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Doug Horne blows Josiah Thompson out of the water


Guest James H. Fetzer

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Guest James H. Fetzer

Since Josiah Thompson has advanced three major arguments in defense of the authenticity of the Zapruder film--(1) that the features of the extant film correspond to those of the original processed in Dallas, (2) that there was an unbroken chain of custody, which precluded the film be changed; and (3) that the Dealey Plaza films are not only consistent with themselves but with one another, where the Zapruder could only have been faked if the others had been as well--all three of these new posts refute Josiah Thompson. We already know there are five features of the extant film that differ from those of the original and that different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days, which vitiates the chain-of-custody argument. Here I am posting extracts from Vol. IV that bear upon the consistency of the films and undermine his contention that they are all consistent, which turns out to be a most interesting question, since all three fail to show the turn from Houston onto Elm Street. But the Zapruder film is not even consistent with itself, which proves that it cannot possibly be authentic!

Doug Horne blows Josiah Thompson out of the water

The Zapruder film displays inconsistencies with other films and with itself

The Alteration of the Zapruder Film was Rushed and Imperfect, Vol. IV, pages 1336 to 1337:

Because there are physical limitations to what can be altered in a film--particularly on a tight schedule and when faced with time pressure--the alteration of the Zapruder film was imperfect, and it therefore had to be suppressed as a motion picture even after its gross alteration to conceal what the forgers had been unable to remove. My working hypothesis postulates that because the cabal that killed the president (and which was feverishly covering up the crime that weekend) did not yet know, on the weekend of the assassination, what type of investigation(s) would be conducted of the crime, or by which governmental bodies, speed was of the essence. By late Sunday afternoon--after discussing the limitations to the film's alteration with the technicians at "Hawkeyeworks" in Rochester--they would have known that while the car stop had been removed from the film, and the exit debris leaving the back of President Kennedy's skull had also been removed, that a serious problem remained: the so-called 'head snap', or violent movement of the President's head and upper body to the left and rear, in response to the frontal head shots. This was a simple and persuasive demonstration of the law of conservation of momentum that even a layperson without a physics degree could viscerally understand, and the public could not be permitted to see it, or the lone assassination cover story would not sell. . . .

The film's imperfect alteration was revealed in other ways aside from the 'headsnap'. As later discovered by Josiah Thompson, Ray Marcus, and other researchers, and as written about in scores of books now and as mentioned in hundreds of lectures, the extant film contains evidence of a very serious 'timing problem': President Kennedy and Governor Connally react to separate shots that occur too close together to have been fired in succession by the rather slow mechanism of the alleged murder weapon. The Warren Commission staff expressed great concern about this internally, and ultimately dealt with it dishonestly by concluding that the same bullet had hit both men, and that Connally had unaccountably exhibited a 'delayed reaction' to this very severe and painful wounds. What we do not know today is whether the 'timing problem' is an artifact of frame removal, or whether those frames of the film prior to the headshot were not tampered with, and reflected the true reality of the assassination farther up Elm Street in the vicinity of the Stemmons Freeway sign. Either possibility is true. Given what we know about the robust evidence in favor of alteration of the Zapruder film, it would be imprudent for JFK researchers to continue to claim that the 'timing problem' is the primary evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. It isn't. Given the overwhelming evidence that the camera original has been altered, the 'timing problem' should now be demoted to simply being 'possible evidence' of conspiracy. Eyewitness and earwitness testimony from Dealey Plaza alone, and the behavior of the impact debris after the head shots, are the true 'bedrock evidence' that proves conspiracy, not the 'timing problem', which is inevitably suspect now, because of the overwhelming evidence that the camera original Zapruder film was altered on Sunday, November 24, 1963.

One final and undeniable mistake by the forgers was their failure to black out the real exit wound(s) in the posterior skull in all frames. I believe one of two exit wounds can been seen today, with proper magnification, in frames 335 and 337 of the extant film [Editor's note: and in frames 372 and 374, where a comparison between David Mantik's study of "Area P" in the lateral cranial X-rays and the blow-out to the back of the head can be viewed in "Dealey Plaza Revisited", Chapter 30 of John F. Kennedy: History, Memory, Legacy, which can be downloaded as a pdf from the book at http://www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/] The best images of this to date have been published in High Treason (the color plate in the cloth edition, opposite page 387), in [Harrison Livingston's] The Hoax of the Century: Decoding the Forgery of the Zapruder Film (on page 264) and in [Robert Groden's] The Killing of a President (on page 38). While the forgers were 'successful' in superimposing rather poor aerial imaging artwork of an enormous head wound on the top and right side of President Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film--a head wound which is grossly inconsistent with the localized posterior blowout observed at Parkland Hospital, and only roughly consistent with the autopsy photos taken after clandestine post mortem surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital--they failed to properly execute their most basic task, which was to hide all evidence of posterior exit wounds in the back of JFK's head. Persons in the government were clearly aware of this problem, for the last frame of the Zapruder film pubished in volume XVIII of the Warren Commission's 26 supporting volumes was frame 334, the frame immediately prior to those which show one of the two exit defects in the back of the head. 'Coincidences' like this are not worthy of belief, and the fact that the Warren Commission stopped publishing at frame 334 strongly implies that someone on the staff--presumably Specter and Rankin--knew they had a problem in frames 335 and 337, and so simply decided not to publish those frames. For them, discretion was the better part of valor. . . .

If the Zapruder Film is an Alteration, Doesn't This Mean That Other Films of the Assassination Must Have Been Altered Also? Also, Are There Inconsistencies Between Other Films and the Zapruder Film? from Doug Horne, INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), Vol. IV, pages 1317 to 1320 (in part):

Absolutely--alteration of the Zapruder film does indeed imply that in a perfect conspiracy, that other films would have been altered also, and in the same way as the Zapruder film. If they were not altered and the Zapruder film was, this would have left undeniable evidence in the photographic record that "the" pre-eminent record of the assassination is indeed an alteration. In fact, what we do find in the evidence is one suggestion of identical altration; and numerous indications of disagreement between various Dealey Plaza films and the Zapruder film.

The Turn from Houston Onto Elm May Have Been Removed from the Zapruder Film, the Nix Film, and the Muchmore Film

First, let us examine the suggested identical alteration of the Zapruder film, the Nix film, and the Muchmore film. Neither the Nix film, the Muchmore film, nor the Zapruder film show the Presidential limousine turning left from Houston Street onto Elm Street. Orville Ni told Mark Lane (on film) in 1966 that his film has initially been 'lost' by the processing plant and that when the FBI returned his film to him, some of the frames had been 'damaged' and were missing. The originals of both the Nix film and the Muchmore film (taken from the opposite side of thje plaza from which Zapruder was shootiong hjis fime, and from much farther away) are missing today. How convenient. The absence of first-frame overexposure in frame 133 of the Zapruder film suggests, but in my view does not prove, that the limousine's turn from Houston onto Elm was removed when the film was altered and recreated, using an optical printer. The fact that the originals of the Nix and Muchmore films are missing is extremely suspicious; they may have been removed from circulation to prevent detection of their alteration--specifically, removal of the limousine's turn onto Elm from Houston and of the car stop during the assassination. If ever found, one of the first things that should be checked is to see if the limousine's turn onto Elm Street in these two films has been excised--either crudely, with splices, or via reprinting those films in an optical printer.

Clint Hill's Interactions with Jackie Kennedy on the Trunk of the Limousine Appear to be Inconsistent in the Nix Film and the Zapruder Film

The 'headsnap" in the Nix film appears to be slightly slower, and less violent than in the Zapruder film; in t he Muchmore film, there appears to be no 'headsnap' visible at all, but this may be inconclusive because of the camera angle at the time of the headshot(s) and because the line of sight to the President's head is obstructed by Dealey Plaza bystanders immediately afterwards. (See episode 3 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy for footage oft he headshot(s) in both the Nix and the Muchmore films; both films can also been seen in their entirety in Robert Groden's DVD JFK Assassination Films: The Case for Conspiracy.) The perceived differences between the headshot(s) in the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore films suggests that when debris exiting from the back of President Kennedy's head was removed from the three films, that it was not done uniformly, resulting in three slightly different versions of the motion of the President's head caused by the fatal shot(s). This has not been conclusively proven, but is worthy of further investigation. . . .

[Editor's note: There is much more, but the Addendum, "The Zapruder Film Goes to Hollywood", pages 1352 to 1363, is of special interest, where highly qualified experts on film restoration viewed a digital version of the forensic copy of the Zapruder film obtained from the National Archives and found that the massive blow out at the back of the head had been painted over in black, which was a stunning confirmation of the observation of Roderick Ryna, reported in Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason, that the bulging out of brains--called the "blob"--and the blood spray visible in frames 314 and thereafter had also been painted in, where Ryan would receive the Academy Award in 2000 for his contributions to cinematography, where his area of specialization was special effects. As of this date, seven Hollywood film experts--eight, if we include Ryay--have agreed that the fakery used to cover up the blow out to the back of the head was very primitive and highly amateurish, a finding that David Mantik has verified using the 4x5 slides created by MPI when it produced a digital version of the film, which are archived at The 6th Floor Museum. The creation of this visual deception was an elaborate undertaking, but it contained the elements of its own refutation.]

Doug Horne blows David Wrone out of the water

Different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days

Not only has Doug Horne demonstrated that the strips of film--the actual celluloid--of the film that was processed in Dallas and the extant "Zapruder film" are not the same, but he has demonstrated that David Wrone has misled his audience and distorted the evidence about the chain-of-custody, where one film--apparently the original, was brought to the NPIC on Saturday, 23 November 1963, which was an 8mm, slit version, the proessing of which Bruno Brugioni, Chief of the NPIC Information Branch, supervised, which even required opening a camera store to purchase an 8mm projector, which the NPIC did not possess, while a second, 16mm unslit version, was brought to the NPIC on Sunday, 24 December 1963, by SS Agent "William Smith", which was handled by Homer McMahon and by Ben Hunter, who had not been present the night before, and a very different film.

A MAJOR CHAIN-OF-CUSTODY DISCREPANCY begins on page 1220 of INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV. The passages that follow are found on pages 1226 and 1227:

Analysis: First of all, we can now say with certainty that the NPIC never copied the Zapruder film as a motion picture, even though for years the NPIC notes had mislead some reearchers into believing that it had. However, Homer McMahon's rock-solid certainty that the film brought to him was an original, unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie--and that it came from a classified CIA photo lab run by Kodak at Rochester--implies that McMahon and Hunter were not working with the true camera original developed in Dallas, but were instead working with a re-created, altered film masquerading as 'the original'. I suspected in 1997, and I am more certain than ever today at this writing in 2009, that 'Bill Smith' told the truth when he said that the film he couriered to NPIC was developed in Rochester--after all, how could he possible make a mistake about something so elementary, since he brought it from Rochester to Washington, D.C. himself? He was only lying about one thing: it could not have been the original film exposed inside Abe Zapruder's camera, because we know from the Dallas Affidavit trail, and from the interviews Rollie Zavada conducted with the surviving personnel from the Dallas Kodak lab, that the original film was indeed developed in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963. If McMahon was correct that he had viewed an original, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 movie film the weekend of the assassination, and if it was really developed in Rochester at a CIA lab run by Kodak (as he was unambiguously told it was), then the extant film in the Archives is not a camera original film, but a simulated 'original' created with an optical printer at the CIA's secret film lab in Rochester.

The critical information published in the ARRB call and meeting reports about our interviews with McMahon and Hunter in 1997 was published in full by Jim Fetzer in the year 2000 in Murder in Dealey Plaza, bug was subsequently ignored by Josiah Thompson in a 2007 essay posted on the Mary Ferrell website(note 14) and was intentionally under-reported and misrepresented by David Wrone in his 2003 book on the Zapruder film. This is what many advocates of a specific hypothesis or a historical position resort to when the heat is on and their longstanding positions on key issues are threatened by new evidence: all too often they either ignore the argument of their opponents as if they do not exist, or they will misrepresent them, intentionally setting up a false 'strawman', and then knock it down. In the case of the serious chain-of-custody implications of the McMahon interviews, Thompson chose to ignore the problem ion 2005 and again in 2007, while David Wrone has not only misreported/misrepresented their import, but he has overstated the case for authenticity, as I shall demonstrate below.

In his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK'ss Assassination, Wrone fails to report the specific content of the Homer McMahon interviews (nor does McMahon's name even appear in Wrone's index), and then completely misreports what I have said about them (on page 127), as follows:

Similarly spurious is Doughlas Orme's charge (yes, he misspelled my name, too) that Time, Inc. allowed the film to be altered. In Murder in Dealey Plaza, Horne argues that Time, Inc. permitted the film to be taken by Federal Officials for doctoring. [This statement was followed by endnote 36, which simply refers to page 319 of Murder in Dealey Plaza, without telling the reader what is on page 319. Page 319 is the interview report I wrote of the Homer McMahon interview of July 14, 1997 at the National Archives.] Like Zapruder, however, Time knew it had a treasure in the Zapruder film, and it would do nothing to endanger the flow of revenue it expected from those 26 seconds of film. [boldface added by author]

Shame on you David Wrone! There are so many things wrong with this short paragraph that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, and most importantly, Wrone never mentioned in his text that the Head of the Color Lab at NPIC, the world's pre-eminent photo interpretation lab in 1963, claimed that he had [had] delivered to him by the Secret Service, prior to the President's funeral, a 16 mm wide, unslit original double 8 film of the Kennedy assassination that was developed in Rochester, the location from which the courier brought him the film!!! So David Wrone's first sin is that of intellectual dishonesty--hiding facts from his readers which might have contradicted his own thesis that the extant film in the Archives today is authentic and unaltered. His second sin is that of putting words in my mouth: it is simply not true that I said anywhere in Fetzer's book that Time, Inc. had allowed the film to be altered! The editor of the anthology, Jim Fetzer, published only my call reports and meeting reports of what the witnesses told the ARRB staff, and no one used that language in their interviews with us. So Wrone set up a straw man here which he attempted to knock down with a private enterprise profit motive, while all the time ignoring facts about C.D. Jackson's long standing associations with the CIA and the national security establishment during the decade of the 1960s. If Wrone had been intellectually above-board, he would have talked honestly about the content of the McMahon/Hunter interviews, and then stated why did didi not find these eyewitness recollections persuasive, if that was the case; instead, he took the coward's way out and intentionally failed to report what McMahon had said.

Note 14: The name of the lengthy 3-part essay is "Bedrock Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination", and is based upon a somewhat shorter version delivered by Thompson on November 19, 2005 at a conference sponsored by Jim Lesar's Assassination Archives and Research Center (ARRC) and the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law.

Doug Horne blows Rollie Zavada out of the water

Five features of the original do not match the extant film

Rollie Zavada on the strip of celluloid:

INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV (2009), p. 1292:

Conclusions

In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, Josiah Thompson told us we should all truth Rollie Zavada's judgment and defer to his authority:

"Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions."

Now that we have concluded examining his report and Zavada's changes of mind since that time, it is clear that he has cooked his conclusions. In particular, he has ignored--trashed--key testimony:

* That the exposures were not bracketed at the Jamieson lab when the three 'first day copies' were struck, meaning that the three 'first generation' copies today should not be bracketed copies;

* That a 'full frame' aperture (picture plus soundtrack) was used when duplicating the Zapruder film, meaning that the intersprocket images should be present on the 'first generation copies';

* That the edge printer light was turned off when the original film was developed, meaning that there a double registration of processing edge prints in the family scenes on the extant 'first generation' copies; and,

* That the camera original film was slit at the Kodak plant in Dallas, meaning that the 16 mm wide, unslit black-and-white copies in existence today cannot have originated from the camera original film, and are instead indirect evidence that a new 'original' was created as an unslit 16 mm, double 8 movie (just as Homer McMahon's expert testimony to the ARRB indicates).

Furthermore, Zavada's opposition to the shooting of a control film in Zapruder's actual camera in Dealey Plaza--which was inexplicable and extremely frustrating when it occurred in 1997--now takes on a very different taint, one of possibly intentional sabotage of the authentication effort by the ARRB staff. An incredible charge, you say? Not necessarily.

Read more on pages 1292 through 1294 as well as 1243 to 1292. And this does not take into account that the numbers on the extant film are not punched in the same location as the original. Read Horne to appreciate the depth of Zavada's deception.

Al, You have it exactly right! For now, I am only going to address Chapter 14: The Zapruder Film Mystery. This is an

astonishing achievement. For Horne to have assimilated and synthesized such a complicated and technical assortment of

arguments and evidence impresses me beyond words. This chapter alone is worth the price of the whole. No matter what

reservations or differences I may have with any other parts of his work, what he has done on the film is extraordinary. He

was my featured guest on "The Real Deal" on Wednesday, 13 January 2010, and I have had the program archived on my new

blog at http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/do...b-part-iii.html as part of a three-part blog on Horne, INSIDE THE ARRB.

The Zapruder Film - Doug Horne interviewed on "The Real Deal" with Jim Fetzer (13 January 2010) in four 25-minute segments:

Part I: Rollie Zavada and the strip of celluloid

Part II: David Wrone and the chain of possession

Part III: Josiah Thompson and the other JFK films

Part IV: The function of the film in the cover-up

Doug has asked me to add the following note of clarification about the "6k" scan being studied by the Hollywood film experts:

Each "6K" scan was a scan of a 35 mm dupe negative frame, on which was recorded an image of the 8 mm extant film, with empty space on either side of it. (In other words, the 8 mm film frame, by its very nature, could never fill the image frame of a 35 mm strip of film, even after it was magnified in an optical printer by Monaco film lab, the Archives contractor in San Francisco.)

The Hollywood group scanned the entire 35 mm film frame at 6K, but then cropped the image so that the extra space is not shown--so that only the full frame of the Z film is shown. Each cropped 6K image is 4096 x 3112 pixels (along the horizontal and vertical axes), which means that in its cropped form, it approximates a "4K" scan in terms of the number of pixels actually composing the useful image content.

Each one of these 4096 x 3112 pixel "6K" scans (sometimes called "4K" by the research group because they are cropped) consists of an amazing 12.75 million pixels of information (4096 x 3112=12,746,752 pixels)! And each one of these frames is 72.9 MB in size. (Too big to be transmitted on the internet.)

To focus only on the medical evidence.

I do not think that Horne's work is "same old...same old" theorizing at all.

I think that Horne demonstrates once and for all, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that there was a complete and total cover-up in the medical evidence. No longer "theorizing"; now once and for all demonstrated as fact.

I think that Horne demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that Humes and Boswell are perjurors and have never told the truth about the autopsy. I also think that he demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that the autopsy photographs in the National Archives are fraudulent, meant to deceive rather than clarify, and that the actual autopsy photographs taken are not in the record. He demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that the brain exam on record in the photographic record and in the supplemental autopsy report is fraudulent.

He also puts forth a very compelling case that the autopsy report and its conclusions went through revisions based on the need to match the other evidence against Oswald rather than the need to be truthful in describing JFK's wounds, and that Humes must have been cognizant of this.

Doug Horne has provided us all with an incredible contribution: he was the driving force in obtaining on the record, under oath statements from several of the major players in the Bethesda autopsy. Especially important are the statements of Sibert and O'Neill under oath that the back-of-the-head autopsy photographs do not match their observations made from one foot away in the Bethesda morgue.

A careful reading of Horne's work is necessary by everyone, I think. You and I may disagree with Horne on some of his speculations. And no theory of the assassination will ever tie together every witness statement. However, as to the medical evidence, in my opinion there can now be no disagreement on his basic conclusion: there was a cover-up in the medical evidence meant to implicate Oswald as the only shooter. The cover-up is now established as fact, plain and simple.

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Guest James H. Fetzer

It has occurred to me that, at this juncture in my presentation of Doug Horne's work on the Zapruder film I should have made a few more points:

Clint Hill's Interactions with Jackie Kennedy on the Trunk of the Limousine Appear to be Inconsistent in the Nix Film and the Zapruder Film

The 'headsnap" in the Nix film appears to be slightly slower, and less violent than in the Zapruder film; in t he Muchmore film, there appears to be no 'headsnap' visible at all, but this may be inconclusive because of the camera angle at the time of the headshot(s) and because the line of sight to the President's head is obstructed by Dealey Plaza bystanders immediately afterwards. (See episode 3 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy for footage of the headshot(s) in both the Nix and the Muchmore films; both films can also been seen in their entirety in Robert Groden's DVD JFK Assassination Films: The Case for Conspiracy.) The perceived differences between the headshot(s) in the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore films suggests that when debris exiting from the back of President Kennedy's head was removed from the three films, that it was not done uniformly, resulting in three slightly different versions of the motion of the President's head caused by the fatal shot(s). This has not been conclusively proven, but is worthy of further investigation. . . .

He discusses some proofs that he considers to be "dispository", including Mary-in-the-Street. Although I agree with him about the line-of-sight argument, published as "Moorman in the Street Revisited", http://jfkresearch.com/Moorman/, I have been round and round with it so many times that I would recommend at least two other lines of argument that are less subtle and more powerful, including "New Proof of JFK Film Fakery" (5 February 2008), which is archived on OpEdNews at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ji..._of_jfk_fil.htm, and "Zapruder JFK Film impeached by Moorman JFK Polaroid" (28 March 2009), which is archived at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Zapruder-...-090324-48.html, where the first documents the evidence for Officer Chaney motoring forward to speak with Chief Curry, which, like the car stop, is missing from the film, and the second the gross inconsistency between the medical evidence and witness testimony of a massive blow-out to the back of his head which hit Officer Hargis so hard that he thought he himself had been shot, which contradicts the bulging of brains to the right-front, which was part of a four-part deception, including the missing mass of the right front in the cranial X-rays, the caption in LIFE magazine about frame 313, and Zapruder appearance on television that day, during which he used his right hand to show where the brains bulged out to the right front--except, of course, it never happened. I am stunned by those who resist the obvious implications of these findings for impeaching the film, where even Jackie reported that, from the front, he looked just fine, but that she had had a hard time holding his skull and brains together! Adding these would considerably strengthen this section of his book. I regard Doug's work as extremely powerful, that does not mean I take it to be flawless. It's an exceptional contribution!

Since Josiah Thompson has advanced three major arguments in defense of the authenticity of the Zapruder film--(1) that the features of the extant film correspond to those of the original processed in Dallas, (2) that there was an unbroken chain of custody, which precluded the film be changed; and (3) that the Dealey Plaza films are not only consistent with themselves but with one another, where the Zapruder could only have been faked if the others had been as well--all three of these new posts refute Josiah Thompson. We already know there are five features of the extant film that differ from those of the original and that different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days, which vitiates the chain-of-custody argument. Here I am posting extracts from Vol. IV that bear upon the consistency of the films and undermine his contention that they are all consistent, which turns out to be a most interesting question, since all three fail to show the turn from Houston onto Elm Street. But the Zapruder film is not even consistent with itself, which proves that it cannot possibly be authentic!

Doug Horne blows Josiah Thompson out of the water

The Zapruder film displays inconsistencies with other films and with itself

The Alteration of the Zapruder Film was Rushed and Imperfect, Vol. IV, pages 1336 to 1337:

Because there are physical limitations to what can be altered in a film--particularly on a tight schedule and when faced with time pressure--the alteration of the Zapruder film was imperfect, and it therefore had to be suppressed as a motion picture even after its gross alteration to conceal what the forgers had been unable to remove. My working hypothesis postulates that because the cabal that killed the president (and which was feverishly covering up the crime that weekend) did not yet know, on the weekend of the assassination, what type of investigation(s) would be conducted of the crime, or by which governmental bodies, speed was of the essence. By late Sunday afternoon--after discussing the limitations to the film's alteration with the technicians at "Hawkeyeworks" in Rochester--they would have known that while the car stop had been removed from the film, and the exit debris leaving the back of President Kennedy's skull had also been removed, that a serious problem remained: the so-called 'head snap', or violent movement of the President's head and upper body to the left and rear, in response to the frontal head shots. This was a simple and persuasive demonstration of the law of conservation of momentum that even a layperson without a physics degree could viscerally understand, and the public could not be permitted to see it, or the lone assassination cover story would not sell. . . .

The film's imperfect alteration was revealed in other ways aside from the 'headsnap'. As later discovered by Josiah Thompson, Ray Marcus, and other researchers, and as written about in scores of books now and as mentioned in hundreds of lectures, the extant film contains evidence of a very serious 'timing problem': President Kennedy and Governor Connally react to separate shots that occur too close together to have been fired in succession by the rather slow mechanism of the alleged murder weapon. The Warren Commission staff expressed great concern about this internally, and ultimately dealt with it dishonestly by concluding that the same bullet had hit both men, and that Connally had unaccountably exhibited a 'delayed reaction' to this very severe and painful wounds. What we do not know today is whether the 'timing problem' is an artifact of frame removal, or whether those frames of the film prior to the headshot were not tampered with, and reflected the true reality of the assassination farther up Elm Street in the vicinity of the Stemmons Freeway sign. Either possibility is true. Given what we know about the robust evidence in favor of alteration of the Zapruder film, it would be imprudent for JFK researchers to continue to claim that the 'timing problem' is the primary evidence of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. It isn't. Given the overwhelming evidence that the camera original has been altered, the 'timing problem' should now be demoted to simply being 'possible evidence' of conspiracy. Eyewitness and earwitness testimony from Dealey Plaza alone, and the behavior of the impact debris after the head shots, are the true 'bedrock evidence' that proves conspiracy, not the 'timing problem', which is inevitably suspect now, because of the overwhelming evidence that the camera original Zapruder film was altered on Sunday, November 24, 1963.

One final and undeniable mistake by the forgers was their failure to black out the real exit wound(s) in the posterior skull in all frames. I believe one of two exit wounds can been seen today, with proper magnification, in frames 335 and 337 of the extant film [Editor's note: and in frames 372 and 374, where a comparison between David Mantik's study of "Area P" in the lateral cranial X-rays and the blow-out to the back of the head can be viewed in "Dealey Plaza Revisited", Chapter 30 of John F. Kennedy: History, Memory, Legacy, which can be downloaded as a pdf from the book at http://www.und.edu/instruct/jfkconference/] The best images of this to date have been published in High Treason (the color plate in the cloth edition, opposite page 387), in [Harrison Livingston's] The Hoax of the Century: Decoding the Forgery of the Zapruder Film (on page 264) and in [Robert Groden's] The Killing of a President (on page 38). While the forgers were 'successful' in superimposing rather poor aerial imaging artwork of an enormous head wound on the top and right side of President Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film--a head wound which is grossly inconsistent with the localized posterior blowout observed at Parkland Hospital, and only roughly consistent with the autopsy photos taken after clandestine post mortem surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital--they failed to properly execute their most basic task, which was to hide all evidence of posterior exit wounds in the back of JFK's head. Persons in the government were clearly aware of this problem, for the last frame of the Zapruder film pubished in volume XVIII of the Warren Commission's 26 supporting volumes was frame 334, the frame immediately prior to those which show one of the two exit defects in the back of the head. 'Coincidences' like this are not worthy of belief, and the fact that the Warren Commission stopped publishing at frame 334 strongly implies that someone on the staff--presumably Specter and Rankin--knew they had a problem in frames 335 and 337, and so simply decided not to publish those frames. For them, discretion was the better part of valor. . . .

If the Zapruder Film is an Alteration, Doesn't This Mean That Other Films of the Assassination Must Have Been Altered Also? Also, Are There Inconsistencies Between Other Films and the Zapruder Film? from Doug Horne, INSIDE THE ARRB (2009), Vol. IV, pages 1317 to 1320 (in part):

Absolutely--alteration of the Zapruder film does indeed imply that in a perfect conspiracy, that other films would have been altered also, and in the same way as the Zapruder film. If they were not altered and the Zapruder film was, this would have left undeniable evidence in the photographic record that "the" pre-eminent record of the assassination is indeed an alteration. In fact, what we do find in the evidence is one suggestion of identical altration; and numerous indications of disagreement between various Dealey Plaza films and the Zapruder film.

The Turn from Houston Onto Elm May Have Been Removed from the Zapruder Film, the Nix Film, and the Muchmore Film

First, let us examine the suggested identical alteration of the Zapruder film, the Nix film, and the Muchmore film. Neither the Nix film, the Muchmore film, nor the Zapruder film show the Presidential limousine turning left from Houston Street onto Elm Street. Orville Ni told Mark Lane (on film) in 1966 that his film has initially been 'lost' by the processing plant and that when the FBI returned his film to him, some of the frames had been 'damaged' and were missing. The originals of both the Nix film and the Muchmore film (taken from the opposite side of thje plaza from which Zapruder was shootiong hjis fime, and from much farther away) are missing today. How convenient. The absence of first-frame overexposure in frame 133 of the Zapruder film suggests, but in my view does not prove, that the limousine's turn from Houston onto Elm was removed when the film was altered and recreated, using an optical printer. The fact that the originals of the Nix and Muchmore films are missing is extremely suspicious; they may have been removed from circulation to prevent detection of their alteration--specifically, removal of the limousine's turn onto Elm from Houston and of the car stop during the assassination. If ever found, one of the first things that should be checked is to see if the limousine's turn onto Elm Street in these two films has been excised--either crudely, with splices, or via reprinting those films in an optical printer.

Clint Hill's Interactions with Jackie Kennedy on the Trunk of the Limousine Appear to be Inconsistent in the Nix Film and the Zapruder Film

The 'headsnap" in the Nix film appears to be slightly slower, and less violent than in the Zapruder film; in t he Muchmore film, there appears to be no 'headsnap' visible at all, but this may be inconclusive because of the camera angle at the time of the headshot(s) and because the line of sight to the President's head is obstructed by Dealey Plaza bystanders immediately afterwards. (See episode 3 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy for footage oft he headshot(s) in both the Nix and the Muchmore films; both films can also been seen in their entirety in Robert Groden's DVD JFK Assassination Films: The Case for Conspiracy.) The perceived differences between the headshot(s) in the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore films suggests that when debris exiting from the back of President Kennedy's head was removed from the three films, that it was not done uniformly, resulting in three slightly different versions of the motion of the President's head caused by the fatal shot(s). This has not been conclusively proven, but is worthy of further investigation. . . .

[Editor's note: There is much more, but the Addendum, "The Zapruder Film Goes to Hollywood", pages 1352 to 1363, is of special interest, where highly qualified experts on film restoration viewed a digital version of the forensic copy of the Zapruder film obtained from the National Archives and found that the massive blow out at the back of the head had been painted over in black, which was a stunning confirmation of the observation of Roderick Ryna, reported in Noel Twyman, Bloody Treason, that the bulging out of brains--called the "blob"--and the blood spray visible in frames 314 and thereafter had also been painted in, where Ryan would receive the Academy Award in 2000 for his contributions to cinematography, where his area of specialization was special effects. As of this date, seven Hollywood film experts--eight, if we include Ryay--have agreed that the fakery used to cover up the blow out to the back of the head was very primitive and highly amateurish, a finding that David Mantik has verified using the 4x5 slides created by MPI when it produced a digital version of the film, which are archived at The 6th Floor Museum. The creation of this visual deception was an elaborate undertaking, but it contained the elements of its own refutation.]

Doug Horne blows David Wrone out of the water

Different films were brought to the NPIC on consecutive days

Not only has Doug Horne demonstrated that the strips of film--the actual celluloid--of the film that was processed in Dallas and the extant "Zapruder film" are not the same, but he has demonstrated that David Wrone has misled his audience and distorted the evidence about the chain-of-custody, where one film--apparently the original, was brought to the NPIC on Saturday, 23 November 1963, which was an 8mm, slit version, the proessing of which Bruno Brugioni, Chief of the NPIC Information Branch, supervised, which even required opening a camera store to purchase an 8mm projector, which the NPIC did not possess, while a second, 16mm unslit version, was brought to the NPIC on Sunday, 24 December 1963, by SS Agent "William Smith", which was handled by Homer McMahon and by Ben Hunter, who had not been present the night before, and a very different film.

A MAJOR CHAIN-OF-CUSTODY DISCREPANCY begins on page 1220 of INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV. The passages that follow are found on pages 1226 and 1227:

Analysis: First of all, we can now say with certainty that the NPIC never copied the Zapruder film as a motion picture, even though for years the NPIC notes had mislead some reearchers into believing that it had. However, Homer McMahon's rock-solid certainty that the film brought to him was an original, unslit 16 mm wide, double 8 movie--and that it came from a classified CIA photo lab run by Kodak at Rochester--implies that McMahon and Hunter were not working with the true camera original developed in Dallas, but were instead working with a re-created, altered film masquerading as 'the original'. I suspected in 1997, and I am more certain than ever today at this writing in 2009, that 'Bill Smith' told the truth when he said that the film he couriered to NPIC was developed in Rochester--after all, how could he possible make a mistake about something so elementary, since he brought it from Rochester to Washington, D.C. himself? He was only lying about one thing: it could not have been the original film exposed inside Abe Zapruder's camera, because we know from the Dallas Affidavit trail, and from the interviews Rollie Zavada conducted with the surviving personnel from the Dallas Kodak lab, that the original film was indeed developed in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963. If McMahon was correct that he had viewed an original, 16 mm wide, unslit double 8 movie film the weekend of the assassination, and if it was really developed in Rochester at a CIA lab run by Kodak (as he was unambiguously told it was), then the extant film in the Archives is not a camera original film, but a simulated 'original' created with an optical printer at the CIA's secret film lab in Rochester.

The critical information published in the ARRB call and meeting reports about our interviews with McMahon and Hunter in 1997 was published in full by Jim Fetzer in the year 2000 in Murder in Dealey Plaza, bug was subsequently ignored by Josiah Thompson in a 2007 essay posted on the Mary Ferrell website(note 14) and was intentionally under-reported and misrepresented by David Wrone in his 2003 book on the Zapruder film. This is what many advocates of a specific hypothesis or a historical position resort to when the heat is on and their longstanding positions on key issues are threatened by new evidence: all too often they either ignore the argument of their opponents as if they do not exist, or they will misrepresent them, intentionally setting up a false 'strawman', and then knock it down. In the case of the serious chain-of-custody implications of the McMahon interviews, Thompson chose to ignore the problem ion 2005 and again in 2007, while David Wrone has not only misreported/misrepresented their import, but he has overstated the case for authenticity, as I shall demonstrate below.

In his 2003 book The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK'ss Assassination, Wrone fails to report the specific content of the Homer McMahon interviews (nor does McMahon's name even appear in Wrone's index), and then completely misreports what I have said about them (on page 127), as follows:

Similarly spurious is Doughlas Orme's charge (yes, he misspelled my name, too) that Time, Inc. allowed the film to be altered. In Murder in Dealey Plaza, Horne argues that Time, Inc. permitted the film to be taken by Federal Officials for doctoring. [This statement was followed by endnote 36, which simply refers to page 319 of Murder in Dealey Plaza, without telling the reader what is on page 319. Page 319 is the interview report I wrote of the Homer McMahon interview of July 14, 1997 at the National Archives.] Like Zapruder, however, Time knew it had a treasure in the Zapruder film, and it would do nothing to endanger the flow of revenue it expected from those 26 seconds of film. [boldface added by author]

Shame on you David Wrone! There are so many things wrong with this short paragraph that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, and most importantly, Wrone never mentioned in his text that the Head of the Color Lab at NPIC, the world's pre-eminent photo interpretation lab in 1963, claimed that he had [had] delivered to him by the Secret Service, prior to the President's funeral, a 16 mm wide, unslit original double 8 film of the Kennedy assassination that was developed in Rochester, the location from which the courier brought him the film!!! So David Wrone's first sin is that of intellectual dishonesty--hiding facts from his readers which might have contradicted his own thesis that the extant film in the Archives today is authentic and unaltered. His second sin is that of putting words in my mouth: it is simply not true that I said anywhere in Fetzer's book that Time, Inc. had allowed the film to be altered! The editor of the anthology, Jim Fetzer, published only my call reports and meeting reports of what the witnesses told the ARRB staff, and no one used that language in their interviews with us. So Wrone set up a straw man here which he attempted to knock down with a private enterprise profit motive, while all the time ignoring facts about C.D. Jackson's long standing associations with the CIA and the national security establishment during the decade of the 1960s. If Wrone had been intellectually above-board, he would have talked honestly about the content of the McMahon/Hunter interviews, and then stated why did didi not find these eyewitness recollections persuasive, if that was the case; instead, he took the coward's way out and intentionally failed to report what McMahon had said.

Note 14: The name of the lengthy 3-part essay is "Bedrock Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination", and is based upon a somewhat shorter version delivered by Thompson on November 19, 2005 at a conference sponsored by Jim Lesar's Assassination Archives and Research Center (ARRC) and the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law.

Doug Horne blows Rollie Zavada out of the water

Five features of the original do not match the extant film

Rollie Zavada on the strip of celluloid:

INSIDE THE ARRB, Vol. IV (2009), p. 1292:

Conclusions

In his long essay published in 2007 on the Mary Ferrell Foundation website, Josiah Thompson told us we should all truth Rollie Zavada's judgment and defer to his authority:

"Roland Zavada has a towering reputation in the field and no conceivable reason for cooking his conclusions."

Now that we have concluded examining his report and Zavada's changes of mind since that time, it is clear that he has cooked his conclusions. In particular, he has ignored--trashed--key testimony:

* That the exposures were not bracketed at the Jamieson lab when the three 'first day copies' were struck, meaning that the three 'first generation' copies today should not be bracketed copies;

* That a 'full frame' aperture (picture plus soundtrack) was used when duplicating the Zapruder film, meaning that the intersprocket images should be present on the 'first generation copies';

* That the edge printer light was turned off when the original film was developed, meaning that there a double registration of processing edge prints in the family scenes on the extant 'first generation' copies; and,

* That the camera original film was slit at the Kodak plant in Dallas, meaning that the 16 mm wide, unslit black-and-white copies in existence today cannot have originated from the camera original film, and are instead indirect evidence that a new 'original' was created as an unslit 16 mm, double 8 movie (just as Homer McMahon's expert testimony to the ARRB indicates).

Furthermore, Zavada's opposition to the shooting of a control film in Zapruder's actual camera in Dealey Plaza--which was inexplicable and extremely frustrating when it occurred in 1997--now takes on a very different taint, one of possibly intentional sabotage of the authentication effort by the ARRB staff. An incredible charge, you say? Not necessarily.

Read more on pages 1292 through 1294 as well as 1243 to 1292. And this does not take into account that the numbers on the extant film are not punched in the same location as the original. Read Horne to appreciate the depth of Zavada's deception.

Al, You have it exactly right! For now, I am only going to address Chapter 14: The Zapruder Film Mystery. This is an

astonishing achievement. For Horne to have assimilated and synthesized such a complicated and technical assortment of

arguments and evidence impresses me beyond words. This chapter alone is worth the price of the whole. No matter what

reservations or differences I may have with any other parts of his work, what he has done on the film is extraordinary. He

was my featured guest on "The Real Deal" on Wednesday, 13 January 2010, and I have had the program archived on my new

blog at http://jamesfetzer.blogspot.com/2010/01/do...b-part-iii.html as part of a three-part blog on Horne, INSIDE THE ARRB.

The Zapruder Film - Doug Horne interviewed on "The Real Deal" with Jim Fetzer (13 January 2010) in four 25-minute segments:

Part I: Rollie Zavada and the strip of celluloid

Part II: David Wrone and the chain of possession

Part III: Josiah Thompson and the other JFK films

Part IV: The function of the film in the cover-up

Doug has asked me to add the following note of clarification about the "6k" scan being studied by the Hollywood film experts:

Each "6K" scan was a scan of a 35 mm dupe negative frame, on which was recorded an image of the 8 mm extant film, with empty space on either side of it. (In other words, the 8 mm film frame, by its very nature, could never fill the image frame of a 35 mm strip of film, even after it was magnified in an optical printer by Monaco film lab, the Archives contractor in San Francisco.)

The Hollywood group scanned the entire 35 mm film frame at 6K, but then cropped the image so that the extra space is not shown--so that only the full frame of the Z film is shown. Each cropped 6K image is 4096 x 3112 pixels (along the horizontal and vertical axes), which means that in its cropped form, it approximates a "4K" scan in terms of the number of pixels actually composing the useful image content.

Each one of these 4096 x 3112 pixel "6K" scans (sometimes called "4K" by the research group because they are cropped) consists of an amazing 12.75 million pixels of information (4096 x 3112=12,746,752 pixels)! And each one of these frames is 72.9 MB in size. (Too big to be transmitted on the internet.)

To focus only on the medical evidence.

I do not think that Horne's work is "same old...same old" theorizing at all.

I think that Horne demonstrates once and for all, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that there was a complete and total cover-up in the medical evidence. No longer "theorizing"; now once and for all demonstrated as fact.

I think that Horne demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that Humes and Boswell are perjurors and have never told the truth about the autopsy. I also think that he demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that the autopsy photographs in the National Archives are fraudulent, meant to deceive rather than clarify, and that the actual autopsy photographs taken are not in the record. He demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever that the brain exam on record in the photographic record and in the supplemental autopsy report is fraudulent.

He also puts forth a very compelling case that the autopsy report and its conclusions went through revisions based on the need to match the other evidence against Oswald rather than the need to be truthful in describing JFK's wounds, and that Humes must have been cognizant of this.

Doug Horne has provided us all with an incredible contribution: he was the driving force in obtaining on the record, under oath statements from several of the major players in the Bethesda autopsy. Especially important are the statements of Sibert and O'Neill under oath that the back-of-the-head autopsy photographs do not match their observations made from one foot away in the Bethesda morgue.

A careful reading of Horne's work is necessary by everyone, I think. You and I may disagree with Horne on some of his speculations. And no theory of the assassination will ever tie together every witness statement. However, as to the medical evidence, in my opinion there can now be no disagreement on his basic conclusion: there was a cover-up in the medical evidence meant to implicate Oswald as the only shooter. The cover-up is now established as fact, plain and simple.

Edited by James H. Fetzer
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I don't know. I've been reading Horne now for over a month and I'm still not done reading, while Professor Fetzer is giving lectures on it. I'm glad I'm not getting graded.

BK

There is LOTS in Horne to read. Jim is the quickest reader, writer and speaker I know.

He has come UP TO SPEED in JFK and 911 evidence FASTER than any researcher in

history. He has total recall of anything he reads or sees.

I see significant things quickly but don't see everything. Jim sees and comprehends

EVERYTHING and his orderly mind classifies everything for future repetition.

Yep, Bill...you and I lag way behind Jim.

Jack

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