The Zapruder Film and NPIC/Hawkeyeworks Mysteries

[Greg Doudna]

David Josephs, it’s not about govt vetting as you misquote me, but scientists’ vetting in science journals peer reviewed. 

When you say “what’s impossible” is to see a “peer-reviewed journal” willing to “actually say what the rest of us know”, 

… THINK David … can you think real hard of why that might possibly be? 

On the seven anomaly arguments/frames you want me to explain, do each of those specific seven have wide consensus inside this bubble as being proofs of alteration? Or not? Just to know the status or weight of these claims you have set forth before a lot of wheel-spinning?

What is Zavada’s response to the seven, if you know?

Honestly, I am sure I could put my life on hold and spend 24/7 for six weeks in crash immersion courses on film technology preparatory to researching the seven frames you ask/demand me to explain. I don’t have that kind of time or motivation, as opposed to the quicker triage of energy route of judging which experts are most credible to trust on technical questions always attempting to steer clear of confirmation bias. Hence, peer reviewed science journals.

And what if I did hundreds of hours of research and came back with findings on those seven frames that differed from your conclusions? Would you listen? Would you consider? Would you have a thoughtful give and take polemic-free discussion, open to change and learning? Would you be open to new information? Would anything I might say matter to you? Are you really interested in knowing of plausible non-alteration explanations if such exist to your seven frames? Have you yourself searched to find such rebuttal explanations in a way that you are capable of accurately understanding and describing the other side of some of these arguments? Why don’t you give the rebuttal arguments yourself if you know them? 

Just for one example, you start right off the bat asserting splicing—“this depiction of the ‘original’ film—spliced 6 times being 7 pieces…” as proof of alteration.

And you present that as consensus belief inside this bubble, and me as ignorant for being too dense not to know what everyone else inside, but no one outside, this bubble claims to know. 

I checked, and found this:

”But Zavada found no evidence of splicing, and instead saw the tell-tale fogging that occurs when a movie camera paused with film in its gate.”

But I’m sure you must already have known that from Zavada (did you?). What is your response to that, not from ignorant me, but to that finding of Zavada who does appear to know what he is talking about?

Edited Friday at 08:48 PM by Greg Doudna

[Matt Cloud]

13 minutes ago, Roger Odisio said:

But the idea to frame Oswald had to have been settled on some time before the murder (we probably don't need to know exactly when).  Designating a patsy along with concealing the planners' involvement were both crucial elements of the coverup.

An essential part of designating a patsy was to decide what to do with him after the murder.  In this case that meant killing Oswald before he could talk to a lawyer, and replacing the trial with a commission that could be counted on to frame him. 

All of these issues and their resolution could not wait to be handled on the fly after the murder.  The planners were professionals.

 

Well, I don't know about that, not needing "to know exactly when." Seems that if you could figure out when, you'd be close to figuring out who -- and that would tell you quite a lot, even perhaps about why.

 

I would also recommending reserving all judgment about the assumed identity of "Oswald."  I think most everyone's in for some big surprises.

[Roger Odisio]

11 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Roger Odisio writes:

There's no reason to assume that "using only the original film for the boards would suffice." Why should "Johnson and the CIA" have assumed that a first-generation copy would not have contained enough detail to determine the number and direction of the shots?

 

I'm always glad when you don't completely hide behind your exhortation to produce the CIA documents that prove what they did.  But instead try to respond to at least some of the particulars of what I am suggesting.

 

J:  There's no reason to assume that "using only the original film for the boards would suffice." Why should "Johnson and the CIA" have assumed that a first-generation copy would not have contained enough detail to determine the number and direction of the shots?

 

RO:  There is no reason to believe that Johnson and the CIA would have assumed a copy was good enough.  How could they know that?  In fact there is no reason to think they had any reason to make any assumption at all about the quality of a copy, and every reason to think they would have wanted to use the original for the boards they had ordered to be made.  They were in charge of the official investigation to find out what happened.  As I have explained and you have ignored, the benefits of using the original for the boards in their situation, compared to using a copy, are clear.  The idea that they would have settled for a copy when they could use the original is ludicrous on its face.

 

J:  Since the only version of the film within hundreds of miles of Washington on the Saturday afternoon was the Secret Service's first-day copy, a copy was all they had access to. Until Roger provides actual evidence (i.e. not speculation) that the original was sent to Washington, or that "Johnson and the CIA" or any of their minions believed that only an original film would do, there is no good reason to believe that the film at NPIC was anything other than the Secret Service's first-day copy.

 

RO:  This is false.  As you know the original was in Chicago almost 12 hours before Brugioni began working on the boards. It was no problem to send it to the CIA's lab in DC.  Shorn of the falsehood, all you have here is another claim that you won't believe that happened without documentation from the CIA to corroborate it.  Evidence you know does not, and could not, exist.

 

  Quote

In fact it's clear to me that the murder would not have proceeded without a story in place the planners had agreed on, to among other things, hide their involvement, blame someone else, and get the policy changes that motivated the murder in the first place.

 

J:  Roger is implying that "the planners", a term which seems to be synonymous with "Johnson and the CIA", had intended as part of their pre-assassination plan to blame the assassination on a lone-nut patsy.

 

RO:  There is no question that the planners of the murder would, as an integral part of the coverup, have settled on blaming a patsy before going ahead with the murder. See my discussion about that today with Matt.

 

J:  But if the blame-it-on-a-lone-gunman-patsy element was decided in advance, it made no sense to have JFK eliminated in public by multiple gunmen, in front of hundreds of people who might capture images which contradicted the lone-gunman story. For the same reason, it made no sense to try to alter any of the films or photographs, because there could have been any number of other films or photographs in existence which might have exposed the alteration.

 

If, on the other hand, the blame-it-on-a-lone-gunman-patsy element was only decided after the event, on the Saturday afternoon once news of Oswald's arrest reached Washington (Roger mentions "the message from the White House Situation Room a few hours after the murder"), the people who made that decision cannot have been the people who instigated a public assassination using more than one gunman. It isn't credible that the same people would have been happy for spectators to capture evidence of multiple gunmen, only to change their minds when someone gets arrested in Dallas less than an hour and a half after the assassination.

 

In both of these scenarios, there would have been no reason to alter the Zapruder film, or indeed any of the other films and photographs. That's why no good evidence exists that any such alteration happened.

 

RO:  So, you're willing to accept that the actual murder, as captured by the Z film, contradicted the Oswald story they advanced, so you can argue against the idea that the story was part of the coverup plan devised before the murder.  While simultaneously arguing there was no reason to alter Z film and so it was not done.  (I'm assuming you have abandoned your original assertion that the planners would have destroyed the Z film instead of trying to alter it).

 

Let's review.  The killers' top priority was to make sure JFK didn't escape the ambush.  That's why they set up multiple shooters firing from different directions.

 

Concealing the killers' involvement was not enough and in fact they didn't do a very good job of that.  They needed someone else to blame as part of the coverup plan to divert attention from themselves. This is the classic story we have been offered in other political murders of the 60s--King and Bobby for example. One reason for its use over and over again was probably the success that was had with covering up the JFLA.

 

The Oswald story became the sole focus of the WC investigation.  No other considerations or parties were considered.  The WC's job was to complete the frame of Oswald.

 

The planners of course were aware of the glaring discrepancy they had created by blaming Oswald.  Which required them to thoroughly plan beforehand a series of steps to try to cover it up.

 

* Kill Oswald before he could talk to a lawyer; they couldn't allow a trial

 

* Because there would be no trial, create a commission that could be relied on the frame Oswald.

 

* Snatch the body at Parkland to control the autopsy

 

* Yes, alter the Z film which had captured the discrepancy.

 

* Countless other smaller actions designed to blunt the emergence of any alternatives to the Oswald story.  E.g., the 1967 CIA memo to its field offices suggesting the argument that critics of the WC hoax were offering only unsupported conspiracy *theories*, while the WC had already explained all the facts. You may recognize that argument.

 

In creating this discrepancy the planners calculated that the things they could do, among others I haven't mentioned, together with their control of the major media, would be likely to let them get away with the murder.

 

Turns out, they were right. 

 

 

•  

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Sandy Larsen writes:

Quote

My proof of the gaping head-wound location is that it is statistically impossible for 40 out of 45 gaping wound witnesses to corroborate each other by placing the wound in the very same location as each other, and yet be wrong. It is a mathematical proof.

Well, Sandy will need to run that past some experts, if he's claiming that evidence as subjective and malleable as witness statements can constitute mathematical proof of anything. Those experts might ask:

• Did all of those 40 witnesses place the wound in exactly the same location? If not, how much variation was there?
• If any witnesses were interviewed more than once, did each witness place the wound in exactly the same location each time? If not, how much variation was there?
• How precisely was the location determined in each case? Was it just someone holding his hand above his own head, or were there verbal descriptions, or did the witness mark the location on a model of a human head so that a precise measurement could be taken?
• How long after the event did these witnesses make these claims?
• How closely did each witness come to the president's body? Did they all handle the body, or did some of them only see it from a distance?
• Who was asking the questions of each witness? Did any of the questioners have an agenda that might have influenced the way they asked their questions? Were the questioners leading the witness at all? Were they interested in a precise location or a general location?

And so on. I wouldn't be surprised if Sandy's witness evidence turns out to be not quite as uniform as he thinks it is. On the plus side, it can't be as embarrassing as his failure to spot an obvious example of the parallax effect and proclaiming that as proof of alteration.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

David Josephs writes:

Quote

Here's the impossible head turn ... for which experiments have been done and have found this to be physically impossible.

Which experiments? Who conducted them? Where are they published? The Journal of Moon-Landings Studies? The American Academy of Faked Photographs Quarterly Review? Who peer-reviewed them?

Quote

What's impossible is meeting your need for a "peer-reviewed journal" with anyone willing to actually say what the rest of us know.

I'm not quite sure what David is trying to convey with that curiously formed sentence, except that he thinks "what the rest of us know" counts for anything at all. Perhaps he is trying to say that no reputable peer-reviewed journal would consider publishing an article that's critical of the lone-gunman claim. If so, he's wrong. I know of two serious scientific journals which published articles critical of the neutron activation analysis carried out by Vincent Guinn for the HSCA.

I wrote earlier that the people who need to be convinced are experts in film technology. Depending on the claim, other experts might also need to be convinced. If you want us to believe that Greer's head-turn really is anatomically impossible, you'll need to convince experts in human anatomy.

If you want us to believe that the Zapruder film that's in the archives is a copy and not the original, it's the experts in film technology you'll need to convince. As it happens, one expert in film technology has in fact examined it closely, several times, and concluded that the film is not a copy (see http://www.jfk-info.com/RJZ-DH-032010.pdf). If, as appears to be the case, the film is not a copy, it follows that the numerous alleged alterations which required the film to have been copied, cannot have happened (frames taken out to conceal a non-existent car-stop, for example).

If you want to overturn that expert opinion, you'll need to find another expert to do that for you. Until someone with the proper expertise examines the film and explains why Roland Zavada was mistaken, the current state of play is that the film in the archives is the actual physical film that was in Zapruder's camera during the assassination.

If anyone wants the film-fakery stuff to be taken seriously, they need to treat it as a serious scientific claim. Assemble the evidence, write it up, submit it to a reputable journal, and see what happens. If no-one takes this elementary step, the subject will continue to be dismissed, correctly, as amateurish moon-landings-style speculation.

Quote

the removal of the slowdown/stop and the removal of scores of frames at the Elm/Houston corner

Right on cue, here comes the amateurish moon-landings-style speculation!

Quote

peer-review when that's exactly what we do here

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but saying "yeah, that blob in that poor-quality copy doesn't look quite right to me either" on a web forum does not constitute peer review.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Roger Odisio writes:

Quote

There is no reason to believe that Johnson and the CIA would have assumed a copy was good enough.

The question I asked was: Why should "Johnson and the CIA" have assumed that a first-generation copy would not have contained enough detail to determine the number and direction of the shots? Roger hasn't answered this. Of course the original film would reveal more detail than a copy, but Roger has given us no reason to doubt that a first-generation copy would be sufficient for discovering basic information such as the number and direction of shots.

Combine that with what the documentary evidence tells us: on the Saturday afternoon, high-ups in Washington had access to one version of the Zapruder film, namely the Secret Service's first-day copy. The fact that it was Secret Service officers (and not CIA officers) who brought the film to NPIC, and Secret Service officers (not CIA officers) who took it away afterwards, strongly suggests that the film in question was in fact the Secret Service's first-day copy.

If, as Roger proposes, the CIA had somehow obtained the original Zapruder film and conveyed it to Washington on the Saturday, surely we would expect to find CIA officers taking the film to the CIA's very own NPIC, and CIA officers taking it away again afterwards. But we don't, do we? Since the relevant officers were actually from the Secret Service, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were bringing and taking away the Secret Service's own copy.

The reason I keep going on about documentary evidence is that, if Roger wants to propose an alternative scenario, he really needs to do more than speculate about what he thinks "Johnson and the CIA" might have wanted. You can't build a case based only on speculation, when a plausible alternative case exists which is based on solid documentary evidence.

So, if Roger wants to persuade anyone that the original Zapruder film was in Washington on the Saturday evening, he needs to produce actual evidence that supports that claim. Obviously we can't expect to find a CIA memo detailing that this particular CIA plane flew from Chicago to Washington, and that this particular CIA agent had the film in his hand luggage. But we might expect to find some trace in the documentary record that "Johnson and the CIA" wanted to obtain the original film rather than a copy on the Saturday. Has anyone even bothered to trawl through the records, looking for something like this? If not, why not?

Quote

There is no question that the planners of the murder would, as an integral part of the coverup, have settled on blaming a patsy before going ahead with the murder. ... The killers' top priority was to make sure JFK didn't escape the ambush.  That's why they set up multiple shooters firing from different directions.

Roger's scenario is that the assassination involved multiple gunmen in order to make sure that JFK was killed, and that before the assassination it was decided that the blame would be placed on a lone nut. That sort of makes sense, until you work out that staging such an assassination in public isn't consistent with blaming it beforehand on a lone nut.

As I pointed out earlier, if you decide to stage an assassination in front of hundreds of spectators (which there were), you can expect dozens of those spectators to capture images of the assassination (which they did), and that there was a good chance that some of those images would expose the assassination as the work of more than one gunmen (which is what happened).

If you want to use multiple gunmen to assassinate someone in front of hundreds of spectators, dozens of whom would be taking photos and home movies, you can expect evidence to emerge that would at least suggest that multiple gunmen were involved. You would only do this if (a) you didn't care that the assassination might look like a conspiracy or (b) you actively wanted the assassination to look like a conspiracy.

To look at the problem from a different direction: if you want to blame a lone nut beforehand, you would either (a) use an actual lone gunman with better skills, a better-quality rifle, and a better line of sight than Oswald is supposed to have had, or (b) use multiple gunmen and stage the assassination somewhere very much less public than Dealey Plaza.

What you wouldn't do is stage the assassination in a way that produces photographic evidence that more than one gunman was involved, and then go around trying to clean up the photographic record afterwards. Not only would this have involved unnecessary work and almost certainly not have succeeded, but there was no guarantee that photographs or home movies might come to light in the future, exposing any photo-alteration.

In short, whoever was behind the assassination can only have staged it in Dealey Plaza in order to make it look like a conspiracy (and chose a patsy whose personal history made the conspiracy look as though it originated with the Cuban or Soviet regimes). And if they wanted to make it look like a conspiracy, they wouldn't have cared what the Zapruder film or any other photographic evidence showed.

To get back to the topic of this thread, the notion that Oswald was chosen as a patsy before the assassination as an integral part of the plot (which may well be the case), is not consistent with the claim that the original Zapruder film was examined at NPIC and altered at Hawkeye Works (for which there is no good evidence anyway).

Quote

(I'm assuming you have abandoned your original assertion that the planners would have destroyed the Z film instead of trying to alter it)

Of course not. If anyone (a) had control of the film and (b) wanted to completely eliminate any incriminating evidence in the film, the only sure way to do so would be to destroy the film. The fact that the film was not destroyed, and survives to this day in the national archives, shows that the people who controlled the assassination either (i) didn't control the film or (ii) didn't care about any incriminating evidence it contained. There is no justification for assuming that some all-powerful Bad Guys controlled everything from start to finish.

[Chuck Schwartz]

This is from a Doug Horne essay, "

Why Do So Many in the JFK Research Community Resist the Mounting Evidence that the Zapruder Film is an Altered Film?

I do not include here, in this question, those who have written books defending the Zapruder film’s authenticity; their obstinacy and closed-mindedness is related to ego, reputation, and to lifelong defense of their established turf.  The old orthodoxy always resents the new paradigm that threatens established ways of thinking.[38]

There is a bigger problem within the JFK research community, and it revolves around the following question commonly posed by perplexed members of the “old guard,” first-generation JFK researchers, to whom the concept of an altered Zapruder film seems dangerous heresy.  They usually ask, “Why would anyone alter the film, and yet still leave evidence of conspiracy in the film?”  (By this they usually mean the “timing problem” in the extant film which makes the single bullet theory impossible; and the “head snap” of JFK’s upper torso and head to the left-rear after frame 313—which they equate with a shot, or shots, from the right front, and not from the Texas School Book Depository.)

The answers to this valid question are clear to me: (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); and removing exit debris frames, and even the car stop, through step-printing.

In my view, the alterations that were performed were aimed at quickly removing the most egregious evidence of shots from the front (namely, the exit debris leaving the skull toward the left rear, and the gaping exit wound which the Parkland Hospital treatment staff tells us was present in the right-rear of JFK’s head).  I believe that in their minds, the alterationists of 1963 were racing against the clock—they did not know what kind of investigation, either nationally or in Texas, would transpire, and they were trying to sanitize the film record as quickly as possible before some investigative body demanded to “see the film evidence.”  There was not yet a Warren Commission the weekend following the assassination, and those who planned and executed the lethal crossfire in Dealey Plaza were intent upon removing as much of the evidence of it as possible, as quickly as possible.  As I see it, they did not have time for perfection, or the technical ability to ensure perfection, in their “sanitization” of the Zapruder film.  They did an imperfect job, the best they could in about 12-14 hours, which was all the time they had on Sunday, November 24, 1963, at “Hawkeyeworks.”  Besides, there was no technology available in 1963 that could convincingly remove the “head-snap” from the Zapruder film; you could not animate JFK’s entire body without it being readily detectable as a forgery, so the “head-snap” stayed in the film.  (The “head snap” may even be an inadvertent result—an artifact of apparently rapid motion—caused by the optical removal of several “exit debris” frames from the film.  When projected at normal speed at playback, any scene in a motion picture will appear to speed up if frames have been removed.  Those altering the film may have believed it was imperative to remove the exit debris travelling through the air to the rear of President Kennedy, even if that did induce apparent “motion” in his body which made it appear as though he might have been shot from the front.  The forgers may have had no choice, in this instance, but to live with the lesser of two evils.  Large amounts of exit debris traveling toward the rear would have been unmistakable proof within the film of a fatal shot from the front; whereas a “head snap” is something whose causes could be debated endlessly, without any final resolution.)

Those who altered the Zapruder film knew that the wound alteration images in frames 317, 321, 323, 335, and 337, for example, were “good enough” to show investigators the film on a flimsy movie screen coated with diamond dust, but they also knew the alterations were not good enough to withstand close scrutiny.  That is why I believe C.D. Jackson—the CIA’s asset at LIFE and its best friend in the national print media—instructed Richard Stolley to again approach Abraham Zapruder on Sunday night, and to offer a much higher sale price for Zapruder’s movie, in exchange for LIFE’s total ownership of the film, and all rights to the film.  By Sunday night, the name of the game at LIFE was suppression, not profit-making.  By Sunday night, November 24^th, C. D. Jackson was wearing his CIA hat, not his Time, Inc. businessman’s hat.  After striking the new deal with Time, Inc. on Monday, Zapruder received an immediate $25,000.00, and the remainder of his payments ($25,000.00 per year, each January, through January of 1968), were effectively structured as “hush money” payments.  His incentive to keep his mouth shut about the film’s alteration would clearly be his desire to keep getting paid $25,000.00 each January, for the next five years.

The alterationists in 1963 also had a “disposal” problem, for they had three genuine “first day copies” of the Zapruder film floating around which threatened to proliferate quickly, unless they could get them out of circulation immediately, replaced with new “first generation copies” stuck from the new “Hawkeyeworks” master delivered to NPIC on Sunday night.

For them, speed was of the essence, not perfection.  I believe that once the new “master” was completed at “Hawkeyeworks” early Sunday evening, three new first generation copies were struck from it, as well as at least one “dirty dupe” for the LIFE editorial crew standing by in Chicago.  Only after these products were exposed at Rochester, early Sunday evening, was the “new Zapruder film” (masquerading as an unslit, 16 mm wide camera-original “double 8” film) couriered down to NPIC by “Bill Smith,” who took his cock-and-bull story along with him, to his everlasting discredit.

Of course, the cock-and-bull story worked, since Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter knew nothing about the event with the true camera-original film at NPIC the previous night.  McMahon and Hunter had no reason, on Sunday night, 11/24/63, to disbelieve “Bill Smith” when he told them that he had brought “the camera-original film” with him, after it had been “developed” at Rochester.  After all, the product handed to them looked like a camera-original “double 8” film: it was a 16 mm wide unslit film, with sprocket holes on both sides, and exhibited opposing image strips, upside down in relation to each other, and going in reverse directions.

I am quite sure that by Tuesday, November 26^th, all of the original “first day copies” had been swapped out with the three replacements made at “Hawkeyeworks” Sunday night from the new “original.”

NPIC finished up with the new “original” Zapruder film by some time Monday morning, November 25^th, or perhaps by mid-day Monday at the latest.  McMahon went home after the enlargements (the 5 x 7 prints) were run off, but the graphics people at NPIC still had to finish assembling the three sets of four panel briefing boards.

And the rest is history.  Now, through the magic of high resolution digital scans—technology undreamed of in 1963, in an analog world—the forgery and fraud of November, 1963 is being exposed, slowly but surely.  Alterations that were “good enough” to hold up on a flimsy, portable 8 mm movie screen back in 1963, look quite bad—very crude—today, under the magnifying glass of today’s digital technology.

The two back-to-back “briefing board events” the weekend of President Kennedy’s assassination at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C.—compartmentalized operations bracketing the Zapruder film’s alteration at the “Hawkeyeworks” lab in Rochester, N.Y.—are the signposts that illuminate for us, like two spotlights piercing the night sky, the hijacking of our nation’s history almost 49 years ago.

The Zapruder film was altered by the U.S. government, using clandestine, state-of-the-art Kodak resources in Rochester, to remove the most egregious evidence within the film of shots that came from in front of JFK’s limousine.  The true exit wound in the rear of his head was blacked out in many frames; frames showing exit debris from the fatal head shot propelled violently to the left rear were removed from the film; and a false “exit wound” was added to many of the image frames, in an attempt to support the lone assassin cover story. The altered film is one of the strongest proofs of a massive government cover-up following President Kennedy’s death, and the intelligence community’s third party surrogates are doing all they can, today, to deny that the film was ever altered, and discredit this story.  I believe the facts speak for themselves.

I will close now with this cautionary quote for those skeptics, unwilling to let go of a discredited paradigm, who still feel compelled to defend the Zapruder film’s authenticity:

 “It is misleading to claim that scientific advances and scholarly experiments can cause all photo fakes to be unmasked. Questions about authenticity remain.  Many photos that once were considered genuine have recently been determined to be faked.”

—Dino Brugioni,
Author of – Photofakery: the History and Techniques of
Photographic Deception and Manipulation, 1999  "

---

[1] The panel voted its decision on June 16, 1999, but did not announce its decision publicly until August 3, 1999, due to its sensitivity over the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash.

[2] Richard B. Trask, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film (Yeoman Press, 2005); David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (University Press of Kansas, 2003);  and Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (self published, 2009).

[3] Horne, 2009, p. 1220-1226

[4] Ibid., p. 1231.

[5] Roland J. Zavada, Analysis of Selected Motion Picture Photographic Evidence (September 25, 1998), Attachment  A1-8 (Meeting Minutes of Discussion between Roland Zavada, Phil Chamberlain, and Dick Blair), and Attachment A1-11 (Phil Chamberlain’s original manuscript regarding events related to the handling and processing of the Zapruder film at the Kodak Plant in Dallas).

[6] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-8.

[7] Trask, 2005, p. 119-122; and Wrone, 2003, p. 22-28.

[8] Zavada, 1998, Study 1, p. 27.

[9] Trask, 2005, p. 127-131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 32-35.

[10] Horne, 2009, p. 1200.

[11] Trask, 2005, p. 131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35.

[12] Horne, 2009, p. 1346-1350.

[13] Trask, 2005, p.  152-155; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35, and 52-53.

[14] Wrone, 2003, p. 34-37.

[15] Horne, 2009, p. 1200-1201.

[16] Trask, 2005, p. 154-155.

[17] Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), p. 293.

[18] Horne, 2009, p. 1221.

[19] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky (Naval Institute Press, 2010), p. 364.

[20] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[21] Horne, 2009, p. 1326-1327.

[22] Horne, 2009, p. 987-1013.

[23] Trask, 2005, p. 122.

[24] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[25] Trask, 2005, p. 118.

[26] Trask, 2005, p. 117-119; and Horne, 2009, p. 1277-1281.

[27] HD Video interview of Dino Brugioni conducted on July 9, 2011 by Douglas Horne.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Handwritten Memo for File written by H. Knoche on 5/14/1975.

[31] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball (Random House, 1991), p. 66.

[32] Horne, 2009, p. 1295-1296

[33] Ibid., p. 1296.

[34] Ibid., p. 1201-1205.

[35] Ibid., p. 1352-1363.

[36] Ibid., 1299-1302.

[37] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-1C, “Film Map of Original Zapruder Film” (prepared by ARRB staff member Douglas Horne following examination of the extant Zapruder film on April 4, 1997, at the National Archives)

[38] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

[Roger Odisio]

1 hour ago, Chuck Schwartz said:

This is from a Doug Horne essay, "

Why Do So Many in the JFK Research Community Resist the Mounting Evidence that the Zapruder Film is an Altered Film?

I do not include here, in this question, those who have written books defending the Zapruder film’s authenticity; their obstinacy and closed-mindedness is related to ego, reputation, and to lifelong defense of their established turf.  The old orthodoxy always resents the new paradigm that threatens established ways of thinking.[38]

There is a bigger problem within the JFK research community, and it revolves around the following question commonly posed by perplexed members of the “old guard,” first-generation JFK researchers, to whom the concept of an altered Zapruder film seems dangerous heresy.  They usually ask, “Why would anyone alter the film, and yet still leave evidence of conspiracy in the film?”  (By this they usually mean the “timing problem” in the extant film which makes the single bullet theory impossible; and the “head snap” of JFK’s upper torso and head to the left-rear after frame 313—which they equate with a shot, or shots, from the right front, and not from the Texas School Book Depository.)

The answers to this valid question are clear to me: (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); and removing exit debris frames, and even the car stop, through step-printing.

In my view, the alterations that were performed were aimed at quickly removing the most egregious evidence of shots from the front (namely, the exit debris leaving the skull toward the left rear, and the gaping exit wound which the Parkland Hospital treatment staff tells us was present in the right-rear of JFK’s head).  I believe that in their minds, the alterationists of 1963 were racing against the clock—they did not know what kind of investigation, either nationally or in Texas, would transpire, and they were trying to sanitize the film record as quickly as possible before some investigative body demanded to “see the film evidence.”  There was not yet a Warren Commission the weekend following the assassination, and those who planned and executed the lethal crossfire in Dealey Plaza were intent upon removing as much of the evidence of it as possible, as quickly as possible.  As I see it, they did not have time for perfection, or the technical ability to ensure perfection, in their “sanitization” of the Zapruder film.  They did an imperfect job, the best they could in about 12-14 hours, which was all the time they had on Sunday, November 24, 1963, at “Hawkeyeworks.”  Besides, there was no technology available in 1963 that could convincingly remove the “head-snap” from the Zapruder film; you could not animate JFK’s entire body without it being readily detectable as a forgery, so the “head-snap” stayed in the film.  (The “head snap” may even be an inadvertent result—an artifact of apparently rapid motion—caused by the optical removal of several “exit debris” frames from the film.  When projected at normal speed at playback, any scene in a motion picture will appear to speed up if frames have been removed.  Those altering the film may have believed it was imperative to remove the exit debris travelling through the air to the rear of President Kennedy, even if that did induce apparent “motion” in his body which made it appear as though he might have been shot from the front.  The forgers may have had no choice, in this instance, but to live with the lesser of two evils.  Large amounts of exit debris traveling toward the rear would have been unmistakable proof within the film of a fatal shot from the front; whereas a “head snap” is something whose causes could be debated endlessly, without any final resolution.)

Those who altered the Zapruder film knew that the wound alteration images in frames 317, 321, 323, 335, and 337, for example, were “good enough” to show investigators the film on a flimsy movie screen coated with diamond dust, but they also knew the alterations were not good enough to withstand close scrutiny.  That is why I believe C.D. Jackson—the CIA’s asset at LIFE and its best friend in the national print media—instructed Richard Stolley to again approach Abraham Zapruder on Sunday night, and to offer a much higher sale price for Zapruder’s movie, in exchange for LIFE’s total ownership of the film, and all rights to the film.  By Sunday night, the name of the game at LIFE was suppression, not profit-making.  By Sunday night, November 24^th, C. D. Jackson was wearing his CIA hat, not his Time, Inc. businessman’s hat.  After striking the new deal with Time, Inc. on Monday, Zapruder received an immediate $25,000.00, and the remainder of his payments ($25,000.00 per year, each January, through January of 1968), were effectively structured as “hush money” payments.  His incentive to keep his mouth shut about the film’s alteration would clearly be his desire to keep getting paid $25,000.00 each January, for the next five years.

The alterationists in 1963 also had a “disposal” problem, for they had three genuine “first day copies” of the Zapruder film floating around which threatened to proliferate quickly, unless they could get them out of circulation immediately, replaced with new “first generation copies” stuck from the new “Hawkeyeworks” master delivered to NPIC on Sunday night.

For them, speed was of the essence, not perfection.  I believe that once the new “master” was completed at “Hawkeyeworks” early Sunday evening, three new first generation copies were struck from it, as well as at least one “dirty dupe” for the LIFE editorial crew standing by in Chicago.  Only after these products were exposed at Rochester, early Sunday evening, was the “new Zapruder film” (masquerading as an unslit, 16 mm wide camera-original “double 8” film) couriered down to NPIC by “Bill Smith,” who took his cock-and-bull story along with him, to his everlasting discredit.

Of course, the cock-and-bull story worked, since Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter knew nothing about the event with the true camera-original film at NPIC the previous night.  McMahon and Hunter had no reason, on Sunday night, 11/24/63, to disbelieve “Bill Smith” when he told them that he had brought “the camera-original film” with him, after it had been “developed” at Rochester.  After all, the product handed to them looked like a camera-original “double 8” film: it was a 16 mm wide unslit film, with sprocket holes on both sides, and exhibited opposing image strips, upside down in relation to each other, and going in reverse directions.

I am quite sure that by Tuesday, November 26^th, all of the original “first day copies” had been swapped out with the three replacements made at “Hawkeyeworks” Sunday night from the new “original.”

NPIC finished up with the new “original” Zapruder film by some time Monday morning, November 25^th, or perhaps by mid-day Monday at the latest.  McMahon went home after the enlargements (the 5 x 7 prints) were run off, but the graphics people at NPIC still had to finish assembling the three sets of four panel briefing boards.

And the rest is history.  Now, through the magic of high resolution digital scans—technology undreamed of in 1963, in an analog world—the forgery and fraud of November, 1963 is being exposed, slowly but surely.  Alterations that were “good enough” to hold up on a flimsy, portable 8 mm movie screen back in 1963, look quite bad—very crude—today, under the magnifying glass of today’s digital technology.

The two back-to-back “briefing board events” the weekend of President Kennedy’s assassination at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C.—compartmentalized operations bracketing the Zapruder film’s alteration at the “Hawkeyeworks” lab in Rochester, N.Y.—are the signposts that illuminate for us, like two spotlights piercing the night sky, the hijacking of our nation’s history almost 49 years ago.

The Zapruder film was altered by the U.S. government, using clandestine, state-of-the-art Kodak resources in Rochester, to remove the most egregious evidence within the film of shots that came from in front of JFK’s limousine.  The true exit wound in the rear of his head was blacked out in many frames; frames showing exit debris from the fatal head shot propelled violently to the left rear were removed from the film; and a false “exit wound” was added to many of the image frames, in an attempt to support the lone assassin cover story. The altered film is one of the strongest proofs of a massive government cover-up following President Kennedy’s death, and the intelligence community’s third party surrogates are doing all they can, today, to deny that the film was ever altered, and discredit this story.  I believe the facts speak for themselves.

I will close now with this cautionary quote for those skeptics, unwilling to let go of a discredited paradigm, who still feel compelled to defend the Zapruder film’s authenticity:

 “It is misleading to claim that scientific advances and scholarly experiments can cause all photo fakes to be unmasked. Questions about authenticity remain.  Many photos that once were considered genuine have recently been determined to be faked.”

—Dino Brugioni,
Author of – Photofakery: the History and Techniques of
Photographic Deception and Manipulation, 1999  "

---

[1] The panel voted its decision on June 16, 1999, but did not announce its decision publicly until August 3, 1999, due to its sensitivity over the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash.

[2] Richard B. Trask, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film (Yeoman Press, 2005); David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (University Press of Kansas, 2003);  and Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (self published, 2009).

[3] Horne, 2009, p. 1220-1226

[4] Ibid., p. 1231.

[5] Roland J. Zavada, Analysis of Selected Motion Picture Photographic Evidence (September 25, 1998), Attachment  A1-8 (Meeting Minutes of Discussion between Roland Zavada, Phil Chamberlain, and Dick Blair), and Attachment A1-11 (Phil Chamberlain’s original manuscript regarding events related to the handling and processing of the Zapruder film at the Kodak Plant in Dallas).

[6] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-8.

[7] Trask, 2005, p. 119-122; and Wrone, 2003, p. 22-28.

[8] Zavada, 1998, Study 1, p. 27.

[9] Trask, 2005, p. 127-131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 32-35.

[10] Horne, 2009, p. 1200.

[11] Trask, 2005, p. 131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35.

[12] Horne, 2009, p. 1346-1350.

[13] Trask, 2005, p.  152-155; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35, and 52-53.

[14] Wrone, 2003, p. 34-37.

[15] Horne, 2009, p. 1200-1201.

[16] Trask, 2005, p. 154-155.

[17] Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), p. 293.

[18] Horne, 2009, p. 1221.

[19] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky (Naval Institute Press, 2010), p. 364.

[20] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[21] Horne, 2009, p. 1326-1327.

[22] Horne, 2009, p. 987-1013.

[23] Trask, 2005, p. 122.

[24] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[25] Trask, 2005, p. 118.

[26] Trask, 2005, p. 117-119; and Horne, 2009, p. 1277-1281.

[27] HD Video interview of Dino Brugioni conducted on July 9, 2011 by Douglas Horne.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Handwritten Memo for File written by H. Knoche on 5/14/1975.

[31] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball (Random House, 1991), p. 66.

[32] Horne, 2009, p. 1295-1296

[33] Ibid., p. 1296.

[34] Ibid., p. 1201-1205.

[35] Ibid., p. 1352-1363.

[36] Ibid., 1299-1302.

[37] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-1C, “Film Map of Original Zapruder Film” (prepared by ARRB staff member Douglas Horne following examination of the extant Zapruder film on April 4, 1997, at the National Archives)

[38] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Thanks for this, Chuck.  It leaves those who are unable or unwilling to engage with the facts and analysis presented here little choice but to attack Horne.

I was particularly struck by Horne's citing of that fabulous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn that explains the difficulty of overthrowing an entrenched paradigm, or set of ideas.

[Jonathan Cohen]

41 minutes ago, Roger Odisio said:

I was particularly struck by Horne's citing of that fabulous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn that explains the difficulty of overthrowing an entrenched paradigm, or set of ideas.

And I’m particularly struck by how Horne’s “paradigm” crumbles when one dismisses his preposterous allegations of human body alteration and fakery of the complete photo and film record of the assassination. 

[Roger Odisio]

52 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

And I’m particularly struck by how Horne’s “paradigm” crumbles when one dismisses his preposterous allegations of human body alteration and fakery of the complete photo and film record of the assassination. 

Jonathon, 

Is it your plan to follow me around the board and quickly cover up what I wrote so that only your name appears on the front page?  Which is a sure sign to people to ignore the thread.  How else can I explain the constant flow of inane and in this case irrelevant liners you post each time?  The pattern seems unmistakable. 

[Roger Odisio]

6 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Roger Odisio writes:

The question I asked was: Why should "Johnson and the CIA" have assumed that a first-generation copy would not have contained enough detail to determine the number and direction of the shots? Roger hasn't answered this. Of course the original film would reveal more detail than a copy, but Roger has given us no reason to doubt that a first-generation copy would be sufficient for discovering basic information such as the number and direction of shots.

 

There is no reason to believe that Johnson and the CIA would have assumed a copy was good enough.

 

J:  The question I asked was: Why should "Johnson and the CIA" have assumed that a first-generation copy would not have contained enough detail to determine the number and direction of the shots? Roger hasn't answered this. Of course the original film would reveal more detail than a copy, but Roger has given us no reason to doubt that a first-generation copy would be sufficient for discovering basic information such as the number and direction of shots.

 

RO:  My clear answer was, there was no reason for the White House and CIA, as part of an official investigation, to even consider using a copy when they didn't have to. You have acknowledged the original would reveal more detail.  How would they have known that if they used a copy the detail you acknowledge would be missed wasn't crucial?

 

I gave a second reason for them to prefer the original, which you have ignored.  If they had any reason to suspect the Z film contradicted their Oswald story, which it did, and which they likely would have expected, they needed possession of the original film to deal with that problem.  Altering or destroying a copy would accomplish nothing while Life still had the original and was going to publish stills from it.

 

J:  Combine that with what the documentary evidence tells us: on the Saturday afternoon, high-ups in Washington had access to one version of the Zapruder film, namely the Secret Service's first-day copy. The fact that it was Secret Service officers (and not CIA officers) who brought the film to NPIC, and Secret Service officers (not CIA officers) who took it away afterwards, strongly suggests that the film in question was in fact the Secret Service's first-day copy.

 

RO:  Wow! Your evidence for the "fact" that both couriers were from the SS is..... that's what they said!   Including the comically named "Bill Smith".  Which sent a "researcher" off to try find Bill on a SS roster and was puzzled when he couldn't find him.  That's your idea of the "research" that you want me to perform.

 

Have you heard of the principles of compartmentalization and the need to know that the CIA lives by.  None of the photo analysts that weekend had a need to know who the couriers were, who they worked for, or in McMahon's case what film he was working on (McMahon said the word Zapruder was never used in front of him).

 

J:  If, as Roger proposes, the CIA had somehow obtained the original Zapruder film and conveyed it to Washington on the Saturday, surely we would expect to find CIA officers taking the film to the CIA's very own NPIC, and CIA officers taking it away again afterwards. But we don't, do we? Since the relevant officers were actually from the Secret Service, the only reasonable conclusion is that they were bringing and taking away the Secret Service's own copy.

 

RO:  Yep, we would expect CIA staff to have delivered the film to persons ready to work on it at their NPIC lab.  And to HW too.  You've given no reason to suspect anyone else delivered it. 

 

J:  The reason I keep going on about documentary evidence is that, if Roger wants to propose an alternative scenario, he really needs to do more than speculate about what he thinks "Johnson and the CIA" might have wanted. You can't build a case based only on speculation, when a plausible alternative case exists which is based on solid documentary evidence.

 

RO:  You haven't made the case that using a copy for the boards was a plausible alternative.  It wasn't.

 

J:  So, if Roger wants to persuade anyone that the original Zapruder film was in Washington on the Saturday evening, he needs to produce actual evidence that supports that claim. Obviously we can't expect to find a CIA memo detailing that this particular CIA plane flew from Chicago to Washington, and that this particular CIA agent had the film in his hand luggage. But we might expect to find some trace in the documentary record that "Johnson and the CIA" wanted to obtain the original film rather than a copy on the Saturday. Has anyone even bothered to trawl through the records, looking for something like this? If not, why not?

 

RO:  Looking for a" trace" of "documentary evidence" that the White House and CIA wanted to use the original film, not a copy, to make briefing boards is a fool's errand.  It's obvious that's what they wanted.  There is no need to verify that with "documents".  You have failed to offer any reason why they would have preferred, or even settled for, using a copy.   

 

  Quote

There is no question that the planners of the murder would, as an integral part of the coverup, have settled on blaming a patsy before going ahead with the murder. ... The killers' top priority was to make sure JFK didn't escape the ambush.  That's why they set up multiple shooters firing from different directions.

 

J:  Roger's scenario is that the assassination involved multiple gunmen in order to make sure that JFK was killed, and that before the assassination it was decided that the blame would be placed on a lone nut. That sort of makes sense, until you work out that staging such an assassination in public isn't consistent with blaming it beforehand on a lone nut.

 

As I pointed out earlier, if you decide to stage an assassination in front of hundreds of spectators (which there were), you can expect dozens of those spectators to capture images of the assassination (which they did), and that there was a good chance that some of those images would expose the assassination as the work of more than one gunmen (which is what happened).

 

If you want to use multiple gunmen to assassinate someone in front of hundreds of spectators, dozens of whom would be taking photos and home movies, you can expect evidence to emerge that would at least suggest that multiple gunmen were involved. You would only do this if (a) you didn't care that the assassination might look like a conspiracy or (b) you actively wanted the assassination to look like a conspiracy.

 

To look at the problem from a different direction: if you want to blame a lone nut beforehand, you would either (a) use an actual lone gunman with better skills, a better-quality rifle, and a better line of sight than Oswald is supposed to have had, or (b) use multiple gunmen and stage the assassination somewhere very much less public than Dealey Plaza.

 

What you wouldn't do is stage the assassination in a way that produces photographic evidence that more than one gunman was involved, and then go around trying to clean up the photographic record afterwards. Not only would this have involved unnecessary work and almost certainly not have succeeded, but there was no guarantee that photographs or home movies might come to light in the future, exposing any photo-alteration.

 

In short, whoever was behind the assassination can only have staged it in Dealey Plaza in order to make it look like a conspiracy (and chose a patsy whose personal history made the conspiracy look as though it originated with the Cuban or Soviet regimes). And if they wanted to make it look like a conspiracy, they wouldn't have cared what the Zapruder film or any other photographic evidence showed.

 

RO:  This is really bizarre.  You claim the killers could only have staged the murder in DP if they wanted to make it look like a conspiracy.  Well they did stage the murder there and have spent the last 60 years denying there was a conspiracy.  Does that convince you that your point is nonsense?

 

You further claim that the killers would not have created the discrepancy between their story and what actually happened because that would have involved "unnecessary work" and "almost certainly not have succeeded".  Haven't you noticed?  The plan and the coverup *has* succeeded for 60 years.  I've explained some of the coverup things were done to achieve that success, and true to form, you haven't addressed any of them.

 

J:  To get back to the topic of this thread, the notion that Oswald was chosen as a patsy before the assassination as an integral part of the plot (which may well be the case), is not consistent with the claim that the original Zapruder film was examined at NPIC and altered at Hawkeye Works (for which there is no good evidence anyway).

 

RO: It couldn't be more consistent because, as I said, choosing Oswald as the patsy created the need to alter the Z film that contradicted their story.

 

  Quote

(I'm assuming you have abandoned your original assertion that the planners would have destroyed the Z film instead of trying to alter it)

 

J:  Of course not. If anyone (a) had control of the film and (b) wanted to completely eliminate any incriminating evidence in the film, the only sure way to do so would be to destroy the film. The fact that the film was not destroyed, and survives to this day in the national archives, shows that the people who controlled the assassination either (i) didn't control the film or (ii) didn't care about any incriminating evidence it contained. There is no justification for assuming that some all-powerful Bad Guys controlled everything from start to finish.

 

RO:  Silly me.  I assumed you would understand that altering the film was the better option than destroying it because altering it left them with a film they could claim was original, and there was no need to explain what happened to the film, which much of the world knew about and wanted to see.  I actually expected you to understand that and abandon your false argument.

 

[Chris Scally]

57 minutes ago, Roger Odisio said:

RO:  Wow! Your evidence for the "fact" that both couriers were from the SS is..... that's what they said!   Including the comically named "Bill Smith".  Which sent a "researcher" off to try find Bill on a SS roster and was puzzled when he couldn't find him.  That's your idea of the "research" that you want me to perform.

 

 

Roger - 

I don't know why you put the word "researcher" in quotation marks in the above passage, because as I pointed out last Monday (page 33 of this topic), the "researcher" who was "sent ... off to try find Bill on a SS roster and was puzzled when he couldn't find him" was Doug Horne!   

 

[Pat Speer]

5 hours ago, Roger Odisio said:

Thanks for this, Chuck.  It leaves those who are unable or unwilling to engage with the facts and analysis presented here little choice but to attack Horne.

I was particularly struck by Horne's citing of that fabulous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn that explains the difficulty of overthrowing an entrenched paradigm, or set of ideas.

The problem is this. 

Kuhn was talking about scientific theories that can be tested. 

Horne is pretending it applies to his theories which are not scientific at all, but historical in nature, and based on wishful thinking, if not dishonesty.

Some examples. 

He claims Robinson saw a bullet hole on the forehead. This is not supported by the record. Robinson said he recalled a small wound by the temple and then later told Horne it was two or more small wounds on the cheek. He specified, furthermore, that no bullet holes were discovered on the front of the head during reconstruction. 

He also claimed Robinson saw the body brought in and out--when Robinson actually said this as an example of what did not happen.

He more recently told an international audience it was James Jenkins who saw this bullet hole on the forehead--when James Jenkins had claimed no such thing, and had long specified that he saw no such wound.

He claims Ed Reed saw Dr. Humes perform surgery to the head BEFORE the x-rays were taken. Only Reed said the opposite. That he saw Humes cut into the head to remove the brain...after the x-rays had been taken. 

Now, James Jenkins had weighed in on this as well, and had insisted no such surgery occurred and that he was in the morgue from hours before the autopsy until the next morning, after the body had been re-constructed. So Horne invented from whole cloth for his book that Jenkins was kept from the morgue for hours, and only allowed in after the "surgery" had been completed. 

He also pieces together the statements of old men many years after the fact to claim a Zapruder film showing an explosion from the back of the head was shown to Brugioni, and then altered to conceal the explosion from the back of the head and add an explosion from the top of the head...when Brugioni's statements fail to support this. 

To be precise, when shown a frame from the Zapruder film depicting the explosion of brain and skull by reseacher Peter Janney, in 2011, Brugioni said it failed to match his nearly fifty-year old memories of the film he saw on that first weekend. He explained:  "I remember the scatter was high--say three or four feet above his head." Well, hold it right there. Horne's theory holds that there was no explosion from the top of the head in the film viewed by Brugioni, and here his (supposed) star witness--Brugioni--claims the explosion he remembers was more, well, explosive than the one in the current film. Well, okay. Maybe Horne assumed Brugioni was tallking about a spray of blood, and not an explosion of blood and skull. Uh, NO. A few years later, when speaking to a second interviewer, in a filmed interview available in Shane O'Sullivan's film The Zapruder Film Mystery, Brugioni described the film as he recalled it in similar terms, only adding in that what he saw three or four feet above the President's head included a "chunk of body." So, huh. Not spray from a bullet hole on the forehead. An explosion from the top of the head. Got it. Making matters worse... In 2023, some 10 year-old footage of this same interviewer asking Brugioni questions while he showed him the Zapruder film was released in a French documentary, and posted online in the states. After viewing the film , and being asked by his interviewer if it was a different film than the one he studied in 1963, Brugioni said "No, I think it's the same film...I just thought the missing frames--there's something missing out of this." Then, after studying close-up images of the large defect on top of the head and questioning not the size and location of the large defect but the dark area on the back of the head, Brugioni commented further. He said: "I thought the blast to the head lasted longer...I thought I saw a glob in the air higher and there was mist." So, wow.  While Horne had long nit-picked discrepancies between various descriptions of the film, and had used these to claim 1) Brugioni had viewed the original film, 2) his co-workers had viewed an altered film, and 3) the current film was the altered film, Brugioni's statements to this interviewer made it crystal clear he  believed the film he saw--the film Horne holds to be the original film, a film Horne insists showed an explosion from the back of Kennedy's head and no explosion from the top of his head --had shown a massive explosion from the top of the head. And Horne knows this because, because, you guessed it, he was the interviewer.

There's no "there" there people. 

If you want to talk about someone getting access to the film and all its copies and painting in the back of the head , or something like that, have at it. But citing Horne's theories like they are a new paradigm--when they are in fact easily debunked nonsense--is an embarrassment to the research community spawned by men like Weisberg, Wecht, and Thompson. 

It's time to move on from the shadow of Fetzer. I mean, 9/11 researchers have moved on from space lasers, right? 

I certainly hope so. 

Edited 8 hours ago by Pat Speer

[Ron Bulman]

8 hours ago, Chuck Schwartz said:

This is from a Doug Horne essay, "

Why Do So Many in the JFK Research Community Resist the Mounting Evidence that the Zapruder Film is an Altered Film?

I do not include here, in this question, those who have written books defending the Zapruder film’s authenticity; their obstinacy and closed-mindedness is related to ego, reputation, and to lifelong defense of their established turf.  The old orthodoxy always resents the new paradigm that threatens established ways of thinking.[38]

There is a bigger problem within the JFK research community, and it revolves around the following question commonly posed by perplexed members of the “old guard,” first-generation JFK researchers, to whom the concept of an altered Zapruder film seems dangerous heresy.  They usually ask, “Why would anyone alter the film, and yet still leave evidence of conspiracy in the film?”  (By this they usually mean the “timing problem” in the extant film which makes the single bullet theory impossible; and the “head snap” of JFK’s upper torso and head to the left-rear after frame 313—which they equate with a shot, or shots, from the right front, and not from the Texas School Book Depository.)

The answers to this valid question are clear to me: (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); and removing exit debris frames, and even the car stop, through step-printing.

In my view, the alterations that were performed were aimed at quickly removing the most egregious evidence of shots from the front (namely, the exit debris leaving the skull toward the left rear, and the gaping exit wound which the Parkland Hospital treatment staff tells us was present in the right-rear of JFK’s head).  I believe that in their minds, the alterationists of 1963 were racing against the clock—they did not know what kind of investigation, either nationally or in Texas, would transpire, and they were trying to sanitize the film record as quickly as possible before some investigative body demanded to “see the film evidence.”  There was not yet a Warren Commission the weekend following the assassination, and those who planned and executed the lethal crossfire in Dealey Plaza were intent upon removing as much of the evidence of it as possible, as quickly as possible.  As I see it, they did not have time for perfection, or the technical ability to ensure perfection, in their “sanitization” of the Zapruder film.  They did an imperfect job, the best they could in about 12-14 hours, which was all the time they had on Sunday, November 24, 1963, at “Hawkeyeworks.”  Besides, there was no technology available in 1963 that could convincingly remove the “head-snap” from the Zapruder film; you could not animate JFK’s entire body without it being readily detectable as a forgery, so the “head-snap” stayed in the film.  (The “head snap” may even be an inadvertent result—an artifact of apparently rapid motion—caused by the optical removal of several “exit debris” frames from the film.  When projected at normal speed at playback, any scene in a motion picture will appear to speed up if frames have been removed.  Those altering the film may have believed it was imperative to remove the exit debris travelling through the air to the rear of President Kennedy, even if that did induce apparent “motion” in his body which made it appear as though he might have been shot from the front.  The forgers may have had no choice, in this instance, but to live with the lesser of two evils.  Large amounts of exit debris traveling toward the rear would have been unmistakable proof within the film of a fatal shot from the front; whereas a “head snap” is something whose causes could be debated endlessly, without any final resolution.)

Those who altered the Zapruder film knew that the wound alteration images in frames 317, 321, 323, 335, and 337, for example, were “good enough” to show investigators the film on a flimsy movie screen coated with diamond dust, but they also knew the alterations were not good enough to withstand close scrutiny.  That is why I believe C.D. Jackson—the CIA’s asset at LIFE and its best friend in the national print media—instructed Richard Stolley to again approach Abraham Zapruder on Sunday night, and to offer a much higher sale price for Zapruder’s movie, in exchange for LIFE’s total ownership of the film, and all rights to the film.  By Sunday night, the name of the game at LIFE was suppression, not profit-making.  By Sunday night, November 24^th, C. D. Jackson was wearing his CIA hat, not his Time, Inc. businessman’s hat.  After striking the new deal with Time, Inc. on Monday, Zapruder received an immediate $25,000.00, and the remainder of his payments ($25,000.00 per year, each January, through January of 1968), were effectively structured as “hush money” payments.  His incentive to keep his mouth shut about the film’s alteration would clearly be his desire to keep getting paid $25,000.00 each January, for the next five years.

The alterationists in 1963 also had a “disposal” problem, for they had three genuine “first day copies” of the Zapruder film floating around which threatened to proliferate quickly, unless they could get them out of circulation immediately, replaced with new “first generation copies” stuck from the new “Hawkeyeworks” master delivered to NPIC on Sunday night.

For them, speed was of the essence, not perfection.  I believe that once the new “master” was completed at “Hawkeyeworks” early Sunday evening, three new first generation copies were struck from it, as well as at least one “dirty dupe” for the LIFE editorial crew standing by in Chicago.  Only after these products were exposed at Rochester, early Sunday evening, was the “new Zapruder film” (masquerading as an unslit, 16 mm wide camera-original “double 8” film) couriered down to NPIC by “Bill Smith,” who took his cock-and-bull story along with him, to his everlasting discredit.

Of course, the cock-and-bull story worked, since Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter knew nothing about the event with the true camera-original film at NPIC the previous night.  McMahon and Hunter had no reason, on Sunday night, 11/24/63, to disbelieve “Bill Smith” when he told them that he had brought “the camera-original film” with him, after it had been “developed” at Rochester.  After all, the product handed to them looked like a camera-original “double 8” film: it was a 16 mm wide unslit film, with sprocket holes on both sides, and exhibited opposing image strips, upside down in relation to each other, and going in reverse directions.

I am quite sure that by Tuesday, November 26^th, all of the original “first day copies” had been swapped out with the three replacements made at “Hawkeyeworks” Sunday night from the new “original.”

NPIC finished up with the new “original” Zapruder film by some time Monday morning, November 25^th, or perhaps by mid-day Monday at the latest.  McMahon went home after the enlargements (the 5 x 7 prints) were run off, but the graphics people at NPIC still had to finish assembling the three sets of four panel briefing boards.

And the rest is history.  Now, through the magic of high resolution digital scans—technology undreamed of in 1963, in an analog world—the forgery and fraud of November, 1963 is being exposed, slowly but surely.  Alterations that were “good enough” to hold up on a flimsy, portable 8 mm movie screen back in 1963, look quite bad—very crude—today, under the magnifying glass of today’s digital technology.

The two back-to-back “briefing board events” the weekend of President Kennedy’s assassination at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C.—compartmentalized operations bracketing the Zapruder film’s alteration at the “Hawkeyeworks” lab in Rochester, N.Y.—are the signposts that illuminate for us, like two spotlights piercing the night sky, the hijacking of our nation’s history almost 49 years ago.

The Zapruder film was altered by the U.S. government, using clandestine, state-of-the-art Kodak resources in Rochester, to remove the most egregious evidence within the film of shots that came from in front of JFK’s limousine.  The true exit wound in the rear of his head was blacked out in many frames; frames showing exit debris from the fatal head shot propelled violently to the left rear were removed from the film; and a false “exit wound” was added to many of the image frames, in an attempt to support the lone assassin cover story. The altered film is one of the strongest proofs of a massive government cover-up following President Kennedy’s death, and the intelligence community’s third party surrogates are doing all they can, today, to deny that the film was ever altered, and discredit this story.  I believe the facts speak for themselves.

I will close now with this cautionary quote for those skeptics, unwilling to let go of a discredited paradigm, who still feel compelled to defend the Zapruder film’s authenticity:

 “It is misleading to claim that scientific advances and scholarly experiments can cause all photo fakes to be unmasked. Questions about authenticity remain.  Many photos that once were considered genuine have recently been determined to be faked.”

—Dino Brugioni,
Author of – Photofakery: the History and Techniques of
Photographic Deception and Manipulation, 1999  "

---

[1] The panel voted its decision on June 16, 1999, but did not announce its decision publicly until August 3, 1999, due to its sensitivity over the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash.

[2] Richard B. Trask, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film (Yeoman Press, 2005); David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (University Press of Kansas, 2003);  and Douglas P. Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (self published, 2009).

[3] Horne, 2009, p. 1220-1226

[4] Ibid., p. 1231.

[5] Roland J. Zavada, Analysis of Selected Motion Picture Photographic Evidence (September 25, 1998), Attachment  A1-8 (Meeting Minutes of Discussion between Roland Zavada, Phil Chamberlain, and Dick Blair), and Attachment A1-11 (Phil Chamberlain’s original manuscript regarding events related to the handling and processing of the Zapruder film at the Kodak Plant in Dallas).

[6] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-8.

[7] Trask, 2005, p. 119-122; and Wrone, 2003, p. 22-28.

[8] Zavada, 1998, Study 1, p. 27.

[9] Trask, 2005, p. 127-131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 32-35.

[10] Horne, 2009, p. 1200.

[11] Trask, 2005, p. 131; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35.

[12] Horne, 2009, p. 1346-1350.

[13] Trask, 2005, p.  152-155; and Wrone, 2003, p. 34-35, and 52-53.

[14] Wrone, 2003, p. 34-37.

[15] Horne, 2009, p. 1200-1201.

[16] Trask, 2005, p. 154-155.

[17] Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic (Skyhorse Publishing, 2012), p. 293.

[18] Horne, 2009, p. 1221.

[19] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky (Naval Institute Press, 2010), p. 364.

[20] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[21] Horne, 2009, p. 1326-1327.

[22] Horne, 2009, p. 987-1013.

[23] Trask, 2005, p. 122.

[24] ARRB interview of Homer A. McMahon conducted on July 14, 1997 by Douglas Horne.

[25] Trask, 2005, p. 118.

[26] Trask, 2005, p. 117-119; and Horne, 2009, p. 1277-1281.

[27] HD Video interview of Dino Brugioni conducted on July 9, 2011 by Douglas Horne.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Handwritten Memo for File written by H. Knoche on 5/14/1975.

[31] Dino A. Brugioni, Eyeball to Eyeball (Random House, 1991), p. 66.

[32] Horne, 2009, p. 1295-1296

[33] Ibid., p. 1296.

[34] Ibid., p. 1201-1205.

[35] Ibid., p. 1352-1363.

[36] Ibid., 1299-1302.

[37] Zavada, 1998, Attachment A1-1C, “Film Map of Original Zapruder Film” (prepared by ARRB staff member Douglas Horne following examination of the extant Zapruder film on April 4, 1997, at the National Archives)

[38] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Thanks for this Chuck.  It's a very good synopsis imo.  Taken with the Sidney Wilkinson piece posted somewhere around here in the last month or so and some of Horne's other work (e.g. Brugioni interview) it's all pretty convincing to me.  Though I don't claim to be an expert or to have studied it all in the depth that some have.