Keven Hofeling

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..."

First of all, all of the links in your post are broken, which may not be that important if they are links only to the screenshots on your website. What I am really interested in seeing are the videos that the screenshots of James Jenkins touching his head on your website are from. I've been unable to locate those videos on the web, but if the screenshots of Dr. McClelland's hand gestures that are on your website are to serve as a guide, then we can be relatively certain that your James Jenkins examples are deceptive, because I've already determined -- as you well know -- that your Dr. McClelland screenshots are intended to deceive: For those desiring verification of this fact, see the first post in the following thread: And as it seems that this thread was inspired by my post on another thread which catalogues a litany of factual misrepresentations you have made during the last six months alone -- https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30407-favorite-author-jim-dieugenio-favorite-researcher-pat-speer/?do=findComment&comment=535245 -- and as it is too late for me to address the above in great detail tonight, I am just going to start out by here reposting the segment of my post from the other thread concerning your next to most recent factual misrepresentations about James Jenkins: ________________ On April 20, 2024, Speer again recited his myth about HSCA autopsy technician James Jenkins allegedly denying the existence of the large avulsive wound in the back of JFK's head that Jenkins had described to the HSCA in 1977, and to David Lifton in 1979. Speer wrote: "...Jenkins said the back of the head between the ears was shattered but still intact beneath the scalp in filmed interviews with Harrison Livingstone and William Law, and then again at two different JFK Lancer conferences which I attended. At the first of these, there was a breakout session with about 30 people in attendance in which he was repeatedly grilled by Aguilar and Mantik about the back of the head, and told them repeatedly that it was shattered but intact beneath the scalp. Of course Mantik turned around and told this to Doug Horne and within days Horne had an article online in which he claimed Jenkins had told this audience that the autopsy photos are inaccurate and Horne then twisted this into Jenkins' claiming the back of the head was blown out--when he had actually said the exact opposite..." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30149-can-speer-and-his-confederates-counter-the-only-math-that-really-counts-re-jfks-occipital-parietal-wound/?do=findComment&comment=534135 In telling this myth, what Speer did not realize is that there is a transcript of James Jenkins's 2013 Lancer Conference presentation that was independently prepared by someone who has nothing to do with David Mantik and Doug Horne which was posted on the Education Forum demonstrating that, contrary to Speer's claim, what Jenkins actually said at the conference was the following: "...there was a small entry…..exit, anyway a small wound that appeared to be approximately four….right in front of the top of the right ear and slightly above it...." "...At the conclusion of the autopsy my personal ideas of the things that I said, I was sure that the entrance wound was above the right ear and that the large wound in the back (of the head) was an exit wound. In the wound in the back (of the head) there were some questions by Dr. Boswell to the gallery...." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30149-can-speer-and-his-confederates-counter-the-only-math-that-really-counts-re-jfks-occipital-parietal-wound/?do=findComment&comment=534146 Best demonstrating the ridiculousness of Speer's slanderous mythology about James Jenkins is the following drawing of the occipital parietal wound Jenkins executed for the HSCA in 1977 (corroborating his HSCA testimony), and the excerpt of Jenkins's 1979 interview by Dvid Lifton which follows it: ________________

First of all, the link you provided to the declassified history of BRIDGEHEAD AKA HawkeyWorks is broken, and inaccessible. Secondly, the Hawkeyeworks history that I am interested in, and that you should also be curious about, is the still classified history involving the Zapruder film that the CIA refuses to release to Doug Horne: Doug Horne wrote: "...“Hawkeyeworks” Explained: After the Homer McMahon interview was released in 1998, JFK researchers loyal to the concept of an authentic Zapruder film that is “ground truth” in the Kennedy assassination downplayed the importance of the “Hawkeyeworks” story, either doubting its existence because there was no documentary proof, or alternately saying that the “Hawkeyeworks” lab was solely dedicated to U-2 and Corona satellite photography. But these critics were wrong on both counts. First, Dino Brugioni, during his 2009 and 2011 interviews with Peter Janney and me, not only confirmed the existence of the state-of-the-art Kodak lab in Rochester used by the CIA for various classified purposes, but confirmed that he visited the place more than once, including once prior to the JFK assassination. (He also confirmed its existence in his recent book, Eyes in the Sky, on page 364.) Second, Dino Brugioni made clear to me, when I interviewed him in July of 2011, that the “Hawkeye Plant” (as he called it) was an enormous state-of-the-art private sector laboratory founded and run by Kodak, which performed far more tasks than “just” Corona satellite and U-2 “special order” film services. He said that the Hawkeye Plant was involved in developing new film products and in manufacturing and testing special film products of all kinds, including new motion picture films, and that it definitely had the capability to process motion pictures. He did not see such equipment himself, but was told by Ed Green, a high-ranking Kodak manager at “Hawkeyeworks” with whom he had a relationship of trust, that the “Hawkeye Plant” could, and did, definitely process motion pictures. When repeatedly questioned about this capability by Peter Janney throughout the 2009 interviews, Brugioni said with great reverence, on several occasions, “They could do anything.”[21] The CIA refused to provide me with any information about “Hawkeyeworks” when the Agency finally responded to my September 12, 2009 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on February 7, 2011. But that was hardly surprising, since over one year earlier, on January 27, 2010, the CIA wrote to me, cautioning: “The CIA Information Act, 50 U.S.C. Section 431, as amended, exempts CIA operational files from the search, review, publication, and disclosure requirements of the FOIA.” What this meant, in rather blunt language, was that if the CIA was running an “op,” such as the alteration of the Zapruder film immediately after JFK’s assassination, then they didn’t have to search for those records or tell me about it, in any way. So the failure by the CIA to answer any of my many questions about “Hawkeyeworks” means literally—nothing. The plain facts are these: (1) the 8 mm (already slit!) camera-original Zapruder film was delivered to NPIC late on Saturday evening, 11/23/63, and the two Secret Service officials who brought it to NPIC for the making of briefing boards left with the film at about 3 AM Sunday morning; and (2) a 16 mm, unslit version of the Zapruder film was returned to NPIC the next night, after dark, on Sunday evening, 11/24/63; and its courier (“Bill Smith”) said it had been processed at “Hawkeyeworks,” and that he had brought it directly to NPIC in Washington, D.C. from Rochester (using the unmistakable code word “Hawkeyeworks”) himself. “Double 8” home movies which have already been slit at the processing facility do not miraculously “reassemble” themselves from two 25-foot strips 8 mm in width, and connected with a splice in the middle, into 16 mm wide unslit double 8 films. A new Zapruder film was clearly created at “Hawkeyeworks” in Rochester, in an optical printer. Bill Smith told the truth when he said the film he carried had been developed there at “Hawkeyeworks;” he lied when he said that it was the camera-original film taken by the photographer in Dallas. If “Hawkeyeworks” truly had the physical capability “to do anything,” as Ed Green informed Dino Brugioni, then all that would have been required that weekend would have been to bring in some experienced personnel—an animator or two, and a visual effects director—experienced in the “black arts” of Hollywood. Those personnel, if not already on-site, employed at “Hawkeyeworks,” could have been brought into Rochester on Saturday, November 23rd, the same day the JFK autopsy photographs were being developed in Washington, D.C. at Naval Photographic Center, Anacostia. The JFK autopsy photos developed on Saturday (per Robert Knudsen’s 1978 HSCA deposition transcript) would have provided the guide for the image alteration necessary on the Zapruder film the next day, on Sunday. The JFK autopsy photos document the massive head wound created by clandestine, post mortem surgery on JFK’s head wounds at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and would have provided a rough guide for the massive head wound in the top and right side of the skull that had to be painted onto selected Zapruder film frames the next day, on Sunday. No such parietal-temporal-frontal wound was seen at Parkland Hospital in Dallas by any of the treatment staff the day Kennedy was shot and treated there, but it had to be added to selected Zapruder film frames, to match the illicit post mortem cranial surgery at Bethesda that was being misrepresented in the autopsy photos as “damage from the assassin’s bullet.”[22] In addition to painting on a false wound, of course, the forgers at “Hawkeyeworks” would have had to obscure—black out—the real exit wound, in the right rear of JFK’s head, that was seen in Trauma Room One at Parkland Hospital. (More on this below.)..." http://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/

Kevin Balch wrote: As Dino Brugioni stated himself, he had not been tasked with any kind of content analysis of the film. Brugioni was ordered to make briefing boards and calculate the timing of the scenes in the film, nothing more, and that is exactly what the NPIC crew did during the first briefing board session. You can hear Dino Brugioni himself answer your question at 5:42 of the following video, which I have cued up for you in advance: The question that is really most pertinent to the first briefing board session is whether or not Brugioni was working with the camera-original Zapruder film, or whether, as Zapruder film authenticity apologists claim, Brugioni was only working with one of the first-day copies of the film. The best proof that Brugioni was in fact working with the camera-original Zapruder film is that the film that was brought to him by the Secret Service was an 8mm film (the first day copies were in 16mm format). And how do we know for sure that the film delivered to Brugioni was in fact in 8mm format? Because CIA NPIC did not have an 8mm film projector, and Brugioni had to have a local merchant called to open his store the evening of November 24, 1963, so that NPIC could purchase a projector. At 1:32 of the following video (which I have cued up for you in advance), you can hear Brugioni himself describe receiving the 8mm film, and continue on to tell the story about having to wake up a merchant to purchase a projector: At 6:08 of the following video (which I have cued up for you in advance), Doug Horne asks Brugioni whether he believes he had the camera-original film or a copy, and why, and Brugioni answers that he believed he had the original because of the fact that the Secret Service agents were personally accompanying and closely guarding the film, and because there was no packaging accompanying the film to indicate that it had been developed as a copy: Kevin Balch wrote: Homer McMahon had also been told that he was working with the camera-original film, and was not asked to analyze it for alterations, nor to perform content analysis of the film, so he had no reason to look for alterations. Kevin Balch wrote: You make it sound as if "the alterationists," as you put it, have done something or not done something in an attempt to conceal McMahon's dementia soliloquy, but that is just not the case. It is right there in the transcript. If "the alterationists" concealed it, then why do you know about it? And as to the dementia/wet brain claims themselves, it's not difficult to figure out what happened: The ARRB first contacted Homer McMahon on June 12. 1997, at which point he made it clear that he was sure he was working with the camera-original film which the Secret Service had accompanied to his briefing board session a couple of days after the assassination, and he was told that the ARRB would soon be contacting him again. Before the in-person interview conducted by the ARRB on July 14, 1997, McMahon was either advised by his former CIA employer, or decided on his own accord to feed the ARRB a barium dose (otherwise known as "a poison pill") for purposes of discrediting himself to protect the CIA during his in-person interview by making claims that impugned his own memory, which he then did, with the effect that people like you are using the claim to discredit the testimony. When NPIC employee Ben Hunter was later interviewed by the ARRB, he had already gotten the message, or thought of it himself, and claimed that his memory was "fuzzy," and that "it would be better to talk to Homer McMahon." Wouldn't Ben Hunter know about McMahon's drug addiction/alcoholism/wet brain/dementia? I assume that both Hunter and McMahon retired in good standing from the CIA's NPIC -- as I can find nothing to the contrary, and the CIA has to my knowledge not disseminated contrary information to discredit their testimony -- so the claims don't quite pass the tummy test. But perhaps the best indication that the claims are indeed "a poison pill" designed to discredit the testimony is the transcript of the testimony itself, which does not read like the statements of an individual disabled by wet brain and dementia. To the contrary, Homer McMahon spoke intelligently and in great detail to the ARRB on July 14, 1997, as can be seen from the transcript excerpts below. So, in short, I'm just not buying the dementia/wet brain claims, which are ultimately coming from the CIA attempting to deny its involvement in the alteration of the Zapruder film and the cover-up of the assassination, a component of all of this which apparently has not occurred to you. ____________ Doug Horne wrote: "...NPIC EVENT # 2 (Presided over by Homer McMahon) As stated earlier, as a member of the ARRB staff, I interviewed Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter three times each between June and August of 1997.[18] A written call report was produced following each interview; additionally, the second of three Homer McMahon interviews—on July 14, 1997—was tape recorded, and that recording may be obtained from the National Archives, along with all of the written interview reports. In May of 2012, I completed a verbatim transcript of the audiotaped interview with Mr. McMahon on July 14, 1997. The summary below recapitulates the totality of the information provided by McMahon and Hunter over the course of all of their interviews in the summer of 1997. Time and date: The strong and final consensus of opinion between the two men was that the NPIC event they participated in took place “about two days after” JFK’s assassination, and “before the funeral.” [The funeral was Monday afternoon, November 25th.] They both agreed that their NPIC activity took place before the funeral of the 35th President. McMahon initially recalled the event as taking place 1 or 2 days after the assassination, and Hunter initially recalled it as taking place 2 or 3 days after the assassination; but both men consistently agreed that their NPIC activity definitely occurred prior to President Kennedy’s funeral. The work commenced after dark, and lasted all night long. [Note: The home movie of the assassination brought to NPIC for McMahon and Hunter to work with was not copied as a motion picture; nor did NPIC even have the capability to do so.]..." https://assassinationofjfk.net/the-two-npic-zapruder-film-events-signposts-pointing-to-the-films-alteration/ ------------------------------------------------------------- EXCERPTS FROM HOMER MCMAHON INTERVIEW REGARDING THE ZAPRUDER FILM BEING AT HAWKEYEWORKS IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK Homer A. McMahon (Former CIA/NPIC Employee) conducted on July 14, 1997 at Archives II in College Park, Maryland. Interviewers: Douglas P. Horne and T. Jeremy Gunn "...McMahon (9:55): OK. But the best that I remember, of how I came to work on this project---and, of course, we all heard of, of, you know, that motorcade, where Kennedy got killed, and I think we shut up shop and went home---af---after that. And it was within the next two days, a chap was introduced to me---and I was sworn to his secrecy, it had nothing to do with the Agency’s secrecy and, and he was, to the best of my knowledge, introduced as “Bill Smith.” - 4 - Horne: “Bill Smith” of---what? McMahon: Of [the] Secret Service, he was an agent. And he had, he had gotten a roll of film directly from the person that had photographed it, who called the Secret Service and told them that he thought he had that on film---and he shot it with a little ‘Brownie,’ ah, double 8 [camera]. And he took it, took it to Rochester, and---we had a division up there, I won’t go into that--- but they processed the film---it was Ek---it was Kodachrome (I think, I or II, the daylight version, whichever it was), and it was double 8 [film]. And, after he got it processed, they told him there that we were probably the only place that had the equipment that could do what he wanted to, ah, take every frame on there--- [chuckling]---of the entire event, and, and make, ah, the best possible quality reproduction. Horne: When you say, “They told him,” who do you mean, ah---? McMahon (12:04): Well---ah---heh, heh---well, Eastman Kodak had, had contracts with the U.S. government, and if you want to know, you can go through the CIA, they’ll tell you [unclear]. OK, but he, he got the film processed, and he brought it to us, and he, and three other people, ah, timed the film, for the---through observation you could tell where the gunshots actually caused the hits and the slumps. We didn’t know anything about any audio---ah, it was just visual. And we timed it and determined, where the, the time between the, ah---physically timed it, with a stopwatch---ah, where the gunshot “hits” hit. And we, we, we, we went from, I think, maybe two 7 frames before the first hit, and then we hit every single frame--- through, and we only, he only counted three hits, possibly four--- ah, couldn’t tell, I think, when, when Connally got hit. It was obvious when, when he [JFK] got hit the first time, and then the second time, as his head [was] going off into the angle, up, and---..." "... Horne: That’s all we are trying to do, for the record, is to clarify that when you said that statement, were you referring to this particular film, or other jobs? McMahon: OK, I---this---I had---I had other clearances; ah, but, but none of these clearances that were given to me under the CIA or other clearances that I held for other government agencies, this was under strictly, a---I was told that none of this could be divulged to anyone (that we had it, that we did it), and I know that it was being used for a briefing, but I don’t know who they briefed on it. My only guess---[was] that we normally briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the National Reconnaissance Committee; and the President of the United States, from the work that I did. And I didn’t do any of the analysis; I just did the color part that was used in the briefing boards and the teleprompters and that kind of work. And it was also distributed under different Top Secret classifications, to the Community, go ahead---..." "...Horne (18:19): OK. Would you allow me to, ah, test your recollection on something, the firmness of it? Ah, you, you said a moment ago that you thought this was, ah, within two days of the assassination. Ah, is there any particular reason why you associate it as being that close to the assassination, any particular other events, or--- McMahon: I think, I think I was told---that this---to get the film from the individual; take it and get it processed; come back---was, was, a couple of days---I’m not sure. I’m not---I don’t know [if I can] recall that. Horne: Do you recall whether this work that you did was before the funeral, or after the funeral, of the President? [Transcriber’s note: President Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22nd, 1963; and his funeral was on Monday, November 25th, 1963.] McMahon (18:56): I’m pretty sure it was before...." "...Horne (28:23): How certain are you that Mr. Smith said he went down to pick up the film from the person who took it, and then took it to Rochester? Are you--- McMahon: I know he took it to Rochester. I’m not certain other than I think he said that---that it--- that he got it from the original person himself, but I’m not positive. I, I am positive that he said that he took it to Rochester---hand-carried it, got it processed, and then they guided him back to us to do the--- Horne: So--- McMahon: Rochester wasn’t set up to do what we were set up to do. Horne: In the sense that you had the big enlarger and they did not? Is that what--- McMahon: We had a complete ‘world beyond’ facility--- Horne: OK Horne (42:08): Before we move along, and before I show you the notes that the Archives has---ah, let, let me revisit with you, ah, what exactly did Mr. Smith say in regard to secrecy or nondisclosure, ah, regarding this event, can you tell me that story again? McMahon: I know that, that my immediate supervisor was not allowed in the room---that it was so sensitive, and he had all the tickets---and he was not allowed in the room. It was strictly on a “need to-know” 19 [basis], do the job, and get it out, and no one knew about it, to my knowledge. No record--- Gunn: [Interrupting] Just---just so the record’s clear, when you say “all the tickets,” you mean all the security clearances that he had? He had a lot of security clearances? McMahon: He had clearance, ah, equal to or [the] same as I had, but he was not allowed---it was not, it was not the CIA, or---a---I held other clearances: Atomic Energy, ah, National Security Agency, and, and it was not under any of these. Gunn: Was there any other compartment, or was it just with a name, such as, ah--- McMahon: I---There was no code name on it that I know of, and if there was, I couldn’t tell you anyway [chuckling]. Horne (43:48): Did, did Mr. Smith ever say to you, ah, “This is classified at a certain level”--- - 12 - McMahon: Yes. He said it is definitely classified on a “need-to know;” and he didn’t give me anything other than it was---that I was sworn to secrecy, and I had---I don’t know whether I had to sign the document, I don’t recall that. But I do know that it could not be divulged. Horne: Did he give you a level of classification, like Confidential or Secret--- McMahon: I have no---no, it did not have---he said it was above Top Secret---..." "...Gunn: OK, what Bill Smith said about what he already knew about the film and what it showed? McMahon (47:17): It---you didn’t---you, you didn’t---after it was processed, at Eastman Kodak; and it wasn’t in---it was not in the Kod[ak] factory---it was at “Hawkeyeworks.” Horne: Pardon me? 21 McMahon (47:30): There, there was another Top Secret lab--- Gunn (3:18): OK, and, ah, what did, ah, Mr. Smith say had happened to the film prior to the time that he brought it, in terms of processing, where it had been, and how it had been processed. McMahon (3:33): OK, because of expedite and the, the expedite part, is, is in---they wanted to find out what happened, and they had, they had film, that was generously turned into them by a very patriotic person, and [they were] told that he would give it to them, because they--- it might help in the investigation. That---this is what, what he was told---what I was told---and that it was of the utmost urgency. So he hand-carried it through; and flew to Rochester; and got it processed at the---the processing division there, and they were made aware that he was coming. Ah, and did it immediately for him, and I also think they made duplications of that, which I was told, and then he came back [to Washington D.C.], because they told him they couldn’t do what he wanted to get done, and that NPIC could do it. And it fell in our laps, and we did it. Gunn (4:55): What---when you said, “They couldn’t get done what needed to be done,” did you mean the enlargements, or was there some other---? McMahon: They, they didn’t have a, a laboratory that, that could do the quality of work that he- 14 -wanted. He wanted maximum sharpness, the most “seeability” that, that he could get of the imagery, and that we were set up to do: and we were well beyond the state-of the- art in, in the quality that was turned out. Gunn: For the film of the, the assassination, was it your understanding that anything more had been done to it other than developing the original film and making some prints of the original film? 23 McMahon: The prints, the prints were duplications of the original--- Gunn: Film. McMahon: Yeah. Gunn: Had anything else been done to the film, besides--- McMahon: No, no one else had gotten it---to my knowledge. Horne (5:52): Was it your understanding that Mr. Smith had come directly to Washington from Rochester? McMahon: Yeah---mmm-hmmm, yes. He’d gotten off the airplane and came from National Airport directly to, to our building. Gunn (6:06): Just so we’re, we’re clear on something---it was our understanding that the film had been processed by Kodak; ah, when you said it was done in Rochester, it---was that an inference that you drew, when they said it had been processed by Kodak, or did the---did he mention Rochester? McMahon: Ah, you’re, you’re getting on classified grounds here, ah, that I can’t answer that question. I know, but I can’t talk to you about that. There was another Top Secret lab, that the government--- you--- Gunn: Ah, if you’re uncomfortable talking about it, we, we can stop that here, so that---that’s fine. But this is something that would---that is important for us to be able to do, so we can go, ah, back to the Agency, and talk to them, so [unclear]--- McMahon: No, you can do that back through the Agency, and I know that hasn’t been down graded, to, to---public domain. [Transcriber’s note: McMahon was referring here to the code-name “Hawkeyeworks,” for the Top Secret lab at Rochester.] Gunn: Ah--- Horne (7:12): I think there’s a way to rephrase the question, so that it’s ah, not a classified---so that you don’t perceive a classified intent. I, I think the way to rephrase the question might be, did Mr. Smith say, ah, “This was developed at Kodak?” or did he say, “This was developed at Rochester?”24 McMahon: Again, again, I know where it was done; I know who did it. And I’m not going to answer[chuckling]--- Horne: Is there any chance that, ah, where it was done was at a Kodak lab in Dallas? That’s another way of raising this question. McMahon: To my knowledge, no--- McMahon (8:08): When you’re in bed with the Yellow God[Transcriber’s note: the primary color in the Kodak logo is yellow]---we had their top scientists and photochemists and optical people working in the ‘world beyond; ’we had their people---I shouldn’t even talk about it, I’m sorry. And there was a definite link, on the- 15 -national level, where we had “the best there was” working with us. Gunn (9:01): Would it be fair to say that there was, ah, another facility--- McMahon: Yes. Gunn: ---where [it was] your understanding that this was processed--- McMahon: Yes. Gunn: ---and that that facility was mentioned to you by name, so that you knew--- McMahon: Yes. Gunn: ---where it was--- McMahon: Yes. Gunn: [Is] That fair [garbled] to say--- McMahon: Yes. Gunn: OK, but in terms of the name of it we don’t need that, but just--- there, but, there was reference made to a particular place--- McMahon: But, I don’t know if there was any downgrading [of the classification level of that facility’s code name, “Hawkeyeworks”]. “National Photographic Interpretation Center” was Top Secret--- you could not say it. You could say “NPIC,” and that was Secret. Horne: I see. That’s--- 25 McMahon: And my cover was that “I worked for the CIA”---I did not work for NPIC. And the military that worked there, worked for the military---whether it was Navy, Army, Air Force, or whatever--- they did not work for [unclear] [Transcriber’s note: subsequent, extended interviews---in 2009 and 2011---of Dino Brugioni, NPIC’s Chief Information Officer, by researchers Peter Janney and Douglas Horne, established that Mr. Brugioni presided over an entirely different “Zapruder film briefing board event” at NPIC the night before Mr. McMahon did. The product created at Mr. Brugioni’s event was entirely different, and the attendees present were entirely different, as was the format of the film delivered for the making of selective enlargements. Furthermore, Mr. Brugioni, whose event commenced the night before McMahon’s, on Saturday night, 11/23/63, was the Duty Officer of record at NPIC the entire weekend following President Kennedy’s assassination: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, as well as on Monday (which became a national holiday because of President 39 Kennedy’s funeral). Mr. Brugioni did not participate in the second NPIC event, which commenced on Sunday night (i.e., the McMahon event), and as Duty Officer, he did not call anyone into work at NPIC on Sunday night, - 24 - 11/24/63. The McMahon event--- the second NPIC event that weekend---took place without the NPIC Duty Officer of record (Mr. Brugioni) being informed, or involved, in any way; we now know that the NPIC Duty Officer (Brugioni) was completely bypassed by those who arranged and conducted the McMahon event, and a completely different NPIC work crew was assembled the second time around (that is, Mr. McMahon and Mr. Hunter, and Navy Captain Sands, in lieu of Mr. Brugioni’s team from the night before). All of these things were unknown by the ARRB staff, and by Mr. McMahon, in July of 1997 when this interview was conducted. Similarly, Mr. Brugioni was not aware, until 2009 (when he was interviewed by Peter Janney), that there had been a second “Zapruder film briefing board event” at NPIC that weekend, following his own event. The “Brugioni event” at NPIC is discussed at length in Volume IV of the transcriber’s book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, on pages 1230-1239, and 1323-1334. This interview transcript can only be properly appreciated when one knows its true historical context; we now know that there were two compartmentalized operations involving the Zapruder film at the CIA’s NPIC the weekend of the assassination, and that the McMahon event was the second of these two operations.] https://dickatlee.com/issues/assassinations/jfk/homer_mcmahon_transcript_reformat.pdf ____________

Mr. Speer: Is the problem you complain of that there is a massive, coordinated conspiracy against you, or that you are being consistently called out on your factual misrepresentations and mythmaking? The post of yours to which this is a response is a prime example: You cite John Simkin as somebody who allegedly embraced a non-confrontational spirit, and yet the truth is that John Simkin consistently confronted forum members about their factual misrepresentations (if you wish to dispute this fact, I will be happy to present you with a long list of examples). To determine whether you are such a diplomat who has been so abused by JFK "buffs," as you seem to be implying, let us review the history to determine whether the problem is instead that you constantly attempt to feed your fellow researchers blatantly false factual misrepresentations calculated to mislead us as if you think we are too stupid to fact check your claims. The following are just a few examples of your very recent blatant factual misrepresentations, which are not just mere matters of differences of interpretation, but are instead glaring distortions of the factual record: ________________ On April 25, 2024, Speer claimed that (1) mortician Tom Robinson claimed in his HSCA testimony that he "saw a small wound that was not a bullet hole by [JFK's] temple," (2) that nineteen years later, before the ARRB, Robinson was no longer referencing the right temple wound, and testified instead "I think I saw two or three tiny wounds by [JFK's] right cheek," and (3) that fourteen years after that Doug Horne, without any actual reference to Tom Robinson's testimony at all claimed that "Robinson said he saw a bullet hole high on the forehead above the right eye." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30374-incision-made-on-jfks-head-kennedy-assassination-nothing-to-see-here-an-incision-made-on-jfks-head/?do=findComment&comment=534508 Later on April 25, 2024, (1) I presented Speer with the HSCA transcript of Tom Robinsen's demonstrating that Robinson had said the right temple wound had been caused either "a piece of bone or a piece of the bullet," (2) I also presented Speer with the ARRB transcript demonstrating that Robinson in his 1996 ARRB testimony ALSO specifically described the right temple wound separately from the shrapnel punctures in the cheek and executed two drawings of that right temple wound, and (3) I pointed out that Doug Horne was basing his high forehead statement on Robinson's 1/12/1977 HSCA transcript showing that when Robinson was asked by HSCA attorney Andy Purdy whether the wound was "in the forehead region up near the hairline," Robinson replied in the affirmative, "yes," and that, as can be seen in Robinson's marking of the right temple wound in the skull diagram below, Speer's claim, made in an adjoining post, that the wound was below JFK's eye is also categorically false. https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30374-incision-made-on-jfks-head-kennedy-assassination-nothing-to-see-here-an-incision-made-on-jfks-head/?do=findComment&comment=534511 ________________ On April 20, 2024, Speer again recited his myth about HSCA autopsy technician James Jenkins allegedly denying the existence of the large avulsive wound in the back of JFK's head that Jenkins had described to the HSCA in 1977, and to David Lifton in 1979. Speer wrote: "...Jenkins said the back of the head between the ears was shattered but still intact beneath the scalp in filmed interviews with Harrison Livingstone and William Law, and then again at two different JFK Lancer conferences which I attended. At the first of these, there was a breakout session with about 30 people in attendance in which he was repeatedly grilled by Aguilar and Mantik about the back of the head, and told them repeatedly that it was shattered but intact beneath the scalp. Of course Mantik turned around and told this to Doug Horne and within days Horne had an article online in which he claimed Jenkins had told this audience that the autopsy photos are inaccurate and Horne then twisted this into Jenkins' claiming the back of the head was blown out--when he had actually said the exact opposite..." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30149-can-speer-and-his-confederates-counter-the-only-math-that-really-counts-re-jfks-occipital-parietal-wound/?do=findComment&comment=534135 In telling this myth, what Speer did not realize is that there is a transcript of James Jenkins's 2013 Lancer Conference presentation that was independently prepared by someone who has nothing to do with David Mantik and Doug Horne which was posted on the Education Forum demonstrating that, contrary to Speer's claim, what Jenkins actually said at the conference was the following: "...there was a small entry…..exit, anyway a small wound that appeared to be approximately four….right in front of the top of the right ear and slightly above it...." "...At the conclusion of the autopsy my personal ideas of the things that I said, I was sure that the entrance wound was above the right ear and that the large wound in the back (of the head) was an exit wound. In the wound in the back (of the head) there were some questions by Dr. Boswell to the gallery...." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30149-can-speer-and-his-confederates-counter-the-only-math-that-really-counts-re-jfks-occipital-parietal-wound/?do=findComment&comment=534146 Best demonstrating the ridiculousness of Speer's slanderous mythology about James Jenkins is the following drawing of the occipital parietal wound Jenkins executed for the HSCA in 1977 (corroborating his HSCA testimony), and the excerpt of Jenkins's 1979 interview by Dvid Lifton which follows it: ________________ On March 12, 2024, Speer regurgitated his myth about Parkland Nurse Audrey Bell (that Bell suddenly inserted herself as a witness into JFK assassination history starting in the 1980's after being groomed by JFK conspiracy advocates, and had never before claimed there was a large avulsive head wound, diplomatically characterizing her account as "bullshit"), as follows: "...There are some major problems with Horne's response. 1. He cites Audrey Bell as a credible witness, when she is not. She never mentioned anything about the head wound till decades after the shooting, after she had been embraced by the research community as a truth-teller..." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30250-doug-hornes-response-to-gary-aguilars-review/?do=findComment&comment=530774 My response, on the same date -- https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30250-doug-hornes-response-to-gary-aguilars-review/?do=findComment&comment=530820 -- was to remind Speer of the existence of an item of evidence that had many times been pointed out to him by others on this forum which completely demolishes his claim about Nurse Bell. A November 1967 paper authored by Bell herself, published in the journal of the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses, titled Forty-Eight Hours and Thirty-One Minutes, that contains references to events supporting the representations Bell would make in the 1980's, such as referencing her proximity to Dr. Perry and the performance of the tracheotomy, and "the massive head wound": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001209208700474 "...I helped cut the President's shirt from his right arm, and positioned the tracheotomy tray for Dr. Perry. It was then that I saw the massive head wound. Even though the prospect of surgery-after viewing the proportions of the wound and the general condition of the President-was improbable, I rushed off in search of a telephone to call the Operating Room...." ________________ On January 21, 2024, Speer made the following blatantly false factual misrepresentations about Bethesda X-ray Technician Jerrol Custer: "Custer said that he would have to have placed the back of JFK's head on the x-ray cassette to take the A-P x-ray. And that he couldn't and wouldn't have done that if the back of his head was missing. Keep in mind that the x-rays were taken with the brain still in the skull. He wasn't about to take an x-ray where the brain would be smushed onto the cassette." https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30083-why-do-some-conspiracy-theorists-accept-the-x-rays-and-autopsy-photos-as-genuine/?do=findComment&comment=526563 My response was as follows: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30083-why-do-some-conspiracy-theorists-accept-the-x-rays-and-autopsy-photos-as-genuine/?do=findComment&comment=526695 Mr. Speer, I regret to inform you that I must once again point out your misrepresentation of testimony to the members of this forum. You claimed that Jerrol Custer "couldn't and wouldn't" have placed the back of JFK's head on the x-ray cassette to take the A-P X-ray if the back of his head was missing. This is, according to you, because the x-rays were taken with the brain still in the skull, so he wouldn't have taken such an x-ray as the brain would be "smushed onto the cassette" if he had done so. Below, I demonstrate your misrepresentations: As you can see in the first segment of Custer's deposition testimony I have highlighted in bright yellow, Custer testified that he didn't even see the stirrup at the autopsy, and that the stirrup was not used during x-rays, but only when the body was being probed. With regard to your claim that Custer "couldn't and wouldn't" have placed the back of JFK's head on the x-ray cassette to take the A-P X-ray, in the second segment I have highlighted in light yellow we see that Custer placed a sheet over the film to collect any bodily fluids that might drain while he was taking the x-rays. In the third pink-highlighted segment, when Jeremy Gunn questioned him about Autopsy Photos 42 and 43, Jerrol Custer confirmed that he had x-rayed the back of JFK's head and mentioned lifting the head just enough "to place the cassette underneath." Furthermore, contrary to your claim that Custer "couldn't and wouldn't" have placed the back of JFK's head on the x-ray cassette because the x-rays were taken while the brain was in the skull, so he wouldn't have taken such an x-ray as the brain would be "smushed onto the cassette" if he had done so, Custer consistently maintained throughout his deposition that there was no brain in the skull when he took the x-rays. Note that on page 89 of the deposition Custer states that the brain was missing from the skull at the time he took the initial set of x-rays, and indicates that he did not witness what was surely a pre-autopsy clandestine craniotomy: Finally, despite the impression you gave of Jerrol Custer's ARRB deposition as uneventful and uncontroversial, the truth is that Custer recalled highly controversial and explosive events, including: He mentioned seeing a mechanical device in the skull at the start of the autopsy; being told the body was at Walter Reed before being brought to Bethesda; witnessing Commander William Pitzer filming the autopsy; seeing more than one casket in the morgue; witnessing the Kennedy entourage arriving after the body had already been at Bethesda for over an hour; seeing interference with the autopsy from a four-star General and a plainclothesman in the gallery; and, many indications that Kennedy had been shot from the front. In the deposition, Custer's memories seem to overlap, such as when, as follows, he relates his memories of the mechanical device in JFK's skull, being told by two separate duty officers that JFK's body had been at the Walter Reed compound before arriving at Bethesda, and recalling having seen Commander William Pitzer filming the autopsy: And after a couple of attempts to get Speer to respond to the refutations I had made regarding his claims about Jerrol Custer with something more on point than a cut and paste job from his website, Speer responded by accusing me of being a "stalker": https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/30083-why-do-some-conspiracy-theorists-accept-the-x-rays-and-autopsy-photos-as-genuine/?do=findComment&comment=526705 ________________ As for Speer's defamatory misrepresentations about Dr. Robert McClelland; they are so numerous and malicious that I had to devote an entire thread to them which spanned 20 pages and had 285 replies:

Here, in pertinent part, is a fairly typical example of one of Speer's slanderous assaults on the work and reputation of Dr. David Mantik: ____________ https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/24550-jfk-x-ray-where-is-rear-bullet-entry-point/?do=findComment&comment=367594 ____________ The following was Dr. David Mantik's response: ____________ https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/24550-jfk-x-ray-where-is-rear-bullet-entry-point/?do=findComment&comment=368084 James DiEugenio wrote: Since I don't think it's fair to say someone is misleading people when they are not here to reply, I am posting Dave Mantik's reply to that accusation: Speer’s Semantic Swamp—a Response by David W Mantik January 7, 2018 “He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.” –Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile, 2014) Pat Speer wants us to believe that (in my work) the White Patch covered the Harper Fragment (HF) bone defect. But I have never said—or written—that. In Speer’s Education Forum post of Wednesday (edited at 02:20 PM, probably on January 2, 2018) he lists many quotations about my work, including these descriptors about the posterior skull defect: “hole” (14 times), “exit wound” (4), “tissue” (4), “defect” (5), “blowout” (3), and “blowout of brain” (1). However, only two of these quotes come directly from me, and both of these use “tissue”—the word “bone” is never mentioned. Speer even confesses that he drew his own conclusion about the role of bone: As he also claimed the Harper fragment had exploded from the back of the head, moreover, it seemed obvious Mantik had simultaneously claimed the white patch covered the hole from which the Harper fragment had exploded. My earliest recorded description of the White Patch appears in Assassination Science (1998), edited by James Fetzer, which can be found online: http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Assassination_Science.pdf (p. 153). Although the White Patch was a central focus at that New York press conference (October 1993), the HF was not mentioned. After all, the point of my presentation was the artefactual nature of the White Patch—not its purpose. Speer even admits this: Mantik's writings show that he never mentioned the Harper fragment in his early articles, and that he first claimed it fit into the middle of the back of Kennedy's skull in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000). On the Education Forum (2010), I stated (as Speer quotes): "I have never demonstrated exactly where on the lateral skull X-ray the HF would appear, but it would be at the very rear." In my e-book (available on Amazon), JFK’s Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis and a New Analysis of the Harper Fragment, see Figures 15A and 15B (also shown here): These are X-ray images are from an experiment performed by Gary Aguilar, MD, in December 1997, which convincingly demonstrate how far posteriorly the occiput would appear on a lateral X-ray. (Note the red arrow, which identifies the metal pentagon on both views.) As I state in the e-book, in February-March 1993 (nearly 25 years ago now) I had anticipated Aguilar’s demonstration by 4 years. I had used lead wires to outline the HF on the occiput of an authentic skull—on both AP and lateral X-ray views. These original X-rays are still in my files. I am not at home now, or I would also post these; the 1993 dates are clearly displayed on them. [The three-headshot scenario—first articulated by Doug Horne—is also discussed in my e-book.] That there was indeed a posterior blowout (or hole, or defect, or exit wound) of brain tissue is clear from the Parkland Hospital witnesses. But the objective evidence for this missing brain derives from data obtained directly from the JFK autopsy X-rays at the National Archives, as cited in “Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Brain Enigma,” by David W. Mantik and Cyril H. Wecht (The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK, and Malcolm X (2003), edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease): One final point is remarkable: the [OD] measurements showed that on the right side, at the level of the cerebellum, only about 30% of the normally expected brain tissue remained. This book is available at Amazon, and can even be purchased for e-readers. To summarize: The defect left by the missing HF derives from the upper occiput—as I showed in my 1993 X-rays. On the lateral JFK skull X-ray, this missing bone lies posterior to the White Patch. But there was indeed a posterior blowout—of brain tissue. It should be emphasized that the missing occipital bone probably included smaller bone fragments just superior to the HF. Furthermore, when McClelland’s (adjacent) bone flap swung open, the hole in the bone was appreciably larger. (See my e-book for further discussion of these issues.) Regarding Speer, my previous critique (2010) of his work is here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-autopsy-x-rays-david-mantik-vs-pat-speer Included in that critique is Speer’s “Rogues’ Gallery” of 29 researchers (plus all the doctors in the 1992 ABA Mock Trial) who made mistakes in this JFK case. My name is present, but the ever-infallible Speer is missing. A definitive, albeit somewhat droll, corollary site (2016) is here: http://assassinationofjfk.net/jfk-windmills-pat-Speer/ Highlighted in red at that site are disconcerting questions for Speer. In the nearly two years since they appeared, he has persistently evaded them. This site also includes a summary by Mike Chesser, MD, a neurologist, who corroborated my conclusions after his own visits to the Archives. He also visited the JFK library in Boston. Here are just two (now very old) paradoxes for Speer to contemplate: 1. The lateral JFK skull X-rays show essentially no brain in a very large frontal area (on both left and right sides), yet the brain photographs show virtually no missing brain on either side. How can this be? 2. How did that 6.5 mm object arise—especially since it was not seen at the autopsy by dozens of witnesses? My peer-reviewed paper about this 6.5 mm object, with an explanation for it, is here: https://themantikview.org/ My own website is here: https://themantikview.org/

PAT SPEER'S "ANSWERS" TO DR. DAVID MANTIK'S TWENTY QUESTIONS https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/22739-the-jfk-windmills-of-pat-speer/?do=findComment&comment=327769