Prayer Man More Than A Fuzzy Picture

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, Roger Odisio said:

I think they made up the WR version [that Oswald came DOWN the steps to the second floor], but can live with the possibility of Greg's version [that Oswald came UP the steps to the second floor], since it changes nothing important about the question of Oswald's guilt or innocence.

 

I have a question for you Roger, out of curiosity.

Since you now realize that the existence of the second-floor encounter -- whether it really occurred or not -- has no effect on Oswald's innocence, will you just ignore all the discrepancies indicating that the second-floor encounter didn't occur? Will you say that researchers like Bart Kamp and myself wasted our time on a distraction? And that my claim (I won't speak for Bart) that the encounter never happened is hurting the CT cause?

 

[Bill Brown]

 

Of course the 2nd floor lunchroom encounter occurred...

 

Mr. BELIN. What did you see?
Mr. TRULY. I saw the officer almost directly in the doorway of the lunch-room facing Lee Harvey Oswald.
Mr. BELIN. And where was Lee Harvey Oswald at the time you saw him?
Mr. TRULY. He was at the front of the lunchroom, not very far inside he was just inside the lunchroom door.

 

[Bill Brown]

 

On film....

Reporter:  "Were you in the building at the time?"

Oswald:  "Naturally, if I work in that building, yes sir."

Oswald admits, on film, that he was inside the building at the time of the shooting.  Therefore, Oswald was not out by the front steps.  If Oswald was not out by the front steps, then he is not prayer man.  If Oswald is not prayer man, then who cares who prayer man was.

 

[Karl Kinaski]

@Bill Brown, said:

Quote

On film....

Reporter:  "Were you in the building at the time?"

Oswald:  "Naturally, if I work in that building, yes sir."

Oswald admits, on film, that he was inside the building at the time of the shooting.  Therefore, Oswald was not out by the front steps.  If Oswald was not out by the front steps, then he is not prayer man.  If Oswald is not prayer man, then who cares who prayer man was.

 

Good point!

This reporter-question would have been a perfect opportunity for Oswald to cry: No, I was out in front of the building. With Bill Shelley! 

The prayer man szenario is disintegrating before our eyes. 

 

[David Von Pein]

 

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by David Von Pein

[Karl Kinaski]

Another one:

Quote, WC-Hearing: 

Quote

Mr. Ball: At that time didn't you know that one of your officers,
Baker, had seen Oswald on the second floor?
Mr.  Fritz:  They  told  me  about  that  down  at  the  bookstore;  I believe Mr. Truly or someone told me about it, told me they had met him—I think he told me, person who told me about, I believe told me that they met him on the stairway, but our investigation shows that he  actually  saw  him  in  a  lunchroom,  a  little  lunchroom  where  they were eating, and he held his gun on this man and Mr. Truly told him that he worked there, and the officer let him go.
Mr. Ball: Did you question Oswald about that?
Mr. Fritz: Yes, sir; I asked him about that and he knew that the officer stopped him all right.

 

 

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Karl Kinaski

[Greg Doudna]

Greg Parker makes this point on the ROKC forum which might or might not bear on why Oswald told reporters he was inside the building, and not out front. 

"Oswald was only out there for the briefest of times.  Certainly went back in before others starting starting streaming back in. We know that because of the report provided by Occhus Campbell that Lee was near the storage room when he (Campbell) re-entered immediately after the shots. 

"In short, Oswald was not out there long enough to realize an assassination had taken place. He connected the assassination timing to the panic that happened AFTER he re-entered. Thus his statement that he was inside when the assassination happened."

Comment on this? Is this a reasonable, or unreasonable, possible explanation?

[Pat Speer]

11 minutes ago, Greg Doudna said:

Greg Parker makes this point on the ROKC forum which might or might not bear on why Oswald told reporters he was inside the building, and not out front. 

"Oswald was only out there for the briefest of times.  Certainly went back in before others starting starting streaming back in. We know that because of the report provided by Occhus Campbell that Lee was near the storage room when he (Campbell) re-entered immediately after the shots. 

"In short, Oswald was not out there long enough to realize an assassination had taken place. He connected the assassination timing to the panic that happened AFTER he re-entered. Thus his statement that he was inside when the assassination happened."

Comment on this? Is this a reasonable, or unreasonable, possible explanation?

I believe Greg is incorrect about Campbell's writing a report in which he claimed to see Oswald as he (Campbell) came back in the building. I believe this comes from an early news article, in which Campbell described Oswald's getting stopped by an officer in the building, and indicated that this happened at the front of the building. But he did not claim he'd witnessed such a thing. 

There is reason to believe he was sloppily repeating what he'd heard, and not sharing what he'd actually observed, moreover. His 3-19-64 statement to the FBI concludes: "I have had occasion to view photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald and to the best of my recollection never saw him while he was employed at the Texas School Book Depository." Well, 1) Oswald was employed at the Texas School Book Depository on 11-22-63, and 2) if he knew who Oswald was and what Oswald looked like well enough to tell someone he'd seen Oswald as he (Campbell) came into the building, well, he wouldn't have had to study photos months later to figure out if he'd ever seen him in the building. 

[James DiEugenio]

We are using Will Fritz now?

Tom Gram is correct on this issue and using those kinds of images to represent PM is really unfair to all sides.

BTW, are we knocking a book that most of the people doing the attacking have not read yet?

I hope not. 

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Karl Kinaski writes:

Quote

Reminder: This is what we are talking about

<edit>
Enlarging any photographic image beyond a certain point will cause it to disintegrate into meaningless bunches of pixels (or, in the old days, grains of silver). You need to view the image at an appropriate resolution. This is what we are talking about:
</edit>

(Source: http://www.prayer-man.com/camera/james-glen-darnell/)

Now, I don't know how much digital manipulation has been applied to this image. But the image as it stands provides reasonable grounds to suppose that it could be Oswald. The skin tone and hairline suggest that the figure is a white man. His dark-toned casual shirt is consistent with that worn by Oswald that day.

Those two factors by themselves tend to rule out all but a small number of TSBD employees. Once you consider the statements made by other employees about their locations at the time of the shooting, and consider plausible identifications of those employees in the various films and photos, there aren't many credible candidates apart from Oswald and some random stranger whom no-one noticed climbing the steps to stand among a bunch of exclusively TSBD employees.

Then we need to add Oswald's claims about his movements during the time he was supposed, on the basis of next to no evidence, to be up on the sixth floor, insofar as we can reconstruct those claims from the official record:

1. He claimed to have started his lunch break by descending to the ground floor;
2. he went up to the second-floor lunchroom to obtain a drink;
3. he returned to the ground floor to eat his lunch in the domino room;
4. from the domino room, he saw James Jarman and Harold Norman enter the rear of the building;
5. finally, at some point, whether before, during or after the shooting, he went outside to watch the parade.

We have corroboration for his presence on the ground floor after mid-day, and for Jarman and Norman's entry around five minutes before the shooting. We have two newspaper reports claiming that Ochus Campbell saw Oswald inside the building near the front door shortly after the shooting. And we have two news films which show someone who looks not dissimilar to Oswald, standing on the steps perhaps half a minute after the shooting.

As the title of this thread implies, it really isn't just a matter of a fuzzy picture. There are other, good reasons to suppose that the figure in the films is indeed Oswald.

Now, the images we have are not conclusive. It's conceivable that the figure may be someone else, even though no equally plausible alternative candidates have yet been identified. But, as Tom Gram points out, there is a way to resolve the question, and the consequences of identifying the figure as Oswald would be revolutionary. All it might take, to completely upset established thinking about the assassination, is to obtain the films from NBC and make good-quality scans of a handful of frames. There's no good reason for not trying to get this done. A good start would be to have the films declared to be official assassination records.

Edited September 26, 2023 by Jeremy Bojczuk
Added the <edit> ... </edit> part.

[Sandy Larsen]

I wonder why Bart chose such an awful version of the Darnell/Wiegman frame for the cover of his book. I have a hard time even making out a face on it. I never had that problem when studying the frames before.

 

[Karl Kinaski]

 

  Captain Kirk: Is this the alien?

Spock: Yes.

Kirk: What is the solution?

Spock: One pixel.

Kirk: Zoom in.

 

Edited October 7, 2023 by Karl Kinaski

[David Josephs]

I'd like to give people some sense of the scale.  "Awful version" give what options @Sandy Larsen ?

I've been enhancing images of PM since it emerged yet need to offer some idea of the size of the image we are analyzing.  There is no "face" there

Trying to determine who that is simply stops short due to the lack of information... data points... within the single frames we are reviewing.

In mm's, the area on that frame is .068 sq mm..
8mm film has a max resolution of 1120 scan lines per frame

Kodak advertises parts of their current film lineup, e.g. Vision3 for Color and Eastman for b/w, as especially made for scanning. According to Kodak, a resolution of up to 1120 scan lines can be achieved with a 8mm film, making Super8 compatible to 2K and Full HD Resolution.

The frames are 3.3mm high so there is 1 scan line for every .003 mms of frame
The area in question is .26mm .26/.003 = 86 scan lines out of 1120. 

 

This was as bright as I could get the image without it crushing out the whites.  The similarities to how Oswald stands and holds his arms is what suggests to me this could be him.

While people were aware of him by sight, there were not that many who worked at the TSBD who could call Oswald out by name.  I can only imagine that these film's development and subsequent presentation offers much worse image quality than the originals.

Finding an image of Oswald that so closely matches how he stands and holds his head and arms seems, to me, a bit too coincidental.  So I superimposed him into the image.  The fit in uncanny... but does not prove anything.

DJ

 

 

[Karl Kinaski]

 

@David Josephs: Would you explain to us all how you are able to make  out of a few pixels more pixles? Please .. .

 

 

 

 

[Jean Ceulemans]

22 minutes ago, Karl Kinaski said:

 

@David Josephs: Would you explain to us all how you are able to make  out of a few pixels more pixles? Please .. .

 

 

 

 

IMO he doesn't.  But I agree with David that it's pretty much impossible with the information that is now available.  One would need to know the grain (among other things) to get the best possible digital scanning result for enhancement.

W/o enhancing the best way to look at this section would be to use the film for what it was intended to be (a projection on a screen).  That would be a first (and try not to burn the film when looking at a single frame....). 

PS : funny how people now are adding a grain-layer over digital films to get a better result (making the sterile digital film to look more "lifelike" and "warm".