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Fred Litwin and the return of Nick Nalli

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/02/18/fred-litwin-and-the-return-of-nick-nalli/

On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 13,

Renowned scientist Doctor Nick Nalli discusses the dictabelt recording, the physics of the Zapruder film, the notorious “back and to the left headsnap, and other issues related to the Kennedy assassination evidence.

Transcript:

I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon my name is Fred Litwin noted author Fred Litwin and of course Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak on the trail of delusion in Oliver Stones film flam at the demagogue of Dealey Plaza Fred Litwin is here he’s a longtime author and certainly Watcher of politics joining us uh Fred Litwin great to have you here thank you very much

[Music]

Welcome to another edition of
On the Trail of Delusion
my bi-weekly podcast where I try to separate the the wheat from the chaff and actually give you something substantive on the JFK assassination rather than the conspiracy Gruel you get all over the Internet
so today I’m I’m really quite happy to bring back Dr Nick Nalli foremost scientist who who has studied all aspects of the Kennedy assassination


But let me tell you about his bio he’s got a master’s degree and a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic studies his PhD was from the University of Wisconsin at Madison
He worked for the for NOAA and the the US government which studies oceans and climate and now he’s a Atmospheric or imagery scientist at the Department of Defense
I mean an incredible background and uh so we’re so lucky because the last time Nick was on
On the Trail of Delusion
it was a great show I mean it was just a fantastic show and and there’s a lot more to talk about and perhaps Nick will come back for a third time because the science the science of the JFK assassination is absolutely fascinating
There’s so much to it and in fact there’ll be more and more over in fact I can’t wait until Nick publishes his first book and I’ll be the first one to buy it believe me so Nick welcome to
On the trail of Delusion
thank you Fred for having me back on this I enjoy doing this type of thing when I when I get time to do it sometimes tough to find the time but but I I very much enjoy talking about uh two things the science science in general and then also the this JFK assassination which we’re all fascinated by so today what I’m going to do is I’m going to I have some prepared slides actually right and it’s going to be I think because I want to get through two different things here and to get into it a little a little bit of depth and to do that it’s just easier to have the slid so think of this as like being in a college class um and feel free to ask questions uh if you have any uh the audience won’t be able to do that but uh but you can I hope I don’t fall asleep like I used to in college no this this you won’t because you you like this stuff and and yeah so by the way well done on your debate there uh with Matt crumpton

yeah that was very uh nice and I see you had a lot of viewership on that so that that’s really great okay good so just a quick again upfront disclaimer any scientific results or conclusions as well as any views or opinions expressed during the podcast or those of myself do not reflect the views of the US federal government or DOD just so these are topics that I’m going to talk about uh first being the the dpd the Dallas Police Department dict toel recording is it Acoustics evidence and then the second is the rer film does it suffer from alterations or Illusions okay so starting off with the the dict Bel so and there’s a lot of slides to get through here uh is it acoustic evidence and I’m gonna hat tip to Michael Odell Dale Myers Paul Hulk and believe it or not yes Tink Thompson because his book last second in Dallas contains information on this that uh was sort of an introduction to me when I read it so him him as well okay so the birth of the Acoustics evidence so this is sort of just the introductory slide uh this goes back to and in this information you can find in really nice detail on Dale Meyer’s site he has a report that he U published there and he really goes into some nice detail on the history uh Tink Thompson’s book also has a bit of that a little less detail but it’s there so I’m going to just kind of highlight it um in the mid 70s it was Gary Mack and Pen Jones who first made these unsubstantiated claims that the Dallas police radio recordings captured gunshots and Gary Mack claimed over a period not just one time as an off off oneoff but uh over a period of time that there were seven to eight gunshots that he heard on the recordings um and you know that’s quite an extraordinary extraordinary claim right I mean imagine being around this where you hear someone saying that there were tapes made of police in the motorcade from a motorcycle police officer and they heard seven eight shots on those tapes now if that were the case that would be hard evidence of of a conspiracy of course you have to analyze it and make sure you’d want to get the tapes and of course that’s exactly what happened so the house select committee formed for a different reason and formed mostly in responsibility to the zeep rder film um uh so Blakey met with JFK critics in DC uh and Mary frell is the one who brought up the police tapes this is both according to Dale Meyer’s version and Ting Thompson’s version uh and that’s what led to the multi-decadal boondoggle known as the acoustic evidence so this is going from the mid-70s till now and again so I’m going to try to distill that all down so Acoustics evidence just simply recur refers to an audio recording of a continuous Dallas Police Department FM radio transmission that was came from a motorcycle that had its its microphone stuck open on the channel one so there were two channels that the police used this was on channel one so this next slide here uh channel one was used for or radio communications used by the Dallas Police Department a not special events this just daytoday they use channel one they recorded their Communications in a transparent way to be transparent have full transparency there’s nothing cestine going on they’re recording what they’re doing uh that that was recording on a what’s called a dick to belt and that was basically a tape uh that used a stylus so it wasn’t like a magnetic tape you can’t think of it as like an eight track tape for the older people or or cassette tape it was it was like a tape but it used a a stylist that recorded physically the the sound so right off the bat that gives you a sense that okay it wasn’t even a magnetic tape which is already sort of like an old technology magnetic tapes this is like even older so it’s kind of a primitive recording medium but but but all they were trying to do is record The Voice the the words that that the police were saying to one another that was the important thing they weren’t trying to that was the the they weren’t looking for high quality high-fi recordings they’re just looking for the words so the there’s a second Channel they use so channel one channel two that was used for special events and I cannot think of any more special an event than a presidential motorcade so the police officers indeed were using in the motorcade channel two to broadcast uh and those Communications were also recorded but they were recorded on a different type of piece of equipment which is interesting but it might be due to you know funding or whatever at the time but they used a gray autograph and I believe that was an older technology I think uh don’t quote me on that uh so the the autograph was basically like a a record player it had a disc um and it had a stylus the only difference between that and a regular record player is that um as the needle moved inward It sped up and the reason for that was to keep a linear um because as you get toward the center there’s less less the even though the angular motion is the same the linear motion slows down because you have less less uh distance to cover so it speeds up as it moves in um interpretation of the recordings is also Complicated by these other issues by the way all this is uh stuff that I had learned pretty well from Michael Odell and he’s the one who really kind of become a master of all this uh so it’d be good to have him on at some point yeah for for sure yeah yeah CU he he really figured all this stuff out so to conserve the recording media um both these devices had an automatic sound Activation so they switched off when there’s nobody talking makes sense that’s actually uh uh that’s being economical um but that complicates things right so during times where nobody’s talking there’s no recording and so that makes it difficult to keep time on the tapes again for day-to-day recordings it’s perfectly fine but when you’re trying do this sort of forensic stuff it becomes more difficult you have to account for it um they also had an automatic gain control feature AGC and what that does is it’s dampening out loud noises and elevating soft noises so what it’s trying to do is trying to keep a a constant sort of amplitude or volume throughout and the reason again is all they’re caring about is words so if there’s loud noises like um recycles that can be suppressed down a little bit or if they’re talking softly or they don’t have the microphone up close enough to their mouth uh then it gets elevated so you can hear them so that’s the automatic game control then finally the gray autograph was um prone to skipping let me switch this to um uh here we go I’m going to go to the laser pointer there we go so uh so uh the the gray autograph also had an additional problem so the there’s dict about autograph the autograph was prone to skipping okay because it’s like a record player and so it would could Skip and that’s another complication to deal with right all right so now I decided this is decades and decades and to try to keep it all straight I decided to put it together as uh as a saga in three episodes and so the first episode A New Hope 1978 to 1982 um so just having a little fun with this as well um in so I already mentioned in the mid 70s Gary Mech is the one who claims to hear gunshots on the radio recordings Mary frell provides him with like a multi-dimensional copy or something to that effect and he he goes around telling people I can hear multiple shots seven shots eight shots on these recordings so then the house committee assassinations is formed slowly shortly afterwards not in response to that but Blakey meets with them DC Mary frell brings up the police tapes and and so they get the tapes and they I think they get kind of what’s close to R I think the original copies of the tapes maybe um and they performed their own investigations including an acoustical experiment at D Plaza 1979 that’s when the house sub committee releases this report concludes a probable conspiracy and it’s based upon this Acoustics evidence and specifically this W report which they said was a 9 5% confidence that there was a gunman on the grassing up it was a couple years after that that 1982 there is a panel that’s formed and releases a report NRC is National research Council of the academy National Academy um prestigious very prestigious um they investigate the claims simultaneously Steve Barber a musician discovers what’s called a cross talk uh and we’ll get into what that is which suggests the time is off and ourc report ultimately dis sprws the Acoustics and debunks it and that’s it we would hope that should have been it the end one movie but no about 20 years later out of the blue uh there’s this 2001 paper appears in a um peerreview Journal by um DB Thomas and he what happens in the paper he claims to find an alternative cross talk that uh that changes things and puts things back gets the timing and it overrides the uh the whole cross talk that Steve Barber discovered uh so so what happens is then Odell Michael Odell finds an error but then Thomas conceives it and then says well there’s another cross talk and so so basically we’ve begun a new whole chapter and that’s why I’ve kind of broken it up this this all starts here uh Dale Meyers later goes on ABC national television also British BBC television as well uh and basically shows at the open mic where the uh House Sub committee determined that you had to have a Open Mic motorcycle at this location for these Acoustics evidence to to be to be correct U it wasn’t located there and then 2005 liner ATL that’s the surviving panel members from the house committee the Ramsey panel uh they issue a full rebuttal of Thomas’s 2001 paper and then also his check cross talk and then Thomas though unded according to tank Thompson that’s his word undotted uh in 2010 publishes a pro conspiracy apology um entitled he no evil politics science the forensic evidence in the JFK assassination which is a weird title because science and politics have nothing to do with each other right that’s the whole purpose of science science is it doesn’t care about that stuff it just is what it is the world is what it is and we’re just trying to figure it out the universe does not care about politics anyway so um I read that book has a lot of good information in it but a lot of bad stuff as well um and it exaggerated the confidence of the grassy n shot to a ridiculous number

99.999% and then the Final Chapter now so in 2010 by the way the Return of the Jedi the JFK empirically dedicated investigators very good yeah I thought I’d again that’s thought I’d have fun doing this stuff so in in 2007 in 2010 Dale Myers actually puts a report out on his on his uh website his web blog and and it’s over that period because he had different editions but so it’s the 2010 Edition really is the one that but you know it came out 2007 but the 2010 Edition includes a response to Thomas’s book but 2013 comes along and lar Sabel commissions the sellus to do their own independent analysis of the recordings and they come to a conclusion that rejects the Acoustics as well they conclude that the open mic’s not even in the motorcade now again I’m going to get into all this in more detail but I’m just just sort of the overview uh Thompson and so some from 2013 about to 2021 about uh Thompson is at meetings saying that he has a new book in the works and Michael Adell is a consultant for that uh he debunks things that are going on but he’s ignored and then in 2021 Thompson publishes last second in Dallas the book that is his his sort of sequel uh he has a rised reconstruction in there and we’ll get into that in more detail all right so now we’re going to go kind of back and be a little more detailed on what we just talked about so house SE Committee in this late 70s um they were able to get original tapes from the Dallas Police and imagine their disappointment but you you know at the same time I might not have been surprised they listen to them and there’s no gunfire on them they don’t hear anything resembling gunfire whatsoever um um despite that the house committee still decided that they would submit these to acoustical Engineers for analysis that’s you know that’s reasonable and they you know they got the tapes and they probably wanted to just make sure uh and they figured we’ll give them to experts and just to make sure uh that there’s nothing on there so that included J James Barger who is with bolt Baron and Newman BBN and then uh Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest ashkanazi w at St City University of New York these were sort of acoustical experts so it was bargar who first came who first looked at this stuff they they did it in not simultaneously they first went bargar and then Weiss and eskinazi um the an acoustic experiment was set up by uh Barger where they went to D Plaza and they set up a bunch of microphones in an array and then they had live gunfire I think they were using the weapon um the Caro from the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy those two locations so they fired off test shots they had their microphone array and they were looking to see if they can discover uh patterns that would resemble the waveforms that were on the dickout so they did that and then that was handed handed on to Weiss and asazi who performed an additional analysis and it was based upon that Acoustics evidence that the house committee made their their change from a lone gunman to probable conspiracy so this kind of I guess I really talked about all this right here that uh in a way I guess I didn’t need this slide so other than what they did is they they found matches between the waveform impulses and the dictabelt with the test muzzle blasts the echo in D Plaza this shows a diagram from the report that kind of shows what we’re getting at so they had they had buildings in D Plaza there and they were able to come up with different trajectories of sounds uh as they would Echo off of buildings and from the muzzle blast and and such and they were looking for those sounds to see if they correlated with the impulses on the diabel when they did that they came up with a 50% confidence of a way form match with a with the shot that came from the grassy null uh so 50% is half and half so you know it’s it’s like a a random thing so it’s not very good assessment so what happens is then they handed the hell committee said went to Weiss and ask gazi to take a look and what they did is they took the data from Barger and they used a hard copy map and basically pen and P you know P paper and pencil analysis uh to to see what they could come up with and they came up with using their methods a 95% confidence of a gunshot from the grassy null assuming that this specific um that there was a motorcycle located this specific location and the only motorcycle that they could come up with that was reasonably seemed could have been was this HB mlan so it ended up becoming well it’s going to be uh police officer HB mlan he has to be here and if he’s there then we get a waveform match by the way we talk about the waveforms that’s what this is and this is from Weiss and askanazi report so this is in time I believe and so sound is pressure waves through the atmosphere they’re compressive waves coming at you so what it means is that you’ll get momentary high pressure and low pressure coming at you um so so what these sort of waveforms are showing is they’re showing periods of high pressure and low pressure from sways and a lot of what you see here is what we might call static or random basically uh just not much signal there there’s just a lot of what’s you know noise or static uh but you’ll see some places that are spikes that might look like they’re something that’s outside of a a a white noise and definitely here and so that’s where they said the S the suspect impulses are now mind you if you look at the whole set of waveforms you’ll find things like this everywhere right so it’s not anything you unique here but these were the waveforms that they were trying to match is these here um one thing that we got to point out is because of this automatic game control that was on the recording you you the recording itself is never going to have anything that’s really large and that’s the reason why um you wouldn’t expect it that well that was the reason that they hypothesized that we’re not hearing the gunshots is for that reason uh but although even then you you know the the one of the police officers said I believe or someone said that yeah you can still hear gunshots on these things so that that’s that’s ridiculous um so anyway we’re going to go on okay so uh this is the quote First debunking of the acoustic evidence uh it was formerly done by the the NRC Ramsay panel U so they’re the ones who were put together as a result of this Richard sprag I believe this Richard sprag was the one who said you can hear gunshots I think on tapes like this or someone of that nature so he knew that there was a problem because he knew from the photograph the photographic evidence that uh he didn’t think there’s going to be a motorcycle in that location so this is the problem when you rush to judgment to to to borrow that phrase as the house committee did so you know they they kind of rushed this and they didn’t really established things and you have to be you have to establish things they never established that there was a police officer there they just kind of said well yeah he probably could have been there this HB mlan and they let it go with that and this gets you in trouble when you do things like this so This Richard brag knew no there I don’t I don’t think there’s anybody there so he he he didn’t keep his mouth shut um and he went to the justice department and told them about it and then you know they became convinced there’s a problem so that’s what led to this NRC panel being form and that included Nobel prizing physicist uh Norman Ramsey and Luis Alvarez the hated Luise Alvarez he was also on that panel and they immediately found problems but simultaneously in the meantime around the same time they had put out these dick Bel recordings on floppy um bino discs that was in Gallery magazine Gallery magazine now is that like a Gallery magazine that what kind of magazine is that a soft porn magazine like or Playboy that’s what I thought yeah good thank you for that so yeah so so you know Steve Barber and Todd Von they were uh J they bought the magazine for the for the record right like they’re buying Playboy for the interviews they bought the that’s exactly right yes yeah so they’re JFK Buffs and uh but C barara was a musician and uh amaz this is just really these stories are I tell you you can’t make them up so he Steve Barber listens to this and he notices something that nobody else notices that’s this thing called a cross talk where he notices that there’s someone’s voice appears on this channel one open mic and he’s like wait a minute that voice I heard on the channel two and it turns out that’s what the cross talk so so you envision this motorcycle officer has an open mic and but there but the motorcade is still broadcasting in Channel 2 and so someone else’s Channel 2 broadcast got picked up by his open mic and that’s the cross talk now the reason why that becomes um something is because then you can use the channel two to help time things in the channel one because channel one is just open the whole time and so there’s no other broadcast there’s no time markers in there where K to had had time markers specifically things like the the the specific cross talk was this bill Ducker a sheriff he’s saying hold everything secure until homicide investigators get there and we we know that that happened about one minute after the shooting of course we know it’s going to happen after the shooting but it took about a minute before you had police office saying this stuff because they didn’t know even what was going on and so that’s what when I call it the hold cross talk is just because it’s what’s being spoken so that was on channel 2 it got picked up on channel one it’s happening at the same time that the supposed gunshots are happening right so so that’s sort of a debunk right then and there and so Barber notifies the NRC panel of the finding and they uh you know they they found they had found other problems themselves but they they affirmed that yeah that’s that’s that’s the case so the suspect impulses occurred about 1 minute after the shooting and basically all they do is they make sure that it’s true right that they go through their own you know rigor to make sure that it’s not uh that that the the claims here are are correct and so that was it that should have been the end of it and it was for all intents and purposes for uh for 20 years but then again as I said out of the blue uh this paper appears in 200 2001 by a an entomologist at USDA that’s United States dep of Agriculture uh he claims in this paper that there’s another cross talk and this one was spoken by this officer Samuel Bella and that that cross talk trumps the the whole cross talk and that yes it’s the grass andol Gman because it restored the timing the paper receives mainstream media attention because it’s that’s an extraordinary claim I mean I mean that’s it’s huge uh if that’s the case you know he basically saying there’s a grassy old gunman so that became out in the open right away and of course people hear about it so T Thompson heard about it and and Michael Odell this person who up to that point would have been what you call an unknown uh and he was not a JFK buff I talked to him he wasn’t a JFK buff he was just a a computer scientist uh and he he liked this type of stuff and he was quite like whoa interesting so uh you know this could it be that someone really scientifically proved that there’s a grassy n gun so he just looked into it uh but within I don’t know maybe a couple months he can confirm for you I mean short order he he found out the problem and by the way this problem is not necessarily Don Thomas’s fault right so what happened is there are skips in the channel 2 autograph recording that weren’t accounted for they weren’t even accounted for by the NRC they they they didn’t account for these things and so what happened is the the omission of these SK the time due to these skips uh they invalidated Thomas’s conclusion but they did not invalidate the NRC conclusion uh the impulses were too late 30 seconds too late still and Don Thomas acknowledged this so when when U when Michael Adell got a hold of Don Thomas to tell him about this uh Thomas acknowledged it and he actually at a JFK meeting too that his his objections were were overruled and and that was it and the thing is is there was nothing wrong with that and it wasn’t really a bad doesn’t really reflect bad on Thomas it wasn’t error due to himself it was just something that nobody had caught Odell caught was the one who caught it again that should have been in the end of it so the Ramsey panel survivors published a rebuttal paper and that debunked it and that should have been the end of it now this is another little side out here so independently and this is stuff that again Michael D can get into with you if you want uh he independently went back and debunked the uh the Weiss askanazi report so he and this is I think the his um I think Odell’s um paper on this is is online I think you can find it at the the McAdams website he has it out there uh where he what he did is he tried to reproduce their result and was unable to do so and he he concluded the following this attempt to reproduce that experiment has demonstrated significant errors and wa’s results at every step falsifying their report that’s what he did he falsified their report basically puts us back to where things were before the house committee and hired them to do the analysis he tried to contact all of them but they all decline the comment now usually when you have someone declining the comment it usually means that it’s sort of like a tacit admission um and and and it’s also like sort of like in a little bit maybe you’re a little embarrassed by it at least that’s the way I take it definitely that’s the case for Weiss and eskinazi to my knowledge and Fred you might even be able to confirm I don’t think they ever spoke up again about about the Acoustics I think they kind of remain mum um for the rest of their time and and markk Weiss uh he passed away in 2020 and uh his obituary is here and you notice they feature in the obituary that he worked in the Watergate tapes but when you go into the obituary there’s no mention of the Acoustics and so that’s sort of more um I think um pass acknowledgement that they knew that they had problems with what they did um it would have been better if they came out publicly and acknowledged it it’s what I think they should have done but certainly better that they not go out and try to defend the indefensible it just makes things much worse yeah it just better if you if you feel like you can’t admit you’re wrong then just keep quiet about it and let it go all right so now the Dale Myers and sist reports this is all really great stuff because it’s all different it’s all independent lines of argument so Dale Myers used an upper polar geometric analysis that just means you use cameras from different angles and you’re able to redu three dimensionality out of it so he he used the the different films put them all together especially this film but also others and uh he was able to determine exactly where HB mlan was and that was he was 175 ft from the HOSA committee position that he needed to be one and a half seconds before the shot so 175 ft and one and a half seconds it’s a little bit too fast right so so bottom line is he wasn’t there and that invalidated uh the the the house committee um conclusion uh and again this is all published in detail now he went on ABC talked about this in 2003 but but he has a detailed report that you can find from his website that talks about all this independent of that Larry Sabo 9 2013 uh commissioned the sonist solists are are sonar sh for sonar analyst they’re like a engineering and Tech contractor supports the military espec I think especially in the Navy for for sonar which is sound um they performed an independent analysis of the dict tabel what they did is they looked at the channel one audio and they an analyzed the motorcycle engine speed and they were able to determine by the sound and they knew what kind of motorcycle they actually knew what kind of motorcycle it was and they were able to deduce the engine speed was way too fast it was going it was like going like uh like uh 30 or 40 mil an hour or something to that effect it it was it was not in the motor cave basically So Not only was it not in the position that was supposed to be it just wasn’t even in the motor cave right so all right so now that leads us to in spite of all this um tin Thompson still triy to resurrect the Acoustics in his book so as I mentioned he he worked on this book and he teased it at meetings JFK meetings about this book that he he’s going to come up and um and that the book was last second in Dallas and he comes up with a Revis scenario from his from his earlier book um his book six seconds in Dallas this one here he changes what what happened um and he claims that there’s a second shot to the head so Jeff K is shot in the head from the grassy null at z313 and then later he shot the head from behind which is just um doesn’t take into account aam’s razor whatsoever I mean it’s just a very convoluted way of trying to get somebody on the grassy know it’s I can describe it um so so he he relies on Thomas’s check cross talk which was debunked um by Michael Odell uh in and um in his book uh so tin came up with a couple of his own arguments I’m not going to get into detail here that’s the type of thing that uh Michael Dell might want to talk about maybe um but more formidably T consulted with James barer the original the original expert that the H committee uh relied on along with a junior engineer and they wrote an appendix for tin’s book and the appendix is pretty looks pretty technical it is technical uh but Michael Dell already had known about all this stuff and he knew there were problems there um he just kept mom about it uh so so those that something that he might want to talk about as well now this is sort of a sort of an overview conclusion of everything I just talked about um from a scientific perspective so it’s the Acoustics non-evidence uh there’s there’s nothing there it was a was a motorcycle uh broadcasting on channel one it wasn’t part of the motorcade and had its microphone stuck open it did not record anything from the crime scene uh there are three General categories of arguments that discredit it I’m going to distill it down one is timing issues so this is the original one this is the one that most everybody had been focused on this started with the uh with the hold cross talk that uh Steve Barber came up with that went into the ramsy report uh basically the suspect W forms on the dict to Belt happened one minute after the shooting approximately the open mic location assumptions uh the open mic motorcycle was not in the location it needed to be that’s at Myers talked about and not only that but it wasn’t even in the motorcade it was someplace else uh and that’s what sonus came up with and then finally insufficient audio information content what does that mean it means that the dict belt Was A Primitive recording media and it did not contain information that could tell you that there were gunshots that’s the reason why we didn’t hear the gunshots is the waveforms themselves one thing about a gunshot it’s loud what does that mean High amplitude so if you were to look at a waveform that really captures that information that what you’re hearing you’ll see like a very large amplitude and then it might come off and then maybe there’s shock wave or something like that that’s not there um and that’s because they they didn’t record that information they they did not record that information they could not they could not record that information now why is that such a big deal um it’s because right from the start before all this stuff they should have known this they should have realized that the these recordings we we cannot definitely tell you that there’s an acoustical signature that’s associated with gunfire to the exclusion of other ambient sources what are other ambient sources motorcycles people yelling oh also cross talks so the whole cross talk discovered by Steve Barber uh that itself from Channel 2 is a non-ambient is an is an ambient source of sound that is not a gunshot turns out Michael Dell has looked into that a little bit and uh it can create impulses that look just like it and so the suspect waveforms are most likely I think uh and this is what Michael Dell thinks uh were due to the the whole cross Talk itself so the gunshots was just the the cross talk so when when Weiss and as asanagi did their test of firing from the sixth floor window what they were they they claimed to have matched that wave form to the the dictabelt where did they really go wrong in that in sort of that match I don’t think that they went wrong there because what they were trying to match were all the different sounds that came out of De Plaza due to a gunshot from certain locations right so from both from the you know and from the Texas schoolbook depository and so you got like a muzzle blast a Bist ballistic crack or shock wave and then Echoes from buildings and so they were looking for matches between those types of sounds along against the waveforms of that was on the dicta Bel so they they in other words they created the they created those sounds and then they recorded them from a microphone array and then they were able to find for that one microphone near the intersection that there was a a waveform match but the thing is what does it mean what does match mean right so this is where you have to get into the you have to kind of get into the weeds a little bit which is not what I’m doing yeah you have to figure out well how what does it mean that something is matched and then not only that but is that the only source that can create those waveforms that’s what this here is and that’s where the whole thing was sort of doomed even if a lot of these other problems are going away as I mentioned um even if the timing even there was no hold cross talk let’s say there’s no you know F maybe Dale Meers found that there was the police officer there even if all that were the case in my opinion is still a problem because you haven’t proven that the recording is a gunshot it could be due to other things right and that’s what that’s what Michael had already shown but like but in theory it could be I mean there’s other sounds that can give rise to things so that’s called that’s the information content problem it’s what you can derive out of data certain data you know data gives you information and then it depends on how much information is in there what kind of conclusions that you can make oftentimes you don’t have enough information so you make assumptions that const strain things a little bit in this case the assumptions they made was that the dict number one was a police officer in the motorcade number two they were located at that location and number three that the dict Bel had gunshots on it but we didn’t even hear the gunshots and there’s no way for him that suggests that that’s a gunshot right so those those were the problems they were fatal problems from the beginning in my opinion in my opinion all they could have ever claimed if everything else were to go away all they could have ever claimed was we did an analysis and from our analysis we cannot rule out the grass SE null as a location we did an analysis we got a waveform match from a grassy n shooter a waveform match as I mentioned um uh so we can’t rule it out but we don’t know if it was gunshot or not that’s it okay all right so let uh and that’s what I just said here so yeah so this just uh I forgot what he even had in these slides uh that so that that’s that’s kind of what these are showing when I was just talking about so this is what a grassy null test shot looks like this has got the amplitude information in there see how how you got this loud sound this is the muzzle blast and you might have a shock wave after that and it kind of goes off into this tiny little area here see uh so but then this is what the dicta Bel had right there’s a big difference between these and what they did is they just assumed that well that’s because there was this automatic game this got truncated and that’s an assumption though you know that and that assumption you you can’t make that assumption unless you have very good proof to do so so that’s where their mistake was and by the way this here this is Michael Odell doing his own waveforms where he just made a k sound I guess he went and that’s what it produces so so a k sound can make uh you know can make impulse matches basically what he’s trying to get at and that’s that’s what the the hold was right so the whole cross talk was most was very likely causing this U anyway again he can get into much more detail about that all right so I think if you don’t have any other questions about Acoustics we can go on to the zville no just one question a very quick question about Ting Thompson I mean what where did he what fooled him or what you know what what you know he he he overrides all of this and accepts the Acoustics evidence and and so how how did he fool himself yeah well that’s a great question and that’s a great way of putting it because I think that is the best way of putting it is he’s fooling himself and I think Michael I think um Richard feineman had some sort of quote about be careful about fooling yourself because you’re the easiest person to fool um I I think that he probably was looking for Vindication of his earlier work which was perfectly fine I mean again he had a wrong conclusion but otherwise was a contributor to to the knowledge base and I I I think he was just looking for validation of that for whatever reason I don’t know if it’s ego or if he wants it to be and um and and it’s this uh don Thomas provided part of that so they I know that those two because I’ve heard about this I wasn’t at these meetings but I heard that the two of them kind of collaborated quite a bit um and so he’s one of the ones who Who provided him that and then and then there was other people at these meetings that provided other things things that he he he just kind of took and ran with one of them being David wimp uh who is the one who first put the idea in his head about the blur illusion which we can get to and uh and then there was another person too at at one of these meetings that that uh talked about the second shot to the head oh you know if you notice later in your own data you know there’s a forward there’s a there’s a emotion forward and that was more than the head snap and so yeah he was shot in the head you know again twice um and no it’s not what’s in the data it’s not there so it it’s too bad that Thompson did that I think his last second Dallas could have been a really it’s like I say it was a missed opportunity to me he could have come out and re um he could have corrected things from his first book in a proper way and and uh instead he he he didn’t he sort of doubled down and and made it worse worse than his original book but other than that it was a it was a you know interesting book you read it he talks about his he does a lot of biographical uh talking in in the book about his what he did you know during that time period during the exciting time period with his Life magazine and he got his hands in the zi rer filming looked at stuff and so you can kind of get a sense of being that person and being sort of in that moment and and being excited by it and you know it was like big part of his life and so you can read the book and enjoy it for that reason but not not for his conclusions

though all right so we’ll go on now this is a good segue say that PR film does it suffer from alterations or Illusions um this is hat tip to Roland Zada he’s a uh Kodak film expert Francis Corbat who’s the who’s the principal scientist at the itch Corporation Max howand Paul Hook and the six floor Museum de Plaza uh particularly Max and six floor for giving me a couple frames from the Z film uh okay so just background again on what the film is it’s forensic photographic evidence and so I I love photographic as physical because it’s uh it’s tangible but also it records phys physicality um uh remote sensing is what it is it’s the process is deriving information from em radiation and photogrametry is a subdiscipline of remote sensing um and so it involves the measurement of photographing images it’s applied in numerous fields of study including forensic science obviously but others as well um just a quick overview of the zapa camera so it was a bell and Hall zoomatic had a shutter speed of about 55 milliseconds per per per frame um and then it exposure time of 25 milliseconds so what happens is the shutter opens for 25 milliseconds and then it closes and then it’s closed for about half of the time so you got to keep this stuff all in mind so opens captures an image closes and then for about 25 milliseconds or 30 m milliseconds it’s closed things are going on and it’s not doing anything then it opens again um he used smartly K Krome 2 outdoor reversal film it was not opt it was not highspeed it would mean and we’ll get into what that means it was optimized for bright lighting conditions which is what we had in November 22nd okay so there’s this thing that’s going on there’s this thing called zilm denialism was what I’m going to call it and it’s one of these again these things can’t you can’t make some of this stuff up so ad hoc assumptions we know what those are and conspiracy theorists using them in drove so if there’s something you don’t like just come up with well that an ad hoc assumption um and and you just keep doing it and so what they’ve done is they’ve built so many ad hoc assumptions that come around the universe is sort of circular it’s a curved Universe due to relativity I guess maybe or something it’s come right back around and now the that Pruder film which is the whole impetus for the first generation waren commission uh critics including tankk Thompson uh you know they relied on it for criticizing the warrant commission report for the single bullet theory the back end to the left and that’s why the house select committee was form was because of it um so but now we’ve had so many of these head HW hypotheses that now ironically you got a lot of people out there a lot of them it’s not even fringed by The Fringe standards it’s you know there’s it’s almost become a mainstream thing and now Tink Thompson is becoming the one who’s sort of being uh forgotten about out uh they they deny it’s authentic they think that it was tampered with and altered and and then if they don’t do that that’s alterationist if they’re not doing that then you have uh others who just deny things like so for example you watch it in full watch it in full speed and Jeff K and Connelly they react at the same time you can see it I mean it’s it’s it’s so obvious when you watch it um people deny that they say no they’re not reacting at the same time I I think I do think this was one of the faults of the Warren Commission that the Warren Commission didn’t really adequately um examine or discuss the zuder film they yeah they missed the lapel flip they missed the fact that they react at the same time you’re right about that yeah they they they didn’t do that did they now uh yeah and that it’s and it’s it’s it is I mean it’s a fact and then then and another thing is there’s the head snap uh which we’ll get into but that’s being denied right so there are two different lines of reasoning for denying it one is the tink Thompson it’s a blur illusion uh de motion blurring and then the other is uh a lot of people are saying this too but I’m not going to get into it too much is that it was due to limo limousine breaking uh we’re g to get into both of these um but first before we do that is it authentic yes it is um first of all how do you determine it’s authentic well one of the things is you you do have to rely on Expert uh testimony uh because uh most everybody out there even I’m not an expert when it comes to the K kod Chrome Kodak film um I know a lot about it I’m an imagy scientist um I know a lot about how this stuff works but I I don’t know the details on that film so you have to go to The Experts first of all and so Roland Zada has said that there’s no detectable evidence and manipulation IM image alteration on the zip prer in camera original film and all supporting evidence precludes any forgery there too so this is what he said he he because he was paid by the way to take a look at it and found nothing he found found all the markings were there it was his codex film produced and at that time period I think 1962 um or 1963 and and and it it’s it’s authentic uh also there’s an i Clan cha of custody now this David ran who’s no long he’s not a lone gunman guy uh read his book read his book he talks about the chain of custody um there is no chance for conspirators to do anything with it they never got a chance U and then zaper himself testified that uh that they are authentic and Camera original and first generation Co copies another thing is that coherent alter those they say co coherent meaning yeah you can go in and screw it up you can go in there and take the film and ruin it basically I mean it was 8 millimeters and Kennedy’s head on that fatal shot would have been was Tiny um you can go in there and try to mess it up but if you’re going to try to do something that’s coherent through a film to to meet some sort of preconceived notion about what happened before it happened or after or before you know what happened I mean it’s it’s it’s not possible um it was not possible in 1963 and not even trivial today and by the way it was a reversal film meaning that there was no negative the film actually got produced as was there’s not a film negative now what happens in the real world let’s say in the real world there was a conspiracy and they did this comp cockamamy thing they they sh have been broad daylight um what they would have done is they would have tried they would Seas they would have send the the gusto in get everybody’s camera films you know and because it would take a Gusto to do this basically and then destroy them um they wouldn’t have come up with this thing about trying to you know alter it and then finally this is me a philosophical question if the zpp film could be altered and was then how do we know the assassination even happened now you could say well you know you know Vince bully obviously doesn’t think it was needed to determine what happened right well that’s true we didn’t need the film to know that it happened but that isn’t what I’m talking about I’m talking about once you go in that rabbit hole of denying evidence that you don’t like uh then you can deny all of it you can deny everything in fact you you know they deny the autopsy they deny a lot of things um so you can deny everything you can deny the fact that the you could say that the media was in on it you can deny you could say that uh that they set it up that it was a contrived thing that happened uh you can come up with all these head hoc hypothesis the the whole thing was conted because Kennedy just wanted to to get out he he didn’t want he wanted a nice soft exit from the presidency and he ended up going to uh you know Aruba or something like that I don’t know yeah it’s it’s the only play left to conspiracy theorists because the evidence points to Oswald so okay we have to claim that’s planted and altered and faked that’s the point and once you go down that rabbit hole you can just do it everywhere and you go no then you’re just spinning your wheels and you’ve got nothing and that’s so so that’s just my philosophical question about it so yes the zpp Brut film is authentic sadly it shows uh the president being shot in the head graphically and gruly all right so um this is the materials here that we’re going to be looking at I just everybody knows this so it’s SE frame 32 12 and 313 I rendered them in Gray scale notice I put a scale on here I put that on there because it’s I’m trying to show this is a quantitative Endeavor uh what I’ve done is I’ve this this image is a matrix of numbers and the numbers I’ve got Grace scaled according to this scale here but so what I’ve got is a matrix of numbers here and and here as well it’s uh frame 313 that we have this uh what is claimed to be the um camera the the panning error due to to the fact that what’s happened is the The Limousines got a little in front of the camera now you so you got you got both of them by the way this woman is a little bit blurred here because she’s moving but you but you notice she’s a lot more blurred here uh that’s again so what’s happened is it’s a lot like Lee Harvey Oswalt shots what’s happened is because the limousine is orthogonal the the that the amount of tracking the linear the angular tracking is at the maximum point so it turns out it’s right here at this fatal moment that it was the most difficult to do the filming uh because the limousine has to take the most panning and then not only that but it’s on a Downs slope so if you notice he’s had trouble zaper had trouble keeping the limousine centered right I mean this Frame here is mostly all wasted on the on the lawn and we barely got them down here um if you were centering it JFK would have been more up would have been more up here um so so that’s all just matters effect so that so what’s happened here by the way this is not due to the gunshot this is not a startle error which be kind of more erratic this is just the limousine got a little bit ahead of him he had a little difficulty tracking it because this moment happened before he would even heard the sound I believe um certainly before he would have react maybe maybe he would have heard the sound but but uh he wouldn’t have reacted that fast and and one other thing too this is how you know it’s tracking error also is because these the sunglint here off the Chrome is horizontal it’s maybe one degree off of horizontal but it’s a totally horizontal thing so it just has to do with limousine got a little ahead of him as he was trying to hand along and it it was it got difficult all right so this shows them in the typical fashion the repeating animated uh jet file uh and you see a lot of these all over the place in the internet uh they’re in full color it’s very gory it’s some the reason why I rendered it in Gray scale by the way I mean one is because we’re just doing some photogrametry here but but another thing is because you know it’s it’s just very gory so you know you don’t need the go to to do the analysis um anyway you could see between the two frames that he has a forward head snap uh it’s clear as day and it was measured by Ting Thompson to be about 5 cmers uh you’ll notice though that the second frame blurs and you can kind of see that especially here you can also see it in John Connelly’s head you can kind of you can just kind to see it in other places uh that’s where the blur illusion comes in but however before we get to that I want to point out it’s not due to limo breaking because to get into physics again classical mechanics what we’re talking about here something called a fictitious force that happens from a decelerating frame of reference Newton’s laws apply in an inertial frame meaning that Newton’s Laws hold in the frame basically that’s what the initial frame is so so whenever you got a reference frame that’s accelerating and decelerating it’s not inertial anymore and what happens is fictitious force is going to arrive now you can get rid of the fictitious forces by using let’s say we use the the street pavement as our initial frame then what happens is it’s no longer it’s no longer fictitious forces uh but but but what happens is in this analysis is more convenient to use the limine as the as the frame of reference in which case then you end up with fictitious forces if it slows a fictitious Force though due to this in a deating reference frame means that everybody in the reference frame all the objects will behave in the same way and what that means is that their Center masses all react in the same way so you got a center mass in your head and one in your body and what happens is it would both snap and not only that but everybody in the limo would snap that way as well because there’s a lot of time that went through the between these two frames 50 milliseconds that’s a lot of time if you’re talking about you know narrowing down your your um scale your time scale if you have like a high-speed camera there’s a lot that can go on between those two that 50 milliseconds so there’s a lot of time between there and so if you’re GNA say that this is due to limo breaking then everything else in there is gonna be due to you’re gonna have the same thing happening I’m really hammering this home maybe I’m beinga a dead horse but there are people who claiming this is do limo limo breaking and it’s not one other thing too it’s 5 cm approximately in one frame that implies deceleration of the car by 2 miles per hour per frame or 40 mil hour per second so hot damn this this limousine can do a break it’s like going from zero to 40 in one second that’s that’s one uh sports car there so other words it’s it like there’s no breaking that’s going to cause that is what I’m also trying to say I mean if there was a breaking it’s not going to cause that much all right so anyway I I beat that to I’m sorry about that but I just feel like I have to to hammer it home so now what about the blur illusion we could see that it becomes very blurry here is that see see con’s head kind of goes is that what’s happening here so let’s take a look all right so what is that so it’s an ad hoc hypothesis the forward motioning of that head is due to blurring um extreme motion blurring can indeed cause Distortion in film images all right so this is why you know Paul hul is the one who said I should look into it I didn’t want to because I’m thinking it’s not necessary but but but he did point out you know this is these are I believe these these frames here from the Zep P film they’re frames uh 405 408 409 409 this is later in the film a part of the film that most people don’t care about um I believe Thompson includes these in his book to illustrate the point uh and it was something that I had to think of a little bit about because because I I looked at and well they do have a point here and that is that did you know so so what happened is after Kennedy was shot in the head then Z prud became quite unsteady and it was no longer just panning error he was just probably nervous as hell and I’m surprised he didn’t just drop the camera which I probably would have done um so so that that led to this sort of extreme blurring and if you notice the lamp post here is distorted uh and then there seems the white bleeding in on it and there’s a person in back of it here so don’t worry about this guy here back there so that’s what’s going on there but it’s sort of like um looks like it’s moved right so so that’s what the point was and so what’s what’s what’s interesting is this is a legitimate phenomenon you can have blurring creating um distortions I don’t want to call it illusion but distortions U but so the question is that’s what is that what was going on here so to to get to this I got a hold of Roland Zada and asked him about it and unfortunately he provided me exactly what I was looking for he provided me this this this kod chrome movie film specs um for that particular film and um it’s this page here the second page that I was most interested in providing me something exactly what I was looking for which is this curve here now I’m gonna go ahead and zoom in on that that’s what this is so I took that and I zoomed in in on it and then what I did is I digitize it now what is it it is a plot of the density of the film versus the log exposure in Lux seconds which is intensity seconds and what that means is intensity seconds just means that the the shutter opens the film is exposed to light coming in and it’s exposed over a period of time and it’s both the combination of the intensity of the light how bright it is along with how long it’s sustained so it’s a combination of both so so so if you have a like a a light that comes on very bright and goes off before the the shutter closes then that will register is less bright than if a is just on the whole time while the shutters open so so that’s what this is depicting so what I did is I took this and I digitized it so then I have I have my computer now so I got numbers in my computer density means it’s more opaque so the film is more opaque at lower exposure they have it in log rhythmic here I I then took it to to linear and this where you can kind of see it becomes nonlinear um so it’s a linear axis but the curves are nonlinear and so what’s happening is it’s saying that the film is opaque and it becomes um less it becomes less opaque as it’s exposed longer but it sort of like starts very fast and it tapers off that’s the What’s called the non- highspeed part of it the outdoor part it’s trying to make sure that it doesn’t saturate the film’s design so you don’t saturate then what I did is I took the gray scale so I averaged gray scale is just an average of those three colors here and I took the negative so now what happens is um it’s the opposite so now as exposure goes up um the U it becomes higher numbers and now I wanted to get rid of these numbers because these numbers don’t really mean anything now so I I turned it into what’s called brightness it’s a number from zero to one so so from lower exposure to higher exposure you end up from numbers of zero brightness so now it’s really making sense zero brightness means it’s going to be black and then we go up to White all right so and it has to do with how long again the the film is exposed I won’t go into all this in detail uh I don’t we won’t have time but this is just my methodology so what I did is I simulated the effect of the film response on motion blurring and then I assessed whether motion blurring can create the illusion of isolated motion let’s worry about this side more so what I did is I took that that response curve and I took it and I and took the brightness array that came to me from the zap prud film itself I converted it back to exposure and then I blurred the exposure by applying a box car filter horizontal so I blurred it and then I took the exposure back to brightness so what this is doing is simulating the effect of blurring according to a film that has an exposure curve that sort of is nonlinear that it responds to the light in a nonlinear fashion this is all the try to investigate the idea does this effect which can cause Distortion Like lamp posts against the with extreme you know the the camera was extremely um um unsteady at that point can that also cause the JFK effect and that this is the result so the left side is c312 and a blurred c312 so 312 and blur Z 312 what we’re looking for is do it create a head snap and the answer is no it does not you see a lot of the other stuff is very similar right you can see that these the the the the Chrome here becomes distorted and you see his head kind his head does what it does but everybody kind of blurs out and there’s no isolated motion on his head conversely or on the other hand also if we go over to the right what I’ve got is the Blurred 312 and z313 which is already blurred and now you notice this all looks quite the same they’re all blurred about the same way the only difference is just that I only had a horizontal blur where that PR had a little bit off about one degree off so that’s the only thing you could kind of notice here otherwise uh that all looks fine but then you go over to here and his head’s still snapping forward uh so it it there’s no there’s no blur illusion and that doesn’t explain it so so blur or not it’s his head that’s being hit

and bonus but wait there’s more but wait there’s more uh so I I just thought I’d talk about this a little bit so the there’s this thing on the internet that oh you know his head is blacked out the back so that’s part of the alterationist they went in there they knew within hours that there had to be D he was shot from the in the head from the front and there was a big blowout we have to cover it up so they they so so this bottom line is this whole thing that I just talk about explains what’s going on uh what’s happening is that there’s a point in the curve where if you don’t get enough exposure you don’t get enough intensity exposure uh you’ll end up with just a blackout right and and that that’s what’s happened here so all has happened here is his head’s in the shadow the sun’s on that side you’re facing the Sun and his head’s in Shadow and so it’s just it’s too dark because it really is in Shadow and by the way his back is also in Shadow it’s blacked up too but but you know details but but that’s what’s going on is just that there’s not been enough intensity uh seconds to to cause a reaction so it’s blacked right and and really that’s uh that’s all it is and uh this paper by Farid he actually modeled it and he showed the same thing use a 3D model to show you get the same effect and one other thing too is when it comes to photo fakery it’s nothing new there I’m not saying it can’t happen that you can’t do it but this is also extremely difficult to to fake shadows and then especially if it’s a 8 millimeter and his head is a tiny little part of the 8 millimeters it’s very difficult to fake this type of thing all right so that’s what the black patch is it’s simply the the the the it’s like today you can even take your your your camera phone if you take it out in the dark and you try to take a picture and there’s no lighting it comes out black and this is sort of the same thing the only difference here is you have a film response whereas with cameras you don’t have to worry about film all right so conclusion um this forward head stap again I didn’t Discover it all I did was analyze it um it was discovered by Rich fan I believe uh and it’s exactly what it appears to be it’s not due to illusion it’s not due to limo breaking it’s just a measured isolated forward movement of JFK’s head on the order of 5 Centimeters between two frames um in accordance with principles of classical Dynamics It could only originate from an impulse from a directional real Force real Force means not fictitious Force but a real Force um his his head suffers a fatal wound so the force is due to a bullet impact uh and that’s only consistent with a impact that’s going from back to front uh so it’s it’s him being hit and had and that if you do a an in-depth dynamical calculation which is what I done had done in a certain way using forces I did I I treated the skull and the soft tissue in certain ways you end up with a movement on the same order of magnitude about 5 cenm so it so what’s observed agrees with what physics would predict um so the Z film provides independent Cooperative forensic evidence that JFK was shot in the head from the rear and I believe that’s all I have well that’s a great presentation I mean I really really appreciate that that’s fantastic I mean what what what again going back to the warrant commission well the first the first generation critics I mean it used to be the first generation critics would take all the evidence the 26 volumes the zuder film or whatever c399 and they would argue the evidence and the problem is now is the ne the new generation of of critics do the opposite we we we do not want to argue the evidence we’re going to tell you the evidence is phony planted fake and whatever that’s the only it’s it’s a whole new way of arguing and it means you can’t really discuss the the the assassination because they reject all the evidence it’s extremely frustrating you can’t Bec is impossible to to discuss it at that point it’s uh the analogy I always like to use is that it’s like um it’s like talking about how many angels can dance in the head of a pen you know arguing with each other about that um you’re G to get nowhere and so soon as people start denying it then you can’t go I just say well how do you know that he was assassinated then and then they think that’s oh I’m not no but no but You’ gone down that path and and there are people by the way believe it or not I come up with that crazy thing but then there are some out there who think that is what happened that he wasn’t assassinated yeah or or people saying Jackie Jackie shot him or whatever you know really gets really yeah yeah Mrs Kennedy you know with her poison dart gun Ting Thompson’s not responding to any of any of the critiques of of his book yeah I noticed that he there was that interview recently that was circulated on the social media I I listened to it and he um he had a sympathetic interviewer who didn’t bring anything up like that no hard questions the only hard questions were or what You Know What’s the magnitude of the conspiracy that would have to go into doing all this and he was very uncomfortable with those questions I could see it um because because he’s not IR he’s not irrational but he’s irrational about this uh but but he because I could see that he’s thinking oh my God that’s like Fringe you know I’d have to be saying that you know everybody’s in on it he doesn’t want to go there he’s wants to say well no all I proved is that he was shot by more than one gunman and I didn’t we’re going to leave it go at that but we’re like you can’t just leave it go at that I mean you can’t just say that and say okay well I’m done you know you you have to you know okay what who was the gun you know you have to you go further than that he doesn’t want to do that it’s too bad well look it’s this is all uh fascinating stuff and there’s still a lot more to discuss uh about um uh the head wound and stuff youve because you’ve written so much and so obviously a third a third uh session is going to be upcoming in the near future uh but thank you much it’s been been amazing okay great Fred I’m glad uh glad that hopefully we uh everybody’s uh enjoys this who’s watching it okay thank you very much and uh we’ll see you soon for another edition of on the trail of delusion

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

The Warren Report was imperfect, and that makes it authentic

www.mattkprovideo.com/2024/09/23/the-warren-report-was-imperfect-and-that-makes-it-authentic/

Some thoughts on the flaws and imperfections in the Warren Report.

Some conspiracy theorists say they think that Lee Oswald was some kind of intelligence agent, maybe for the FBI or the CIA.


They also point out to many of the flaws, contradictions and overall imperfections of the story told in the Warren Report as evidence that it is false.


I’ve never been an FBI agent and neither have any of you, so I can only go on second hand reports of what its like to be one.


I really liked the movie “Donnie Brasco” and then I read the book. Agent Joe Pistone ( aka Donnie Brasco) tells what I can assume to be a true story of his time as an undercover FBI agent.


In the opening scene of the movie, Donnie Brasco takes a jewel from gangster Lefty Ruggiero and examines it with a “jewelers loupe.” A loupe is a handheld magnifying glass. After just a brief peek at the jewel, Brasco says to Ruggiero “this jewel is a fake!”

How could he tell that?

I read up on it and learned that a trained/prepared person can look at a jewel and tell if its real or fake because… real gems/jewels are organic natural things and are composed of crystals and such. A real organic jewel is authentic because you can see all of the naturally occurring flaws and imperfections that ALL natural authentic things have.
How can we tell the difference between a department store mannequin and a real human person? The mannequin is smooth and “perfect” and a real person has thousands of wrinkles, flaws and naturally occurring imperfections.

If you go into a furniture store and look at displays of kitchen furniture…
There will probably be a bowl of fruit on the table.


Fake fruit.


Whoever makes fake fruit have really upped their game. As a kid fake fruit looked ridiculously artificial. It looks more believable nowadays, but you can still tell its fake fruit because…. it looks too perfect. No flaws, no dents, no spots or imperfections. And even if its world class fake fruit that looks 100% real, as soon as you pick it up it feels fake and it has no smell.


Hundreds of books have picked apart the Warren Report and found many flaws. Some of these supposed flaws are exagerrations or outright lies from the conspiracy authors, but not all of them. There ARE imperfections in the Warren Report.

Which is all the more reason I think we should believe it.

Different witnesses describe the same thing vastly differently.
Does that mean one of them is lying? No, it means one or all of them brought their own personalities and emotional baggage to their memories of an event.

Different witnesses describe the rifle found as either a Mauser or a Mannlicher Carcano. Both conflicting reports are in the Warren Report.

Different witnesses describe the origin of the shots as coming from vastly different places. The conflicting testimonies are all included in the Warren Report.
Even the witnesses who said the shots came from the Book Depository disagreed as to which window the shot came from.

The paraffin and fingerprint evidence is less than perfect. These facts are are included in the Warren Report.

Some witness testimony seems to make it seem it couldn’t have been Oswald. These testimonies have not been suppressed.

Frazier said Oswalds package was only 2 feet long. His sister says it was between 2 or 3 feet long. A man at the door of the depository says he didn’t see Oswald with any package at all.
These 3 stories contradict each other and go against the official Lone Gunman narrative. But they are all included in the final report.

The witnesses of the Tippet shooting almost universally disagree on the details. They give different descriptions of of the time, Oswald/s hair, the color of his jacket, even the color of HIM ( his skin). They give different descriptions of the direction he was walking in. All of these conflicting testimonies were included in the final Warren Report.

The Dallas cop who knocked on Ruth Paine’s door said she said “come in we’ve been expecting you”
She says she didn’t say that.


Explanation?

One of them is lying? Both of them are lying?

One or both of them “mis remembered” the incident?


These 2 contradicting statements are both in the final report.
(By the way fellow JFK buffs….. Surely Ruth Paine had numerous visits from law enforcement after November 22. Did she maybe say that on a different visit from the cops? Im not saying she DID, I just wonder if….. maybe???)

An FBI rifle expert test fired Oswalds rifle and found several flaws with it. The scope was off, it sometimes jammed and it often fired “high and to the right.” These flaws were all included in the Warren Report.

Some witnesses went from being “Maybe I saw Oswald” witnesses to “It was definitely Oswald” witnesses. Someone got them to change their story?

One of the autopsy doctors burned his original bloody autopsy notes and turned in a cleaner, bloodless copy. Conspiracy Theorists think there was something different, perhaps incriminating in the original notes.
If that were the case, then WHY do we know about the original notes? If the second version of the notes were a part of some kind of deception, why do we KNOW that they are a second version? If I were that autopsy Doctor and and some gun wielding agent of “The Conspiracy” had threatened me and coerced me into writing up a second autopsy report with different information, then ordered me to burn the original, I would be too terrified to ever ever EVER tell anyone what I had done.


Whats the best way to keep a secret?


Don’t tell anyone.


Why did the autopsy Doctor TELL us he burned his first version of the notes??? If he were (forced to be?) in on a cover up, wouldn’t he just tell us the second notes were the first notes?

How would ANYONE ever know about the first notes if he didnt tell us?


Doesn’t everything, (EVERYTHING!) ever created in this world have a first draft?

A first version that ends up night and day different from what eventually gets released?

A company like Microsoft probably has many people working on a new software before it gets released. They probably create dozens, if not hundreds of revised versions of the software before they THINK they’re done? And even then, isn’t it all but expected by both the company and the customers that there is a 99.9% chance there are flaws and imperfections in their “final” version, and we should expect them to release Version 1 point two, version 1 point two, 1 point three in the weeks after we buy the software?

And of course there are the theories of The Mysterious Deaths and the suppressed/altered evidence.


We’ve all seen the part of GOODFELLAS wherein DeNiro’s character Jimmy kills everyone who might slip up and expose the Lufthansa heist:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyAK1iXqxiQ


And there is the similar THEORY that the criminals who killed JFK then went and killed anyone who might expose them.


J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, all the members of the Warren Commission and President Lyndon Johnson were all supposedly afraid to speak up against “the conspiracy,” but various housewives, waitresses and other powerless nobodies were NOT afraid to speak up and appeared in various JFKA documentaries with no ill response to them.


We can easily disprove the “Mysterious Deaths” by seeing who WASN’T silenced. Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald are still alive, as well as several other witnesses who said things contrary to the Lone Gunman theory. And most if not most of all contrary witnesses lived for decades after the assassination and died of natural causes after telling their accounts to numerous magazine and book authors with no repercussions.

The official story of the Zapruder film and other autopsy materials was that they was suppressed (kept from the public) because they were too graphic and offensive. The CT story is that they were suppressed in order to hide the truth.
And yet the pictures and film(s) eventually leaked out anyway.

If the Warren Report really was one big lie, if it really left out/altered anything that might prove a conspiracy, why did they leave in all of these contradictions and imperfections?

If it was all a fake, they would have left out ALL of the contradictory testimony. In a fake Warren Report there wouldn’t be these one or two people who thought they saw a Mauser. In a fake Warren Report every witness would have seen Oswald’s Carcano and no other.

A fake Warren Report would tell us of perfect fingerprints on the rifle and boxes and a faked paraffin test would have found definite proof that Oswald fired a rifle (and pistol).
A fake Warren Report with coerced/altered testimony would have Frazier his sister, his mother and the door monitor seeing an over 3 foot long package in Oswald’s hand. They would have maybe even seen the rifle peeking out from the paper bag.

A faked Warren Report would have had all of the Tenth and Patton witnesses seen the same thing. Definitely Oswald, definitely at the right time for him to have walked from the rooming house.

A faked Warren Report would have the FBI rifle expert report that the rifle was perfect and absolutely capable of doing what the WC said it did.

A powerful conspiracy would NEVER leave outsiders/civilians alone with the photos and films and give them a chance to make copies/smuggle them out.

If the burning of the autopsy notes was in pursuit of keeping a secret, why do we know of the first version? We should only know about the second version, and not know it WAS a second version.
I know if I altered/forged something, I wouldn’t tell anyone about the first version. Its not like the autopsy notes were turned in, included in the final report and then years later someone put in a new/different version.

Oswald’s rifle is a few inches different than the one in the ad. Proof of a conspiracy?
Lee Oswald was the first, last and only person in the history of the world to get something through mail order that was a little different than what was advertised?!?!?
A high powered conspiracy wouldn’t make an error like that.


I read somewhere ( I can’t remember where) that Gary Shaw ( of the Sixth Floor Museum) bought a copy of the gun magazine that Oswald ordered his rifle from. AND he also bought the next months issue- and in THAT issue the same company ( Klein’s) was selling Carcano rifles that were the same length that Oswald got. So that explains the discrepancy, they ran out of 40.2 inch rifles and started filling orders with the second lot. I wonder if anyone at Kleins even KNEW that the second lot of rifles was slightly different. I wonder if Oswald himself even realized the rifle in his hands was a few inches off from what he ordered>

Lee’s mother and wife described the details and the number of backyard photos differently. Why didn’t the conspiracy alter their testimonies to make them match up?

The Dallas Police said they remembered finding a Minox spy camera in Ruth Paine’s house. The FBI said the same item was a light meter. Why include BOTH descriptions in the final Report?


And if Ruth Paine WAS some kind of spooky agent, and IF she WAS expecting the Police to show up soon, why would she SAY “We’ve been expecting you”?


If she were a spook and was expecting the Police to show up, why didn’t she get rid of any supposedly incriminating evidence from her house? The Minox spy camera, the “aluminum file cabinets of spy reports” and anything else that might tie her to a conspiracy?

Yes the Warren Report is full of imperfections. Which is proof that it was organic and real.

Video into Film?

mattkprovideo.com/2023/09/03/video-into-film/

Some 4K (3840 by 2160) drone ( DJI Mavic Pro 3) and iPhone video footage, tinkered with in Adobe After Effects to look like film.

I played with “Brightness/Contrast”, color, LUT, “add grain” and “add dust” to get the look I like.

Shot at the Bexar County Courthouse in downtown San Antonio, Texas. September 2, 2023. And at the nearby “Love Locks.”

www.bexar.org/2987/Bexar-Courthouses

www.thesanantoniothings.com/love-lock-bridge-san-antonio/

Fred Litwin

www.mattkprovideo.com/2021/10/01/fred-litwin/

A conversation with lifelong JFK conspiracy buff and author Fred Litwin.

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/

http://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/blank-page-5

I am going to use this as part of my forthcoming documentary debunking (most) JFK conspiracy theories.

This is all uncut, and after the first minute, I didn’t even attempt to have the video match with what we’re talking about.

A rough YouTube transcript of our conversations with many grammatical and transcribing errors:

All right Fred, and testing one two three one two three testing

Can I interview you for my documentary?


Absolutely

All right tell me about becoming a jfk buff what led to it
I was basically 18 years old i’m sitting at home on a thursday night watching Geraldo Rivera

and he shows the Zapruder film for the first time on national tv a

And i had never seen it never heard of it and just blew my mind and after i saw it i realized i wanted to learn more
But more about why did the warren commission not find that evidence compelling why did they say that JFK was hit from behind
As i wanted to find the answers so i immediately went to the library and the first book i got out was mark lane’s rush to judgment
and that started me on the path led to Cyrill Wecht

and the doctors and the autopsy x-rays and photos a

nd i was hooked


how old were you when when this started?


i’m 18 years old 18

okay and what what led you from thinking it was a conspiracy to thinking it wasn’t

i
I was uh sort of lucky in that i was in montreal canada and one of my best friends basically said

look you know if there was a conspiracy it had to be a really small one

it couldn’t be huge

so i never believed in a really big conspiracy
I went to mba school in 1978 and i decided i really wanted to focus on my studies so i literally put the jfk assassination to the side


i didn’t go back to it u until the 1980s many many years later and and then by then i was starting to rethink some of my positions


Largely based on the house select committee on assassinations

and i had gotten a cd-rom of all their volumes of evidence and i started reading it and it blew my mind


All the scientific testing they did and every single scientific test they did supported the lone gunman and uh i it changed me all


Right now what led you to do your book on Garrison oh also if you could answer in a form of a complete sentence as if i didn’t ask it.

I decided to do a book on Garrison after my first book because people said oh you know what you don’t really know garrison that well you didn’t go through garrison’s papers you’re relying on a lot of secondary authors and so you know you really don’t know the story
And so i decided to look into this and just at the same time somebody email emailed me a link to all the garrison papers they are all online so i said you know what i might as well have a look
And i started looking at these papers and i started noticing crazy memo after crazy memo after crazy memo and after i started accumulating like 20 or 30 of these crazy memos
i started saying you know what maybe there’s a book here because this guy was crazier than i really thought and that was the the genesis
Now the people of my generation it’s funny jim garrison’s name doesn’t come up in other people’s conspiracy books
no his other conspiracy books show up in his but they don’t talk about him and to my generation you’re gonna choke on this but you know where i’m going with this , jim garrison is kevin costner , uh moby dick standing up against the white whale of the federal government and he was on the to the truth but they had infiltrated him with spies and and betrayers and and in the end he was telling the truth and
Look, Jim Garrison was on the way to nowhere um he he bombed out with his case against clay shaw he was living in obscurity he wrote a book in 1991 it really didn’t do all that well nobody was really paying attention to him and he got resuscitated by Oliver Stone and so oliver stone made him the centerpiece of his movie JFK and that brought Garrison back to life he was back from the dead and with a vengeance and all of a sudden his book started selling like crazy and he made a lot of money and unfortunately for him he died a year later

well tell me what is wrong with the public perception of jim garrison

Well i think the public perception again is largely based on the movie for those who even think about him it’s largely based on the movie and this heroic figure who has stood against the government and stood up for the truth and and was this this this crusader um who uh was really really phenomenal and the truth was that he was a charlatan who really uh investigated the jfk assassination not only came up with nothing he had to invent a conspiracy out of thin air and the process ruined the life of an innocent gay man

all right all right let’s talk about that it uh as if um we’ve talked about this online a lot let’s pretend like we never talked about it before
um from the beginning what why how did this dallas conspiracy in in his mind somehow start in new orleans well he he realized that he was involved in two leads back in 1963 because Lee Harvey Oswald lived in New Orleans for five months in the spring and summer of 1963
and there were two leads that garrison was involved with back in 1963 investigating them the first lead was about david ferry who was a a pilot who had basically taken a trip to houston on the weekend of the assassination and there was a drunk in new orleans who called up garrison’s office and said this guy ferry is involved uh he knew lee harvey oswald they served together in the civil air patrol um
He’s involved that was one lead was that Jack Martin jack martin was the one who called garrison’s office he called everybody in fact okay and the second lead was related to dean andrews who was this attorney who was in the hospital the weekend of the assassination and claimed that a man by the name of clay bertrand phoned him in the hospital and said would you go to dallas and represent Lee Harvey Oswald and so those were the two leads that garrison was involved in investigating back in 1963
and so when the assassination was a big controversy in 1966 garrison said well you know what maybe i should go back and reinvestigate those two new orleans leads
maybe there’s something there
maybe that was the genesis of the ultimate conspiracy and how how did he go get uh
and we talked about i’m going to cut this out but because i wanted to say this as short as possible but um

the problem with logic is why would somebody in new orleans call up a municipal lawyer who’s not licensed in Texas and had no experience in murder trials tell if you can talk about that
well you know this this whole i mean dean andrews was the kind of guy who liked to embellish stories and he had a big mouth and liked to talk and in fact he was when he got the so-called phone call to represent Lee Harvey Oswald he was under heavy sedation in a hospital in new orleans being treated for double pneumonia so even he after a few days of being questioned said you know what maybe i made this up maybe this really didn’t happen
Nobody else knows about this probably was a figment of my imagination but what really surprised garrison i think is when dean dean andrews testified before the warren commission that year in 64 and told the same story again
he resuscitated the story and i think that’s what surprised uh garrison why did he do that why did he say tell that story under oath can he just say i made it up or i don’t remember i don’t know well he could have i think he uh decided he had to be the center of attention and i think that he got caught up like he did before with being uh sort of a star who knew something
it’s kind of boring when you say i don’t know anything it’s much more interesting when you say i do know something and i think he went with it not realizing there would be real life consequences both for him in later life because he was charged with perjury by garrison but also he never expected that clay shaw’s life would be ruined
how do you go from clay bertrand to clay shaw well
it’s a good question how do you go from clay bertrand to clay shaw so garrison was convinced that clay bertrand was real who was he and he sort of uh with the help of some of his assistant da’s put together the concept that um clay bertrand was clay shaw because clay shaw also spoke spanish clay bertrand spoke spanish
clay shaw was gay as was clay bertrand and they shared the same first name and so to garrison this made sense that he had this unique belief that gay people when they use pseudonym keep the same first name change the second name um and so it made sense that clay shaw must be clay bertrand
where would he get that idea from that did gays use pseudonyms they used
That’s a good question where did he get it from maybe he got it from his own experience in gay bars
i don’t know uh but he certainly uh that was i mean he picked up his d.a or is that like do you think that was a thing in the 60s that gay man would closeted would use fake names i think there was uh probably some use of pseudonyms but i think a lot of gay people just go by one name
yeah okay i’m my mal or i’m bill or whatever you know there’s no real actually no need for a second name but uh because you go to gay bar and bill just go home with the guy i mean it’s pretty common right
so it doesn’t it doesn’t make any sense that anybody would hire dean andrews to be no i mean he wasn’t that kind of lawyer but also by going back to Clay Shaw
i mean Clay Shaw was really uh everybody knew him in new orleans he was on tv often he was in newspapers a lot he stood he was six feet four um with his magnificent white hair
He was very very well known it really would have been tough for him to use a pseudonym uh from people not know who he was okay but we know you’ve got the fallacy of him saying that this was uh glacial clay bertrand now and you’ve they made the connection
Was it the pamphlet the 544 camp street that made him think there was a connection to uh somebody who was under the same roof but not really the same office uh banister
Well that was all you know that was all related yes banister there was the guy banister connection uh which was part of the david ferry link right so david ferry did some work for guy bannister so that was a whole what did it work what did he do some investigative work for uh uh well no actually he was involved more involved with guy bannister with the anti-castro cuban cause in the early 60s like 60 to 61.
But you had these two different story lines which was the david ferry and guy bannister connection and then you also had this sort of bertrand stuff with Dean Andrews and what dean what jim garrison did was he melded the two together into one story and that was sort of a genius move on his part to meld it all together into one story and he did that through perry russo through the use of hypnosis and sodium pentathol and he melted the two stories together
All right tell the folks about 544 camp street which was one roof with many rooms
But that most people don’t know well it was a building on camp and lafayette so there was a building there and it had two entrances one on camp street and one on lafayette and so guy bannister had an office in the building and and sergio arcata smith who ran a cuban organization he had an office in the same building but they used different entrances because they went to different parts of the building and so oswald not on the pamphlets he handed out but one of his fair play for cuba pamphlets about the organization he stamped on it with a hand stamp the 544 camp street address on a few of them and so the question was why did he pick that was he there did he know guy bannister did he know sergio arcacha smith how was he connected and that that was a big thing that tied oswald into this whole thing uh jim moore he said on the radio interview that bannister and clay shaw would have gotten along with oil and water they would not have gotten along on any level would you do any research on that well bennett the problem with banister is banister normally was anti-communist and hated castro but he was a segregationist he was very very anti-civil rights and that’s not that’s not who clay shaw was clay shaw was very very much for civil rights and that’s why i have a hard time believing that lee harvey oswald was secretly working with guy bannister i mean i just can’t see how the two of them would have would ever see eye to eye on things like civil rights all right now what did he what what material did he have okay let’s start with the grand jury in new orleans because i’ve read that it to me you know to an outsider it seems like well you can’t get a grand jury indictment unless you’ve really got some solid evidence but i’ve heard that in new orleans under garrison it was he had it rigged that he could pretty much convict you of being donald duck well first off he had the power in new orleans to indict anybody on his own didn’t need the grand jury for a non-capital crime garrison could just sign a piece of paper and you were indicted so he didn’t have to go to the grand jury he could go to the grand jury as an option but he didn’t have to in the case of clay shaw he did three things he filed a bill of information which is his own indictment he went to the grand jury for an indictment and he went to a preliminary hearing to get an indictment from the judges and he did i think all three to cover his ass so that he could say later on you see i had all this evidence everybody else agreed with me i think that’s why he did it did we talk this morning we could retell that story about the uh the alias card the the arrest card well in the trial all of a sudden the the garrison wanted to bring up the fact that when clay shaw was booked at the police station after his arrest that on the arrest form it asks you they asked him what alias he was known as and on the form on one of the copies that says clay bertrand and so the policeman testified that yes that was what what clay shaw said he said his alias was clay bertrand and that’s why i typed it out but on there were many copies of that form and it was only on one copy of the form and it was there were actually witnesses there was another policeman there who actually testified at the trial and said he faishah was not asked the question and he did not say that and so the judge even the judge haggerty who was quite biased in the case ruled against the admissibility of the arrest card

now in both his book and the movie you get the impression that he had a rock solid case and he was being undermined by the cia and they corrupted some of his people and that the um bill of broussard uh sent in like fake or crazy witnesses or extremely unreliable witnesses to undermine garrison what do you say to that well it’s patently untrue i mean garrison really undermined his own investigation by using dodgy witnesses in the trial i mean he could only blame himself charles spicell who is the big witness that really undermined the case uh was interviewed by james alcock who was the second in command and spicell said on the stand in the trial i told garrison about my you know but the things i believed he was the guy who was fingerprinting his own daughter right every time she went to university and came home um so they should have known that and they didn’t and uh yeah it’s easy to blame the cia but in fact it was their own their own malfeasance all right um

um

i think we you did a blog or something about uh even if he was going around gay bars calling himself Clay Bertrand
plot well this is it he was in this he was supposedly in this top secret assassination plot in 1963 and then he can he continues to use the same pseudonym it doesn’t make sense to to keep the same pseudonym year after year after year after you’ve just plotted to kill the president of the united states
but that was what they were alleging and if they were a part of some super secret plot to kill the president why would they talk about it in front of strangers at a party well
exactly they talked about it in front of him they talked about this so-called conspiracy in front of perry russo and not only did they talk about it but then kennedy is killed and perry russo doesn’t even ask david ferry hey what was going on there you talked about this kennedy was killed
russo doesn’t go to the warren commission
he doesn’t go to the fbi he said he was too busy at school um so you just belie’s belief that this guy actually heard anything like that and then you know did nothing
tell us about the James Phelan story that perry russo originally said i knew david’s very
maybe i could help you and then that story changes well the whole story about perry russo started when david ferry died and was in the papers and perry russo was living in baton rouge
He was an insurance agent and he saw the newspapers and he knew david ferry
and so he called the local baton rouge newspapers he called the baton rouge tv station
said hey i knew perry i knew david ferry and david ferry always talked about getting kennedy and that was the story
there was no assassination party
there was no lee harvey oswald there was no clay shaw t
here was no clay bertrand
it was just i knew david ferry and he once said he was going to get kennedy
that was it
that was the story in baton rouge

and then under shaumbra who worked for garrison

went to baton rouge to talk to perry russo

who instantly told him

you know you should hypnotize me because perhaps i could remember more details about what happened


And so they took him to new orleans and they gave him sodium pentathol a

nd all of a sudden he started remembering this so-called assassination party with david ferry and clay bertrand


did he actually remember it or isn’t there like tapes that he gets pretty clear they’re implanting memories


well we don’t have the tape of the sodium pentathol session so we don’t know


we have a memo about what happened there and that’s where they they sort of u

h started their whole melding of the thing

but you there are some interviews with perry russo with the clay shaw defense team in 1971

and he said when he got to new orleans he just by the questions that he was asked he knew what to say they were shaping the questions and leading them

and he knew exactly what to say and what they wanted what what


why would he why would he want to do that though? Was he being bribed or coerced or…?


you know there’s no shortage of people in this case who came forward with stories okay


people sometimes people just want to get involved for whatever reason they don’t know what they’re really getting into and they come forward i just uh last week blogged the story of arthur strout


i don’t know if you heard of arthur strout but he was a dishwasher

he was a dishwasher in up in boston and he contacted Garrison and said

you know what i i have pictures of david ferry and Lee Harvey Oswald

and i i knew them i knew i have all these stories


and they gave him a plane ticket to come to new orleans and he takes the plane ticket and halfway there he decides
you know what i really didn’t see anything
and goes home
but there are many people like that who came forward with all sorts of information
many prisoners would call garrison’s office and say
yeah i know david ferry i knew clay shaw i knew this
And so there was no shortage of people coming forward
Perry russo came forward and he was malleable and fit the bill


But now wasn’t there going to be a a is it a second trial or hearing or something and he pled the fifth?


Well there was a there was a hearing in 1971 and this was a hearing to determine if Garrison’s prosecution of Shaw for perjury should go forward

So they held three days of hearings in january 1971
and perry russo was called to the stand and he took the fifth
he wouldn’t testify and uh

the clay shaw defense team asked the asked the judge asked garrison

would you give perry russo immunity so he can testify freely

and they would not grant him immunity


and so rousseau knew that if he testified that shaw that the whole thing was made up

he would have been charged with perjury


and so that’s why he took the fifth

now we talked a lot about uh people anybody connected to the assassination
that if you knew Lee Harvey Oswald or you were there in Dealey Plaza you became something of a micro celebrity and it seemed like a lot of people like said i want to be one of those too

Yeah you know look anytime you have a big crime like this with publicity across the country around the world people pop up everywhere

yeah i saw lee harvey oswald

there were people in my coming from montreal

there were people in montreal city i saw the rv ozil in montreal the summer of 63 at a pro cuba rally the rcmp the royal canadian mounted police investigated big huge file

you can get about their investigation of lee harvey oswald and they actually got pictures of all the people at this little demonstration there was only like eight people there oswald wasn’t there

but there were people who came forward and said he was in wisconsin

and he was out west and he was in florida

this happens in almost any big crime where you get a lot of

if publicity hadn’t died would he would he was he gonna he was about to sue garrison

clay shaw sued garrison for five million dollars in damages

and uh the case was whinding through the courts

and the problem was that clay shaw was getting sick

he had cancer and he started telling his lawyers to hurry up

let’s go with this case let’s get it going

and unfortunately he got sicker and he died before the case could be heard.

And so the course the case went to a court to determine if the if it could go forward because clay shaw had no Heirs.

he was a gay man with no children and the court initially the courts ruled that it could move forward under the terms of the will his lawyer was named as the plaintiff in the case

but ultimately it went right up to the supreme court and because of a because of louis louisiana laws

the case could not go forward because clay shaw had no Heirs and so the case was dropped

Unfortunately tell us what the clinton witnesses

suppose the supposed clinton was

well it was a very big surprise at the start of the trial the clay shaw trial in 1969

right at the start and there were these witnesses who came forward from clinton louisiana which is a small town 150 miles north of uh of new orleans

it was a town that was embroiled in a lot of controversy in the early 60s over voting rights for black citizens

and these witnesses came forward who said that they had seen lee harvey oswald with david ferry and clay shaw in clinton

um in which they were um trying to get a job for lee harvey oswald at the mental hospital in jackson louisiana

and so there were all these witnesses the white and black witnesses who came forward

and they who saw these these men

and it sort of it shook the clay shaw defense team because they knew nothing about this

and really had no because there was no discovery back then in the louisiana courts

and that helped the case that Lee Harvey Oswald knew Shaw and knew Ferry

but it was all a fix

somehow it was a fix

i mean some this was a kkk town and somehow it was all pieced together

um this story was incredibly implausible.

All right tell us about the story that supposedly it came out years later that Clay Shaw did work for the CIA?

but if you dig into that story it’s not what it sounds like

yeah well there was basically right after clay shaw was arrested there was a series of articles in a communist controlled newspaper in rome italy called paesa serra

and it was a series of six articles about clay shaw

he was on the board of the directors of a world trade center in rome called centro mondial commercial

and the newspaper charged that that was a CIA front organization

that was funneling money to right-wing extremist groups and so that was the linkage of they claimed the clay shaw was involved

and clay shaw was working for the CIA

with this right-wing organization the reality that was completely made up

it was most probably a KGB planted story

but the reality was that clay shaw did have a cia connection from 1948 to 1956

clay shaw was a domestic contact of the cia

because he was head of the international trade mart he knew a lot about trade with communist countries

and so on several occasions he provided information to the cia about international trade

and that ended in 1956

and that was the extent of his involvement with the cia

Speaking of which there’s one theory that all of us the mark lane books all of this was some commie plot to undermine americans confidence in their government sounds like a crazy theory but people thought

this is not so crazy tell me about that

well there’s there’s no question there’s no question that the cia the kgb there’s there’s no question that the kgb would like to try to help put into the minds of the american people that the cia was responsible for the assassination

and they actually ran several operations to help this first they funneled money to mark lane

secondly if you remember that operation there was a letter that was sent to a mr hunt

i don’t know if you remember this but it was a letter sent to mr hunt and it was from lee harvey oswald

and it said if if i could be of any help to you or any assistance please contact me blah blah blah

and that letter was sent anonymously to Harold Weisberg and a couple of other critics of the warren report

now what’s interesting is that that was most probably a KGB operation

and the hunt the mr hunt that they were referring to was e howard hunt of watergate fame

but to the warren commission critics they all thought it was h.l hunt the oil billionaire in texas

and so it’s slightly backfired

uh didn’t quite work

but that was most probably a kgb operation then

there’s the Pias Sera that i talked

about trying to say that clay shaw was was connected to the cia

that was most probably a kgb operation a

And i keep on saying the most interesting files that have yet to be released are not in washington

they’re in moscow

and those files in the kgb that talk about perhaps other kgb plots or

KBG operations to help prove that the cia was behind the assassination

those are the files i really want to see

hmm okay do you think there’s any possibility that Oswald was involved in some kind of in full sentence

bio weapons program,

did he supposedly have a mistress who brought him into a bio weapons program in new orleans?

Makes for a great story but

uh that’s absolutely false and there’s nothing to that

i say it in a full sentence but my voice

well the the whole concept of lee harvey oswald having a mistress and bio weapons

and any sort of fanciful conspiracy is just ridiculous

and no basis in fact

and whether it’s Judy Vary Baker

anybody else it’s just completely false

okay um tell us about what some people would call uh Norman Mailer called

” the sickness”

where you just can’t shake your obsession with the Kennedy assassination?

well i think you know the question is about the sickness

and the kennedy assassination

I call it “Assassination fever”

And once you get assassination fever

particularly if you believe in conspiracy

uh we’re not even if you believe

even if you don’t believe in conspiracy

once you get the fever it’s hard to shake it

i mean for me myself i mean i was very very much interested in the 1970s

i let it go i stopped it and i even gave away all my correspondence with cyril wacht and harold weisberg

threw it out gave away all my books

and then it was sort of rekindled in the 1980s and 1990s

And i literally had to buy back all the books that i had thrown out

or given away like i think i bought Crossfire three times over the course of my of many years

it’s hard to shake and once you get into it i feel sort of like Adam West and batman

you know adam west played batman in the tv series and all of a sudden you get type cast

and he was very different he actually felt you know what

i’m typecast as batman let me play to it i’m going to be batman i’m going to enjoy it i’m going to spend the rest of my life playing to my fans

and he had a great life

and i think right now for me you know what i don’t know if i could shake this fever so i might as well debunk as much stuff as i can um a

nd and uh be productive uh in the assassination uh stuff e

QUESTION:

Even people who haven’t read the conspiracy books and just have only the basic knowledge it’s it’s i think for a lot of it it’s hard to believe it’s one it’s hard enough to believe that Oswald did what he did then it’s even more difficult to believe about jack ruby

who got away with what he got away

we expect us to believe one crazy night i’ll buy two crazy nuts on the same weekend

really difficult to buy

and then it gets worse with what we are told was the single bullet scratch that the magic bullet theory that ziggy zag then came out Pristine

and the “Back and to the left” thing and the fact that they won’t that the files are locked

i think that basic stuff is what most people think of when the kennedy assassination

Fred Litwin responds:

Look after i wrote my first book i had a lot of people coming up to me when i would tell them

that i was writing on the JFK assassination

they’d look at me like there’s something funny about that r

Right something happened

what was it with the shot from the front

a lot of people don’t know very much about it

but they know there’s something strange something weird something going on

something funny it’s

i get this all the time from people who know nothing

oh was it jack ruby

what was that guy’s name

well there’s something strange there

and so yeah it’s in people’s consciousness

this psyche that that yeah there’s i don’t know any of the details

but there’s something really weird and funny about the assassination

All right and is there a simpler way to debunk all that rather than just go on and on about

Well you know actually it was an exit one that caused the head to go back into the left

You know it’s hard to debunk something like that

because it’s it’s sort of people just have a general feeling

and so it’s how do you feel with the general feeling

you could say

okay you’re wrong there’s nothing to it i

i’ve had a lot of friends who were like they won’t argue with me but they just think there’s something there

but they can’t put it into words

they don’t know enough about it they don’t want to read anymore

they’re not really particularly interested in reading my books

but they know there’s something there and that’s it and there’s nothing you can do for some people

for some other people they they’re very very convincible and they can understand what’s going on

now

Wasn’t there some a witness to the tip assassination that didn’t want to come forward because he was in that neighborhood paying a social visit to a woman other than his wife i i i

there probably was i don’t know that much about it to be honest i’m not uh but yeah i’m sure there was and

of things these uh you know these these things happen all the time about uh about

mistresses and affairs and

uh i’m always drawn to the song

the long black veil do you know this is the song the long black veil i might so johnny cash

saying it a lot of people made it famous but the song is about a man who was accused of murdering somebody else and he said i don’t know what i don’t know what to do

because i i didn’t commit the murder

but i was in the arms of my best friend’s wife

yeah well the exact that’s the kind of thing

like i didn’t commit that like he never came forward

and he was killed but so there’s lots of that all the time well i

sn’t that clay shaw that uh garrison had him by they the nards because he had to keep certain secrets

well clay shaw was in the closet and homosexuality was illegal and so you know it was something that clay shaw didn’t want to talk about

and he didn’t want to talk about
is interested in s m and and all of this made him extremely vulnerable


um but it also made a lot of people in the french quarter in new orleans extremely vulnerable to uh to threats and to uh coercion by garrison and his henchmen

Well, from your research i when i think in new orleans i i think of it as an anything goes city nobody really cares what you do is your business i just assume it’s always been like that
is that am i wrong about that?

You’re wrong about that because back in 1962 the police and the da’s office issued a statement that they were going to wage a war against uh drinking prostitution and homosexuality a

nd they did wow just shut down the city of new orleans i mean well you know it’s it’s the problem is it what what garrison did and it was going after gay people was an easy way to get informants

So you had the french quarter and so he really quickly figured out hey i can arrest people for crimes against nature i could turn them in from defendants to informant

okay and so he discovered yeah i can have a stable of all these informants who will tell me all sorts of things going on in the french quarter so the way of coercion

Something he discovered very early homosexuality was a good a good lever against people
And then he also shook down a lot of people for money so people were arrested for homosexuality and you pay enough money it goes away
it’s in my book
the letter uh that from the attorney general’s office to louisiana the one of the assistants wrote a letter to hoover so you’ve got to investigate
there’s a homosexual shakedown racket going on in new orleans and in fact i uncovered another letter in my book from an anonymous person to ramsey clark the attorney general saying you got to come investigate
i’m a gay person there’s they are shaking down gay people in new orleans

Do you think that this FBI and or the CIA was tapping or spying on Garrison?

no
i they weren’t they were certainly not tapping they were interested in what garrison was saying
why wouldn’t they
look garrison was going around accusing the cia accusing the fbi of all these crimes
if i accused you of a crime you’d want to know what i was saying
the cia had to understand what was garrison saying
what was garrison alleging because they themselves had to determine
did Garrison have any inside information any secret information?

that perhaps he shouldn’t so they had to monitor him they weren’t bugging him
and in fact there’s lots of memos it’s in my book
i’ll be doing some more blog posts about it
but that actually was hands off both the fbi and the cia told their people hands off garrison
don’t go near him
don’t talk to him
leave him alone hmm um


i just i lost i just lost my 2000 next question


oh didn’t garrison think that maybe if he cracked this case then it was on to be governor garrison and president garrison and he

well he was well on his way politically he was very very uh effective as a D.A in gaining political power he was even the governor was was scared of him

So he could have gone a lot further a
nd in fact had he not gone down the JFK rat hole he most probably would have been governor or vice president or senator.

He could have gone on to much bigger political office

didn’t his uh associates his underlings actually want him to drop it when david ferry they breathe a sigh of relief like he’ll drop it now

yeah so when david ferry died unexpectedly that was an opportunity for him to drop the case
and his assistants said to him
look now’s the time you could drop the case you could be a hero you could say that your chief suspect just died
you did your best
you tried hard
you wanted to crack the case
it’s time to drop it move on to something else
but he said
no this is the crime of the century and i’m going to solve it

did david ferry do you think he committed suicide or did he die of a berries aneurysm or

david ferry did not commit suicide

he died of a berry aneurysm which is a congenital defect

and so the autopsy had affected a full forensic autopsy

and not only did they find evidence of an aneurysm but they found evidence of an earlier bleed

and so it was definitely not suicide

it was definitely not murder

it was completely natural causes

And in fact in the weeks preceding his death he was complaining of headaches

he felt he was a very sick man

he thought he had encephalitis

he told many people he was dying um

and that’s why you have these so-called suicide notes they’re not really suicide notes

they are farewell letters because he thought he was dying okay