Unraveling the Mystery: Fletcher Prouty's Possible Role in the JFK Assassination

[Sean Coleman]

2 hours ago, Adam Johnson said:

Hi Michael, 

Perhaps you've never heard of the late Gary Mack....

Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza and an authority on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Wednesday. He was 68.

He had been suffering a “rare and aggressive” form of cancer, according to his wife, Karin Strohbeck, with whom he lived in Arlington.

Mack, who once influenced a congressional inquiry on the JFK assassination, joined the museum in 1994 after a career in radio and television. He had long professed a belief, or at least a suspicion, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing the president.

“As conspiracy theorists like to say, you’re either a lone-nutter or a CT — conspiracy theorist,” Mack once said.

Despite Mack’s “CT” leanings, those who believe Oswald acted alone were among Mack’s staunchest admirers. They respected his open-mindedness and the fact that he embarked, often aggressively, on detailed missions to debunk conspiracy theories as the best way of reaching the truth.

"I doubt if anybody anywhere knew more details about all aspects of the JFK assassination and aftermath than Gary," said Hugh Aynesworth, author of November 22, 1963: Witness to History. Aynesworth is among those who believe Oswald acted alone.

Mack helped unravel “some of the more ridiculous offerings,” Aynesworth said. “His work at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza was beyond exemplary and will be sorely missed. Within hours of his death, I had three phone calls from European newsmen who were stunned and planning coverage.”

Gerald Posner, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in writing perhaps the definitive book on the assassination, Case Closed, said he had known Mack for 23 years.

“He was always a remarkable source of information about the case and a wise guide who helped me avoid the many investigative pitfalls and black holes of JFK’s murder,” Posner said. “That we did not agree on the role and sole culpability of Oswald did not prevent him from always finding the time in his otherwise busy schedule to answer my many queries. His top priority was simply searching for the truth in the case.”

Dave Perry, a former insurance adjuster and one of Mack’s closest friends, collaborated often in debunking theories.

With Perry’s help, Mack proved in the early 1990s that a story naming a deceased Dallas police officer as the grassy knoll gunman was bogus. A young man named Ricky White said he could prove that his late father, Roscoe White, had fired the final, fatal shot as part of a conspiracy. Aynesworth later credited Mack and Perry with one of the more important put-downs in the history of assassination research, saying, “Dave and Gary disemboweled the Ricky White story.”

Many credited Mack with knowing more basic facts about Kennedy’s death than anyone.

“It’s not that he’s academically, archivally trained,” the late Jeff West, then the Sixth Floor director, said in 1999. “It’s just that his expertise is amazing. Somebody can bring in a shoe box of old photographs, and just by looking at them, he can tell you the time, the location and who the people are in the pictures. He has so much in his head, I’d like to figure out a way to download his head. Gary’s knowledge of the subject is nothing short of encyclopedic.”

Mack’s reputation extended well beyond Dallas.

G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, credited Mack with playing a key role in putting together evidence that, in 1979, prompted the committee to conclude with a “95 percent or greater” degree of probability that a conspiracy existed. The finding had to do with recordings found in old Dallas police files. Mack came up with the theory that the assassination might have been recorded by Dallas police and brought it to Blakey’s attention.

Although it remains controversial and was later rebutted by the National Academy of Sciences, Mack’s idea led to this: A recording taken from a microphone strapped to an officer’s motorcycle in Dealey Plaza and transferred to a Dictabelt machine at police headquarters indicated there were four shots fired at the president, according to the acoustic sound study conducted by the House committee.

That prompted the committee to conclude that, of the four shots fired, three came from behind and one from the grassy knoll — which missed. If four shots were fired, the committee reasoned, there had to have been two gunmen.

The Warren Commission concluded that only three shots were fired and that all came from the $12.95 Mannlicher-Carcano mail-order rifle owned by Oswald and found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.

The best lesson he ever learned about the assassination, Mack said, “is not to get locked into anything. … There’s a lot of nonsense out there. Part of our job is to clear away some of that stuff and get some straight answers.”

Born in Oak Park, Ill., Mack was given the name Lawrence Alan Dunkel. During his days as a disc jockey, he changed his name to Gary Mack at the request of a radio station program manager, who felt it would be catchier.

Mack is survived by his wife; a sister, Susan Coleman of Las Vegas; a son, Stephen Dunkel of Arlington, Va.; and his grandchildren, Nolan and Violet Dunkel. Details on services are pending.

 

AJ.

Informative biog AJ! Didn’t know he’d changed his name.

Do you know if Gerda Dunkel -who has done some great work with the available assassination footage- is related? 

 

[Michael Griffith]

On 5/27/2023 at 9:08 AM, Adam Johnson said:

Hi Michael, 

Perhaps you've never heard of the late Gary Mack....

Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza and an authority on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Wednesday. He was 68.

He had been suffering a “rare and aggressive” form of cancer, according to his wife, Karin Strohbeck, with whom he lived in Arlington.

Mack, who once influenced a congressional inquiry on the JFK assassination, joined the museum in 1994 after a career in radio and television. He had long professed a belief, or at least a suspicion, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing the president.

“As conspiracy theorists like to say, you’re either a lone-nutter or a CT — conspiracy theorist,” Mack once said.

Despite Mack’s “CT” leanings, those who believe Oswald acted alone were among Mack’s staunchest admirers. They respected his open-mindedness and the fact that he embarked, often aggressively, on detailed missions to debunk conspiracy theories as the best way of reaching the truth.

"I doubt if anybody anywhere knew more details about all aspects of the JFK assassination and aftermath than Gary," said Hugh Aynesworth, author of November 22, 1963: Witness to History. Aynesworth is among those who believe Oswald acted alone.

Mack helped unravel “some of the more ridiculous offerings,” Aynesworth said. “His work at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza was beyond exemplary and will be sorely missed. Within hours of his death, I had three phone calls from European newsmen who were stunned and planning coverage.”

Gerald Posner, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in writing perhaps the definitive book on the assassination, Case Closed, said he had known Mack for 23 years.

“He was always a remarkable source of information about the case and a wise guide who helped me avoid the many investigative pitfalls and black holes of JFK’s murder,” Posner said. “That we did not agree on the role and sole culpability of Oswald did not prevent him from always finding the time in his otherwise busy schedule to answer my many queries. His top priority was simply searching for the truth in the case.”

Dave Perry, a former insurance adjuster and one of Mack’s closest friends, collaborated often in debunking theories.

With Perry’s help, Mack proved in the early 1990s that a story naming a deceased Dallas police officer as the grassy knoll gunman was bogus. A young man named Ricky White said he could prove that his late father, Roscoe White, had fired the final, fatal shot as part of a conspiracy. Aynesworth later credited Mack and Perry with one of the more important put-downs in the history of assassination research, saying, “Dave and Gary disemboweled the Ricky White story.”

Many credited Mack with knowing more basic facts about Kennedy’s death than anyone.

“It’s not that he’s academically, archivally trained,” the late Jeff West, then the Sixth Floor director, said in 1999. “It’s just that his expertise is amazing. Somebody can bring in a shoe box of old photographs, and just by looking at them, he can tell you the time, the location and who the people are in the pictures. He has so much in his head, I’d like to figure out a way to download his head. Gary’s knowledge of the subject is nothing short of encyclopedic.”

Mack’s reputation extended well beyond Dallas.

G. Robert Blakey, chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, credited Mack with playing a key role in putting together evidence that, in 1979, prompted the committee to conclude with a “95 percent or greater” degree of probability that a conspiracy existed. The finding had to do with recordings found in old Dallas police files. Mack came up with the theory that the assassination might have been recorded by Dallas police and brought it to Blakey’s attention.

Although it remains controversial and was later rebutted by the National Academy of Sciences, Mack’s idea led to this: A recording taken from a microphone strapped to an officer’s motorcycle in Dealey Plaza and transferred to a Dictabelt machine at police headquarters indicated there were four shots fired at the president, according to the acoustic sound study conducted by the House committee.

That prompted the committee to conclude that, of the four shots fired, three came from behind and one from the grassy knoll — which missed. If four shots were fired, the committee reasoned, there had to have been two gunmen.

The Warren Commission concluded that only three shots were fired and that all came from the $12.95 Mannlicher-Carcano mail-order rifle owned by Oswald and found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.

The best lesson he ever learned about the assassination, Mack said, “is not to get locked into anything. … There’s a lot of nonsense out there. Part of our job is to clear away some of that stuff and get some straight answers.”

Born in Oak Park, Ill., Mack was given the name Lawrence Alan Dunkel. During his days as a disc jockey, he changed his name to Gary Mack at the request of a radio station program manager, who felt it would be catchier.

Mack is survived by his wife; a sister, Susan Coleman of Las Vegas; a son, Stephen Dunkel of Arlington, Va.; and his grandchildren, Nolan and Violet Dunkel. Details on services are pending.

AJ.

I know all about Gary Mack. I dealt with him in the early 2000s. I found him to be dishonest and unreliable. He once accidentally included me as a recipient on a revealing email that he sent to some fellow officials at the Sixth Floor Museum regarding my effort to get the museum to offer more anti-WC books in its bookstore. Among other things, his email made it clear that he had no intention of having the bookstore offer a balanced selection of books on the JFK case, even though most of the books published on the subject rejected the WC's claims. When I replied to his email and called him out on its contents, he declined to reply and would never deal with me again. 

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did not refute the HSCA acoustical evidence. Far from it. The NAS panel did not even address all of the evidence that supports the acoustical evidence. In fact, if you read the NAS report with care, you discover that they admitted, in a very oblique manner, that by their own calculations there was only a 22.3% chance that the impulse identified as the grassy knoll shot was not a gunshot from the knoll. The panel also admitted--again, very obliquely--that their own calculations showed that there was only a 7% chance that the powerful locational movement correlations between the dictabelt gunshot impulses and the test-firing gunshots were the result of chance. (LINK)

Edited May 28, 2023 by Michael Griffith

[Keyvan Shahrdar]

I guess we will learn more about what team Fletcher Prouty was really in, with the conspirators or with the researchers, after The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection releases these files:

• File No. 104-10300-1037: This file contains a memorandum from Prouty to CIA officials on December 1, 1963. The memorandum discusses the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.
• File No. 104-10400-1052: This file contains a memorandum from Prouty to CIA officials on December 4, 1963. The memorandum discusses the possibility that the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy.
• File No. 104-10500-1004: This file contains a report on a meeting between Prouty and CIA officials on December 8, 1963. The meeting discussed the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.

If in these documents Prouty is pushing for conspiracy with Castro or the Russians, we will then know he was one of the conspirators.

I got these files from AI Bard.google.com.  It searched The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection and found these files on Fletcher Prouty.  These files have not been released and I don't know of a way to access them.

[Larry Hancock]

It appears that the AI is getting its number formatting wrong, all of these are missing a digit in the last character set so something pretty fundamental is wrong in how the AI is searching for - and finding records.  I'd be hesitant to accept anything its providing at this point...

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/rif-numbers

 

.

[W. Niederhut]

29 minutes ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

I guess we will learn more about what team Fletcher Prouty was really in, with the conspirators or with the researchers, after The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection releases these files:

• File No. 104-10300-1037: This file contains a memorandum from Prouty to CIA officials on December 1, 1963. The memorandum discusses the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.
• File No. 104-10400-1052: This file contains a memorandum from Prouty to CIA officials on December 4, 1963. The memorandum discusses the possibility that the assassination of President Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy.
• File No. 104-10500-1004: This file contains a report on a meeting between Prouty and CIA officials on December 8, 1963. The meeting discussed the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.

If in these documents Prouty is pushing for conspiracy with Castro or the Russians, we will then know he was one of the conspirators.

I got these files from AI Bard.google.com.  It searched The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection and found these files on Fletcher Prouty.  These files have not been released and I don't know of a way to access them.

Kehvan,

     Your speculation about Prouty, "pushing for a conspiracy with Castro or Russians," is simply absurd.

     It's the precise opposite of Prouty's beliefs about the JFK assassination.

      He suspected that the assassination was a U.S. Deep State op.

      My recommendation is that you read his book on JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam to better understand his views on JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam.

      At least your new search engine thing-a-majig didn't credit Prouty with the authorship of LBJ--Mastermind of the JFK Assassination.

      At the rate things are going, I won't be surprised to learn that Ulysses S. Grant wrote Huckleberry Finn...

[Keyvan Shahrdar]

1 minute ago, W. Niederhut said:

Kehvan,

     Your speculation about Prouty, "pushing for a conspiracy with Castro or Russians," is simply absurd.

     It's the precise opposite of Prouty's beliefs about the JFK assassination.

      He suspected that the assassination was a U.S. Deep State op.

      My recommendation is that you read his book on JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam to better understand his views on JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam.

      At least your new search engine thing-a-majig didn't credit Prouty with the authorship of LBJ--Mastermind of the JFK Assassination.

      At the rate things are going, I won't be surprised to learn that Ulysses S. Grant wrote Huckleberry Finn...

W, I understand that you believe what these books have to say.  I am skeptical of any information that any author puts out.  I would rather wait until these documents become available to make my mind up.

I believe that AI will change the way we research information going forward, specially with an AI like bard.google.com that is capable of performing deep searches that have not been available before.  You should try it.  It is not perfect and yes, the AI will hallucinate, but I find it more credible than book sources with authors who really don't know what they are talking about.

We will find out when those three documents are released for public viewing if Prouty was pushing for a conspiracy with Castro or Russia.

[Larry Hancock]

See my note on the document number problem...the AI is not even getting number formats right and these are not legitimate document numbers at all...which is probably why its generating documents and then not finding them.

 

[Keyvan Shahrdar]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

It appears that the AI is getting its number formatting wrong, all of these are missing a digit in the last character set so something pretty fundamental is wrong in how the AI is searching for - and finding records.  I'd be hesitant to accept anything its providing at this point...

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/rif-numbers

 

.

Or.... This is information has not been released and bard is getting this information from their database or API directly.  But the fact that Bard may be hallucinating is not out of the realm of possibility.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Keyvan Shahrdar

[Larry Hancock]

Bard states where it is obtaining its records and identified a public source - but then says it cannot find them in that public source.  So it knows they exist and is excerpting information from them but then cannot locate them to support its information. It does not say it can locate them but they are classified and cannot be accessed.

Given that the numbers it gives do not correspond to those known to be related to that source suggests its not a matter of release but rather a matter of such documents being real.

Of course someone may have given the AI the ability to tease..?

To be blunt, creating a mystery out of this as if there were some major source of searchable records that the AI can find and nobody else has - including NARA itself -   deserves some confirmation before we jump into one more sensational mystery among those we already face. I'd suggest you contact NARA on Monday and get their opinion.

Otherwise somebody might want to notify the FBI that a huge national security problem has emerged and the AI is compromising who knows what secret and unreleased files...surely someone should be concerned?

[David Josephs]

1 hour ago, Larry Hancock said:

Bard states where it is obtaining its records and identified a public source - but then says it cannot find them in that public source.  So it knows they exist and is excerpting information from them but then cannot locate them to support its information. It does not say it can locate them but they are classified and cannot be accessed.

Given that the numbers it gives do not correspond to those known to be related to that source suggests its not a matter of release but rather a matter of such documents being real.

Of course someone may have given the AI the ability to tease..?

To be blunt, creating a mystery out of this as if there were some major source of searchable records that the AI can find and nobody else has - including NARA itself -   deserves some confirmation before we jump into one more sensational mystery among those we already face. I'd suggest you contact NARA on Monday and get their opinion.

Otherwise somebody might want to notify the FBI that a huge national security problem has emerged and the AI is compromising who knows what secret and unreleased files...surely someone should be concerned?

 

Keyvan explains it very well here Larry.  Knowing something is there and not being able to access it is possible yet as we discuss in the linked thread... and you have mentioned, the numbers are not only wrong but there is no 104-10500 series at all, nor a 104-10385 series in the released database.

Furthermore, I can't see how the FBI would have a report on these men so fast unless the rabbit hole is even deeper related to the tramps than we know.  Not a big stretch

I'd be much more concerned if the numbers came back in the correct format and there were still no docs appearing.

DJ

 

 

Edited July 16, 2023 by David Josephs

[W. Niederhut]

2 hours ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

W, I understand that you believe what these books have to say.  I am skeptical of any information that any author puts out.  I would rather wait until these documents become available to make my mind up.

I believe that AI will change the way we research information going forward, specially with an AI like bard.google.com that is capable of performing deep searches that have not been available before.  You should try it.  It is not perfect and yes, the AI will hallucinate, but I find it more credible than book sources with authors who really don't know what they are talking about.

We will find out when those three documents are released for public viewing if Prouty was pushing for a conspiracy with Castro or Russia.

Keyvan,

     If you want to do a deep search of Prouty's opinions about JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam, try reading his book on the subject.

     And your GIGO search engine needs work.

     If this is the future of historiography, we're in trouble.

[Michael Griffith]

The evidence that Prouty was a crackpot who made fraudulent claims is too clear and compelling to deny. Anyone who is aware of that evidence but continues to defend and use Prouty is proving themselves to be too ideologically driven to be objective.