11/22/1991: Jerrol Custer, Tom Wilson and Harry Livingstone

[Vince Palamara]

Filmed by myself on 11/22/1991. When Wilson saw that I was video taping the session, he freaked out and demanded I take the tape out and erase it...I switched it with a blank tape and told him I did haha! I haven't seen this SINCE 11/22/1991.

 

 

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Vince Palamara

[Vince Palamara]

Wilson and Custer both died in July 2000. Livingstone passed away in February 2015.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Vince Palamara

[Ray Mitcham]

Thanks for posting, the video,Vince. I believe that Tom Wilson was correct about what he said about the photos. I hope somebody somewhere can re invent the system he used, and which unfortunately died with him.

[Guest]

For some reason there is only 11 minutes on the tape I digitised, too bad that there is not more.

From the Harry Livingstone Archives, with thanks to Malcolm Blunt.

[Lawrence Schnapf]

Bart- you have the Harry Livingston archives? It is important that these be digitalized. Indeed, there are too many silos of paper files held by various researchers. It is imperative that an electronic clearinghouse be created so all files are available to all researchers. It's the 21st century! CAPA will be having a panel on this top at the November in Dallas conference Nov. 22nd-23rd.

[Joseph McBride]

I started watching this, but it disheartened me because

it seemed like researchers were trying to tell an eyewitness

that what he saw was wrong.

[Pat Speer]

Sad to say, but Wilson was full of it. I was a professional record buyer for a major distributor, and was the recipient of tens of thousands of sales pitches, and know a complete blowhard when I see one or hear one. And Wilson is just way too full of himself. No one worth listening to would ever behave the way he behaves in this video. 

While I don't rule out that new technologies may uncover secrets in the photos (I have discovered things myself by using--gasp--Lightroom), this video is really discouraging, in that it shows Wilson less interested in discovering what happened, and primarily interested in gaining converts. 

My only question then is how the heck did he pull the wool over the eyes of Wecht, and others? 

[Andrej Stancak]

Pat:

As far as I know Tom Wilson and his work, your statements appear to me as very harsh. Tom Wilson was not aware that he was being filmed, and he was not selling or advertising his work. Actually, Tom Wilson expressed his disagreement with being filmed.  However, he was very enthusiastic about his work and results which is something what researchers often show. He was just sitting in the kitchen with three people whom he trusted and took some minutes to explain his findings. Tom Wilson was indeed very interested in finding out the truth and it is simply shameful to cast any doubts on Tom's work or character posthumously. This was a friendly chat among three people, not a professional interview of Jerrold Custer or Tom Wilson.

 

Edited June 2, 2019 by Andrej Stancak

[Guest]

On 6/1/2019 at 4:47 AM, Lawrence Schnapf said:

Bart- you have the Harry Livingston archives? It is important that these be digitalized. Indeed, there are too many silos of paper files held by various researchers. It is imperative that an electronic clearinghouse be created so all files are available to all researchers. It's the 21st century! CAPA will be having a panel on this top at the November in Dallas conference Nov. 22nd-23rd.

Way ahead of you Larry. You will see soon enough.

[Ray Mitcham]

1 hour ago, Andrej Stancak said:

Pat:

As far as I know Tom Wilson and his work, your statements appear to me as very harsh. Tom Wilson was not aware that he was being filmed, and he was not selling or advertising his work. Actually, Tom Wilson expressed his disagreement with being filmed.  However, he was very enthusiastic about his work and results which is something what researchers often show. He was just sitting in the kitchen with three people whom he trusted and took some minutes to explain his findings. Tom Wilson was indeed very interested in finding out the truth and it is simply shameful to cast any doubts about Tom's work or character posthumously. This was a friendly chat among three people, not a professional interview of Jerrold Custer or Tom Wilson.

 

Agreed, Andrej. I think Pat's opinion is swayed by the fact that Tom's work  doesn't agree with his.

[Guest]

Tom Wilson at ASK 1991. From the HL archives

 

[Andrej Stancak]

Bart, thanks for posting this old conference presentation by Tom Wilson.

I thought that this recording was lost forever, and it now surfaces with all the music in the background which eyewitnesses remembered well. Here is a post by the Bernice Moore, dated March 9, 2007, which gives some more context to this video:

Bernice Moore:

I saw both of Wilson's initial public presentations. The first was at the Assassination Symposium on John F. Kennedy (ASK) in Dallas in 1991. It was a presentation

involving charts of mathematical calculations and color slides of computer-processed images. That debut of Wilson's work was videotaped by South by

Southwest, the conference organizers, but the quality of the presentation and the video was compromised by a loud party in the next-door ballroom. The two ballrooms

were separated by a non-soundproof, movable partition. In what is at best an amazing coincidence, that party was part of a reunion of U.S. Secret Service agents,

some of whom had served on Kennedy's Dallas trip. That was learned about three years later by Vince Palamara while interviewing some of those former agents.

-------------------------------

The video gives some more insight into Tom's results compared to what is known from Don Phillips's book, however, practically no information about his methods. Apparently, Tom Wilson was willing to talk about his methods, however, nobody had asked proper questions at that time. 

 

 

Edited June 3, 2019 by Andrej Stancak

[Pat Speer]

On 6/2/2019 at 3:32 AM, Ray Mitcham said:

Agreed, Andrej. I think Pat's opinion is swayed by the fact that Tom's work  doesn't agree with his.

Not at all, Ray. Tom studied the Z-film and claimed he found a bullet entrance near the EOP,  a bullet wound most CT's at the time thought didn't exist. I am one of the few around today who thinks there may have been something to some of Tom's work. But his boasting and insisting he KNEW what happened to an actual witness is beyond the pale. This helps explain a lot, IMO. That is, why so few followed up on his research. Because he comes off as a total whack-a-doodle.

And no, that's not a random opinion. I was a record buyer for a prominent record distributor. Big whoop, I know. But as a side-benefit to the job, or maybe curse, I was able to observe hundreds of professional salespeople make tens of thousands of sales pitches. And I learned to spot the curve--when someone is trying to force their will on the situation. Wilson didn't give a crap about what Custer remembered or saw. He was only interested in winning Custer over as a convert.  This is not that unusual a situation, actually. I've seen it at conferences when people approach Buell Frazier and tell him Oswald was on the steps, or when people approach William Newman and tell him the sound he heard was not behind him, as he believed, but from behind the picket fence, over to his right. It's obnoxious behavior, and symptomatic of a zealot.

It's just hard for me to believe Dr. Wecht, for one, was ever taken in by this. Perhaps Wilson started out as a humble guy who thought he'd stumbled onto something, and became more zealous as time passed and it became clear he wasn't gonna win the war.

Edited June 3, 2019 by Pat Speer

[Pat Speer]

On 6/2/2019 at 1:51 AM, Andrej Stancak said:

Pat:

As far as I know Tom Wilson and his work, your statements appear to me as very harsh. Tom Wilson was not aware that he was being filmed, and he was not selling or advertising his work. Actually, Tom Wilson expressed his disagreement with being filmed.  However, he was very enthusiastic about his work and results which is something what researchers often show. He was just sitting in the kitchen with three people whom he trusted and took some minutes to explain his findings. Tom Wilson was indeed very interested in finding out the truth and it is simply shameful to cast any doubts on Tom's work or character posthumously. This was a friendly chat among three people, not a professional interview of Jerrold Custer or Tom Wilson.

 

So why do you think he was so adamant about not being filmed?

P.S. I don't think Custer saw the "chat" as friendly. Few realize that after being subjected to a number of such chats with men like Wilson and Mantik, Custer turned his back and told the ARRB the x-rays were the genuine article, and that the back of the head was not missing at the beginning of the autopsy, but broken like an egg shell. Strikingly, this is exactly what James Jenkins told me a number of times, before someone (almost certainly Michael Chesser) convinced him to "change" his impressions for his book.

[David Andrews]

How does the infamous black patch painted on the back of JFK's head in the Z-film affect Tom Wilson's grey-scale analysis?  I don't seem to find this being considered in Wilson's presentation, though the patch is evident in the film and in stills from the frames.  If he talks about it in the ballroom presentation, I missed it.

Edited June 4, 2019 by David Andrews