaging) -- not at "opticals" (i.e., traveling matte)...." Horne's "Inside the ARRB," Vol. 4, p. 1361. Even Rollie Zavada has acknowledged the black patch and conceded that "...it certainly looks like a patch; it looks like it could be an alteration...." Although Rollie Zavada is not and never claimed to be an expert on film alteration or cinematography. Zavada was a Kodak employee with expertise in Kodachrome II film, and thus is not qualified to evaluate the Zapruder film for content falsification, and the ARRB mandate that Zavada had did not include "content analysis" for which he is not qualified. Zavada authenticated that the extant Zapruder film is on Kodak Kodachrome II film -- which is no surprise given that Hawkeyeworks was a joint CIA/Kodak facility -- and then went beyond his expertise to claim that the film had not been altered. But as you can see below, even Rollie Zavada, viewing an inferior copy of Z-317, admitted that the black patch looks like an alteration, but not being an expert in film alteration, simply said he refused to believe it because he hadn't seen evidence of how it could have been done.... "It certainly looks like a patch; it looks like it could be an alteration. But I haven't seen evidence of how it was done, so I refuse to believe it." Having no expertise in film alteration whatsoever he resorted to blind faith in a sacred cow instead of following the evidence wherever it leads even though the Heavens may fall... -------------------------------------------------------------- DOUG HORNE TAKES ROLLIE ZAVADA TO TASK OVER ZAPRUDER FRAME 317 [THE BLACK PATCH SUPERIMPOSED OVER JFK'S OCCIPITAL BLOW OUT WOUND]: https://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/10709.html "...In the breakout session, when Josiah Thompson asked him to display the controversial frame 317 and comment on whether the black object covering the rear of JFK's head was a natural shadow or evidence of alteration, Rollie [Zavada] put up the slide (a very dark, muddy image of 317 with much contrast present---an image greatly inferior to the Hollywood scans of the forensic copy), and then said words to the effect: "It certainly looks like a patch; it looks like it could be an alteration. But I haven't seen evidence of how it was done, so I refuse to believe it." [This is very close to a verbatim quote---guaranteed to be accurate in its substance.] I and several others, including Leo Zahn of Hollywood, then suggested---demanded, actually---that Rollie display ALL of frame 317---not just the portion showing JFK's head. When this slide was finally displayed, I asked everyone present in the room what explanation those who were against alteration had for the extreme difference in density between the shadow on Governor Connally's head, and the extremely dense and dark (almost D-max) "anomaly" on JFK's head in that same frame. The two so-called "shadows" have absolutely no relation or similarity to each other, yet both men were photographed in the same frame, at the same instant in time, on the same planet, with the same light source (i.e., the sun). The ensuing silence was more profound than that inside the whale that swallowed Jonah. Rollie and Tink had no explanation for this. Nor does anyone else, who believes that the Zapruder film is an unaltered film. The most reasonable, and currently the only known explanation for this paradox in frame 317, is alteration---the blacking out of the true exit wound on the back of JFK's head in that frame, and in many others, with crude animation...." 'Josiah Thompson and Rollie Zavada at JFK Lancer: A Critical Report' by Douglas P. Horne, author of Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. https://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/10709.html

Pat Speer wrote: Mr. Speer, I would point out to you that your comment contradicts your usual mythology about James Jenkins -- that he is not a back of the head wound witness -- but you would just respond by saying that the video you posted is from 2018 after, according to you, William Law, Doug Horne, Dr. David Mantik and Dr. Michael Chesser had prevailed upon Jenkins to change his story about the location of the large avulsive head wound being in the frontal quadrant of JFK's head as, according to you, Jenkins had placed it prior to that time. Given that James Jenkins had told the HSCA (and made a drawing for the HSCA) in 1977, and also told David Lifton in 1979 that the back of the head wound was in the right quadrant of the back of JFK's head (to Lifton, specifically occipital-parietal), your story that Jenkins had later started claiming it was instead in the frontal quandrant never made any sense to me, and caused me to suspect, like so many other things, that were just lying about this. As I'm sure you recall, I've repeatedly asked you where I can find the video from which you made the screenshots on your website to accompany your claims that Jenkins was demonstrating the large avulsive head wound to be on the top of JFK's head, and now I understand why you've repeatedly ignored my requests... Because I've located that video and have ascertained that your claims about James Jenkins changing his mind about the location of the head wound are fraudulent. I'll demonstrate what led me to conclude that your James Jenkins claims are fraudulent, as follows: The following is a screenshot of fraudulent misrepresentations you make on your website in which you claim that James Jenkins was handed a "mannequin head marked on the low back of the head" with which he disagreed by "insisting", according to you, "that scalp was attached to the bone" in the area marked on the model, and "that there was thereby no blow-out wound" in that area. The following is a video of the segment of the 1991 Dallas Conference of Medical Witnesses from which you have taken your screenshot and upon which you are basing your claims about the statements you allege that James Jenkins made: The topic of the discussion was the back of the head autopsy photograph, and James Jenkins was asked to explain from the perspective of the autopsists why the photograph does not depict the gaping back of the head wound that had been described by the Parkland doctors. James Jenkins responded that by the time the work of the pathologists was completed -- and skull fragments had been inserted into the wound -- there remained a "silver dollar" sized hole in the same place as the large avulsive wound in Dr. Robert McClelland's drawing "that still had bone and scalp missing." At this point Jenkins was asked to draw the wound he was describing on the mannequin head, and he did so. * Thus, it is a lie that Jenkins was disagreeing with a marking that was already on the mannequin head. * And it is a lie that Jenkins was, in any way, saying that there "was no blow out wound" in the area of the back of the head. Immediately following that segment on your website is the following in which you claim that James Jenkins next demonstrated the location of the large avulsive head wound by placing his hand "on the top right side of his head," going on to then describe the silver dollar sized hole was "after reconstruction." The following is a video of the segment of the 1991 Dallas Conference of Medical Witnesses from which you have taken your screenshot and upon which you are basing your claims about the statements you allege that James Jenkins made: Contrary to your claim that Jenkins had went on to describe the silver dollar sized hole, Jenkins had in truth went on to describe the large avulsive wound he saw at the beginning of the autopsy which he described as "an open gaping wound" approximately the "size of a closed fist" similar "to Dr. McClelland's drawing," except a little higher. Jenkins then went on to identify the F-8 autopsy "mystery" photo as being of "the massive cavity" that existed at the beginning of the autopsy. Then Harrison Livingston asked Jenkins to turn around and put his hand on his head to show "where that large hole was," and Jenkins turned his body entirely around in his chair to do so, placing it on the back of his head. Despite my best efforts with the technology available to me, I was unable to clean this photo up well enough to make it clear that Jenkins was indicating the back of his head, but you should be able to determine that watching it in the video starting at 1:57 ( https://youtu.be/UOtc56ga5Es?si=TLl6IbGw0bWeSKdu&t=117 ), additionally, as a matter of common sense, Jenkins would not have had to twist around in his chair like that if he was just going to touch the frontal part of the top of his head. Dr. McClelland was sitting on the other side of Harrison Livingstone, and Jenkins had referenced Dr. McClelland's drawing for the location of the "open gaping wound." * Thus, it is a lie that Jenkins was demonstrating the location of the large avulsive head wound by placing his hand "on the top right side of his head." * And it is a lie that Jenkins was at this point describing the silver dollar sized wound as it existed at the end of the autopsy rather than the large avulsive occipital-parietal wound. Speer, you can consider your fraudulent misrepresentations that James Jenkins was conned into moving the large avulsive wound to the back of the head by "alterationists" circa 2018 to now be officially dead. That was a con job, and you are now busted. I can barely believe that I distrusted my own instincts about you and about this to feel reluctant about James Jenkins's credibility and about posting his 2018 skull model wound drawing all the way up until now. And the following is the information about the 1991 Dallas Medical Witness Conference that Speer refused to provide to me (and now we know why ) Link to complete 'JFK Medical Witness Conference Part 1 (April 6th, 1991)' https://youtu.be/t_FY2loSOZY?si=afF4yPtWK5jusv_s An extremely rare, but important video discussion between eyewitnesses from Parkland Hospital, where JFK died and Bethesda Naval Hospital, where his autopsy was performed. This was the FIRST and only time these witnesses met each other and discussed their memories. It was filmed on April 6th, 1991, at the Stouffer Hotel in Dallas, Texas. It was hosted by Harrison Livingstone, author of High Treason 2. Which includes a transcript of key moments from this conference, in Chapter 14: https://archive.org/details/hightreason2grea0000livi/page/282/mode/2up

Are you referring to the article by Doug Horne? "The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration" by Douglas P. Horne https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/ If so, I agree with you: Next to the Zapruder film chapter in Volume IV of Doug Horne's book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, I think that the online essay linked above is the best and most comprehensive tutorial on the Zapruder film that exists. From the available testimony of CIA NPIC officials Homer McMahon and Dino Brugioni, it would appear that Hawkeyeworks in Rochester, New Your, was a highly classified joint CIA/Kodak film lab that was, in addition to NPIC, in possession of the camera-original Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination, and all but a few documents from the second briefing board session at NPIC remain classified. I don't know why this would still be the case after all of these years other than that something highly nefarious took place, namely, alteration of the Zapruder film. When Homer McMahon was interviewed by the ARRB in 1996, and divulged the name of the facility, "Hawkeyeworks," the CIA immediately informed the ARRB that even the name of the facility itself was classified. The following is a memo from Doug Horne memorializing that communication: For me, it is the alterations in the Zapruder film itself that are the surest indications that it was modified that weekend (we know it happened that weekend because the same alterations are present in the NPIC briefing boards made on November 24, 1963, and in the Zapruder film stills that were published in the November 29, 1963 assassination edition of LIFE magazine). In particular, the headshot sequence scenes depict damage to JFK's head that was not reported by any of the Parkland Hospital and Bethesda autopsy witnesses, and which is not present in the autopsy photographs; namely, a cavernous hole in the President's forehead, that is approximately the size of a cantaloupe, as we can see in the following stills from the 1998 MPI "Images of an Assassination" digital copy of the "original" Zapruder film which are highlighted to make the forehead crater clearer to the naked eye: That wound is somehow -- perhaps magically? -- missing from the autopsy photographs: The closest witness to the head wound, Jackie Kennedy, of course described to the Warren Commission a wound completely different than what we are seeing in those Zapruder stills above: "I was trying to hold his hair on. From the front there was nothing -- I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on...." In the Zapruder film we can see Jackie feel the margins of the back of the head wound that she later described to the Warren Commission (and which roughly twenty Parkland Hospital doctors and nurses reported), just before she went out onto the trunk to retrieve a piece of brain that had been blown out of the back of her husband's head that she would turn over to Dr. Marion Jenkins upon her arrival at the hospital: Notice above that what Jackie Kennedy appears to be feeling with her white gloved hand has the appearance of a large black blob instead of a bloody blow out wound. Zapruder film authenticity apologists of the variety that admit the existence of the large avulsive wound in the back of JFK's head generally claim that we are not seeing the blood, brain and skull we should be seeing because "Zapruder's camera just couldn't pick up such details"; but note that in the same footage WE ARE seeing Jackie's red roses, so WE SHOULD also be seeing the blood, brain and skull associated with that wound. So what is the deal with that black blob that appears where the occipital-parietal wound should be? It is most clearly seen in frame 317 of Sydney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead's 6K scans of the Forensic Copy of the "original" Zapruder film that they purchased from the National Archives in 2009, in which we more clearly see that the black blob is a hexagon shaped D-max black patch with sharp edges that has been inserted over the occipital-parietal wound, and is definitely not the "natural shadow" that Zapruder film authenticity apologists claim that it is: And when we look at the clearest Zapruder film stills from the headshot sequence that follow Z-313 (the frame of the headshot) also from Wilkinson and Whitehead's 6k scans, we see that same black patch covering the back of the head wound morphing in shape from frame to frame: What would professional cinematographers who are familiar with the special effects of 1960 era films think of this? We don't have to wonder, because Sidney Wilkinson and Thom Whitehead have already solicited opinions from some of them, and the following is what they had to say: https://www.fff.org/2023/08/16/the-evidence-that-convicts-the-cia-of-the-jfk-assassination-part-4/ "...I’m going to present one last piece of evidence to complete my case. That evidence consists of expert testimony from three witnesses — Paul Rutan, Jr., Garrett Smith, and Dr. Roderick Ryan. In my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, I include a partial transcript of an interview of Rutan and Smith, both of whom closely examined a high-quality copy of the extant Zapruder film — that is, the film that is in the National Archives that is purported to be the original film but that is actually the altered, fraudulent copy of the film that the CIA secretly produced at its top-secret Hawkeyeworks facility in Rochester, New York. I was fortunate to be able to include a portion of that interview in my book. The interview was conducted by Thom Whitehead, a Hollywood television and feature-film mastering editor specializing in motion pictures. The interview was conducted as part of a documentary on the Zapruder film that is being produced by Whitehead and his colleague Sydney Wilkinson. Douglas Horne, the author of the watershed book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board and who served on the staff of the ARRB, requested permission from Whitehead and Wilkinson to include a portion of the interview in my book, and they graciously agreed. As far as I know, my book is the first and only place where that portion of the interview has been published. Rutan and Smith The following are excerpts from the partial transcript of that interview that I included in my book: Smith: .…Now, as to my credibility, thirty-seven years in the movie business, I’m not sure how much lower you can go than that; and [I] just got done with nearly twenty-five years at Paramount, where I basically ran their mastering for most of those years and spent the last few years investigating new digital production technology. Rutan: [I’ve] been doing this since 1968, I was delivering film in New York City; and then full time from ’74 I got hired to work for my Dad, and I worked for him for 12 years — started out as janitor, and then shipping, and then film cleaning, and then film repair, and then optical lineup, and then optical printing. So, ever since then I’ve worked for a couple of companies, set up a department at COMPAC video, and I had my own company for 14 years doing restoration. Whitehead: Do you see any signs of alteration? Rutan: Yes. Whitehead: Where do you see them? Rutan: Well [speaking while pointing at frame 313 on a large HD monitor], in the — this explosion right here doesn’t look, it’s, see [pointing] — it’s got defects on it — but it just doesn’t look real, it doesn’t look like blood, it just doesn’t look real…. Rutan: I think you’re looking at a patch, at a photographic patch that they put on the back of his [JFK’s] head. It’s crude, but if you run the film you’ll see that it moves — differently than his head does, as well. So, it’s an optical, some sort of an optical [effect] that they put on there, to not show the back of his head. Whitehead: In your opinion, what do you think would have been the most likely way this would have been accomplished? Rutan: With an optical printer, with an aerial optical printer…. Rutan: Well, the only thing I can see really is how predominant the black patch is in this particular frame [pointing]. I mean, it’s clear to me that that is not the back of his head, that that is some kind of a [sic] optical effect, that has been laid on the back of his head by an optical house. And this [pointing at the large pink “blob” on the right side of JFK’s head] is also an optical effect. But the back of his head is what always — what I’m always drawn to, because you — it’s almost like he’s wearing a toupee, because there’s the top of his head [pointing at JFK’s auburn hair on the very top of his head] and that’s basically the color it should be, and then it’s black, it’s just solid black. Smith: You know, the density doesn’t match — the shoulders don’t match that [meaning that the shadow on the back of JFK’s shoulders does not match the black patch on the back of his head] and [the black patch] doesn’t match the top of his head [pointing to JFK’s auburn colored hair on top]…. Smith: It just seems really obvious that the frames where they’ve matted out the back of the head, and added in the pink splash, the pink water-balloon — whatever it is that’s supposed to be the blood — it’s just not even believable … maybe fifty years ago that might have passed muster, but for anybody — I mean — my impression is if I showed it to a 12-year old kid, they would say it was a cartoon…."

Okay, Mr. Von Pein, let's conduct a simple little exercise to determine whether it is I who is the prevaricator in this circumstance or whether it is you who is the prevaricator. And let's call it PIN THE "TELL" ON THE PREVARICATOR A. Were you lying, Mr. Von Pein, when on May 6, 2024, you wrote that: "I was, of course, doing no such thing. I have never communicated the idea that I have ever thought that Dr. McClelland ever placed the large head wound anywhere except the far-right-rear portion of JFK's head.I have no idea how or why you have latched on to the goofy notion that I was trying to say that McClelland was placing the wound "over the ear" in the above screen captures from the 1988 NOVA program. I never said any such thing. You just decided to make that up (for some reason)." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30412-question-for-pat-speer-who-are-these-key-witnesses-and-what-precisely-is-your-criteria-for-designating-them-as-such/?do=findComment&comment=535354 B. Were you lying, Mr. Von Pein, when on January 24, 2024, you wrote that: "I have no idea why Keven Hofeling is blasting me on the McClelland "hands-on demonstrations" topic. McClelland's "demonstrations" have ALWAYS placed the large "blow out" wound at the RIGHT-REAR of JFK's head (with very little variation). So where's the disagreement there, Keven?" https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30045-why-pat-speer-owes-the-family-of-dr-robert-mcclelland-an-apology/?do=findComment&comment=526769 C. Were you lying, Mr. Von Pein, when on January 4, 2024, you wrote that: "In addition to his appearance in 1988's "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", Dr. Robert McClelland also performed a "hand-on-his-head" demonstration for the PBS-TV camera in another 1988 television program, "Who Shot President Kennedy?", hosted by Walter Cronkite. In that PBS program, Dr. McClelland twice put his right hand over the upper-right portion of the back of his head to indicate where he said the large wound was located in President Kennedy's head (see the screen captures below)." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30045-why-pat-speer-owes-the-family-of-dr-robert-mcclelland-an-apology/?do=findComment&comment=525024 Now let's look at C, your January 4, 2024 statement again. You wrote: "In addition to his appearance in 1988's "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", Dr. Robert McClelland also performed a "hand-on-his-head" demonstration for the PBS-TV camera in another 1988 television program, "Who Shot President Kennedy?", hosted by Walter Cronkite. In that PBS program, Dr. McClelland twice put his right hand over the upper-right portion of the back of his head to indicate where he said the large wound was located in President Kennedy's head (see the screen captures below)." But at B, in your January 24, 2024 statement, you wrote: "I have no idea why Keven Hofeling is blasting me on the McClelland "hands-on demonstrations" topic. McClelland's "demonstrations" have ALWAYS placed the large "blow out" wound at the RIGHT-REAR of JFK's head (with very little variation)." And at A, in your May 6, 2024 statement, you wrote: "I was, of course, doing no such thing. I have never communicated the idea that I have ever thought that Dr. McClelland ever placed the large head wound anywhere except the far-right-rear portion of JFK's head. I have no idea how or why you have latched on to the goofy notion that I was trying to say that McClelland was placing the wound "over the ear" in the above screen captures from the 1988 NOVA program. I never said any such thing. You just decided to make that up (for some reason)." So, Mr. Von Pein, were you lying on January 24 and May 6, 2024 (B & C), were you lying on January 4, 2024 (A), or -- and this is what I frankly think it actually was -- were you lying in ALL three instances (A, B, and C)? I'm going to leave the honors to you, Mr. Von Pein. Which is it, A, B, or C, or is it, as I believe, all three? Now pin the "tell" on the prevaricator, Mr. Von Pein...

You are writing as if there is some kind of consensus that has been reached whereby a large number of other researchers have flocked around your distortions of the meaning of Dr. McClelland's first day Admission Note being that he saw only a large wound at President Kennedy's right temple (which he misdescribed as the left temple) when the fact is that a long list of other researchers, including Dr. Gary Aguilar -- and more recently Sandy Larsen and myself -- have been schooling you for more than a decade on some very simple facts about that Admission Note; that it identified two wounds, a "a massive gunshot wound of the head," which he believed to be the exit wound, and ''a gunshot wound of the left temple," which he believed to be the wound of entrance, based upon his colleague, Dr. Jenkins having represented to him that there was an entry wound at the left temple. Let's set the record straight. Dr. McClelland's note unequivocally identified two distinct wounds: a "massive gunshot wound of the head," which he believed to be the exit wound, and "a gunshot wound of the left temple," which he believed to be the entrance wound. Your attempt to twist this into a large right temple wound is a desperate and transparent ploy to fit your narrative. It is evident that Dr. McClelland was mistaken about the left temple wound based on Dr. Jenkins mistakenly telling him that there was a left temple wound, a fact that you conveniently overlook to serve your own agenda. Your persistent distortions and attempts to manipulate the truth are not only intellectually dishonest but also an insult to the integrity of historical inquiry. It's time to abandon your self-serving narrative and engage with the facts as they stand, rather than perpetuating a skewed version of events to suit your agenda. ____________ PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL ADMISSION NOTE DATE AND HOUR Nov. 22, 1963 4:45 P.M. DOCTOR: Robert N. McClelland Statement Regarding Assassination of President Kennedy At approximately 12:45 PM on the above date I was called from the second floor of Parkland Hospital and went immediately to the Emergency Operating Room. When I arrived President Kennedy was being attended by Drs Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, James Carrico, and Ronald Jones. The President was at the time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea. An endotracheal tube and assisted respiration was started immediately by Dr. Carrico on Duty in the EOR when the President arrived. Drs. Perry, Baxter, and I then performed a tracheotomy for respiratory distress and tracheal injury and Dr. Jones and Paul Peters inserted bilateral anterior chest tubes for pneumothoracis secondary to the tracheomediastinal injury. Simultaneously Dr. Jones had started 3 cut-downs giving blood and fluids immediately, In spite of this, at 12:55 he was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark the neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery who arrived immediately after I did. The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple. He was pronounced dead after external cardiac message failed and ECG activity was gone. COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm LINKS TO ORIGINAL DOCUMENT: PAGE 1: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019a.htm PAGE 2: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019b.htm ____________ This too is another one of your distortions of the facts. Dr. McClelland referred to the "massive gunshot wound of the head" in his first day Admission Note (as did Drs. Clark, Carrico, Perry, Baxter and Jenkins in their accompanying Admission Notes), and he likewise thereafter consistently described and demonstrated that wound until the day of his death. To demonstrate this, let's take the evidence you present to the contrary on your website, which we'll call Exhibit A: In Exhibit A you present screenshots of Dr. McClelland with his right hand on his head demonstrating the large avulsive back of the head wound from TMWKK and KRON's JFK: An Unsolved Mystery, and in parenthesis you tell us to "Just look at the locations of his fingers in comparison to his hairline...," to stand for your proposition that McClelland was actually demonstrating your side of the head wound instead of the occipital-parietal wound he has always described. There is a problem with the screenshots you use in Exhibit A however, and it is a BIG PROBLEM! The actual footage from the TMWKK episode shows that McClelland is actually just resting his fingers on the top of his head while rubbing his thumb up and down the occipital-parietal region of the right side of the back of his head to indicate the location of the large wound, right where he has ALWAYS maintained that it was located. And you have cherry picked a frame from that segment and have falsely described it as being McClelland indicating that the large wound was instead on the side of JFK's head. As can be seen in the following clip of McClelland's entire hand gesture, he is running his thumb up and down on the right side of the back of his head as he describes the location of the large head wound to the interviewer. Moreover, there is no way you could have merely been confused about what Dr. McClelland was communicating with his hand gesture when you were capturing the screenshot from the segment because at the time, in that video, he was saying the following: "Almost a fifth or perhaps even a quarter of the right back part of the head in this area here [AT WHICH POINT MCLELLAND RAN HIS THUMB UP AND DOWN THE BACK OF HIS HEAD] had been blasted out along with probably most of the brain tissue in the area." See SEGMENT ON YOUTUBE: Likewise, the actual footage from the KRON episode shows that McClelland is again just resting his fingers on the top of his head while rubbing his thumb up and down the occipital-parietal region of the right side of the back of his head to indicate the location of the large wound, right where he has ALWAYS maintained that it was located. And you have cherry picked a frame from this segment as well and have falsely described it as being McClelland indicating that the large wound was instead on the side of JFK's head. As can be seen in the following clip of McClelland's entire hand gesture, he is running his thumb up and down on the right side of the back of his head as he describes the location of the large head wound to the interviewer. It is not as obvious as it is in the TMWKK episode, but if you watch how his wrist moves, you can see that his manner of demonstrating the wound is to rest his fingers higher on his head and to feel around for the occipital bone with his thumb. And if you have any doubt at all, simply listen in the video of the segment to hear that as Dr. McLelland is feeling the back of his head with his thumb, he is saying the following: "It was in the right back part of the head -- very large..." See SEGMENT ON YOUTUBE: Such trickery is the law of the land for Mr. Speer, and others like him, such as David Von Pein, who has the following meme of deceptive screenshots on his website: To debunk Mr. Von Pein -- as we just debunked Mr. Speer -- I wrote the following: Here's the problem: You've presented this meme of Dr. McClelland in the 1988 PBS Nova program "Who Shot President Kennedy" in support of the notion that he was communicating that the large avulsive back of the head wound that he reported to the Warren Commission was actually on the side of JFK's head in the parietal area over the ear. But close examination of the program reveals that your two screenshots comprising your Lone Nutter meme were taken when McClelland quickly made these gestures while highly animated in thought and speech, making for a very misleading impression of what he was intending to communicate. I say this because in the same program, within minutes of the footage from which you derived these two screenshots, Dr. McClelland takes his hand and swirls his fingers in a vertically oriented oval shape on the back of his head to demonstrate the location of the large avulsive wound, as follows: I have slowed this footage down to 25% of its normal playing speed and turned it into a GIF to highlight his oval shaped vertical gesture. Moreover, we can be certain that McClelland was much more focused on presenting an accurate demonstration of the dimensions of the back of the head wound at this time -- as opposed to your screenshots -- because while doing so (when presenting his rationalization for why the large avulsive wound is not visible in the BOH autopsy photos) he was saying the following (AND PLEASE NOTE THAT I HAVE HIGHLIGHTED THE EXACT WORDS HE IS SAYING WHILE MAKING THE OVAL SHAPED GESTURE IN RED). _____________ "The Pathologist has taken this loose piece of scalp which is hanging back this way in most of the pictures, exposing this large wound, and has pulled the scalp forward to take a picture..." _____________ As follows is a video of the segment described above to allow you to appreciate the importance of what Dr. McClelland is saying simultaneous with his hand gesture (it is at 50:37 through 50:53 of the original program at this link: https://youtu.be/SL9orid231c?si=4Fo7ICwInJX-rxKO ). So although Mr. Speer is a "limited hangout" version of Mr. Von Pein, we can see that these types who deny the first day medical testimony and relentlessly fight for the integrity of the Autopsy Protocol, Photos, X-Rays and the Zapruder film are more alike than Speer would ever admit. In short, the misrepresentations about Dr. McClelland -- as demonstrated in Exhibit A -- serving as the foundation of Speer's crusade against the voluminous evidence of JFK's large avulsive back-of-the-head wound, all comes down like a house of cards upon a showing that his bedrock assumptions are demonstrably false. Again, Dr. McClelland referred to the "massive gunshot wound of the head" in his first day Admission Note (as did Drs. Clark, Carrico, Perry, Baxter and Jenkins in their accompanying Admission Notes), and McClelland likewise thereafter consistently described and demonstrated that wound until the day of his death, and as we have seen above, the evidence Speer presents to the contrary is nothing more than the sophistry of deceptively labeled screenshots.

You are again attempting to answer my questions with more questions, which you then expect me to answer. Isn't going to happen. READ THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD. Secondly, the nature of your questions leads me to conclude you either have not closely read or do not understand the comments of my post. Try again, and maybe, just maybe you will get it...

Pat Speer wrote: I could generate such a list in short order, using prioritization criteria consistent with established and universally recognized evidentiary principles such as probative value and evidentiary weight, but there is a problem here. Can you see what that problem is? YOU have made claims about there being "KEY WITNESSES," and this thread is premised upon asking YOU to identify said "KEY WITNESSES," and to divulge the criteria by which you have selected these "KEY WITNESSES." Now it seems to me that, for some reason, you are attempting to dodge these questions. You seemed pretty confident about the existence of these "KEY WITNESSES" in the post you authored which I used to initiate this thread; is there some reason why you have developed cold feet now that you have been asked to further expound upon your concepts? I'll tell you what, you answer my questions first, and THEN I will provide you with my list and the criteria for that list. Does that sound fair? Pat Speer wrote: Has it never occurred to you how unreasonable it is to expect that anybody is ever going to be able to assemble a list of reputable medical professionals who have the intestinal fortitude to claim or even suggest that the American intelligence agencies and the U.S. National Security state would assassinate the President of the United States and then cover it up by subverting military personnel to engage in body alteration and photographic forgery, or is that precisely the reason that you employ such a straw man fallacious argument? These medical professionals have reputations to protect, and families that depend upon them. Who better than to empathize with this, but you, who presents himself as being so incapable of even imagining the possibility of fraudulent photographic evidence? It is nothing short of astonishing that some of them went so far as to suggest that the autopsy photographs are not authentic upon their initial viewing of the materials. Even Doctor McClelland, undoubtedly one of the most courageous medical witnesses, partially capitulated to the back of the head photograph when confronted with it by PBS Nova. The principle of this story is that there are few who are made of the stuff that Dr. David Mantik is, as is to be expected. And please note that my question for you is the sentence that begins the paragraph above. Pat Speer wrote: Come now, is it that these reputable medical professionals have been called "cowards or liars," or is it just that it is convenient for you to make such a claim to justify your own unrelenting assault upon the medical expertise and judgment of the medical professionals because their earliest observations and reports present such an impenetrable barrier against your entire project? Of all people, you are the least well positioned to have such a self-sanctimonious attitude about this, or to exercise such a pretense of righteous indignation. Can you see the hypocrisy involved with you, of all people, pretending to be worried about the reputations of the medical professionals who attended to President Kennedy? Pat Speer wrote: Is it really possible that you are so impervious to any type of self-introspection or awareness of your own sins in this regard; and could it be that your own blindness and bullheadedness is largely responsible for the negative experiences you have had and are continuing to have with others? Take it from this "stalker," I really think there might be something to this. Pat Speer wrote: Now read closely. I'm going to now do something that I don't think you have any experience whatsoever doing yourself. I am going to actually respond to your combative questions with answers instead of questions of my own. And my answers to your questions are the same answers I provided the last time I answered the same questions from you -- instead of responding with questions -- and that is to say that it does not appear to me that Dr. Mantik factors in the damage that resulted from the craniotomy into his analysis, even though he is well aware of the evidence of the craniotomy, such that in this instance he may be experiencing a blind spot due to his training in radiation oncology and does not see that he is being misled by the X-rays. This does not detract in any way from my high opinion of Dr. Mantik as a scholar and a gentleman, and I furthermore acknowledge that he may be right and I may be wrong, but Dr. Mantik and myself are both undergoing a constant evolution in what we know, and we'll just have to see where it all stands in five or ten years from now. And likewise, Doug Horne's interpretation of Ed Reed's testimony could be incorrect, or Ed Reed's own memory of the chain of events could be incorrect. Suggesting either possibility is certainly different by a massive order of magnitude than alleging that twenty Parkland doctors and nurses are all wrong, but I bet that falls within the parameters of your own blind spot (or is contradicted by the mission statement of your limited hangout project).

The Kennedy Casket Conspiracy by Jacob G. Hornberger November 22, 2010 | https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/kennedy-casket-conspiracy/ Last November a new book entitled The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence, by Gerald Blaine and Lisa McCubbin, promised to “reveal the inside story of the assassination, the weeks and days that led to it and its heartrending aftermath.” Unfortunately, however, while providing details of the events leading up to the assassination, the assassination itself, and President Kennedy’s funeral, the book provided hardly any information on one of the most mysterious aspects of the assassination: what happened when Kennedy’s body was delivered to the morgue at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of the assassination. For almost 50 years, people have debated the Kennedy assassination. Some claim that the Warren Commission got it right — that Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone-nut assassin. Others contend that Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. It is not the purpose of this article to engage in that debate. The purpose of this article is simply to focus on what happened at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963, and, specifically, the events that took place prior to Kennedy’s autopsy. What happened that night is so unusual that it cries out for truthful explanation even after 47 years. U.S. officials have long maintained that Kennedy’s body was delivered to the Bethesda morgue in the heavy, ornamental, bronze casket in which the body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The problem, however, is that the evidence establishes that Kennedy’s body was actually delivered to the Bethesda morgue twice, at separate times and in separate caskets. How does one resolve this problem? One option, obviously, is just to forget about it, given that the assassination took place almost a half-century ago. But it seems to me that since the matter is so unusual and since it involves a president of the United States, the American people — regardless of which side of the divide they fall on — lone-nut assassin or conspiracy — are entitled to a truthful explanation of what happened that night at Bethesda. And the only ones who can provide it are U.S. officials, especially those in the Secret Service, the FBI, and the U.S. military, the agencies that were in control of events at Bethesda that night. The facts of the casket controversy are set forth in detail in a five-volume work that was published in 2009 entitled Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK. The author is Douglas P. Horne, who served as chief analyst for military records for the Assassination Records Review Board. The ARRB was the official board established to administer the JFK Records Act, which required federal departments and agencies to divulge to the public their files and records relating to the Kennedy assassination. The act was enacted after Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, JFK, produced a firestorm of public outcry against the U.S. government’s decision to keep assassination-related records secret from the public for 75 years after publication of the Warren Commission Report in 1964 and for 50 years after publication of the House Select Committee on Assassinations Report in 1979. Horne’s book posits that high officials in the national security state — i.e., the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and U.S. military — planned and executed the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that the man who replaced Kennedy as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, orchestrated a cover-up of the conspiracy by telling officials that national security (i.e., a potential nuclear war, citing Oswald’s activities relating to the Soviet Union and Cuba) necessitated shutting down an investigation into determining whether Kennedy’s murder involved a conspiracy. Horne’s book focuses primarily on the events surrounding the autopsy of Kennedy’s body on the night of the assassination. As he himself acknowledges, his book expands upon the thesis set forth in a book published in 1981 entitled Best Evidence by David Lifton, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and reached Number 4 on the New York Times best seller list. It was Lifton who originally challenged the official story that Kennedy’s body was delivered only once to the Bethesda morgue. It is Horne who has set forth in more detail the evidence that establishes that Lifton was right. When Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base from Dallas, Kennedy’s casket was placed into a gray Navy ambulance in which Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, was traveling. Proceeding in a motorcade, the ambulance arrived at the front of the Bethesda Naval Hospital at 6:55 p.m. At 8:00 p.m., a little more than an hour later, the casket was carried into the Bethesda morgue by a military honor team called the Joint Casket Bearer Team, which consisted of personnel from all the branches of military service, all of whom were in dress uniform and wore white gloves. However, the evidence also establishes that at 6:35 p.m. — 90 minutes earlier than when Kennedy’s Dallas casket was carried into the morgue at 8:00 p.m. by the Joint Casket Bearer Team — another group of military personnel carried the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue. That casket was a plain shipping casket rather than the expensive, heavy, ornamental, bronze casket into which the president’s body had been placed in Dallas. Equally strange was the fact that the president’s body at the 6:35 p.m. delivery was in a body bag rather than wrapped in the white sheets in which the medical personnel in Dallas had wrapped it before it was placed into the heavy, bronze casket in Dallas. Have doubts? Let’s look at the evidence. On November 22, 1963, Marine Sgt. Roger Boyajian was stationed at the Marine Corps Institute in Washington, D.C. On that day, he received orders to go to the Bethesda Hospital to serve as NCO in charge of a 10-man Marine security detail for President Kennedy’s autopsy. Four days later — on November 26 — Boyajian filed a report of what happened. Here is what his report stated in part: If you would like to see a copy of Sergeant Boyajian’s report, it is posted here on the Internet as part of the online appendix to Horne’s book. Still not convinced? In 1963, E-6 Navy hospital corpsman Dennis David was stationed at the Bethesda National Navy Center, where his job consisted of reading medical textbooks and transforming them into Navy correspondence courses. David later became a Navy officer and served in that capacity for 11 years in the Medical Services Corps. He retired from active duty in 1976. On November 22, 1963, David was serving as “Chief of the Day” at the Navy medical school at Bethesda. According to an official ARRB interview conducted by Horne on February 14, 1997, David stated that at about 5:30 p.m. he was summoned to appear at the office of the Chief of the Day for the entire Bethesda complex (including the medical school). When he arrived, there were three or four Secret Service agents in the office. He was informed that President Kennedy’s autopsy was going to be held at the Bethesda morgue. David was ordered to round up a team and proceed to the morgue and establish security. He rounded up several men from various barracks, proceeded to the Bethesda morgue, and assigned security duties to his team. At around 6:30 p.m., David received a phone call stating that “your visitor is on the way: you will need some people to offload. ” David rounded up 7 or 8 sailors to carry in the casket and a few minutes later, a black hearse drove up. Several men in blue suits got out of the hearse, along with the driver and passenger, both of whom were wearing white (operating room) smocks. Under David’s supervision, the sailors offloaded the casket and carried it into the morgue. What did the casket look like? David stated that it was a simple, gray shipping casket similar to the ones commonly used in the Vietnam War. Now keep in mind that the motorcade in which the gray Navy ambulance that carried Mrs. Kennedy and the heavy bronze casket into which her husband’s body had been placed in Dallas didn’t arrive at the hospital until 6:55 p.m., twenty minutes after Kennedy’s body was carried into the morgue by David’s team. Keep in mind also that according to the official version of events, the Dallas casket wasn’t carried into the morgue by the Joint Casket Bearer Team until 8:00 p.m. David added that after his team had delivered the shipping casket into the morgue, he proceeded into the main portion of the hospital, where several minutes later (i.e., at 6:55 p.m.) he saw the motorcade in which Mrs. Kennedy was traveling (and the Dallas casket was being transported) approaching the front of Bethesda Hospital. As he stated to Horne, he knew at that point that President Kennedy’s body could not be in the Dallas casket because his team had, just a few minutes earlier, delivered Kennedy’s body into the morgue in the shipping casket. While David didn’t personally witness the president’s body being taken out of the shipping casket, he later asked one of the autopsy physicians, a U.S. Navy commander named Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, in which casket the president had come in. Boswell responded, “You ought to know; you were there.” Moreover, when Lifton showed David a photo of the Dallas casket in 1980, David categorically stated that that was not the shipping casket in which Kennedy’s body had been delivered at 6:35 p.m. (Horne, volume 4, page 989.) What David told Horne in 1997 was a repetition of what David had told Lifton many years before, which Lifton had related in his 1981 book, Best Evidence. As Lifton recounts in his book, David gave the same account to a reporter from the Lake County News-Sun in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1975. If you would like to see Horne’s official ARRB report of his interview with David, it is posted on the Internet here. (Lifton’s account is in chapter 25 of his book and is entitled “The Lake County Informant.”) Still not satisfied? According to Horne, “After Best Evidence was published, a Michigan newspaper and a Canadian news team located and interviewed Donald Rebentisch, one of the sailors in Dennis David’s working party, who had been telling the same story independently for years.” (Horne, volume 3, page 675.) So, you have a Marine sergeant and two sailors, whose statements unequivocally confirm that Kennedy’s body was carried into the Bethesda morgue in a plain shipping casket at 6:35 p.m. Is there any more evidence of the 6:35 p.m. delivery of Kennedy’s body to the morgue? Yes. On November 22, 1963, Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc., which, according to Horne, had been the most prestigious funeral home in Washington for many years, was summoned to Bethesda Hospital to perform the embalming of President Kennedy’s body. On November 22-23, 1963, Gawler’s prepared what was called a “First Call Sheet” for President Kennedy’s autopsy, which contained the following handwritten notation: The person who wrote that notation was Joseph E. Hagan, the supervisor in charge of the Gawler’s embalming team for the Kennedy autopsy and who later became president of Gawler’s. When the ARRB interviewed Hagan in 1996, he stated that he had not personally witnessed the president’s body being brought into the morgue in the shipping casket but that someone whom he could not recall had advised him of that fact. If you would like to see a copy of the Gawler’s First Call Sheet, it is posted here on the Internet. Need more evidence? Paul O’Connor was an E-4 Navy corpsman who served as an autopsy technician for the Kennedy autopsy on November 22, 1963. According to Horne, O’Connor told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1977 and Lifton in 1979 and 1980 that Kennedy’s body had arrived in a “cheap, metal, aluminum” casket in a “rubberized body bag” with a “zipper down the middle.” (Horne, volume 4, page 990.) In 1979, Lifton interviewed a man named Floyd Riebe, who was a medical photography student present at Kennedy’s autopsy when he was an E-5 Navy corpsman stationed at Bethesda. According to Horne, Riebe stated that Kennedy’s casket was not a viewing casket because the lid did not open halfway down. Riebe also confirmed that Kennedy’s body was in a rubberized body bag with a zipper. (Horne, volume 4, page 990.) Jerrol Custer was an E-4 Navy corpsman who served as an X-ray technician for the Kennedy autopsy. According to Horne, Custer told Lifton in repeated interviews that Kennedy’s body was in a body bag. Custer also told Lifton that he saw the black hearse that brought in the shipping casket. He stated that he saw two different caskets in the Bethesda morgue, one of which was bronze. Interestingly, in a deposition conducted by the ARRB in 1997, Custer denied that Kennedy was in a body bag even though he had stated the contrary in two separate interviews with Lifton in 1979 and 1989. (Horne, volume 4, page 991.) Ed Reed, an E-4 Navy corpsman, also served as an X-ray technician for the Kennedy autopsy. In an ARRB deposition in 1997, Reed testified that Kennedy’s casket was a “typical aluminum military casket.” He said that there were Marines present at the time the casket was delivered. He recalled that the president arrived in a see-through clear plastic bag, not in a standard body bag. (Horne, volume 4, page 991.) According to Horne, James Jenkins, another E-4 Navy corpsman who served as an autopsy technician for Kennedy’s autopsy, told Lifton in 1979 that Kennedy’s casket was not ornamental and that it was plain — “awful clean and simple” and “not something you’d expect a president to be in.” (Horne, volume 4, page 992.) According to Horne, John VanHuesen, a member of the Gawler’s embalming team, told the ARRB that he recalled seeing a “black, zippered plastic pouch” in the Bethesda morgue early in the autopsy. (Horne, volume 4, page 992.) So, what do we have here? We have eight Marine and Navy enlisted personnel who were performing their assigned duties on November 22, 1963, and whose statements unequivocally establish that Kennedy’s body was delivered to the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket and in a body bag rather than in the heavy, ornamental, bronze casket into which it had been placed at Parkland Hospital, wrapped in white sheets. We also have two written reports — Sergeant Boyajian’s report and the Gawler’s report — that were filed contemporaneously with the autopsy, both of which confirm early arrival of Kennedy’s body in the shipping casket. We also have a member of the Gawler’s embalming team stating that he saw a body bag in the morgue. But that’s not all. We also have the statement by Dennis David that after he and his team offloaded Kennedy’s casket and delivered it into the morgue at 6:35 p.m., he personally witnessed the motorcade in which Mrs. Kennedy (and the Dallas casket) was traveling approaching the front of Bethesda Hospital at 6:55 p.m. In fact, David isn’t the only one who saw Mrs. Kennedy’s motorcade (which contained the Dallas casket) approaching Bethesda Hospital after the president’s body had already been delivered to the morgue at 6:35 p.m. According to Horne, Jerrol Custer told Lifton in 1980 that he had seen Mrs. Kennedy in the main lobby while he was on his way upstairs to process X-rays that had already been taken of the president’s body. (Horne, volume 4, page 991.) Let’s now turn back to the official version of events. The official version is that Kennedy’s body was carried into the Bethesda morgue by the Joint Casket Bearer Team at 8:00 p.m. in the heavy, ornamental, bronze casket into which it had been placed at Parkland Hospital. This is the account given in William Manchester’s book The Death of a President. When the casket was opened, Kennedy’s body was taken out, and witnesses confirm that it was wrapped in the white sheets that had been wrapped around the body by the Parkland Hospital personnel in Dallas. At 8:15 p.m., the autopsy began. So, which is it? Was Kennedy’s body carried by a team of sailors into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket encased in a body bag after being delivered in a black hearse that contained several men in blue suits? Or was it carried in by the Joint Casket Bearer Team at 8:00 p.m. in the heavy, ornamental, bronze casket from Dallas and wrapped in white sheets after being delivered in a gray Navy ambulance? The answer: Both. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “There’s no way that Kennedy’s body would have been delivered two different times into the Bethesda morgue. Why would anyone do that? Anyway, if Kennedy’s body was actually delivered into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. in the shipping casket, how did it get back into the heavy, ornamental, bronze casket from Dallas that the Joint Casket Bearer Team carried in at 8:00 p.m.? Why, that’s just plain crazy!” Permit me to cite some of the adjectives that the noted attorney Vincent Bugliosi used in a chapter entitled “David Lifton and the Alteration of the President’s Body” in his book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: “preposterous,” “far out,” “unhinged,” and “nonsense.” So, which casket delivery would you guess Bugliosi settled on — the 6:35 p.m. delivery of the shipping casket with the body bag or the 8:00 p.m. heavy bronze casket delivery with the white sheets wrapped around Kennedy’s body? You guessed wrong! Bugliosi settled on a third casket delivery. Yes, you read that right. Vincent Bugliosi, along with noted conspiracy critic Gerald Posner, author of the 1993 book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, have settled on a third casket delivery into the Bethesda morgue — one that took place between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. — that is, after the 6:35 p.m. casket delivery and before the 8:00 p.m. casket delivery. Are you doubting me? Are you thinking to yourself, “No way, Jacob. Two casket deliveries were already enough for me. But a third? Now you’ve gone too far”? Permit me first to set forth Bugliosi’s position. Referring to Paul O’Connor, the E-4 X-ray technician cited above, Bugliosi writes, Posner writes. Having concluded that the president’s casket could have been delivered only one time to the Bethesda morgue, Bugliosi and Posner obviously concluded that FBI agents Francis O’Neill and James Sibert and Secret Service agents Roy Kellerman and William Greer must be the only ones telling the truth and that the enlisted men who stated they carried the president’s body into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket had to be speaking falsely. It is clear that to both Bugliosi and Posner it is inconceivable that the 6:35 p.m. group could be telling the truth. Bugliosi ridicules the veracity of Paul O’Connor, while Posner mocks the veracity of O’Connor, Jerrol Custer, and James Jenkins. What about Marine Sgt. Roger Boyajian, who filed the after-action report on November 26, in which he stated unequivocally that the president’s casket had been carried into the morgue at 6:35 p.m.? What about Dennis David, the Chief of Day for the Naval medical school, who later retired from the Navy as an officer, who stated that the president’s body had been carried into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket? What about Donald Rebentisch, a member of David’s team, who stated the same thing? What about Floyd Riebe and Ed Reed, two other enlisted men who confirmed the account? What about Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc., whose representatives filed a written report on November 22 23, 1963, which stated that the president’s body had arrived in a shipping casket? Most of them aren’t even mentioned by Bugliosi and Posner, and Posner describes them collectively as “bit players at Bethesda — orderlies, technicians, and casket carriers.” Bit players? Permit me level a very simple question at Vincent Bugliosi and Gerald Posner: Why in the world would these eight enlisted men, who were simply doing their jobs on the evening of November 22, 1963, have any reason to lie or concoct a false story about bringing the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue? Only Bugliosi and Posner can explain why they didn’t carefully focus on and analyze the statements and testimony of all these witnesses, but let give you my theory on the matter. In my opinion, the reason they didn’t do so is that they knew that if they did, their own position would immediately become untenable. Why? Because both Bugliosi and Posner know that the chance that each of all those witnesses came up with the same fake story independently of all the other witnesses who were saying the same thing is so astronomically small as to be nonexistent. Therefore, for all the witnesses to have all come up with the same fake story about the 6:35 p.m. delivery of Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda morgue in a shipping casket would have had to involve one of the most preposterous conspiracies of all time. Bugliosi and Posner would be relegated to becoming conspiracy theorists and ridiculous ones at that. They would be alleging that eight enlisted men in the United States Armed Forces who were suddenly called to duty to serve at the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy’s body conspired to concoct a wild and fake story about how they delivered President Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda morgue in a shipping casket at 6:35 p.m. on the evening of November 22, 1963. Oh, I forgot — the conspiracy also would have included the most prestigious funeral home in Washington, D.C., the funeral home that the U.S. military had selected to handle the embalming of the president’s body. Well, pray tell, Mssrs. Bugliosi and Posner: What would have been the motive behind such a conspiracy? Perhaps if we try to imagine how the conspiracy got arranged, we can figure out what the motive was. Let’s see: Carrying out his orders to establish a team of Marines for security at Bethesda Hospital, Marine Sgt. Boyajian calls the team together and says, “Men, I’ve got an idea. Let’s conspire to come up with a fake and false story about how the president’s body got delivered to the Bethesda morgue. We’ll tell everybody that his body was brought to the morgue in a black hearse that contained several men in blue suits and that Kennedy’s body was contained in a shipping casket and in a body bag.” The team goes along with the idea. Then, once Marine Sergeant Boyajian arrives at the morgue, he collars the Chief of the Day at Bethesda medical school, Dennis David (a “bit player” who would later become a Navy officer), and whispers in his ear, “Hey, dude, my Marines and I have come up with a great idea. We’re conspiring to concoct a fake story about how we delivered President Kennedy’s body into the morgue in a shipping casket at 6:35 p.m. Would you like to join our conspiracy?” David responds, “Wow! That sounds great! Yeah, I’ll talk to my team about it.” So David goes to his team and convinces them to join the conspiracy. Oh, but wait — there are also the other “bit players” to contact. So, the conspirators approach the X-ray technicians and photographers and, after some persuasion, convince them to join the conspiracy. All that’s left is Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc. No problem. When they hear about the idea, they think it’s fantastic, and they’re willing to risk the good reputation they’ve built up over the years to become the most prestigious funeral home in Washington and quickly join the conspiracy. And for what? Whoops! It still isn’t clear what the motive of all those “orderlies, technicians, and casket carriers” could have been. Let me use the adjectives that Bugliosi employed to describe this supposed conspiracy among what Posner described as “bit players”: “preposterous,” “far out,” “unhinged,” and “nonsense.” Unless one is convinced that such an impossible conspiracy took place, there is only one conclusion that can be reached: Those eight enlisted men and the representatives of Gawler’s funeral home, all of whom were suddenly and unexpectedly called to do their duty on the evening of November 22, 1963, were telling the truth. President Kennedy’s body was carried into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m. in a shipping casket and inside a body bag. The next question naturally arises: Was the O’Neill-Silbert-Kellerman-Greer casket delivery that Bugliosi and Posner settled on the same casket delivery as the Joint Casket Bearer’s Team’s casket delivery? Or were they two separate casket deliveries? Posner doesn’t address the issue. In fact, he doesn’t even mention the Joint Casket Bearer’s Team’s delivery of the Dallas casket, which would seem odd, since it was prominently mentioned in William Manchester’s famous book on the assassination, The Death of a President. Perhaps Posner had difficulty reconciling the two different accounts and just felt it would be simpler to leave one of them out of his analysis. Bulgliosi, on the other hand, does address the issue. What is his approach? Obviously convinced that there could have been only one casket delivery that night, he conflates the O’Neill-Sibert-Kellerman-Greer casket delivery and the Joint Casket Bearer Team’s casket delivery into one casket delivery. The problem for Bugliosi, however, is that the evidence does not support his position. Instead, the evidence leads to but one conclusion: three separate casket deliveries, as follows: 6:35 p.m.: First casket delivery. We know this from the statements of Marine Sergeant Boyajian, Chief of the Day David, the six other enlisted men, and the Gawler’s funeral home report. Between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Second casket delivery. We know this from statements made by FBI agents O’Neill and Sibert and Secret Service agent Kellerman, as shown below. 8:00 p.m.: Third casket delivery. We know this from the official report of the Joint Casket Bearer’s Team, as shown below. We have already reviewed the evidence that establishes the first casket delivery and its time of delivery of 6:35 p.m. Let’s now review the evidence that establishes the second casket delivery, which took place sometime between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. In their official report of November 26, 1963, O’Neill and Sibert stated in part as follows, Keep in mind that the ambulance arrived in the front of the hospital at 6:55 p.m. Keep in mind also that the Joint Casket Bearer Team didn’t deliver the Dallas casket into the morgue until more than an hour later, at 8:00 p.m. On March 12, 1964, an official memo of the Warren Commission recounted the following exchange between Warren Commission counsel Arlen Spector and FBI agents O’Neill and Sibert: Ask yourself: How could preparation for the autopsy begin at approximately 7:17 p.m. if the Joint Casket Bearer Team didn’t deliver the body into the morgue until 8:00 p.m.? Of course, since we know that the body had already been delivered to the morgue at 6:35 p.m. in the shipping casket, preparation for the autopsy could have begun at 7:17 p.m. In fact, recall that X-ray technician Jerrol Custer, one of the enlisted men who witnessed Kennedy’s body being brought into the morgue in the shipping casket, saw Mrs. Kennedy entering the main lobby of the hospital as Custer was heading upstairs to process X-rays of Kennedy’s body. Question: How could Custer have been processing X-rays of the president’s body if the Dallas casket containing the president’s body had not yet been delivered by either the Joint Casket Delivery Team at 8:00 p.m. or by O’Neill, Sibert, Kellerman, and Greer sometime between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.? In a deposition that was taken by the ARRB in 1997, Sibert was asked about the 7:17 p.m. time that he and O’Neill had referred to in their 1964 exchange with Specter: Ask yourself: If there was only one casket delivery, how could it be unloaded at 7:17 p.m. and also 8:00 p.m., as reported by the Joint Casket Bearer Team? Here is what O’Neill wrote in a sworn statement to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978: Notice that, once again, the implication is that the casket is promptly delivered after the 6:55 p.m. arrival of the motorcade. Also, notice that there is no mention of the Joint Casket Bearer Team and that O’Neill states that he, Sibert, Greer, and Kellerman transported the casket into the morgue on a roller. In an affidavit signed and delivered to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Sibert reinforced O’Neill’s testimony: Consider the testimony of Secret Service Agent Kellerman before the Warren Commission in 1964: Later in his testimony, Kellerman became more specific: Notice that Kellerman is reinforcing O’Neill’s and Sibert’s testimony that they delivered the Dallas casket into the morgue sometime between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Ask yourself: How could they begin to work on the autopsy no later than 7:30 p.m., given that the Joint Casket Bearer Team didn’t deliver the Dallas casket until 8:00 p.m.? According to Horne, a Washington Star article dated November 23, 1963, referring to the motorcade’s 6:55 p.m. (or 6:53 p.m., as another account asserted) arrival at the front of the Bethesda Hospital with Mrs. Kennedy and the Dallas casket, “also noted that the ambulance containing the casket was not driven away from the front of the hospital facility for at least 12 minutes after it arrived, i.e., at about 7:07 PM (or at 7:05 PM at the earliest, depending on which arrival time one uses).” (Horne, volume 3, pages 677-78.) That fits with O’Neill, Sibert’s, and Kellerman’s testimony that the Dallas casket was delivered to the morgue between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Let’s now review the evidence that establishes the third casket delivery, the one at 8:00 p.m. by the Joint Casket Bearer Team. Headed by infantry 1st Lt. Samuel Bird, the Joint Casket Bearer Team was the honor team charged with formally carrying President Kennedy’s body into the Bethesda morgue. As previously stated, the team consisted of soldiers in dress uniform and white gloves representing all the branches of the military. On December 10, 1963, Lt. Bird filed his official report of the Joint Casket Bearer Team’s delivery of the president’s casket into the Bethesda morgue on the evening of November 22, 1963. The report stated in part: A copy of the Joint Casket Bearer Team’s official report is posted on the Internet here. You will notice that the report makes no mention of O’Neill, Sibert, Kellerman, or Greer or the roller that O’Neill, Sibert, Kellerman, and Greer used to carry the casket into the morgue. You’ll also notice that the report contains the following memorable incident, later recounted in Manchester’s The Death of a President: Nowhere do O’Neill, Sibert, Kellerman, or Greer relate the McHugh incident in their account of delivering the Dallas casket into the morgue. There is something else to consider: A member of the Joint Casket Bearer Team denied that O’Neill, Sibert, Kellerman, and Greer helped the team carry the casket into the morgue. According to Lifton, Now, consider the following sworn testimony before the Warren Commission on March 16, 1964, of Commander James J. Humes, one of the physicians who conducted the autopsy on the president’s body on the evening of November 22: Ask yourself: How could the body have been received at 7:35 p.m. (i.e., 25 minutes before 8:00 p.m.) if the Joint Casket Bearer’s Team didn’t deliver it until 8:00 p.m.? Now, let’s examine the thesis originally developed by Lifton and later expanded upon by Horne to see if the evidence is consistent with three casket deliveries into the morgue. Again, unless one concludes that Marine Sergeant Boyajian, Chief of the Day David, the other six enlisted men, and Gawler’s funeral home entered into a quick, preposterous conspiracy to concoct a fake story about the delivery of the president’s body, we begin with the fact that President Kennedy’s body was offloaded from a black hearse containing several men in blue suits and delivered into the Bethesda morgue in a shipping casket at 6:35 p.m. That obviously means that the Dallas casket that arrived twenty minutes later at 6:55 p.m. in the motorcade with Mrs. Kennedy did not contain the president’s body. Therefore, there was an obvious challenge for whoever did this and wished to keep it secret: how to get the president’s body back into the Dallas casket so that it could be formally delivered into the morgue by the Joint Casket Bearer Team just before the autopsy would begin? As Horne explains, that was what the O’Neill-Sibert-Kellerman-Greer casket delivery had to be all about. Soon after the arrival of the motorcade, they drove around to the morgue and carried the empty Dallas casket into the morgue sometime between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Then, sometime between 7:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., the president’s body was then wrapped back into the white sheets in which it had been wrapped in Dallas, placed back into the Dallas casket, and carried back out to the Navy ambulance, enabling the Joint Casket Bearer Team to officially carry it back into the morgue at 8:00 p.m. There is actually no other reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence. Kennedy’s body is delivered at 6:35 p.m. in the shipping casket. The middle delivery of the Dallas casket — the one between 7:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. — was used to effect the transfer of the body back into the Dallas casket, so that it can then be carried back out into the gray ambulance and then be delivered formally into the morgue at 8:00 p.m. by the Joint Casket Bearer Team, enabling the autopsy to formally begin 8:15 p.m., which is the time that everyone agrees the autopsy formally began. Why was all this done? That is a very good question. One possible explanation is that officials were concerned about the possibility that someone might try to attack the motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base to Bethesda Hospital and steal the president’s body and, therefore, decided to secretly separate the president’s body from the Dallas casket and secretly transport it to the morgue to obviate that possibility. It seems to me that that would have been a plausible explanation, if they had announced it publicly at the time. But they didn’t do that. Instead, they engaged in secrecy, deception, and cover up, and have ever since. Some people would undoubtedly respond, “No way, Jacob! Not high government officials. They would never lie to the American people. Only ‘bit players’ like Marine sergeants, Navy enlisted men, and long-established funeral homes would do that.” But keep in mind that it is undisputed that several months after the events at Bethesda Naval Hospital, it wasn’t “bit players” consisting of “orderlies, technicians, and casket carriers” who secretly conspired to concoct a fake story about a North Vietnamese attack at the Gulf of Tonkin, with the intent of securing a congressional resolution that would lead to the Vietnam War. Instead, it was the new president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, who entered into that secret and deadly conspiracy. It seems to me that if high government officials would conspire to lie about a military attack that they had to know would bring on a war that would result in the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers (and millions of Vietnamese people), high government officials would be fully capable of lying about casket deliveries on the night of November 22, 1963. The only other explanation for the multiple casket delivery that I can conceive of is a nefarious one, the one that is carefully detailed by Horne in his 5-volume work: that U.S. military officials at the Bethesda morgue, including the autopsy physicians, perhaps following orders based on national security, used the period of time from 6:35 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on the night of the autopsy to alter the president’s body in order to hide any evidence of wounds resulting from gunshots that came from the front of the president, e.g., from the grassy knoll. One of the most fascinating stories that Horne describes involves the testimony of Tom Robinson, a member of the Gawler’s embalming team. When Robinson was questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he made the following cryptic statement: Those are not my ellipses. They are also not Horne’s. In fact, neither are the parentheses around the word “autopsy.” That’s exactly how Robinson’s testimony appears in the official transcript of his testimony. As Horne points out, that’s fairly unusual, given that people don’t ordinarily speak using ellipses and parentheses. Those sorts of things are used in written communications, not oral ones. Because Robinson’s testimony was recorded, Horne decided to look up the tape and listen to the actual recording of Robinson’s testimony. His office located the tape labeled as Robinson’s testimony in the National Archives. Unfortunately, however, the tape contained something else on it, and Horne was not able to locate another tape with Robinson’s testimony on it. Perhaps I should mention that after Robinson gave his testimony, it was ordered sealed for 50 years, along with testimony provided by other people for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Keep in mind also that the Warren Commission had ordered many of its records sealed for 75 years. It was only thanks to the JFK Records Act, enacted in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, that such records were ordered opened to the public. If you would like to see the pertinent excerpt from the official transcript of Robinson’s testimony, it is posted here on the Internet. It might interest you to know that the personnel who participated in Kennedy’s autopsy, both military and civilian, were required by U.S. military officials to sign written oaths of secrecy in which they promised to never reveal what they had witnessed at the autopsy, on threat of court martial or criminal prosecution. In fact, as Horne pointed out, If you would like to see a copy of the oath of secrecy that people were required to sign, it is posted here on the Internet. Do you now see why the authors of The Kennedy Detail: JFK’s Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence might have chosen to omit a detailed account of what happened at Bethesda Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963, notwithstanding their promise to “reveal the inside story of the assassination, the weeks and days that led to it and its heartrending aftermath”? Specifically denying Lifton’s (and Horne’s) contention that President Kennedy’s body had been “kidnapped” (the term used by the authors) and omitting any reference whatsoever to Lt. Bird and his Joint Casket Bearer Team, the sum total of the authors’ account of what happened at the Bethesda morgue that night was the following sentence: “There was a presidential suite on the seventeenth floor of the hospital, and as Bill Greer, Roy Kellerman, and Admiral Burkley accompanied the casket to the morgue for the autopsy, Clint Hill and Paul Landis escorted Mrs. Kennedy and her brother-in-law the attorney general to the suite.” (Blaine and McCubbin, Chapters 15 and 22.) Regardless of whether one believes that President Kennedy was killed by a lone-nut assassin or was the victim of a conspiracy, the American people have a right to know exactly what happened at Bethesda Hospital on November 22, 1963, and why. Who were the men in blue suits who got out of the black hearse that delivered the president’s body in a shipping casket at 6:35 p.m.? What were their names and who did they work for? Were they Secret Service, FBI, or CIA? Are they still alive and, if so, where are they? Did they file written reports of their actions on that evening and, if so, where are those reports today? Why, when, and how was Kennedy’s body separated from the Dallas casket? Why all the secrecy and deception associated with the delivery of the president’s body into the Bethesda morgue? Although President John F. Kennedy’s autopsy took place almost 50 years ago, we the people — the citizens of the United States living today — have a right to know everything about what happened on the night of November 22, 1963, and why. Notwithstanding the lapse of almost half a century, U.S. government officials, including those in the Pentagon, the Secret Service, the FBI, and the CIA, have a duty to provide us with the complete truth. This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email. THE CASKET MYSTERY from KRON's JFK: An Unsolved Mystery 1988 https://youtu.be/aGXUM0y5DwU?si=KxYwgTauOUFiPpgp

@Pat Speer Pat, who are these "KEY WITNESSES" you are referring to below, and what precisely is your criteria for designating them as such? https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30409-what-james-jenkins-actually-said/?do=findComment&comment=535256

This PDF file (the link to which is below) contains the internal correspondence concerning the ARRB's investigation of the Zapruder film events at the NPIC on the weekend of the assassination, about contacting and interviewing Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter, and includes copies of CIA documents about same provided to the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, and copies of the working notes from the second NPIC session itself: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/104-10336-10024.pdf The following is the premier article on the alteration of the Zapruder film by Doug Horne, former Chief Analyst for the Assassination Records Review Board, and author of the five volume "Inside the Assassination Records Review Board." If you read it thoroughly you will understand the Zapruder film issues inside and out. It is well worth the read! --------------------------------------------------------- "The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration" by Douglas P. Horne https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/

I agree with you, but the single-bullet theory version of events has Connally getting hit at Z-223/224 (particularly as advocated by Posner), and Connally himself -- before the 1998 public release of MPI's digitized "Images of an Assassination" Zapruder film which exceptionally informed researchers mark as the demise of the single-bullet theory -- basing his view on an inferior projected copy of the Zapruder film, estimated he was struck at Z-230. Just goes to show the ridiculousness of anti-conspiracy rationalizations like the single-bullet theory, doesn't it?

Below is high-definition slow motion footage of Zapruder film frames 215 through 340. Given the following Warren Commission testimony, and Connally's movements in the film, AT WHAT Z FRAME DO YOU BELIEVE CONNALLY BEGINS REACTING TO BEING SHOT? (and NOTE that Connally was still holding his white Stetson hat in his right hand -- the wrist of which was shattered by the shot that hit him-- as late as Z-277]): GOVERNOR CONNALLY: "We had just made the turn, well, when I heard what I thought was a shot. I heard this noise which I immediately took to be a rifle shot. I instinctively turned to my right because the sound appeared to come from over my right shoulder, so I turned to look back over my right shoulder, and I saw nothing unusual except just people in the crowd, but I did not catch the President in the corner of my eye. and I was interested, because once I heard the shot in my own mind I identified it as a rifle shot, and I Immediately—the only thought that crossed my mind was that this is an assassination attempt. So I looked, failing to see him. I was turning to look back over my left shoulder into the back seat, but I never got that far in my turn. I got about in the position I am in now facing you. looking a little bit to the left of center, and then I felt like someone had hit me in the back..."