DUPLICATING OSWALD'S STANCE IN 133A

[Chris Bristow]

I find it impossible to duplicate Oswald's lean in 133a. There are two crucial elements of Oswald's posture that  must be matched to test his stance and that is the angle of his right foot and his hips.  I have seen Oswald's extreme angle achieved but the right foot and hips are usually swung way out, far past Oswald's. when you reproduce his foot and hip angles even if it's just a loose approximation, the stance become hugely problematic I will explain how I determined the hip and foot angles below.
      Whenever you take measurements  like these there will be some  ambiguity.  Each measurement has a tolerance and by the time you add up all the variables in a persons posture you have too much variability. To limit the ambiguity I have done two things.
      First I will give a very large tolerance to the hip angle measurement. I found the hip angle is well below 10 degrees,  but for the purposes of testing the stance you can increase the hip angle to 20 degrees. 
      Secondly, the only part of Oswald's stance that I test is from the waist down. Simply trying to match the  vertical alignment of his right knee, shin and waist is all you need to discover the problem with his posture. even if you try to lean your upper body to counter the lean(Which Oswald did not do) it will not allow you to reproduce his lean. 
 One odd side note is that Oswald is leaning all of his body equally like a mannequin leaned against a wall. You can draw a straight line from his adams apple right down through the crouch and and between his feet. The line traces the center of his body the whole way down.

 There is disagreement on which version of 133a is actually level. The fence is either leaning 2,3, or 4 degrees. To avoid any ambiguities I will use the 4 degree tilt which has Oswald leaning the least. However I think it is actually around 2 1/2 degrees based on the door frame visible on the house in the background of the Getty image below.  There wasn't much in that yard that was  vertical. The bannister leaned right. The post by Oswald leaned left. It makes so you can't trust much of anything. But that vertical door frame is, imo, a very good reference to find vertical.
 In the Getty image below I have rotated them to match. You can see that Mr Cappel on the right does not swing his leg way out but you can also see from the green lines that he is not leaning out over his stance like Oswald.  
   There only two things to verify before you can attempt to duplicate his stance, the foot and hips angle

 

THE ANGLE OF HIS SHOE
This first image was taken from directly above a shoe that is angled at about 38 degrees. The two images below are the same shoe at 38 degrees but the angles are now distorted to between 68 and 72 degrees.
The  images are at 68 degrees and 72 degrees and were taken from 10 and 12 feet away. 
     The distorted angle of his right foot in 133a is about 68 degrees so the actual angle of his foot was around 38 degrees.  The camera distance is an estimate so to be fair I will give an extra 12 degrees and say the actual angle of Oswald's shoe was no more than 50 degrees.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

FINDING THE HIP ANGLE
 
The images below shows a recreation of the telephone line shadows that fell on the ground behind Oswald and across his hips. The diagrams on the left are overheads of the corresponding image on the right. The only difference in the diagrams is that in the upper one Oswald is facing directly West, his hips are parallel with the shadow on the ground. Because he is standing parallel the shadow across his hips(simulated by the white box standing behind the protractor) is also parallel with the shadow on the ground.
 But Oswald was actually facing the camera, which according to the HSCA had a line of sight of 22 degrees North of East. The image on the bottom shows that rotating his hips to face the camera caused the shadow across his hips to take on an angle. There are a few basic and obvious facts we can draw from the shadow on Oswald's hips. First, we know Oswald's hips could not be anywhere near a 22 degree angle because the shadows would be parallel as In the top image. Second the amount of angle divergence between the ground and hip shadows is around 8 degrees and matches 133a so Oswald was facing much closer to the camera than directly West as in the top image. 
 I think the hip shadow shows his hips must have been at no more than 7 degrees of angle if that. But to test his stance you could go as far as 15 degrees or even 20 degrees and it will still prevent you from achieving Oswald's alignment of shin, knee and waist. 
 You can see the shin, knee, and waist alignment If you look at the green lines below. You will see the green line on the right runs vertically from Oswald's shin, through his knee and up to the waist  where it intersects about one inch left of Oswald's center line. That is about one inch left of where his belt buckle would be.

 To summarize, I have found that is you keep the right foot to 50 degrees and the hip to 20 degrees it becomes extremely difficult to maintain Oswald's lean, if not impossible. 
 The easiest way I found to approach the stance is as follows. First I leaned out far enough to align my shin and waist which leaves the knee out to the right of the alignment. Even before tucking the knee in to finish the alignment it was very painful and placed way too much strain on the right knee to be able to fully stand there without keeping one hand on the wall. 
 Someone here made a good point that Oswald may have been  in a transition from one stance to another at that moment. So it would just be a momentary strain. But in that posture you feel like you are just a couple millimeters away from an injury and it gives you an intuitive understanding that you can't afford to hop around in or out of that stance cause you are just to close to your limit. 
 finally when you try and tweak your knee into alignment you realize that even if you could maintain that posture for a few seconds why would you? It is really such a torturous stance that you are left with the nagging realization that it just makes no sense. I would advise anyone who attempts this stance to be careful because you could injure yourself. I found it necessary to put my hand against the wall for support.  
 

Edited December 28, 2021 by Chris Bristow

[David Andrews]

And - with all respect to your work - it appears that you have your left foot too far forward and the heel too far apart from your right shoe, plus your left leg too straight, in order to maintain balance.  Which makes this BYP look even stranger.

Was the camera or film stock used in the BYP capable of catching Oswald in mid-movement without blurring?  Of course, we'll never know what camera was used.

[Chris Bristow]

6 hours ago, David Andrews said:

And - with all respect to your work - it appears that you have your left foot too far forward and the heel too far apart from your right shoe, plus your left leg too straight, in order to maintain balance.  Which makes this BYP look even stranger.

Was the camera or film stock used in the BYP capable of catching Oswald in mid-movement without blurring?  Of course, we'll never know what camera was used.

David, that confused me for a second. I am not in the photos so you must mean Mr Cappel who posed for that picture many years ago. That image is used by Lne'rs to show that the lean can be reproduced. Obviously it does not even come close. 
 I do think there would be some blur. The end of the Carcano would show some blur if he was moving  but I don't see any blur there.
 One thing about the left foot position I have found is once you lean right your weight comes of the left foot. At that point it does not make much  difference in your posture except for a slight counter weight effect the farther you hold it out. The wiki page on the Imperial reflex camera says the slow shutter speed causes that camera to blur easily. They said you needed to hold the camera very steady. Interesting

 Not to rag on the skeptics but when that Cappel photo is offered as proof that he could lean that far, they always offer up the fact that 'They are the same height too'. But that is complete BS. They did arrange the photo to match the position of his head with the post above, but to do that they had to raise the camera about 4 inches. Easy to confirm this by comparing the roofline of the house next-door to where it intersects with the stairs. The comparison they  offer has an image of 133a next to the Cappel image but it  is rotated 4  to 4 1/2 degrees farther left than 133a. But even then Mr Cappel's lean does not match Oswald's. If the stance can be debunked legitimately why do they offer a photo that misrepresents height and has to be rotated 4 degrees from the comparison photo, and even then they can't match the stance.!

Edited March 19, 2019 by Chris Bristow

[David Andrews]

Sorry, I read this really quickly at work, and replied too quickly.  Obviously, that's a Getty Images photo.  But the difference between that and the BYP shows how difficult it is to reproduce the BYP.  The model seems to be hunching his shoulders uncomfortably just to keep from tipping over - and he's still not in the same impossible pose as "Oswald."

[Ron Bulman]

What would jack White have thought?

[Andrej Stancak]

The problem of extreme leaning in the backyard picture has been already discussed on this Forum. I guess it is possible to reproduce Lee Oswald's posture without losing balance.

 

I have modelled the posture using a human avatar named Andy in Poser 11.1. Using Andy's figure, it is possible to visualise the relationships and angles in legs, hips and arms.

 

 

 

 

[Chris Bristow]

1 hour ago, Andrej Stancak said:

The problem of extreme leaning in the backyard picture has been already discussed on this Forum. I guess it is possible to reproduce Lee Oswald's posture without losing balance.

 

I have modelled the posture using a human avatar named Andy in Poser 11.1. Using Andy's figure, it is possible to visualise the relationships and angles in legs, hips and arms.

 

 

 

 

Andrej, Your hips are angled back at maybe 45 to 50 degrees and your right foot is almost 80 degrees out to the side. The point I stress is that Oswald's hips are no more than 20 degrees angled and his foot, when you subtract for perspective( Completely explained above) is angled no more than 50 degrees.  I have considered your photo before and you lean even farther than Oswald but unless you match the foot and hip angle i don't think it is a valid test. It is the hips and foot angles that drastically limit how far you can lean.
  The Dartmouth images you posted have the fence rotated to 4 degrees which puts Oswald at 5 degrees of lean. I  and many consider 2 1/2 to 3 degrees to be correct and that puts Oswald at around 7 degrees. They also show Oswald's hips at 35 plus degrees. I think the shadow analysis above makes it clear those hips can't even be at 20 degrees. 

EDIT:Oh ok that is your model not the Dartmouth one.
 

Edited March 20, 2019 by Chris Bristow

[Chris Bristow]

3 hours ago, David Andrews said:

Sorry, I read this really quickly at work, and replied too quickly.  Obviously, that's a Getty Images photo.  But the difference between that and the BYP shows how difficult it is to reproduce the BYP.  The model seems to be hunching his shoulders uncomfortably just to keep from tipping over - and he's still not in the same impossible pose as "Oswald."

Yes he also seems to lean more with his upper body.

Edited March 20, 2019 by Chris Bristow

[Chris Bristow]

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

What would jack White have thought?

I don't know. I disagree with so much of his opinions on the BYP's. He said they used the same background but the roofline at the stairs is different in each BYP photo. don't know how he missed that. but to be fair he often said things like "This needs a closer look" instead of making claims. Then again I never found any of the photographic fakery observations he made about the Z film to be valid. 

[Ray Mitcham]

Andrej, in the stick model, his right foot is not directly under his head  as it appears in the photo. It needs moving to our right, or to his left. This will make a huge difference.

 

And what makes you think his left leg should be raised?

Edited March 20, 2019 by Ray Mitcham

[Andrej Stancak]

 

Ray:

the reconstruction with myself posturing as Lee Oswald had only the purpose to show that the extreme leaning was actually possible without falling. I had no assistance or navigation as to how to orient my right foot or left arm.

The front of the left foot touches the ground but not the heel of the left foot. This is the cost of placing all body weight onto the right foot; the left foot only provides some stability but carries almost no weight. I also did an overlay of Andy onto Lee Oswald's figure to check if Andy's posture would be a good approximation of Lee's posture. However, it is not my intention to argue about the details of my work: the sole purpose was to show that the posture displayed in BYP was humanly possible.

By the way, John Butler was able to find, back then when this topic was discussed (2017?), a fitting photograph of young John Kennedy leaning forwards to simulate the angle of the leaning tower of Pisa. It shows how seemingly impossible postures can be actually achieved.

 

 

Late edit: I hope people can spot the staggering similarity between Lee Oswald's posture in BYP and Prayer Man's posture (with right foot on the second step and carrying all the body weight and the right leg slightly bent in the knee joint).

 

 

 

  

Edited March 20, 2019 by Andrej Stancak

[Paul Bacon]

2 hours ago, Andrej Stancak said:

Late edit: I hope people can spot the staggering similarity between Lee Oswald's posture in BYP and Prayer Man's posture (with right foot on the second step and carrying all the body weight and the right leg slightly bent in the knee joint).  

I noticed that myself.  Striking similarity!

[David Josephs]

 

The problem with these images is much more involved than how he is standing...

How do you reconcile the ghost image below looking "fine" from a perspective and alignment pov...
but when you take the actual image and past it back in... not so much.??

How are both of these images possible - despite the obvious rotation conflict with the background?

[Andrej Stancak]

There is a number of anomalies in BYPs which Jack White, Tom Wilson and others have flagged up. My theory is that BYPs genuinely show Lee Oswald, however, that the pictures were altered in very obvious manner. This gave Lee Oswald a plausible denial - he postured himself as a sort of potentially aggressive leftist in these pictures which could be used to pin guilt on him. However, he could always show that the pictures were manipulated and that gave him protection in any trial. Of course, it is a speculation and hardly anyone besides Lee Oswald could confirm it.

Edited March 20, 2019 by Andrej Stancak

[Chris Bristow]

6 hours ago, David Josephs said:

 

The problem with these images is much more involved than how he is standing...

How do you reconcile the ghost image below looking "fine" from a perspective and alignment pov...
but when you take the actual image and past it back in... not so much.??

How are both of these images possible - despite the obvious rotation conflict with the background?

First Brown said he cut himself out of the photo and I guess he had to change the story because the silhouette is obviously Oswald in 133c. But then he claimed that the ghost image is 133c with Oswald cut out? Did he change his story after that? This ghost photo has the perspective of the Dallas PD photos not 133c. The camera is much lower in the Dallas cop photos which is obvious when you look at  where the roof line of the house behind him meets the stairs. Did he really claim the background is from 133c? 
 To make the ghost image he would have had to cut Oswald out of 133c then placed that over the Dallas PD image in order to trace Oswald's silhouette. 
 

Edited March 20, 2019 by Chris Bristow