JFK assassination film hoax
The wound mistake
The Zapruder film seems to
show the front of JFK’s head being blasted open by a shot:
Researchers like Stewart
Galanor, who were lucky enough to see the film in the 1960s (at a private
screening in the U.S. National Archives), believed that this proved that JFK
was killed by a shot coming from in front of him and to his right (from the “grassy
knoll”), because his head moves backwards and to his left.
In the same way, when the
film was first shown on TV in 1975, people were outraged. The U.S. Government’s
story—that one man in a building far behind the President shot him—didn’t make sense.
This led the U.S. House of Representatives to create a new Select Committee to
investigate the assassination.
But even in the 1960s,
researcher David Lifton discovered that the Zapruder film not just gives us
confusing information about where the shot came from, but actually makes no
sense at all!
Lifton was a graduate in
engineering physics. He took the black-and-white copies of the Zapruder film
frames, published by the U.S. Government, to Nobel-prize-winning physicist
Richard Feynman. He thought that Feynman would conclude, from the laws of physics, that the shot must have come from the front.
Lifton was dismayed when
Feynman ignored all of the frames except the ones that show the President just
before and just after the impact of the shot:
(These are modern copies of
those frames.) Even though Frame 313 is blurred, Feynman was able to measure
the position of JFK’s head compared to fixed parts of the limousine (like the
handle reflection between the Kennedys and the Connallys).
Feynman found that JFK’s
head moved forwards at the moment of
impact.
The laws of physics then
tell us that the shot must have come from behind!
The backwards movement of the President’s head after Frame 313 then
became the mystery. Were there two shots?
Could there be some other physics explanation for this strange phenomenon? Did
the red spray of blood force his head backwards, like a jet engine? Could his
muscles have gone into spasm because of the brain damage?
In 2001, scientists used
modern computers to remove as much of the blur from Frame 313 as possible. When
the two clear frames are laid on top of each other, there is no doubt at all
that JFK’s head moves forward:
The movement was checked by
yet another method: Frame 312 was blurred
by the same amount as Frame 313, and then the two frames were compared.
Again, the President’s head was found to move forwards.
You can also see something
remarkable in this comparison: the red spray of blood in Frame 313 is clearly in front of JFK’s head. Indeed, it
blocks our view of his wife’s face, which can be fully seen in Frame 312!
This seems to again tell us
that the shot came from behind. There is no other way for bloody brain matter
to be blasted forwards.
But Lifton made a discovery
that, for more than two decades, was so incredible that it was not given much
credence: the head wound shown on the Zapruder film does not at all match the
wound described by eyewitnesses and the doctors that treated JFK in
We can see the problem just
by going one more frame forward, to Frame 314:
The Zapruder film is
telling us that the whole front-top of JFK’s head gets blasted away! There is a
huge crater where his forehead used to be, through which we can again see his
wife.
This would make sense, if
he was indeed hit by a high-velocity rifle bullet from behind.
There is only one problem
with this: everyone who saw the
President after the shooting said that his face was not injured or damaged at all!
JFK
autopsy photographs surfaced in the late 1980s, and showed his face to be completely
intact:
Even
the skeptics had to agree that either the Zapruder film or the autopsy photos
(or both) have to be forgeries.
From
the 1970s, Lifton had argued that the bright reddish-white wound which seems to
appear and snake up the side of the President’s head, which he called “the
blob”, completely disagreed with the descriptions of the head wound given by
the doctors and nurses at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where the President was
taken:
In a thousand-word footnote in his 1980 book, Best Evidence, he argued that this tells us that the Zapruder film has been substantially altered, if not completely forged.
However, Lifton would have to wait nearly a quarter of a century for scientists to prove that he was right.
His hundred-page chapter in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax is a wonderful history of the Zapruder film, and the way it was used to convince the American public, over the past four decades.
The wound mistake ◄ You are here!