JFK assassination film hoax
The hole mistake
When the forgers made the frames of the Zapruder film, they probably thought that they would never have to actually show anyone an actual “original” 8 mm film. All they needed were images that could be published by the U.S. Government.
In the same magazine issue
described on the last page, one of the Zapruder film frame
images showed the edge of one of the “sprocket holes”: the little holes down
the side of the film that the projector teeth grab onto:
Apart from the ridiculously
long forearm of the Secret Service agent, nothing seems to be out of order with
this image.
It was 33 years before the
public got another close look at the edges of any of the sprocket holes. The
“original” film was digitally scanned, and some of the images published on DVD
in 1997.
When scientists looked at
the same frame on the DVD image, they got a surprise:
The DVD showed the sprocket
holes for all 486 frames of the film, and researchers had studied and measured
them carefully. You can see clearly where the sprocket hole is: it is the white
area (a rectangle with rounded corners).
The problem is that, in the 1964 image, the rounded corner of the hole clearly crosses over a bright smudge of light (caused by the way the camera was designed) and runs down to the right of the white area. Between the two is a pale blue area.
This can be seen more clearly when the two images are laid on top of each other:
How can a hole be blue?
It can’t, of course. If a
genuine film was photographed (being lit from behind, like a slide or an
X-ray), then any hole in the film will be white.
Scientists believe that the
forgers created the images by first exposing a photographic film with the frame
image (in this example, the limo and Secret Service agent, etc.) as well as the
right parts of the next frame and the previous frame that would bleed over in
the area between the sprocket holes (the bright smudge of light you can see
that goes up to the armpit of the Secret Service agent). Then they created the
sprocket-hole shapes by doing an extra white exposure, with just these hole shapes.
This seemed to give nice white
sprocket hole shapes, but the forgers didn’t notice
that where there was only the “hole” exposure plus the exposure of the dark
blue limousine, the result was only pale blue, not white.
By the time the “original” film was scanned for DVD in 1997, the round edge of the “hole” had been changed slightly, so that it looked like the left edge was the “real” edge of the sprocket hole. You can see the change above, especially in the corner where the two edges cross.
What was left was a “halo” around the sprocket hole. Similar “haloes” can be seen on many frames of the film. Researchers in the early 1990s had wondered where these “haloes” had come from.
The frame published in 1964 gives us the answer: the sprocket holes weren’t really holes at all, but “triple exposures” of light. Where there was only a “double exposure”, you don’t get something completely white, but instead a pale version of the object that is underneath.
This is yet another mistake made by the forgers. Maybe they didn’t anticipate how much scrutiny their forgery would get in the years and decades afterwards.
But it was good enough to help cover up the
assassination for the rest of their lives,
wasn’t it?
The hole mistake ◄ You are here!
For
more information about the forgery of the Zapruder film, please read The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, edited by
Professor