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Dec. 17, 2024 - Jim Fetzer
59:09
JOHN COSTELLA - A Simple Introduction to The JFK Assassination Film Hoax
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Welcome back everyone to the False Flags and Conspiracies Conference 2024. And our next guest up today is John Costella.
And John's title of his presentation today is Simple Introduction to the JFK Assassination Film Hoax.
John has spoken for me at my JFK online conferences that I hold every May on JFK's birthday.
And he does an amazing job.
He was on our film panel last time.
And he has an interesting take on it.
He doesn't believe that the film that we see that's the Subruder film is the real film.
So with that, I will leave you with John.
And John, if you want to tell anybody about your background or anything about you as we get started here, please do.
Thanks a lot.
No worries.
G'day, everyone.
Thanks, Lorraine and Jim, for inviting me to speak here at this fifth annual False Flags and Conspiracies Conference 2024. I've got a lot of stuff, so I don't know if I'll give too much of a background.
There is a blurb on the schedule and the speakers list and on my website, but...
I have to say, having listened all of the day, I think I probably disagree with about 75% of what I've heard so far today.
But thank God I live in a country where I'm allowed to.
Well, in theory anyway.
I hope so.
Anyway, as Lauren just said, I'm going to talk about something completely different, JFK assassination, which I guess is about as conspiracy theory as you can get.
I mean...
Conspiracy theory, the term, you know, that was around before then and they even used the concept to slam people with the wrong opinions.
But I think grassy knoll conspiracy theorist really exploded into the public mind between the 60s and the 80s.
It's kind of shocking that it's still a powerful tool today, the term.
I mean, I've told the story before of how I actually missed out on a job at Google, not because I wasn't good enough, but because of my work on conspiracy theories.
Of course, they've been trying to steal me away from Facebook ever since, but still.
Well, I mean, it's a bit embarrassing to even bring that one up because there's so many people here that have had so much more punishment meted out for having the wrong opinions.
But actually it's funny because when I was in high school in Australia, we were the class of 1984. So our state decided that it would mandate that every high school senior, as you'd say over here in the state, had to read 1984 by George Orwell, which I guess in itself is a little bit ironic when you think about it.
But anyway, the point I was going to make is that for decades I kept that book On the fiction shelf of our bookshelf.
Go figure.
Anyway, so on that topic, I think things are pretty bleak for free speech right now.
I have to say, I think this is the worst country for free speech in the world, except for all the others.
Except for all the others.
So I'm an immigrant, obviously.
So I absolutely love the Bill of Rights.
not because it's in great shape right now but because I never had one before so but anyway make no mistake this is still the greatest country in the world
Anyway, notwithstanding Jim's comments at the start of his presentation just before, maybe in the past Five weeks, we've had some sort of glimmer of hope that we can make the First Amendment great again.
I'm not sure about that.
We'll just have to see who's right on that one between Jim and me.
Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now.
I've got a ton of things to go through.
I'm going to be flopping all sorts of random things up on the screen.
Pretty rapid fire.
No presentations, but a lot of material.
I want to cover it all.
I know that people watching here, and totally changing tracks from where we've been in the last six or seven hours, people watching here will come from all different levels of knowledge about the JFK assassination, all the way from some people might even say Who's JFK? And then we've got other people like Jim who've studied in detail for a lot of the past 61 years, if not all of it.
So if I go too slow or too fast or you can't even understand my Australian accent, I believe the videos are going to be put up later.
So you can go back through them.
That hopefully might help.
They will be on BitChute or Rumble.
I can't remember which on Jim's channel.
Give us a few weeks to edit.
They'll be up there, folks.
No worries.
Okay.
Well, you've got to try and catch what you can right now and you'll get the rest for Christmas or New Year's.
So I mentioned grassy knoll conspiracy theorist.
It's a famous term, but I'm not actually going to talk about the grassy knoll at all today.
I'm only going to talk about the Zapruder film, which is the best film of the assassination.
So let me show it to you.
Here it is.
There you go.
There's a Zapruder film, right?
It's pretty small, these 8mm films.
Of course, this isn't the actual Zapruder film.
That's down the road in the National Archives.
It's about six feet long, so I don't think my arms will, even if it reached, you're not going to see it on screen.
But actually, the part of the Zapruder film that shows Elm Street is exactly six feet long, the original film that's in the National Archives.
Exactly.
I guess that's a bit of an in-joke, probably.
You know, get it?
JFK is six feet under.
But anyway, so, well, the question you might ask is how...
How could this even be an in-joke?
Like, this is an actual film, right?
And the point is, and cutting to the chase, I'm spoiling the...
I mean, I've been doing this for a little while, and we said it in the introduction, that the film is a complete forgery, in my belief.
And I'm hoping...
Well, not to convince you, but to present what I've done on it a couple of decades ago.
The thing was created from...
Well, it wasn't...
I was going to say it was created from whole cloth.
It wasn't created from whole cloth.
It was based on a true story.
JFK was assassinated in Dallas 61 years ago.
And it must have been based on real photos, real films taken on that day.
But it's not...
It's been completely manufactured, right?
From beginning to end, every frame, the whole thing is a complete fabrication.
It's a manufactured film.
The six-foot strip of film down the road in the National Archives is no more a camera original Zapruder film than this one here is.
This is just a bootleg copy that someone gave me 20 years ago that were going around in the 60s and 70s.
Anyway, so I said I'd get off my soapbox.
Let me get screen share running and see what I'm doing.
Alright, let's see if I can make this work.
You can see cherry blossoms and a face inside it.
Is that working?
I can hear Sally from the other room saying yes.
Yes.
Sally and I both agree.
So I'm going to start.
And as I said, I haven't got a presentation.
I'm going to go through various things as I have done before.
This is my homepage.
I've had it for about 30 years because, you know, I was a physicist.
We're on the worldwide web pretty early.
It's obvious, johncostella.com.
It's moved around over the years.
And I've got various links here.
I moved them all around.
But JFK is there.
And...
So I'm not going to go through every page on here in detail or even the introduction, but just to give you a bit of an overview of where things are, and you don't even need an Australian accent translation engine.
You can read it for yourself in your own accent, except for this film clip down here.
That is Australian.
I even put a transcript because no one can understand it except for us.
But...
Basically, I started this stuff off 25 years ago.
Actually, 25 years ago this month, I went down to the local library in the school holidays, Christmas holidays, summer holidays.
That works because it's Southern Hemisphere.
And I actually came across this book.
I'm trying to see.
There you go.
Killing of a Present by Robert Groden.
I don't want you to go out and buy this, but it's actually got a lot of great photographs in it, and I was just reading it out of interest, and I thought, actually, that's funny that I opened that page.
I thought that photo there was quite interesting because a lot of things are blurred, and this is very, you know, quite a famous topic, even 30 years ago when it came out, and it actually gave me an idea for creating An algorithm, and you know, I'm a physicist, I'm a bit of a geeky, you know, a bit of a computer person.
I came up with an idea for an image de-blurring program based on those images.
I scan them with my color scanner and Built this thing and all that.
I wasn't...
I don't know how it all happened.
I went onto the internet saying, hey, can I get frames of the Zapruder film?
And I got pulled into this rabbit hole that there was like a forum with like a hundred people in the world that thought Zapruder film was a fake.
And there was another forum with more people that were arguing that it wasn't a fake because if it was a fake, then...
We've lost our best evidence of a conspiracy, which is a problem.
So I went down that rabbit hole.
I did a couple of years of work.
I mean, not full-time.
This is just a hobby.
And...
The stuff here.
So there's an interview from 2011 when I happened to pop up in Vancouver.
There's a TV show, which is quite funny.
There's some stuff here about Tim Thompson's book that came out a few years ago that was unfortunate.
There's an eyewitness compilation.
I'm quite proud of that.
That's the only work I did sort of after 2003, 2004. That was a bit of work, and I like that one.
Everything, what the witnesses said, other than How many shots were there?
Which direction they came from?
Because that had already been done.
Everything else.
It's quite telling.
Some stabilized versions of the Sapruta film.
You see, I did this in 2006 when HD was like, wow, HD. I mean, HD is terrible now.
We've got 4K and 8K and 6K and things.
But anyway, this seemed...
Fancy at the time.
There's versions there.
There's some panoramas that I did back in 2002. There's three different things.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
You can click on those and try and get a feel for Dealey Plaza if you haven't been there or even if you have.
There's all the frames.
There's a Zapruder film.
This is what we put together for the 2003 conference.
There's actually the film symposium for 2003 itself.
It wasn't uploaded until 2010 to YouTube because YouTube didn't exist yet.
And when it did, you could only upload 10 minutes.
So Rich De La Rosa I chunked it up into 10-minute chunks and uploaded them one by one.
Will forever be in his debt for that, because otherwise we wouldn't have it.
And there's a book.
Where's the book?
The Great Supreme Film Hoax.
That came out in 2003. It cost, I don't know, it was secondhand.
It was like 100 bucks for a while.
I wouldn't have even bought it myself.
But it's on Amazon now, so you can go back and see what I wrote back then.
I haven't changed too much of what I've said.
Let's go back up to the top.
Hopefully I didn't cause you any motion sickness doing that scrolling.
I won't do that again.
The main thing here I'm going to go through, and not in detail, like I'm just going to give you a bit of an overview with a few props to support what's on here.
But this simple introduction.
I originally did it back in 2003, before the 40th anniversary, around the time that we're preparing that book.
And actually I was a school teacher, so it was partly to explain it to the school students who had never seen the Zapruder film.
In fact, Let me just, I might as well show you, in case anybody here has not yet seen it, it's not really breaking news anymore, but the long story short is in 1963, JFK was in Texas, in Dallas, he's in his motorcade,
in Dealey Plaza, he goes behind the sign, he comes out, something's happened, and then, alright, that's pretty gruesome, school students, they always say, what's that woman doing climbing up on the back, right?
And actually, just while I've got that one up, let me take that off so it doesn't distract us.
So I don't have to explain that, okay, that's the President's wife and we didn't know what she was doing, but that's what it shows.
But the one question I would always ask is, I said, okay, do you remember where the car was when it stopped?
And, you know, I was saying, well, it didn't stop.
I'll show it again.
It doesn't stop.
I said, yeah, it stopped.
No, it doesn't stop.
So I'll come back to that in a moment.
That's actually quite an important part of this whole picture.
But the first time you watch it, if that was the first time, if you watch it again, just look at it and say, where did the...
Where did the limo stop?
Like, actually stop.
Or maybe a rolling stop, you know, when you cheat going through a stop sign.
But it didn't.
So that's quite curious.
So here, I sort of give an introduction, even if you don't know anything about the JFK assassination.
It wasn't shown on TV until March 1975, but then it was like, whoa, what's going on here?
He gets thrown back into the left.
Sorry if I go over it.
Back into the left, right?
And so he was supposed to be shot from behind.
So that caused some excitement.
It caused a whole House Select Committee on Assassinations to be created after 1975. They went through and they did some stuff and they found some stuff, but really not much.
The other confusing thing about the film...
Is that if you look at the frame when he gets hit in the head, And there's a little bit of magic going on here.
I've got some other things that justify this with more rigour.
But basically, the very shot where he gets hit in the head, his head moves forward instantaneously.
And David Lifton, who's now no longer with us, he tells a story of how he went to Richard Feynman, a famous physicist.
I mean, to me, he's like a god.
He went to Richard Feynman at Caltech in 1965 and showed him the frames of the Zapruder film in Warren Commission volumes and Say, look, his head went back into the left and Feynman got out a ruler and measured it and said, well, hang on, in the first frame he goes forward, which devastated Lichten at the time.
But it's absolutely confusing.
And the fact that Tink Thompson wrote a whole book about it again three years ago shows that, and by the way, I'm What you're seeing is over here.
So if I keep looking, pointing over there, that's why I'm going in that direction.
So I'm not going to go through all the explanation here of what was going on, but that's the introduction, right?
And there's a number of pages down here.
I've taken out some of the gimmicky 2003 things.
So I'm going to go just over a few of them, just so you understand why I believe, strongly believe, I think there's irrefutable evidence, but people can disagree, right?
That's the whole point of having a First Amendment, at least in this country.
Is...
Why do I believe that?
So...
Let me first...
Before I show this one...
What happened in 2002, when I started getting involved, I said, I just want Frames as a Prudafilm.
Copyright?
No, it's not.
You know, this actually, some guy actually had captured them off this.
This video, this DVD had come out in 1998. He actually captured it off that with a capture program and emailed it one by one, if you could believe it.
So I'm forever in his debt.
I started getting into this debate and Tim Thompson, Josiah Thompson, he's famous, wrote one of the most famous books in 1966, I believe, and there's a whole story about that.
He, we were discussing, and I think he's trying to suss out what my opinion was, and I said to him, I think I said it on the Lancet Forum as well, this, I mean, these hundred people or whatever, they're crazy.
The film could not possibly be a fake, right?
I mean, it is true.
I've measured the blur.
Remember, I was doing the blur, the whole point of I'm throwing it away now.
Oh, here it is.
The whole point of doing images out of this book was that I was being a geek and trying to get rid of the blur with a new image processing method that I invented because that image processing just happened to be one of my hobbies.
And I told him it couldn't possibly be forged.
I mean, all the blurs match up and you've got to take into account distortion and All this stuff and perspective and how the thing goes through the claw that pulls down the film and all that sort of thing.
I told him it couldn't be fabricated.
It couldn't be altered.
It couldn't be fabricated.
It must be genuine, which made him happy because he was the lead advocate for being genuine.
The lead advocate for not being genuine, of course, was Jim Fetzer.
So Jim invited me to present in 2003. He says, no matter what you find, genuine, fake, whatever, Here I'll send you a box of books, which ended up including this one because I didn't have it at the time.
It was just from the library.
And some other things and a couple of videos and things.
And come and present.
Whatever you find.
I'm going to have one in 2003. And that's the one you saw that happened in Duluth.
It kind of doesn't make sense, does it?
I just said that the film cannot be altered, and now I'm telling you that's a fake, right?
So there's something weird going on there.
And of course, when you say something definitely absolutely cannot be fake, you know that you're set up for a fall, and you're going to have to eat crow and say, I was wrong.
Because basically, I looked at the film more and more, and found a couple of mistakes.
And finding mistakes, well, I mean, these days I do forensic investigations.
I look for mistakes, okay?
That's where you find things.
You don't find things that everybody does things correctly.
Sorry, I've got some notes as well to make sure I cover everything.
No, it's nothing there.
A couple of mistakes.
The film is like almost perfect.
It is actually probably the most famous and best forgery in the history of the world.
It is quite incredible.
And I can't get into all the scientific details.
I'll cover a couple in a bit.
But anyway, back to the sign.
So there's a couple of mistakes.
One is a mistake with the sign.
I know it's a Stemmes Freeway sign, but it's just a big sign.
And if you look here, I'm talking about this thing here.
This sign I don't know if you can see that funny colour mouse going around in circles.
That sign, that sort of, he goes behind it, he comes out and he's been, something's happened, he's pulling his arms up, right?
So that sign is really important.
So to understand Well, some work has to be done as well.
Let's hold that one for a sec.
What have I also got over here?
There's a couple of things with this whole film, and this is partly to show you how good the forgery is.
There's a couple of optics, physics things that you've got to get right to forge this thing.
So this is something from my 2003 presentation.
Just showing what happens with lens distortion.
So you see I'm wearing these glasses.
Some of you wear glasses, some of the time at least.
And if you put them on, if you look, I mean, everything's pretty clear.
Even if I look around the corners, it's all clear.
But if you notice the real world and the corner of what I'm looking through in my glasses, I mean, sort of the wrong position in my glasses because I'm short-sighted or short-sighted.
In America, what do we call it?
Nearsighted.
It pulls the corners in.
And that's because, I mean, lenses are magic.
I mean, they've been around like 500 years, but lenses are pretty magic, but you've got to sacrifice something.
So you don't want things to be blurry.
You don't want little colored fringes.
You want it to be clear everywhere.
But the thing that you basically normally end up sacrificing is that there's this distortion.
So the corners get pulled in.
And the same as if you look at me, like the side of my head doesn't, right, actually match.
Where the side of my head is, because I'm short-sighted, you can tell.
By the way, that's how you can tell when you're watching a movie, if they're really wearing glasses, because if their head doesn't move, if it all lines up, then it's probably fake glasses.
But anyway, so this is something I did back in, from one of the photos that the late Jack White did back in 2002. Some lens systems, I meant to put that on a loop, some lens systems pull things out into the corners, And other lens systems.
So I said with my one, it tends to make it more barrel-y.
It pulls things in.
If I was long-sided, or here in America, far-sided, then it does the opposite.
It pulls it out into the corners, right?
And so if I was wearing my contacts and I had the other glasses on, then my eyes would look bigger and my face would look bigger and I'd probably look less suspicious.
But anyway, I decided to wear these ones.
And in the case of the Zapruder film...
I should have stopped at a different spot.
In the case of the Zapruder camera, We have the actual patent for the lens system in the Zapruder camera, and when you put it on full telephoto zoom, which has been proved that that's what it would have had to be set on for the Zapruder film, it pulls things out like this.
I mean, it's not quite that drastic, but that's what happens With a genuine Zapruder camera.
There's actually some weird things to do with a Zapruder camera as well in terms of its serial number and so on, but you know these numerology sort of jokes that are in there.
But I won't get into that one today.
So let's take that one away.
This is the one on the website and it just sort of shows that Let me go back to the start of this one.
So if you look at the raw film, this is what I did back in 2002, that white wall, which in real life is a straight wall, it's concrete, it's absolutely straight, and you can prove that if you have an ideal camera, something that's straight in the real world should be straight on the image as well.
I mean, real cameras doesn't happen, and in this case, You can see, it's a little bit hard to see here, but a few other examples, you can see that in the raw frame, as you get from the actual film, like if you looked at the actual frame on here, this little strip of film, where you can see the sprocket holes here as well, there's the original there, the wall is actually bent because of the camera pulling things out.
So what you do is basically measure that, which is what I did on a number of different things, figure out how much distortion there is, I compared that against the patent for the lens system and actually turned out to be exactly correct.
So the distortion is perfectly correct as well.
And then you can correct all the frames.
So if you see, and you know, it's a great compliment that if you look at just about any version of Zapruder film on the internet, they're all sort of bent like this.
The corners are all bent, and that's because they're using this version that I created, which gets rid of the lens distortion and makes an ideal camera.
So...
I'm running pretty slow.
I'm gonna have to speed it up.
Anyway, long story short, if you do that, Then you can take a couple of frames of the Zapruder film where the sign, that sign that I talked about, the thing that gets in the way, it comes out, it's been shot.
You can take two different frames where the sign is in one corner and one and the other corner and the other and overlay them.
Apart from lens distortion, there's also perspective you've got to worry about.
Did I have something on perspective?
Let me see.
Here you go.
This is the magic video from 2003 on perspective.
So basically, and you've got to remember, this is before Google Maps Street View.
It's actually before Google Maps itself.
So this is me writing some fancy stuff to change the perspective of a, like you're looking in a different direction.
All the lines, you know, if you're an artist, all the parallels change if you change perspective, right?
It's Anyway, it's just mathematical.
It's not too difficult, but back then it wasn't trivial to change the perspective of things.
So if you do all that, adjust the lens, adjust the perspective, put them together, and then overlay them, then everything should line up that was fixed in the real world.
Obviously not people that are walking, the limo, like they'll move, but things that were actually like bolted to the ground or the concrete wall or this window in the background, they should be in the same position no matter which frame of the film you look at, right?
So you can do that, and this is me, again, this is back from 2003, showing how they're overlaid.
And that's one frame where the sign is way over in the sprocket holes.
There's another frame where it's way over on the right side.
And they should line up.
And in fact, if you look at the...
Here, I've done a bad job of picking the one I wanted.
If you look at...
This, you can convince yourself that it all lines up very well.
In fact, I'll show you a better one in a moment.
But the wall and the holes and the edges and so on, and even the little bushes, because they might have blown in the wind, but basically all the little highlights and things in the bushes are all fine.
The better way to see this is flipping between the two frames, okay?
So everything lines up nicely, right?
It's the wall and the thing and the holes and like even the little dot in the bushes, whatever that is.
It could be a flower.
I don't know.
I'm a physicist.
I don't know about biology and flowers and stuff, botany.
But anyway, everything lines up until you look at this thing, this sign.
Like, what the hell is going on with the sign?
And what happens is that as the camera moves, the sign wobbles around in real life.
The camera goes one way, the sign does this.
The camera goes the other way, the sign does that.
It's like, hang on, the sign's not connected to Zapruder.
That's crazy.
And apart from that, it's made out of steel and wood and everything.
It can't flop around.
Here's another one with lines put on the pole that holds the sign on the edge of the sign.
It's not right.
Which is...
I didn't expect.
So...
I had to figure out, like, how...
Everything's perfect.
Why the hell would you do that, right?
And the answer comes down.
Luckily, Jim sent me some other things.
If you look in Life magazine, there's a few issues of Life magazine that have frames that there's a Prudafilm.
They never called it there's a Prudafilm.
They called it an 8mm film.
There's all sorts of descriptions that make no sense.
There's a whole lot of weird stuff.
So, let me show you...
This is the first version of life that came out after the assassination.
It's dated November 29, but it actually came out a couple of days before.
They got it out as quickly as possible.
So just as a brief recap, Friday, like it was this year actually, the calendar was the same as this year.
So Friday was November 22, he's assassinated.
Saturday, Oswald's in custody.
Sunday, Oswald gets assassinated.
Monday's the funeral.
Tuesday, they talk about the funeral in here as well, so it can't be before that.
But Tuesday, they basically get this issue out by all accounts that I can tell.
And I think everybody agrees about that.
So, if you go to here, right?
The other, okay.
You can tell I don't have a script for this, right?
The other part of this is that Life bought the Zapruder film.
Like these guys, Time Life, Life, bought the Zapruder film.
And there's a whole story with that.
It's basically equivalent to one point something million dollars in today's money.
So Zapruder made lots of money.
There's a whole story with that as well.
But basically, there's a Prudafel.
So you think life.
Now, if there's anybody younger than me, they probably don't even know what life is.
But they had these big magazines they sent out to people, and they got lots of colour photos, beautiful big colour photos, like this one, inside the magazine.
That's the whole point.
And millions of these got sent out every week.
So this one is some guy, it's still got the little shipping label, some guy in Texas.
I don't know if it's a guy.
And the point is, and now see, I've closed it up, I've lost the page.
Once you send this out, the toothpaste is out of the tube.
You can't change it again, right?
Because you've got millions of these, like the evidence is out there.
Millions of copies of the same evidence.
So whatever you put in Life magazine, That's it.
It's fixed forever.
Even today, 61 years later.
So if you look at this This is the first thing, right?
And I show them over there on the computer, but this is what I scan them from, right?
And it's like, well, the first question you say, what's going on?
Life is supposed to have colour photos.
And they bought a colour film.
They paid a million bucks in today's money for it.
Why are they in black and white?
Well, okay, maybe the rush job and assassination, funeral, everything.
But if you actually look at the quality of these and compare them to what we have today, they're actually terrible quality.
They're actually not much better than this bootleg thing that was like a 27th generation copy.
Probably a 27th, maybe 10th generation copy from the 60s or 70s.
It's actually very bad quality.
So there's an interesting question there.
But forget about that.
And here's the three frames that I show over there.
You can see the sign is there.
And actually, it looks even straighter here than the way I scale it there.
It's basically...
So I thought to myself, all right, what if they did...
Oh, I lost it.
Where'd it go?
Oh, hit scroll.
What if they did alter the Zapruder film?
This is when I first did it.
I mean, I knew they couldn't alter the Zapruder film, really, but what if they sort of pasted a new sign over the top of something, or the sign that was there, and the point is that they, well, if they pasted in the sign and it was perfectly square...
in what they put in the magazine and then later down the track they had to figure out all this magical optics and distortion and perspective and everything that I talked about and all the blur and I'll talk about that at the moment as well then that can explain how they got it wrong because once you send out this copy of life magazine you can't change it um anytime ever another interesting one I'll just mention in passing because I'll come back to this this one down this one down here Is what we now call Zapruder frame 323 and
it's quite interesting for a number of reasons but it's sort of got his head here after the shot.
They don't show anything at the time of the shot but they show this.
That's a quite interesting one I'll come back to as well.
So let me put that to one side.
That's the sign mistake.
So the sign mistake is one of the biggest ones.
Because it's just not possible.
Now, if somebody was able to prove that my processing and calculations for that is incorrect, then that one would go away.
There's other evidence to suggest that the film is just a total fake.
But scientifically, that's what I found.
And I got rid of some of the ones.
Actually, David Mantic was good enough.
Before I ever came on the scene, he...
He'd contributed to this book, Murder in Dealey Plaza, a whole lot of stuff about JFK, and he had a whole lot of things that looked wrong, and I proved that all of his things were not wrong, partly because of all that optical stuff, and he was, amazingly, he said, oh, fantastic, you've proven me wrong on everything.
Keep going.
Like, that told me that he was being fair dinkum, I would say, in Australia, legitimate, you would say over here.
Anyway, the next one, the blur mistake.
So this is the other big one.
Which is a little bit harder to quantify and to show you, but it's also related to Life Magazine.
So here's the basic problem.
If you're taking a photo of something, you know that unless you've got a really high-speed camera, if something's moving, it's going to be blurred.
If you pan with it, then that thing's going to be okay, but the background's going to be blurred.
And the Zapruder camera basically had a little shutter that was sort of like open half the time, this round thing that went around with a hole in it.
And so it was quite, it wasn't made for like high-speed sports photography, you know, sort of thing you have today.
So here's one example.
This is completely correct as well.
So I told you I did a full analysis of all the blurs on a whole lot of frames and they're all completely correct.
You know, measuring the motion of the limo and the blurs and how much the aperture is open for it.
It all works out.
So here's one example where you've got little highlights on the roll bar on the limousine.
They're sharp, and everyone else is sharp, and the background is blurry.
That's how it should be, because the car's moving.
You remember, the car's moving.
The problem is, if you get, in fact, a...
Oh, here we go.
It's in the...
Nope.
I've mixed them around.
Here we go.
So a couple of weeks after that, they came out with a memorial edition of Life Magazine.
And that's this one.
It's sometime around December.
Well, it's not dated, but people believe and no one disputes.
It's around...
It's around this time, December 13th, December 14th.
So we're talking a few weeks after the assassination, or maybe even a week earlier before that.
I can't remember.
But the date doesn't matter.
But by this stage, they actually realised they had the whole Zapruder film in colour.
And look, now we're getting beautiful colour images from the...
8mm film.
They don't use the name Zapruder ever.
So here's one, and I just showed it to you there, but if you scan it, it looks like this.
The third one across is this one, and what struck me about this, having worked on blur for all these Zapruder frames, is how sharp they were.
And that's a problem, particularly this one, because you see this thing here, that's actually the keyhole in the limo.
You can check other photos.
And then you've got these light, these dots, these parts of the, those light highlights in the bushes, right?
They're all little dots.
That's also sharp.
And that doesn't make sense because that's moving and that's not moving and you can't have them both.
One can be sharp, the other can be sharp, you can't have them both sharp.
A lot of details in here, you can look at the frames to figure out how fast the car is moving and here it is where I basically show What the motion is.
Shutter's open for half the time.
A lot of, you know, a lot of technical geeky stuff.
And basically what you end up with is this is how far the car moves when the shutter is open.
So either the background has to be blurred by that much or the car has to be blurred by that much.
Or best case scenario, you're half panning.
Zapruder was half panning.
So half the speed of the car.
The background is blurred by half.
The car is blurred by half.
And if you did, you'd get something looking like this, where this is half blurred and the background is half blurred.
But you can't, so this frame here, this thing here, and again, this is toothpaste out of the tube.
So the important thing is these very small mistakes, you only really get, and I've just lost my page, I was going to show you something past that as well.
You only get those when you publish something very quickly, and they didn't publish very many frames.
The curious thing about, there you go, I should have left that other place.
Anyway, that frame that I showed you before is ZapruderFrame323.
In fact, well, no, I'll show you another one before that.
This one here.
This one here.
Yeah, this one here, right?
You see him just before he gets shot.
And that's what they say, right?
The problem with that is this is what we now call Z311. Zapruder frame 311. He gets shot in frame 313. The problem with this is there's a frame in between called 312, naturally, because they've just numbered, they counted them, which is much sharper than this.
This one's blurred, like they're blurred.
You can see they're blurred.
Why didn't they publish 312?
It shows him perfectly sharp.
He's not shot yet.
There's no gore.
There's no, you know, upsetting anybody.
And that's a real curious thing.
Let me just stick on that one for a moment.
If you actually go, they put out another edition when the Warren Report came out.
You've got to remember the Zapruder Frames had not been published when the Warren Commission came out on my minor second birthday in 1964, September.
This was published like a week later.
They, again, had a whole lot of frames.
Well, they didn't have a whole lot of frames.
They sort of reused the same frames.
But if...
Which, you know, again is a bit annoying and also the fact that I haven't got the right page here.
But the weird thing is, so now we're talking about October 1964 and I've still got this blurry version But then they've got this one here, 323. Again, well, there's an interesting thing that the original one looks like it had a bit of retouching done to it, but that's neither here nor there.
This one here, and I'll come back to that one in a moment, because this time I'm going to put my bookmark back in.
Okay, so that's the blur problem, and it's only because you look for the mistakes and when could they make the mistakes in the early things that were put out.
So, what else have I got here?
There's another angle problem here with the lamp posts.
If you put together a panorama of things, Everything in the background is all lined up, but the post is on the wrong angle.
It can shift with parallax, but it's on the wrong angle, which again is a problem.
There's also another page here, and this has got all really crappy looking 2003 size video clips, but basically there's a whole lot of problems where you've got like Governor Connolly does this hat trick, he sort of flops his hat over like that, which doesn't make any sense.
I had some clips of that, but I haven't got time.
I'll skip those.
The well-known things about people snapping their head, you know, twice as fast as humanly possible.
The Conleys collapsing and so on.
All four people in the front of the car lurching forward, which if you remember some physics or you...
Ever driven in a car or a tram or a train or bus is that if someone puts on the brakes, you go forward because of momentum.
The problem is the car did not brake, especially not at that point and not that violently.
So the actual footage here is probably legitimate.
It just doesn't match the motion we see of the car in the film.
So that's another problem.
That's all there.
The blood Blood mistake basically comes from this spray here on JFK's head.
It's only in one frame and then it basically disappears but then you get this big crater in this part of his head which does not match the autopsy.
You can...
Okay.
All sorts of things and I've showed a whole lot of frames and a graph of things but this has been done much better.
So let me just explain...
Let me jump out of that for a moment.
That...
So I did this back in 2003. Now, you remember, originally, the sort of material we had was this, VHS cassette.
Robert Grodin got hold of a whole lot of films and put them on VHS in the early 90s.
I won't get into that story.
VHS, of course, today is terrible quality.
It's standard definition and blurry and all that sort of thing.
Then I showed you before, by 1998, we had this DVD. Now, I mean, this seemed good at the time.
This is a DVD. Wow, it's 2K, basically.
But then they also screwed around with it.
I've got an appendix in this book where I say the hoax becomes a joke because they did so much to the film.
It was a joke.
So this was supposed to be the reference copy that the JFK Act said that the government had to provide a digital reference copy to researchers to research the film.
And they gave us this.
A home movie.
What they actually did was they they took this or the equivalent one of this up the road in the National Archives did a liquid gate enlargement straight to 4x5 and then they did a high resolution digital scan to to scan that.
The digital scans are fantastic from what we do have they are magnificent.
So the original film so-called but let's the original film one enlargement high quality scan So what basically happened was, and there's another thing I don't address on this page at all, people might wonder about, although no one's ever asked me about, why don't I talk about the back of JFK's head?
You can see it here right on the cover.
The whole point of Jim putting that on the cover, you can see I've got a ring light, right, the reflection, was the back of his head has got this blacked out bit.
I never touched that.
And the reason is because I had this crappy copy of the film that I knew in a dark area to prove that something was blacked out, I couldn't do it.
Even though it was DVD quality and everything on the internet is based on this, basically, from what I did, I couldn't do it myself.
What happened in between, since then I mean, since 2003, where have I got this?
So, I'll point you to this presentation that David Manti gave.
I believe he gave it last year.
And I'm going to kill this off now.
My stuff.
David Mantic's presentation, I think at Cyril Wecht's conference just before the 60th anniversary last year, there's a video link here where you can download it or view it in the transcript or the PowerPoint.
So this is at the 60th, showing videos taken just before the 50th, and I did my work just before the 40th anniversary.
It has some magnificent coverage.
Basically what happened, there were some researchers called Sydney Wilkinson and her husband, Tom Whitehead, I think it was, they actually went to the National Archives and got high quality scans, 6k scans of I think a third generation, according to David, a third generation copy of the camera original that's up the road.
Which is 6k.
I mean, this is 2k.
The 6k logarithmic colour space.
That sounds like jargon.
Basically, it's what you want to look at if you want to look at dark areas.
And there's magnificent presentations in there about...
The blood and even what people that saw it that first weekend said and also the back of the head.
So I've never talked about the back of the head because I didn't have material.
It's more than covered in there.
What I wanted to go back to was to fix something that I did not do well in 2003 or any time since which is to actually explain why I believe that the film could not be a fake.
And after I did find out it was a fake, why I basically proved that the whole thing was fabricated.
So we go back to this little film here, right?
That's what it looks like.
And it's going to get a little bit geeky again.
So let me pull up this thing.
So basically you're going to look at the Zapruder camera, right?
And this This film, oh there you can see, that's the film, but twice as wide, right?
It starts off at 16mm with holes on both sides.
You can see that over here, right?
There's the film and there's the holes on one side, here's the holes on the other side.
And here's the little hole in the camera, the aperture, the hole, the light comes through for a frame of the film, right?
So it's obviously got a cutout here because there's a little thing that grabs the film every time and pulls it through the claw.
That's why I did a claw sort of hand there.
And it pulls the film through and each time it stops, it takes another photo, another photo, another photo into this.
That's where the frame is.
That takes each frame of the film, 18.3 approximately times per second.
More geeky details here.
Here's the same thing.
It's upside down.
This is from the Zavada report.
Here's that same thing.
Here's that squarish hole, but with a whole lot of details, the light comes through.
It has to obviously go through the metal hole.
The light can't go through the metal.
Here's another Consideration.
Again, upside down to make it easier.
Here's the sprocket holes.
I won't use my finger.
Here's the sprocket holes on the left.
Turn it upside down to make it easier for the way we see the film.
You've got the lens of the camera as well, and it could be like wide angle telephoto.
It was on telephoto, or at least the film is consistent with it being on telephoto.
And this, forget about this other little line, this line here is basically how far the lens lets the light come out onto the film.
So more than enough to cover the whole frame.
Like this is the frame that you normally watched on grandma's projector or whatever.
Because it was on telephoto zoom, it actually sent light through all of this.
Now that's fine.
Now let me put, I did do one where I put those two together.
Well, not together.
I didn't do any photoshopping this time.
I just sort of put them together.
So here's the square thing.
And here's the round thing, the big circle here, and you've got to imagine putting one over the top.
I don't have any fancy animations of this one.
And it's where that round light intersects with that squarish thing is where you actually get the exposure for each frame.
So now, and I should have done that back in 2003, so pulling up a slide from my 2003 presentation, which, okay, it's much bigger.
Here's, and don't ask me why I use blue, it's a technical reason, but basically back then I was masking off blue, so that's sort of that square thing, and then there's this square thing here, and then there's these sprocket holes that I've masked off because they're not relevant, and I've got this sort of circular line.
Because if you look at the actual frames of the film, you can see that circular thing of the lens.
So everything's consistent with that.
You notice here it's also bent, which means I've taken out the lens distortion.
And the important thing here to note is that this here, down here, is actually below the frame.
This thing down here is actually the corner of this limousine, the bottom left corner of the limousine, Projected through onto the previous frame, or the next frame.
I've got to remember which one it is.
And the same thing here.
This is the limo from the next frame, and this is the little wall that's above.
You can't actually see the wall in this frame, but...
Yeah, here you go.
I took something from the panorama.
And from the panorama, this is three different things put over each other.
So there's like a, this colourful thing here is from 2002. This black and white thing is from the week after the assassination, Dallas Police Department photos.
And this is obviously the panorama I've made from the Zapruder film.
And they're all overlaid.
They're all corrected and all mathematical magic and it's all put over each other.
The point is, what I'm pointing to here is these...
See this little here?
This little ghost panel that I call it?
I don't know what it's supposed to be called.
This is basically above the Zapruder film.
It's on the next frame.
But it got through because of that cutout in the sprocket hole areas.
It doesn't matter because when Bell and Howell made the camera, they don't care about some of the sprocket holes.
No one ever sees that.
Unless you happen to film someone, the President of the United States getting assassinated, then they scan it like 30 years later and we get to see what's between the sprocket holes.
So that, I'm going to jump through some of these.
So this is from the 2003 presentation that the ghost image...
Oh, I've got to show that other one again.
It's quite amazing if you look at this slide that not only are all the ghost images correct but the blur in this image correct.
So in this case the limousine is moving a little bit And these motorcycle cops, they're the two front windshields, windscreens.
I can't remember which word we use in America, but that's the front visor type thing that's on the motorcycles.
You can tell I'm not a motorcycle rider.
And you can see not only are they blurred, there's actually a little gap in each one of them.
It's a bit hard to see, but if you look at the film for a while, you can see that it's actually blurred this much, but then there's a gap.
And so it's like, okay, why is there a gap?
What's going on?
Well, I mean, the other thing you notice is this part between the sprocket holes is darker.
And both of those things are actually from the fact that that little claw thing that's pulling down the frame every time is covering this up while because it's getting ready to pull the next one down while you're exposing the frame and so what happens is it covers it up some of the time and that's why it's darker.
So that's completely correct.
It's been checked but most amazingly while the motorcycle is blurring the claw comes in in between and puts a little hole in the middle of the blur.
So this is absolutely incredible.
There is no way that this could be here by accident.
To actually fabricate a film And get this right.
This is amazing.
This is like, you know, CIA level physics and a lot of work to get all this absolutely correct, if the film is a fake.
So you have to believe the film is a fake.
If it's not, it has to be absolutely genuine because all these physical properties coming together, optical properties, the actual claw covering it, making a hole in the blur, like it's just, and this is frame after frame after frame for the whole film.
It's absolutely correct, self-consistent, apart from the mistakes and apart from the fact that 72 people said the limo didn't stop.
That's covered in David Mantik's presentation as well.
So...
There's one more aspect of this that proves that the whole film was a fake.
You see this thing here?
This is a double exposure of the next frame onto this one.
Like, there's grass here, but then you've got the limo from the next one up in the sky, and this...
Well, you can't see much here, but there's also one here that will come from...
This, right, the next frame.
So you've got these two double exposures in the sprocket holes for every single frame.
Sometimes there's not much there, but you've got double exposures.
So the thing you need to know about double exposures is you can't undo them, basically.
It's impossible.
So what this does, it's like a zipper, right?
It basically means that every single frame on this film, through the This one.
And this one doesn't have stuff in the sprocket holes because it's not the original, right?
But if it did, every frame is tied to the next frame and the one before.
They're linked like a zip.
Or, no, no, a zip on.
But like a clasp every time.
And you can't just take one out because you can't get rid of the frame and put the new frame in.
What you have to do is you've got to create...
A brand new film, frame by frame.
You can have all sorts of geeky physicists like me measuring everything and blurs and getting the real world and films and everything.
It's a whole production just to create one frame.
It's got to be perfect, physically perfect.
Luckily you've only got 486 of them.
Still 486 forgeries, but you can do it.
But you can't do it overnight.
I mean, it would take you at least weeks, I would assume.
The good thing is, I mean, for the people that forged the film, is that they didn't have, in the end...
Now, okay, this is the other thing.
Once you figure out that this is a fake...
Then you've got to work backwards and say, well, what do we know about the film?
The whole thing is a fake, right?
The limo stopped, but the film doesn't show it.
So a whole lot of stuff has been taken out.
The whole film is inconsistent, right?
But stuff has been taken out.
And David Mantic, again, covers this in much better detail in his presentation.
So I haven't even used any of my notes here.
All right.
I had slides from the scenario of what happened.
Let me see if I can just pull one of them up.
This one will do.
It doesn't really matter.
I mean, you can go back and watch it on YouTube.
It's like four hours long.
You'll definitely fall asleep.
But what I basically said back then is on 23rd of November, because I was an Australian back then, not November 23rd, that...
People were seeing the Zapruder film, various versions of the Zapruder film as a film.
They were projecting and saying, oh my god, we've got the film.
This is classified, right?
We're not talking about people on the street.
Nobody on the street saw it for many years after this.
But in a classified environment, people were seeing versions of the film and they gave descriptions that were totally wrong.
Where was I going to go with this?
Oh, what I speculated basically was...
That there were real films of the assassination, and there actually had to be more than one, because this doesn't really work with just one Zapruder film.
But anyway, that's the technicality.
If you have watched, or when you do watch David Mantic's presentation, because everyone will, if you see this book and it looks familiar from his presentation, that's because that's his copy of the book.
He gave it to me 21 years ago, for which I'm forever grateful.
This basically describes how film editing was done, like Mary Poppins and all that stuff, Back in, this is published in 1965, but this is basically contemporaneous, how you could create a completely fake film, you know, with animated characters and all sorts of things not there, in 1965. The point is...
Alright, I'm going to go back to...
Forget about what I did, because this was totally trumped by...
Some things that happened back in 2009 to 2011. Peter Janney and Doug Horn.
Doug Horn had already interviewed a guy that saw a copy of the film on Sunday night.
Remember, Assassination Friday, Oswald's killed by Sunday, funeral Monday.
He had already interviewed as part of his official duties with the Assassination Records Review Board in the '90s, a guy that was at the National Photographic Interpretation Center just over in Navy Yards.
I mean, before it was, now it's just like apartments, but then it was actually Navy Yards, I believe, that saw a highly classified, I mean, beyond top secret film, and they did briefing boards That was known back in the 90s by Doug Horn.
Did interviews with the people and so on.
What happened that was quite amazing is that they then came across someone else who worked at that same centre who had it on Saturday, but described a completely different film.
Dino Brigioni, I think is his name.
I can't remember how to pronounce it.
And they have videos of this guy looking at the Wilkinson high-quality 6K images.
Totally, like, you know, you couldn't do it with mine.
But basically describing that the film that...
And I probably don't need any more on that one.
I might even stop sharing that.
Basically...
The film that was seen, well, we don't know what we had on Friday, right?
It wasn't what we have as a Zapruder film because there's all sorts of inconsistencies between all the eyewitnesses.
Now, one eyewitness can get something wrong, two can get a little bit better.
If you've got five people saying the same thing, it's probably reliable.
Some of these things, we've got like 72 people all saying the same thing.
The limo stopped, right?
And I can show you that film again, you can go to the website and play it.
The limo doesn't stop.
I don't care if you look at it this way, that way, it never stops.
If you measure it carefully enough, and I did back in 2001, it slows down slightly, but it does not stop.
No one would say it stopped.
I mean, you would not, no matter where you were in Dealey Plaza, it wouldn't look like it stopped.
But by Saturday, there's some sort of film.
It sounds like it was pretty close to what really happened in Dealey Plaza, because it doesn't look anything like the Zapruder film, and that's what you see in those videos when you see Doug Horne interviewing Dino Brugioni, how do you pronounce his name, back in 2011, I believe it was.
And the scans that Sydney Wilkinson and her husband had, Sally and I actually visited them just before the 50th in 2013 in their home in Hollywood Hills and I saw the quality of the scans and the logarithmic space and everything and I actually wish that I had those scans.
I'm not sure if I ever asked her for them, but they were perfect for the questions.
They're asking like, did the head look like this?
Did the blood look like this?
Was there stuff in the air and all that sort of thing?
And what he described on Saturday night was totally different from what the other guys saw on Sunday night.
Now, how do you go from that on Saturday to Sunday?
Well, all you need really is a film, that one that you project, so you can edit it like this.
And if you do take individual frames of the film, which they did and they created big blow-ups for obviously highly classified for leadership, probably for the new president and so on.
You've got a bit of a problem there, but all you've really got to do is take these highly classified copies of frames, and then later when you actually create the actual Zapruder film, the one we have today, you then have to just make sure you take those back and substitute something else, which seems like is exactly what did happen.
So that is...
And I can't remember, I think we're getting up on when I was supposed to stop.
Yeah, it's time, John.
Yeah, that's basically a whirlwind of why I believe there's a pretty film is a complete fact.
That is fantastic.
Thank you so much.
Great presentation.
Go ahead, Jim.
Yeah, Laurie and I ought to have introduced John.
I mean, this guy's completely brilliant.
He's the world's leading expert on the film.
Well, you gotta appreciate the genius of his work.
He was working on internal features of the film to prove that it had been a fabrication.
Now, they took original footage.
And then subjected it to optical printing and special effect, combined any foreground, any background.
They could have had Jack doing backflips if they wanted.
You've got to understand the quality of what you're getting here.
This is absolutely sensational.
There are half a dozen most important contributors to the scientific study of the assassination of JFK. David Lifton, David Mantic, and Jerry Corsi, our next speaker, is going to be talking about Mantic's work.
John Costella, Doug Horn, now today, Larry Rivera, doing the latest work, especially on the limo stop, and my role in publishing all this stuff and advocating, synthesizing, simplifying to make it accessible to the public.
That's the core.
I tell you, the man, I am such a fan of John Costello.
I flew up from Australia twice to the United States, once for the effort here for the Zapruder Film Conference he's already described, but also when I was doing research on the death of Paul Wellstone, his plane went down just 60 miles north of my office on the Duluth campus.
John and I were tromping around in snow and 35 below zero weather, picking up chunks of the fuselage.
He principally authored an article entitled The NTSB Failed Wellstone that Michael Rupert published in his From the Wilderness Newsletter that's absolutely a classic.
It is the most obviously documented article ever published.
It's about six pages with 150 notes.
Good work, my friend.
Yeah.
Thank you, John.
You're absolutely amazing.
And I'm going to invite you and Jim to do more Zapruder Film stuff for JFK Birthday Conference again this year.
So that'll be fun.
So we'll have you back.
No worries.
Thanks, Jim.
Yeah, thank you.
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