So is David Lifton's Final Charade just going to be lost to history?

[Pat Speer]

3 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

I have indisputably proven that the blowout wound on Kennedy's head was indeed on the back of his head. Which means that the back-of-head autopsy photos are fraudulent, the autopsy x-rays were altered, and the Zapruder film was altered to hide that wound. All of these make Pat's post moot.

My proof is basically this: There are so many more witnesses who said they saw the wound on the back of the head, compared to the number who didn't see it there, that it is statistically impossible for so many witnesses to have gotten it wrong.

The proof is here:

 

 

My God I think he's serious. 

This reminds me of the mysterious deaths claim from years past. Someone claimed he'd proved there was a. conspiracy by calculating the odds of so many people connected to the assassination's dying of unnatural causes. 

But his whole approach was folly. For one, he estimated the odds of any one person's dying and then multiplied that by how many people died, while his numbers failed to reflect how many people did not die. You can't pick ten M & M s from a bag of M& M s and say "My God, all M & Ms are green! And I've proved it" Particularly when you have knowingly excluded the non-green M & Ms from your study. 

In this case, we have numerous Dealey Plaza and Bethesda witnesses claiming the wound was not on the far back of the head. 

In this case, we have several Parkland witnesses claiming the wound was not on the back of the head. 

In this case, our ability to know what witnesses saw or did not see is limited by the fact we are receiving these claims second-hand, from people with an agenda. This works both ways. Some witnesses were known to change their minds after viewing the autopsy photos. This taints the data. And, similarly, some witnesses who'd never gone on record for decades only made their observations public after reading books telling them what they should have seen and being tracked down by people with an agenda, who may or may not have culled some of their statements to reflect what they wanted the public to believe this person saw. And then there are the semantic issues. Many of the so-called back of the head witnesses said "right rear" or "posterior" which those with an agenda insist means the far back of the head. Well, a less-biased analysis would include that those viewing the wound and claiming it was "right rear" may have been claiming it included the right rear of the head when viewed from above, which would be three or four inches away from where people have taken to claiming they were claiming--on the far back of the head at and below the level of the ear.

And this doesn't even get into the scalp flap issues, and position of the body issues, which would undoubtedly have effected people's recollections of the wound's location...

Here is our friend Dr. Aguilar in an email to me last week (and yes, he said I could quote him):

"Re the 'back of the head blowout' controversy, I think you put your finger on it, Pat: Jack's scalp flaps fell backward as he lay on the gurney, face up, at Parkland. (And at Bethesda, too.) It was likely NOT a blown-out exit wound; the Z film wasn't altered, etc."

 

So... If you really think you've proved the back of the head was blown out and everything is fake, you have quite a hill to climb. You have to include all the witnesses and then prove your witness pool was untainted by those reporting on their statements and then prove they weren't misled by things like scalp flaps and body rotation. Good luck. 

[Jonathan Cohen]

32 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

Here is our friend Dr. Aguilar in an email to me last week (and yes, he said I could quote him):

"Re the 'back of the head blowout' controversy, I think you put your finger on it, Pat: Jack's scalp flaps fell backward as he lay on the gurney, face up, at Parkland. (And at Bethesda, too.) It was likely NOT a blown-out exit wound; the Z film wasn't altered, etc."

Thanks for posting this, Pat. I was honored to get to know Gary in the '90s and will always respect his opinions on these matters more than any message board theorist.

[Sandy Larsen]

3 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

4 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

I have indisputably proven that the blowout wound on Kennedy's head was indeed on the back of his head.

My God I think he's serious.

 

I'm dead serious.

Lets make it really simple. Roughly 40 out of 50 witnesses who saw the wound said it was on the back of the head. Pat claims they are all mistaken.

That begs the question, how could so many of the witnesses gotten it wrong?

What I did was calculate the odds (probability) of that happening. I did so using a well known formula for calculating such odds, called the binomial probability distribution formula. The answer I got was 1 in 2,089,874,696,731,895. In other words, what Pat proposes -- that 40 of the 50 witnesses got it wrong -- is pretty much zero. (1 divided by 2,089,874,696,731,895 is zero for all intents and purposes.)

Now, if Pat doesn't believe that, I suggest he try this experiment... even if it is just a thought experiment. Toss a coin 50 times and see if it comes up heads (or tails... doesn't matter) 40 times or more. If it doesn't happen, do it again and again till it does happen. Guess what folks... IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! At least not in our lifetimes, or our kids' or grandkids' lifetimes.

And it is only worse for Pat if we talk about real witnesses that have a better than 50% chance of being right.

There is just no getting around this. It is mathematical fact that so many witnesses couldn't have gotten it wrong. And with it being mathematical fact, it is also a scientific fact. Because math is a branch of science.

So, if Pat denies this proof, he is in fact anti-science.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

10 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

It is mathematical fact that so many witnesses couldn't have gotten it wrong. And with it being mathematical fact, it is also a scientific fact. Because math is a branch of science.

So, if Pat denies this proof, he is in fact anti-science.

This is absurd. You cannot apply "mathematical facts" to determine whether specific historical events actually happened or not.

[Sandy Larsen]

15 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

This is absurd. You cannot apply "mathematical facts" to determine whether specific historical events actually happened or not.

 

I didn't do that.

I used math to show that it is statistically impossible* for 40 out of 50 witnesses to agree with each other and at the same time be wrong.

 

*For all intents and purposes.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

54 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

I used math to show that it is statistically impossible* for 40 out of 50 witnesses to agree with each other and at the same time be wrong.

Sandy, NOTHING is statistically impossible. Weird things happen in life. Coincidences happen all the time, no matter how unlikely they may seem. Were they impossible too?

[Tom Gram]

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

I didn't do that.

I used math to show that it is statistically impossible* for 40 out of 50 witnesses to agree with each other and at the same time be wrong.

 

*For all intents and purposes.

 

Respectfully Sandy, as a professor, you should have at least a basic understanding of statistics and running experiments, and should know that your “calculation” is totally meaningless. 

I really shouldn’t have to explain this, but think of all the variables involved in human perception and memory in a traumatic, chaotic environment. Pat and Gary Aguilar pointed out several. You cannot reduce something like this to a freaking coin flip. Period.

If you were tasked by a university with conducting an experiment on memory recall of the location of a large, complex cranial gunshot wound on an ER patient, how would you write that proposal? How would you record the data to simulate what happened with the early Parkland witnesses reporting their observations hours and days later? Think about it.

[Sean Coleman]

Fantastic statistic….

 

I thangyou

Edited March 19 by Sean Coleman

[Chris Davidson]

Doug Horne excerpt:

"...1) those altering the Zapruder film at “Hawkeyeworks” on Sunday, November 24, 1963 were extremely pressed for time, and could only do “so much” in the twelve-to-fourteen hour period available to them; (2) the technology available with which to alter films in 1963 (both the traveling matte, and aerial imaging) had limitations—there was no digital CGI technology at that time—and therefore, I believe the forgers were limited to basic capabilities like blacking out the exit wound in the right-rear of JFK’s head; painting  a false exit wound on JFK’s head on the top and right side of his skull (both of these seem to have been accomplished through “aerial imaging”—that is, animation cells overlaid “in space” on top of the projected images of the frames being altered, using a customized optical printer with an animation stand, and a process camera to re-photograph each self-matting, altered frame);"

 

Something like this. Quite distinct, just as the extant frame is.

 

 

 

 

[Bill Fite]

57 minutes ago, Tom Gram said:

Respectfully Sandy, as a professor, you should have at least a basic understanding of statistics and running experiments, and should know that your “calculation” is totally meaningless. 

I really shouldn’t have to explain this, but think of all the variables involved in human perception and memory in a traumatic, chaotic environment. Pat and Gary Aguilar pointed out several. You cannot reduce something like this to a freaking coin flip. Period.

If you were tasked by a university with conducting an experiment on memory recall of the location of a large, complex cranial gunshot wound on an ER patient, how would you write that proposal? How would you record the data to simulate what happened with the early Parkland witnesses reporting their observations hours and days later? Think about it.

If I had to do it -

(1) Assume the worst case scenario - all the witnesses are just guessing.

(2) That gives a probability that any 1 witness is correct of 0.5.

(3) If there are 50 witnesses on record then the probability that 40 are wrong would follow a binomial distribution.

(4) So we have n=50, p=0.5, x=40.

(5) I would then go to Python and use the binomial distribution to find the probability of 40 are more being wrong.

(6) So, I would then use the following piece of code to get that probability:

from scipy.stats import binom

p = binom.cdf(39,50,0.5)

print(f'The probability of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is approximately {1-p:8.6f}')

print(f'The odds of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is {1/(1-p):,.0f} to 1')

which prints out the answer:

The probability of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is approximately 0.000012

The odds of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is 83,818 to 1

note: here a success is a person being wrong in their observation.

Assumptions:

* The probability of a person being wrong is not greater than if they had just guessed.  

* The person stated location is independent of other witnesses stated locations.

So in the worst case scenario - defined here as independent guessing & independence of wound locations assumptions - I think the above works.

Happy to have someone point out the error or errors.

Edited February 7 by Bill Fite
added f to from in python code

[Matt Allison]

10 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

But just to start with: get your heads together and tell us definitively which parts of the film were altered and which parts weren't.

Toward the top of this very page I posted a picture of the one part of the film that looks altered to me. One part. Very straightforward.

You're trying to deflect using other people's claims that I have no interest in.

Explain what I posted.

Go ahead. 

[Jonathan Cohen]

1 minute ago, Matt Allison said:

Toward the top of this very page I posted a picture of the one part of the film that looks altered to me. One part. Very straightforward.

Matt, what's the source of that image?

[Matt Allison]

3 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Matt, what's the source of that image?

Z-317

A zoom-in of the image posted on page 6 of this thread:

[Tom Gram]

32 minutes ago, Bill Fite said:

If I had to do it -

(1) Assume the worst case scenario - all the witnesses are just guessing.

(2) That gives a probability that any 1 witness is correct of 0.5.

(3) If there are 50 witnesses on record then the probability that 40 are wrong would follow a binomial distribution.

(4) So we have n=50, p=0.5, x=40.

(5) I would then go to Python and use the binomial distribution to find the probability of 40 are more being wrong.

(6) So, I would then use the following piece of code to get that probability:

from scipy.stats import binom

p = binom.cdf(39,50,0.5)

print(f'The probability of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is approximately {1-p:8.6f}')

print(f'The odds of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is {1/(1-p):,.0f} to 1')

which prints out the answer:

The probability of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is approximately 0.000012

The odds of having 40 or more successes in 50 trials is 83,818 to 1

note: here a success is a person being wrong in their observation.

Assumptions:

* The probability of a person being wrong is not greater than if they had just guessed.  

* The person stated location is independent of other witnesses stated locations.

So in the worst case scenario - defined here as independent guessing & independence of wound locations assumptions - I think the above works.

Happy to have someone point out the error or errors.

The problem is this isn’t just a right vs. wrong or in this case back vs. top scenario. We’re talking about specific location of a wound on a three-dimensional head, and as Pat has pointed out many of the early witness statements are not very anatomically specific, at all. The autopsy photos show a wound in the right posterior portion of the top of the head. This is a question of inches, not 0 vs. 1. 

[Jonathan Cohen]

5 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Z-317. A zoom-in of the image posted on page 6 of this thread

Right but do we know from which version of the film it was drawn? Or from where on the web it was sourced?