Black OP Radio
December 10th, 2009
Guest - Doug Horne
Osanic - Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Black Op Radio. Today we have the privilege of speaking to Doug Horne. Hello, Doug and how are you?
Horne - I’m great Len and thanks very much for having me on this evening.
Osanic - You have been in the research community for awhile and for those who don’t know the role that you have played and research you’ve done why don’t you give us a brief background of yourself and then we will get into the work end and book, and your work on the Board, things that we’ll all get into in the interview.
Horne - Sure, Len. I grew up a Marine Corps brat. My Dad was in the Marine Corps for about 13 years. And then he got out and did something better, kind of lived all over the country. And then graduated from Ohio State with a B.A. in History in 1974 like a lot of other people, and then ended up working for the Navy for 20 years. I was a junior officer in the surface warfare community, that just means I worked on surface ships. I was a “bus driver,” as we called it on surface ships for 10 years. And then worked for the Navy another ten years as a Civil Servant in an anti-sub marine warfare program.
So, after working 20 years for the Navy I became aware of an opportunity to apply for a staff position on the Assassination Records Review Board. And I became aware of that opportunity at a COPA conference, the Coalition on Political Assassinations, at one of their conferences in 1994 in Washington, D.C. and was able to attend the first public hearing of the Review Board where they were trying to define an “assassination record.” I was energized by that and the next day I turned in my application. And many months later, about half a year later in March 1995 I received a job offer. And so I wound up working for the ARRB for the last three years of its 4 year life span. I worked for them from August 1995 until sunset at the end of September 1998, which means I really didn’t miss very much. The first year they were in business they were just busy hiring staff literally building an office in a building in downtown D.C., you know, constructing their own office, and getting clearances for people. So, I was there for, you know, just about everything that was significant and important.
And since that time I’ve done a number of things. I worked for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum after I left the Review Board, for awhile, and now I work for the State Department. Of course, now, let me make my caveat statement right now none of the views in my book, or none of the views expressed on this program represent any individual or agency of the government. They are my views alone. And now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s proceed.
Osanic - Right, so when you heard of a position with the ARRB how was it that it was open to the military?
Horne - Okay, that’s a good question, Len. At the COPA conference Jack Tunheim, who was one of the board members. In fact, he was the board member who had been selected by his peers to be the chairman of the Review Board, the chairman of the five VIP group that set our policy and made our big decisions he made his stump speech and then he was asked during the Q and A session by a member of the audience. are you still hiring staff and he said yes we are. And at that time it was just an open ended answer, yes we are. We are hiring staff and people can apply if they want to. So, as I proceeded to run this gauntlet of interviews, six telephone interviews, I was working in Hawaii at the time, I was out at D.C. on a business trip and was able to hear Jack Tunheim’s speech and attend the public hearing, but I had to go back to Hawaii, to my job, so I had to run this gauntlet of six telephone interviews over a period of six months, and during that process I learned there were four teams of analysts on the Review Board staff, one was the CIA records team, one was the FBI records team, one was the Secret Service and all other records team, and then the fourth team was of analysts was the military records team. And these teams were rather small. They were four to five people each. The head of analysis, the chief of all the analysts Jeremy Gunn, who also later became the General Counsel. He wore two hats. Jeremy Gunn made it clear to me that, you know, we need people on the military records team that have some military experience in their past and who will understand the military culture, and military terminology and messages, and who will be able to relate to those people within the government as we search for records. So, that’s why I was hired, I had some Navy experience under my belt.
Osanic - Okay, and you had an interest, then, in the JFK assassination to be attending a COPA conference.
Horne - Oh, that’s right Len, I was 11 when the assassination occurred. So, I have some rather vivid memories of the effect it had on my household and of the events on television that weekend. And then three years later when the first critical books began to come out in ‘66 and ‘67, they really captivated me. I was 14 then and I realized, hey this Warren Commission doesn’t make any sense in view of all of this evidence that these other authors are talking about, the official explanation didn’t make sense to me. So, I was captivated from the time I was 14 or 15 years old.
And then in 1981, like a lot of other people, I read this amazing book by David Lifton, “Best Evidence,” which was published, I think, in January of ‘81, right before I transferred overseas to Saudi Arabia, and it really grabbed me because it was about the medical evidence. You know, I thought what better way to study a murder case than to study the medical evidence. So, as the years progressed I just became more and more interested in the subject because the evidence in this case, as Josiah Thompson has pointed out many times, it just doesn’t come together like the evidence in a normal homicide case usually does. In fact, the more one studies-
Osanic - Well, to support the conclusion, though, right? That’s what we’re getting at right, that there is evidence, but it does not support the conclusion of a lone gunman.
Horne - That’s correct. You said it better than I did. The evidence does not come together to support a lone gunman conclusion. And, in fact, the more one studies the evidence the more fraught with conflict and the more problematic it becomes. So, -
Osanic - Okay, well I want to continue just from your first days at the ARRB, you also had mentioned to me though that we were going to break the interview into sections, so I don’t want to bypass anything, is this kind of the first section that you want to just continue with?
Horne - Sure, it’s a great time to launch into that. Right.
Osanic - Right. Well, my first question to you of interest would be then tell me of your early impressions of the first week that you’re working on the ARRB. Did you have a feeling that this was really going to make a breakthrough? Or was there a lot there?
Osanic - Len, I wondered what have I gotten myself into? I was almost in a state of shock, initially. Here I was, I had come almost 5,000 miles, moved myself at my own expense, had to pay for my own plane ticket. The Review Board didn’t pay for people to relocate, and didn’t pay for their moves. It was a temporary agency. They didn’t have a lot of money. And found myself on a staff, first of all with a lot of people with advanced degrees, people had Masters degrees or law degrees, or both, a couple of people had Ph.D.’s and law degrees, and I found out that about 2/3rds of the staff were either Warren Commission supporters or leaned in that direction, and about 1/3rd of the staff thought there might have been a conspiracy or had an open mind, you know, genuinely had an open mind and were curious about the conflicts in the medical evidence. So, I didn’t find the same proportion of beliefs, I’m not sure if belief is the right word, but I didn’t find the same proportion of opinions on the staff that we find in the general public. And later I came to understand the reasons for that. I was told by my boss Jeremy Gunn on three different occasions that none of the five board members believed there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. So, you would have to ask yourself, you know, what motivated them? I think what motivated them was the desire to restore trust in American institutions, to restore trust to the government, that the government could conduct a citizen review, and search for and locate classified records on this subject and get them released to the maximum extent allowed by the JFK Act. And so that’s what was motivating them, to do a good deed, and release records, and as they said many times let the chips fall where they may, but they did not expect any records that were released to reveal that there was a conspiracy. They wanted to do their duty as they saw it. But, because these five people, nominated by, basically by the establishment, one by the A.B.A., two by historical societies, one by a society of archivists, and one by the White House staff, and these five people determine who is going to be hired. So, they hired David Marwell as Executive Director. And David Marwell was officially an agnostic about the assassination but in reality he thought the Warren Commission basically got it right. So, that’s how the dominoes were falling. So, in retrospect I was very lucky to get a job on this staff. I was completely upfront with these people when I was interviewed I said I thought there was probably a domestic conspiracy to kill the president but that I could not define it. I was just concerned with all the conflicts in the evidence and that I wanted to learn all I could about it and in the process get all the records released that we could get released. And I think ultimately the main reason I got hired was because Jeremy Gunn one of the six people that interviewed me he had a like interest. He and I were both fascinated by the conflicts within the medical evidence. So he, he number one he needed a guy on the military records team, he needed another person, and number two he had an agenda that he wanted to pursue, if permitted later, which was to try to clarify the record as to how President Kennedy was killed, and to study the autopsy. That’s how I got my job.
And then as I was there I found out that how hard one worked and how motivated one was was much more important than what degree one has. There were people on that staff who had advanced degrees who didn’t do much work because they just weren’t that interested in the subject. Or viewed it as an exercise of resume building, and left, you know, after a year. And then there were other people who didn’t have as many degrees who probably got a lot more work done because they were much more interested in the subject. So, I learned a lot working there.
Osanic - So those were your early impressions-
Horne - My early impressions were do I even belong here? I wondered if I, first I was concerned that maybe I was in a group of people that were much more qualified than I was but after a couple of months I realized that the degrees didn’t matter that much, what mattered was what kind of research did you want to do as an individual to become familiar with the evidence in your area, that your team was working on. It was very much a situation there where your influence upon what the staff did was going to be proportionate to how much initiative you showed, and how many things you proposed to your boss, and how much you wanted to do. So, it all worked out fine in the long run.
Osanic - Right, over a three year period, but still you know it reminds me of the anecdote that when you see a team play, a hockey team, or you know, baseball or something you just assume everybody is good buddies but you don’t assume that some guys don’t get along with other guys or they rub each other the wrong way, or that it’s not really [a team.]
Horne - That’s right, Len, that’s right. There were times on the staff when the people’s opinions about the subject matter that we were working with did create friction(s). Sometimes I was involved in those friction. There were some people who really didn’t care much one way or the other, some staff members, many of the people hired because they had just gotten out of school, or were in-between jobs, and, I am just going to come out and say it, they could be low balled from the standpoint of salary, people who desperately needed a job, and wanted a job in the government and wanted to do honorable work, but they could be low balled. So, this agency that didn’t have much money was going after anybody it could get at the salaries it had predetermined and they were not generous. Unless you were a senior staff member the salaries were not generous, you could barely survive on them as a matter of fact, if you were at the mid-level or lower level of the staff. And in addition, David Marwell, the Executive Director, his, one of his goals was to avoid hiring “zealots,” and “people with an agenda,” and people that would try to “solve the assassination,” because maybe we should remind the audience here the JFK Records Act of 1992 which, of course, was born out of Oliver Stone’s movie and the controversy created by the film, the JFK Records Act did not empower the Review Board to reinvestigate the assassination or to reach conclusions in its final report. It only empowered the review board to search for assassination records in the government, to make sure that the agencies of the government were doing a thorough search, and then to make a determination about the proposed redactions, those areas of the record which the agencies did not want released. That was the job of the Review Board. [It] was to review the proposed redactions and then where we thought it was appropriate, which was most of the time to force the agencies to declassify them. (Doug Horne was about to say something when Len Osanic starts talking)
Osanic - Right. But, as one could imagine, this was like watered down by lawyers who are saying, well, we don’t want anybody to investigate this too deep but we just want to lift the lid enough to show people that everything was done, you know it really is lame, it’s a ridiculous excuse for saying that you’re allowed to look for documents but that you’re not allowed to make conclusions about them.
Horne - It was a cop out by congress.
Osanic - Yeah.
Horne - Congress was painfully aware that its investigation in the late ‘70’s had pleased no one. And let’s remember they concluded that there was probably a conspiracy to kill the president, but couldn’t define it, and then shut down.
Osanic - Yes, but if I can interrupt, really this is about people and people’s interest in their idea of the government, not congress, congress was probably dragged kicking and screaming to re-open this again, so what I’m saying is that interested concerned citizens had lobbied to have something done-
Horne - Yes.
Osanic - And this almost is the bare minimum that could be done. (laughs) It’s like saying-
Horne - You know, you’re right. It was the bare minimum, officially.
Osanic - Yeah.
Horne - But, thank god Jeremy Gunn and I, we did more than the bare minimum, and you’ve given me a great segue here to explain that.
Osanic - Okay, sure go ahead.
Horne - Before we get into areas of fraud in the evidence, Congressman [Louis] Stokes, who was the second Chairman of the House Assassinations Committee in the late 70’s, Congressman Stokes met with the Review Board, with the five VIPs, before I was hired, he met them early in the game and told them, that he encouraged them to look into the medical evidence and see if they could make more sense out of it than the House Select Committee had. That was done in private, but it was a defacto admission that he was aware that the country and the research community was not satisfied necessarily with the work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in trying to figure out where the wounds were and how many times the president was shot and from what directions. He was aware that there was still serious problems there. Because he encouraged them to try to clarify that area of evidence that is what gave Jeremy Gunn and I a foot in the door to do something besides just collect old records. So, what went on for three years and what, really what my book is about is the extra credit work, okay? My book is about the extra credit work, namely the fact that we took ten depositions of people associated with the autopsy and one group deposition of some of the treating physicians from Dallas, and numerous, numerous, numerous unsworn interviews of medical witnesses, morticians, and people involved with autopsy photography. So, that attempt to “clarify the record,” provided the basis for this book I’ve just written and I’m really grateful that we were permitted to do those things.
Osanic - Okay, so let’s get to maybe the first topic you have then, of the six areas you want to get to.
Horne - Sure. I have decided that it’s an unalterable, irrefutable fact that there was a medical cover-up at the highest levels of [the government in] President Kennedy’s death, of the true facts in his death. I don’t think that is subject to dispute anymore. One can still argue about who killed the president or why and that will probably go on forever, but I don’t think it can be denied anymore that there was a medical coverup and the reason I feel so confident in that assertion is that there are six areas where I found fraud in the evidence. Before we launch into the first one I would say to the listeners imagine that the Kennedy assassination puzzle, it’s like a 500 piece picture puzzle that you buy at the store, and imagine that in 1963 someone took half of the pieces 250 of the pieces and just threw them away and then put in 250 pieces that really didn’t belong in that puzzle just to confuse everyone and to present a false picture. And unfortunately, what I think researchers did for decades was to try to assemble this puzzle where half the pieces were missing and half the pieces they had to deal with were of the wrong picture.
Osanic - Well, you make a good point and the only criticism of the research community is if they are following a red herring it is because someone has planted this evidence-
Horne - Precisely.
Osanic - And it’s hard to fault somebody if they think they’ve discovered something and it doesn’t lead to where it should, because this is like misleading and phony evidence then, X-rays and photographs, and they are not the real thing.
Horne - Right, So, yes, everyone probably fell into the trap initially, of believing for decades, of believing that well if the government had the evidence its sacrosanct, it’s sacred, and we should trust it, and it’s just a matter of connecting the dots properly. I don’t think that’s the case. And the reason there has been no consensus on the wounds is, or what happened to the president is because half the puzzle pieces are wrong. So, you know, an awful lot of old guard researchers have resisted this notion that there is fraud in the evidence now for about the last 10 or 15 years. And they have resisted it because in their minds to acknowledge this would make the crime unlovable and parenthetically it would also make some of their work irrelevant. So, we are dealing with turf here, people are defending turf, and things they have written in the past. And I would say to these people if you made errors it’s not your fault, it’s because someone else monkeyed with the evidence and let’s just move forward.
So, the first area I’d like to talk about as we move forward is are the autopsy photographs and X-rays; there were many autopsy photos that have been destroyed, and I can tell you that it’s a firm fact that two skull X-rays have been destroyed. Now, how do I know this? I know this because during the course of our ten depositions of autopsy witnesses at the Review Board we were asking them questions based on their previous testimony to the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee, and in some cases about statements they have made to magazines, like for example the three pathologists were interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992. So, we were asking people well informed and appropriate questions about the autopsy photos and X-rays, and to make a long story short as I analyze the testimony by all the witnesses to the autopsy taken over the years I now conclude that if all of their recollections are correct there are as many as, now this is a maximum, there were 18 different views of the body that were taken that are not in the collection at the archives. And that’s not the archives fault, that is because they were culled from the collection, removed, by the people controlling this cover-up before those photos were put in the archives. But, that’s a lot of pictures that are not there. What are some of those? Well, some of those are a close-up of the entry wound in the skull with the scalp reflected back so it should show a hole in the bone; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the outside, those are missing; a close-up of the entry wound in the skull from the inside with the brain removed, taken from the inside, missing; photographs of the bruise on top of the pleural dome, that’s the cavity in which your lung sits, missing; photographs of probes in the body which were seen as they were taken by Dr. [Robert Frederick] Karnei, the second or third year resident that night, he was a Navy lieutenant and a resident, he worked in and out of the morgue all night long, who recalled probes in the body, metal probes in the body which is normal procedure in a death by gunshot a probe would go in where the entrance wound was and come out where the exit wound was in the body and the angle at which the probe is photographed is going to indicate the angle of a bullet tract, so he remember probes in the body and seeing strobe lights go off, that’s a flash, if you will, when those pictures were taken. And he was just astounded when we interviewed him and told him there are no photographs in the collection of probes in the body. He actually, his face turned beet red, he was just astounded that they were not in the collection because he saw them being taken.
There is another witness who developed autopsy photography, who developed pictures, Chief [Robert] Knudsen, Navy chief photographers mate, who told the House Committee in a deposition that he developed pictures and he knew darn well that at least one of them showed probes in the body because he remembers examining the negative after he developed it. So, that’s another type of photo that is missing.
And as far as the head X-rays, the skull X-rays go, Jerold Custer, one of the two X-ray technicians was very, very consistent over the years about one thing, he was inconsistent about many other things but he was very consistent about one thing, and that is that five skull X-rays were taken. Well, right now there are only three skull X-rays in the National Archives. And for those who may not aware we should explain I guess that the autopsy photographs and X-rays were held by the Secret Service in a safe in the old Executive Office Building that is across the street from the White House. They were held by them until April of 1965. And then Senator Robert Kennedy, the deceased president’s brother, Senator Kennedy wrote a letter to the military physician for President Johnson, Admiral, actually by this time Vice-Admiral Burkley, Burkley was the military physician for JFK and for Johnson, after JFK was killed he got promoted from Rear-Admiral to Vice-Admiral, so Burkley was still around controlling access to these things Senator Kennedy, RFK, wrote him a letter and said I want those materials transferred to Mrs. Lincoln at the Archives, that was, she was JFK’s secretary and had some office space over there, and was working for Bobby at this time. So, Admiral Burkley conducted an inventory of what was in the safe. He had Secret Service people sign the inventory. He signed it. So, all the materials that are in the archives today were transferred by Burkley from the Secret Service to Robert Kennedy. And then about a year and a half later from Robert Kennedy to the archives. So, that is the provenance of those items.
So, anyway, I think now that we’ve started to talk about X-rays it’s probably time to move onto area two of fraud in the evidence. So, the first area that we just discussed was destruction of evidence, I mean pictures that we know were taken that are not in the collection. Oh, and I would add one thing to that category, the most credible witness that we interviewed of the ten deponents was Sandra Spencer. Sandra Spencer was a Navy photographers mate who was not at the autopsy but who did develop post mortem photographs the weekend of the assassination. She developed color negatives. She is absolutely certain. She even remembered the name of the chemical process, you know, required to process color negatives. She developed color negatives that weekend and there are no color negatives in the collection, there are only color positive transparencies, slides if you will, 4 by 5 inch slides which are really called transparencies because they are not mounted they are just large pieces of film and black and white negatives. That is what is in the archives today, black and white negatives and color positive transparencies, they are all four inches by five inches, they are large format. She developed large format color negatives and not only that but when we deposed her and showed her the existing collection in the archives she shook her head and said these are not the pictures I developed. She said the president looks much worse here. He looks really beat up. There is a lot of blood in the photographs. And she said no, the photographs that she developed the president had been cleaned up. He looked much better, Apparently they were after a post mortem reconstruction, probably after the morticians were finished. So, those were other additional photographs which were made and are not in the collection. And probably the most significant one that she discussed is, and remember now she is talking about photos taken after the reconstruction by the morticians was completed, a photograph that still had a blow out in the back of the head, a big hole in the back of the head, about two inches wide, where the scalp could not be closed and where there was no bone. So, that recollection of hers, under oath, alone made her trip to Washington worthwhile because what it said was that the observations made by the Dallas treating physicians were surely correct, that there was an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head because she remembered this photo, after reconstruction, after the autopsy showing the exact same thing.
So, area two though, area two of fraud in the evidence, let’s talk about the three skull X-rays that survive. Now, this isn’t new information but what I think I’ve done in my book is explain Dr. David Mantik’s work with the three skull X-rays which prove to me and to many others that while yes, these images are of President Kennedy’s skull, I mean, they are his teeth, they are his sinuses, and they are [of] his body, [but] these images are not original skull X-rays. They are copy films. They are altered copy films, Len. They are forged, composite, copy film. And two of the skull X-rays that are in the collection at the archives are lateral images, they are taken from the side, one is a right lateral and one is a left lateral. They look almost identical to each other. And Dr. Mantik is absolutely convinced in these two lateral X-rays, the blow out in the back of the head which the Dallas doctors observed has been obscured by, basically, by light blasting, by a light batch, so that that area of the X-ray looks like solid bone. It looks very, very white in the X-ray image, but that what you’re looking at really isn’t bone, it’s an artifact of alteration. And the third skull X-ray that he is convinced it has been altered is the AP, the anterior posterior skull X-ray, which in layman’s terms means the X-ray was taken with the X-ray beam shooting from the front towards the rear of his head, from the front to the rear. Now that is the X-ray which shows an apparently large metallic, metallic fragment, reportedly a bullet fragment, and it just happens to be 6.5mm wide, which is the width of the ammunition, ammunition reportedly used by the assassin on the back of the skull. Just as in the lateral X-rays he believes that this bullet fragment really is not a fragment, that it’s just an artifact caused by light blasting that area of the X-ray. Now these are extraordinary claims, and the question would be if Carl Sagan was here with us tonight he would say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Well, I agree with that. Dr. Mantik has visited the archives on nine different occasions, most of those were in the 1990’s, I think one was in the year 2000, probably, and he was permitted by the Kennedy family to study the autopsy materials. He took with him his optical densitometer, a machine which measures the intensity of light coming through the X-rays. This man took meticulous measurements, every tenth of a millimeter of these skull X-rays in the critical areas. And he collected a mass of empirical data. I am talking about scientific, numerical data, which, number one, could be replicated by anyone else if they wanted to challenge his work or see if they could come up with the same results or different results they could replicate this if they wanted to. So, he not only took optical densitometery readings of these three areas on the X-rays but he conducted controlled experiments using real X-rays from deceased persons and also using skulls filled with biological material, or material simulating brain tissue. And what I have done for the reader, hopefully, is [to] explain this, this research of Dr. Mantik’s in a way that anyone can understand it. I have provided all the numerical data. I’ve tried to explain it so that a layman can understand how he came up with his conclusions, and it’s in a rather long chapter about the X-rays, chapter five which is about 200 pages long. It’s all explained in the book. By the way, the chapter on the autopsy photographs is about 260 pages long. So, I’ve got arrows in my quiver. When I say that evidence is missing, or evidence is tainted, or evidence is forged, I provide the evidence. I don’t just state a conclusions and then tell the reader to trust me. So, Dr. Mantik, by the way is a radiologist, he is a radiation oncologist, he also has a Ph.D. is physics, so this man knew what he was doing. No one to this date, and he first started giving lectures about this back in the 1990’s at symposia. And then he would give a follow up lecture each year providing additional results of his research. All I can tell you is that no one to my knowledge, not only has no one successfully challenged his work, no one has even attempted to because I don’t think it can be challenged. This bullet fragment that is supposedly on the AP X-ray, he measured the density of this object based on the light coming through the X-ray and if this were a real object in the real physical world, I mean it registered a density which was thicker than all of the president’s fillings in all of his teeth combined and yet it was represented by the House Committee to be just a sliver of metal, very, very thin and yet how could it be thicker than all of the dental amalgams in the president’s mouth? I mean that’s impossible. So, when you look at the lateral X-rays what you see is, you do indeed see a very, very, tiny metallic fragment on the back of the head, very, very tiny, very tiny. And then when you look at the frontal X-ray, the AP, that object is much, much, much denser. So, that’s where the forgery took place, it’s on the AP X-ray, in the same location where there already was a metal fragment. So, that’s area number two, the three surviving skull X-rays are forged composite copy films and I would encourage anyone who wants to learn more about that to read chapter five of my book.
Osanic - Great, and I guess we should bring that up right now, what’s the name of your book?
Horne - (laughs) Yeah, right, we didn’t do that yet did we? The name of my book, I will give you the long title and then the short title, the long title is “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK,” the short title is “Inside the ARRB,” or “Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.” And for people who are interested in learning more about it, or purchasing it, just go on Amazon, and click on the book section-
Osanic - (cross talk) I’ll make a link too.
Horne - and put in my name, Douglas P Horne, or the book title.
Osanic - Right. Do you have a website at all?
Horne - I do have a website, a blog, thank you Len, the blog explains quite a bit about the book, it’s www.insidethearrb.livejournal.com, so that’s the blog.
Osanic - Good, we’ll will make a link to that too.
Horne - Great. Let’s talk about what the autopsy photographs that are in the collection depict. You know, I have talked already about photographs and X-rays that are missing, and about skull X-rays that appear to be, well, that are forgeries, but let’s talk about what the photos in the collection really depict. The first thing I’d like to do with the listening audience is remind them that none of the autopsy photographs in the collection today show the wounds described by the treating staff at Parkland hospital, and that’s a serious problem. The House Select Committee was aware that it was a serious problem and they tried to deal with it. You know they, they had a decision to make, I mean, they, they, here’s the problem they were faced with, they called in a group of photographic experts nd they took a look at the autopsy photos, and they decided these photographic experts decided they did not see any evidence of tampering in the photographs.
Osanic - And can I interrupt you there, so what you are also illuminating is these are people who are kind of Warren Commission supporters, and they are calling in “experts,” to maybe support their view?
Horne - One wonders, you know, we’ll never know, we weren’t there. At any rate, I’ll get back to that in a minute. You bring up a good point there it’s possible that that’s what happened, the experts for the House Committee decided that they did not see evidence of forgery in the autopsy photos. So, based on that “expert opinion” the House Select Committee decided that all of the Dallas doctors were wrong. And that all of those doctors and nurses that saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head must have been mistaken, and they said they were troubled by that, but that that was their final conclusion.
Now their X-ray experts did not detect any evidence of forgery in the X-rays either, but this technology that Dr. Mantik used is a new technique that was not used by those experts and no one even considered that the X-rays might have been the type of forgery that he later uncovered. So, they just-
Osanic - Right, right.
Horne - They didn’t catch it because they hadn’t considered that technique.
Osanic - I bring that up though because of the reputation of Blakey, clinging to the Mafia did it, you know-
Horne - Right.
Osanic - At least back then.
Horne - Yeah, I’d like to talk about Mr. Blakey later tonight.
Osanic - Sure.
Horne - I have some strong opinions there, I might as well just say it now, I am convinced after completing my book that G. Robert Blakey’s principle goal was to support faith in the institutions of government. That was his principle objective. And that what he was doing was, for the most part, reselling us the old wine of the Warren Commission in a new bottle, and the only thing new about the bottle was that they did an acoustic study, and the acoustic study showed a shot from the front, and the House Committee decided that that shot missed, and that Oswald still did all the shooting of people in the car. So, what we had when the House Committee was done, with the finding that there was probably a conspiracy, that they couldn’t define it, that Oswald still did all the shooting, and yet when Blakey met with reporters to give them his personal opinions on what all this met that’s when he spun the Mafia did it story. You know, you won’t find that in the House Committee report. And Gaeton Fonzi makes this clear in his book, his book, “The Last Investigation,” makes it very clear that that is not in the House Select Committee Final Report, that “the Mafia killed the President,” that is Blakey’s personal spin, which he gave to the media and ensured [it] got in the headlines concurrent with the publication of the House Select Committee report.
Osanic - Oh yeah, I think I recall one headline, one headline (laughs) said “So there was someone else shooting at Kennedy at the same time, so what?”
Horne - Yeah, that was the cynical remark of The New York Times which said well maybe there were two lone nuts, which was really shameful.
Osanic - Oh, it’s beyond shameful, right?
Horne - Yes, it is
Osanic - someone’s got to take them to task, and I guess it’s, I just hesitate to use stronger language to reveal how I really feel.
Horne - There may be young people listening
Osanic - It doesn’t matter.
Horne - Well, let me explain how I have analyzed the existing autopsy photographs because I think this is a paradigm busting analysis. You know, David Lifton’s book in 1981 laid forth the following assertions, he was a paradigm buster, what he said was, he said I think the Dallas doctors were correct in what they saw, and he said I think the autopsy physicians were correct in what they described, and he said the reason they described totally different wounds is because, he believed, that the skull wounds were altered by post mortem surgery before the autopsy proper began, okay? And that in his view both groups of witnesses were probably correct, the Dallas treating physicians who only saw an exit wound in the back of the head and who did not see any damage to the top or right side of the head and then he believed that the Bethesda autopsy pathologists were also correct when they described a large skull defect which extended from the rear of the head all the way through the top of the skull and the right side of the skull, he believed they were also correct, and that they were describing the results of surgery. The difference between David Lifton and I, which is, it’s a significant one to me, is that David believed that the surgery was illicit, clandestine, illegal, clandestine, illegal surgery took place before the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. I do not believe that. My analysis forced me to conclude that this surgery took place all right, it took place at Bethesda Naval Hospital by the autopsy pathologists, it just took place in secret before the autopsy started. So, what does that mean? Here’s what it means to me. Len, 2/3rds of the autopsy photos I think were taken within 10 minutes. The were taken very early that evening. 2/3rds of the autopsy photos show the president lying supine on his back and his head is lying in a metal stirrup or brace, and so you cannot see the back of his head. I believe that was intentional. And what you can see in these photographs is this enormous defect, this huge defect where the whole top of his head is gone on the right side, and even beyond the midline at the top, the entire top of his head is gone from just behind his hairline, all the way back down it’s missing, the scalp has opened up, the bone is gone, and the bone is flapped out on the right side forward of the ear there is all this damage to the bone. Now the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the autopsy pathologists, both groups, represented this as damage caused by the assassin’s “bullet.” I don’t believe that’s what it is! I believe that this gross damage in these photographs, which is really two thirds of the collection, is really damage from this illicit, clandestine post mortem surgery performed at Bethesda and its a con job. It’s represented to us as something that an assassin’s bullet did. And I’ll tell you why I feel confident in saying it, I mean I feel very confident, there were three physicians in the record who saw the president’s head wound right after the body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital, for the autopsy. And all three of these people have described the same damage seen by the Dallas treating physicians. They are, Dr. Ebersole, who was the radiologist that night, Dr. Ebersole; and Rear Admiral Burkley, the president’s military physician, and Captain Canada, who was one of the senior officials at the Naval hospital. Now Ebersole testified to this to the House Committee under oath and he talked about the back of the head missing, and then when he was shown the autopsy photographs he actually said under oath, he says, “Well, you know, that’s not what I remember seeing,” he says, “this wound in the autopsy photograph, “ he said “it’s far more lateral and superior than I remember.” Well, that’s a pretty damning statement. What he’s saying is that the wounds in the pictures are too far on the top of the head and too far over on the side. It’s not what he remembered. And so the second witness who saw the same wound that they saw in Dallas is Dr. Burkley, and he admitted this to researcher Henry Hurt, and its in Henry Hurt’s book. And then the third witness, Dr. Canada said this to researcher Michael Kurtz, apparently in 1968, and then demanded that Michael Kurtz not reveal this fact, that there was an exit wound in the back of the head for 25, until he had been dead for 25 years. So, Michael Kurtz sat on this information and didn’t reveal it, this critical observation of Captain Canada, didn’t reveal it until his book was published in 2006, his second book. I’m both frustrated by that and I’m also grateful that he finally did reveal it because what we have here, summarizing, three physicians, these are not non-medically qualified witnesses, these are three physicians who saw an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head right after the body arrived. And the Review Board found the two witnesses that witnessed the surgery inside the Naval hospital, and that’s the big part of this story. Tom Robinson, who many researchers will be familiar with his name, Tom Robinson was one of the young morticians working for The Gawler’s Funeral Home, and he was, he and his boss showed up very, very early that night, in fact, Tom Robinson said he was there the whole night he had a fifty yard line seat in the gallery, in the morgue, because it was a teaching, the Naval hospital was a teaching hospital, training Naval personnel, so he is sitting up there in the gallery, kind of an indoor bleachers, and he saw the whole thing, apparently including the post-mortem surgery before the autopsy started. And he gave an interview to the House Select Committee, it’s one of the few that they tape recorded, and so there’s a so called transcript of the tape recording that was released in 1993 thanks to the JFK Records Act. Blakey had sealed it for 50 years but then the congress had to release all of these medical witness interviews that the House Committee did in 1993 and they did. So, Robinson talked to the House Committee about seeing the brain removed but they didn’t pursue it with him. But, we sure did. We found Tom Robinson and we called him into the Review Board offices, and we ahd a lot of people in the room, I was afraid he might be a little bit intimidated, but he wasn’t, he was just himself, straight forward and honest. And he told us he saw the doctors saw the skull open to get the brain out, and I looked at Jeremy Gunn, and he looked at me, and that was really interesting to us because Dr. Humes, the chief pathologist, had always stated that we never had to do a craniotomy, we never had to saw the skull open to remove the brain because the damage was just so great, we just took the brain out, we, you know, we made a little incision here and there in the scalp, maybe cut one small piece of bone and just took the brain out, which is really, really, a strange story. So here is Tom Robinson who we asked to draw, let me explain the context in which he made that remark, we asked him to draw diagrams on anatomical templates from anatomy textbooks, so we had our anatomy pictures, diagrams, you know, medical illustrated diagrams of what the back of the skull looked like, and [what] the inside of the skull looks like from Grant’s anatomy, from one of the two primary references for medical students. So, he drew a big giant hole in the back of the head, not the top of the head, not the right side of the head, the back of the head, he drew a big round hole, just like he had for the House Committee but the sketch he made for them was just hand drawn and there were no landmarks on it, you know, we gave him a medical atlas diagram with sutures on it and all kinds of land marks so that there could be no mistake about what he was drawing on. He drew a hole in the back of the head and then he drew two gigantic dotted lines across the back of that picture one dotted line was horizontal, like below the ears, and the other dotted line was at the top of the picture and then the round holes in the middle of it, and we said what are those dotted lines and he says oh that’s where the doctors had to saw the skull open to get the brain out. That was an epiphany for me. Because that’s when I realized that for a fact that post mortem surgery took place and that Dr. Humes had lied when he said he did not have to cut skull bone away to remove the brain. This is the witness that saw him do it. We then showed Mr. Robinson the famous Fox set of autopsy photographs, now this in our office, okay, this is in our office in E street in Washington, D.C. We were not allowed to have the original autopsy photos in our office, they are in the National Archives, but we had the, the so called bootleg set made by Secret Service agent Fox, and, you know, Jeremy Gunn and I had seen the original photos several times and we knew that the bootleg photos depicted exactly the same thing they are just a little bit darker, there is a little bit of contrast build up, but they depict exactly the same thing that is in the photos that are in the archives. We showed him the famous and disturbing photograph of the top of President Kennedy’s head taken at the autopsy, which is in many assassination books now, it has been in Dr. Crenshaw’s book, and David Lifton’s book, and some of Harry Livingston’s books, and I think one of Robert Groden’s books and it shows the entire top of the head missing. It’s really a horrible picture. And Tom Robinson looked at that picture and he said, “That makes it look like the bullet did that! He said, “The bullet didn’t do that damage,” he said, “the doctors did that!” So that’s the explanation for that photograph. That photograph and the others associated with it do not represent damage from an assassin’s bullet they represent the results of post mortem surgery.
Now, the second witness that we found who observed the surgery being conducted was Ed Reed. Ed Reed was one of the two X-ray technicians, the other one was Jerold Custer. Ed Reed told us, under oath, that he recalled seeing Dr. Humes taking a scalpel and cut open the scalp above the forehead just behind the President’s hairline and he actually made a gesture with his hands during the deposition so that we knew what he was talking about, and he said after that, this is an incision right above your forehead and just behind where your hairline would start, you know, from left to right, so he described that incision with his hands, and then he said after that Dr. Humes got out a circular bone saw and started cutting open the bone under that incision just above the forehead, and he said, he and Custer were summarily ordered to leave the room, get out of here!
You know the people performing this cover-up that night are really the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. You know, they let a mortician come in and let him see things that if they had been good coverup artists they wouldn’t have let him be there. But they probably thought that, well, he’s a nobody so he doesn’t matter. And then if they had really done a professional job of covering this thing up they wouldn’t have let the X-ray technicians witness the beginning of the post mortem surgery, but they did.
If members of the audience are wondering well why would this be done, the answer is pretty simple, if you study the eyewtiness and earwitness testimony from Dealey Plaza it is very clear that President Kennedy was driven into a crossfire, you know, there were shots coming from the front, there were shots coming from the rear. That’s the one thing about this case that is clear. And it’s my conclusion that the reason this post mortem surgery was conducted before the autopsy is, number one, to remove any evidence in the body of shots from the front, number two to expand the skull defect so you can get access to the brain and remove bullet fragments from the brain before the autopsy, and number three if you expand the wound which in the back of the head, if you expand it tremendously in the process of getting access to the brain, if you expand it then you can misrepresent it later as an exit wound in the right side of the head, and the top of the head, which is what they did.
So, these photographs of the top of the president’s head, and the right side of the president’s head, and for that mater the left side with his head in this metal stirrup with the back of the head obscured, I think they were all taken within about ten minutes, at the same time, right after this surgery was completed. Before the autopsy proper started at 8:15. So, then that leaves us to what is wrong with the rest of the autopsy photos? And most of your audience will know this already that the other third of the autopsy photo collection shows the back of the head apparently intact, it’s apparently intact and there’s no hole in the back of the head. So, the question is how can this be if all the Dallas doctors saw an exit wound in the back of the president’s head? And how can this be if Sandra Spencer saw post mortem photos after reconstruction that still showed a hole there? How can this be
that the autopsy photos show the scalp apparently intact in the back? Well, I’ve decided how it can be. If you look at those photographs, and I’ve seen the collection now I think, yeah, it was a total of 16 times I saw the original photographs, this is over the course of the ten depositions, and a staff viewing that we had and then some unpaid consultants that we called in, 16 times, in everyone of those photographs you’ve got, of the back of the head that appears to be intact you’ve got human hands holding the scalp in place, two or three sets of hands. It is not just one person. There are some pictures where you have, you know, two right hands, or two left hands, or whatever, but I remember its anatomically impossible for all of the hands in some of these photos to have come from one person because of where the thumb is. You have gloved hands holding a big piece of scalp that it’s reported to be the intact back of the scalp. I think they are just relocating loose scalp to cover up an exit wound and fool the camera. And I think this was done after the FBI agents left the morgue.
This is the time to explain what do I mean by that. There were two FBI witnesses to the autopsy. FBI agents Sibert and O’Neil. I believe Jim Sibert is still alive. He’s quite elderly [now], I think he’s still alive, I know Frank O’Neil died earlier this year. Those two gentlemen could not wait to give us their depositions. They were overjoyed that I called them. they had been interviewed by Arlen Specter in March of 1964. They didn’t get along well. He then buried their report, of what they saw at the autopsy, the Sibert and O’Neil report, he buried that in the archives, he did not publish that in the Warren Commission in all of its 26 volumes of supporting evidence that was not published, and he did not ask them to testify under oath. The House Committee staff spoke with them and then prepared affidavits for them to sign based on their interviews, but they did not take their depositions. So, they were very happy that we called them and asked them to come testify under oath as to what they had observed. And both of those men, now they were trained observers, trained observers, they were professional law enforcement officials, and for what it’s worth they were both still J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. So, these men had no incentive to fabricate a story or tell a tall tale, these were J. Edgar Hoover loyalists. And yet these men under oath both looked at these photographs of the back of the president’s head that are in the archives, apparently intact, and they both said, no, no, no, that’s not the way it looked at the autopsy. And we showed Frank O’Neil the drawing he made for the House Committee staff of a big hole in the back of the head, and he said yes, I verify that drawing, I remember making it and this photograph, he said, these photographs, he said, are not the way it looked, and he said, “it looks to me like it has been doctored.” Now that’s an explosive word, and then he clarified later in his deposition, he said, “ I don’t think the photo has been doctored, I think the head, the head has been doctored in this picture to make it look intact.”
Well, his partner, Sibert, said to us “no, that’s not what it looked like,” he said, “I think that the head’s been reconstructed.” He said, “This looks like a reconstruction,” he said because there was a hole in the right rear of the head, and he said it’s not in the picture. And we asked him to authenticate the drawing he made for the House Committee and he couldn’t remember making it even when we showed it to him. So we said, well, can you remember today what you saw, and he said yes. So, we said, okay make a drawing for us today. So, he made a drawing of a hole in the right rear of the head. And so O’Neil thought the body had been doctored before the photo had been taken. His partner Sibert thought the head had been reconstructed, those are just two different ways of saying the same thing. So, we now the testimony of Dr. Humes before the Warren Commission that the autopsy ended at eleven o’clock. He said that twice, under oath, in 1964. So, it’s my conclusion that after the FBI agents left the morgue at eleven after the formal conclusion of the autopsy that this final round of pictures was taken to deceive history. And we know from Jerold Custer and other witnesses who were there, and Paul O’Connor, Paul O’Connor was one of the two autopsy technicians assisting the pathologists, it was Paul O’Connor and James Jenkins. O’Connor and Custer have both talked about how badly shattered President Kennedy’s head was and the fact that it was completely malleable, everything could be moved around, and then of course, once you conclude an autopsy and you remove the brain all the scalp, you know, the skull had been cut away, the scalp has been reflected so this scalp late in the evening would have been very malleable and subject to being moved.
Now many people in the research community have chosen to believe for years that these photos of President Kennedy’s head in which it looks intact when viewed from behind, they chose to assume for years that the photographs have been altered. But, the House Committee photographic panel said they didn't see any evidence of that, and they said they did stereoscopic viewing. Now unfortunately, the Review Board didn’t. Jeremy Gunn and I did our best, but we are not photo experts so we never did stereoscopic viewing but the House Committee panel said they didn’t see any evidence of alteration of the photos themselves and then I spent a week in Rochester, New York at KODAK. KODAK did some pro bono work for us. They digitized all of the autopsy transparencies and negatives for us, for history because you know film eventually disintegrates over time and then it’s just gone. So, they digitized all of the images. And so I spent a week in a lab up in KODAK in November 1997 looking at high resolution digital scan blow ups and even enhanced images of the back of the head photos on big 17 inch computer monitors, big high resolution monitors and I did not see any evidence of matte insertion lines, or photographic tampering. I didn’t see any hairs that did not line up. I didn’t see any areas that were suddenly out of focus around the edges. I didn't go to film school, but, you know, I’ve seen the old Star Trek shows and I know what a matte insertion is, I knew, in a general way what to look for and I didn’t, I not only didn’t see any photographic anomalies in the back of the head photos I saw extreme these close-ups of real human skin and hair, and I didn’t see any discontinuities between the hairs. So because of my own subjective experiences at Rochester and because of the House Committee's conclusion that there was no tampering with the autopsy photos it’s my conclusion that the scalp was rearranged after the FBI agents left just temporarily to take this set of pictures and I even have a candidate for who probably took the pictures and that candidate is Navy Chief Robert Knudsen. Chief Knudsen is a real mystery figure in this story. He was the social photographer at the White House for five different presidents. He was a very honorable man. He was a very good photographer of social photographs. It was his job to take portraits. In fact, the portrait of President Kennedy in the Warren Report was taken by Chief Knudsen. We know that Chief Knudsen was involved in developing post mortem pictures because the House Select Committee deposed him in August of 1978 and they grilled him about that. And he told them things that they didn’t find very pleasant. That he had developed pictures of probes in the body, and types of film that were not in the collection, types of film, a black and white press pack, you know, that type of film is not in the collection. We have black and white duplex film, but he developed a different type of black and white film, a different format that is not in the collection. They were so unhappy with some of his answers that they never revealed in their report that he had even been deposed. And Blakey buried his deposition for fifty years. But, thanks to Oliver Stone and his film Blakey didn’t get away with this. In 1993 congressional record keepers had to open up all of their interview reports, all the medical witnesses, the deposition of Ebersole, the deposition of Chief Knudsen, and they were deposited in ‘93 in the National Archives. And we have all been poring over them ever since.
So, Chief Knudsen, the mystery thickens here. Chief Knudsen always told his family, Len, that I photographed the president’s autopsy and it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. He not only told his family that but he told a photography magazine, and we got hold of the article from 1977, I mention the name of the magazine in my book but, and he told them the same thing, and he told them as an oh by the way, almost a throw away comment they were asking him about his career, you know, working for five presidents and in the middle of the story he just mentioned that in passing that oh and I also photographed the president’s autopsy which is the hardest thing I ever did. Now, the official photographers of record for the autopsy are John Stringer and his assistant Floyd Riebe. And they don’t recall anyone named Knudsen ever taking pictures. It’s also pretty clear that they left as soon as the autopsy was declared over that night. That they went home about 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. or midnight at the latest. And so we have Chief Knudsen telling his family that I met the president’s airplane at Andrews Air Force Base, I went out to Bethesda in the motorcade, and I was there all night, I was there when they started and I was there when they finished. Well, I think Chief Knudsen probably took the set of photos taken right after the surgery which present a dishonest picture of the head wounds and I think he probably took the set of pictures after the FBI agents left. And its my conclusion today that none, none of the pictures taken by Stringer and Riebe are in the collection at the National Archives. I don’t think one of the photos they took are there. I think that’s why there’s up to 18 views of the body missing. All the photos they took are gone. I think the only photos in the collection were taken by a social photographer who was not accustomed to macro photography, to doing close-up work, and I think that’s why they are out of focus in some areas, that’s why there are no tags in the photos explaining you know, what, what, showing the autopsy number, or, there is no progression of wide shot, medium shot, extreme close up, like you would normally find in an autopsy collection. That’s why we have a set of really substandard autopsy photos in terms of the photography because the guy taking them wasn’t used to doing that kind of picture taking.
So, we have a why and we have a who. So, that was a long explanation, but that’s my conclusions about what’s wrong with the autopsy photos in the National Archives today.
Osanic - Right, very illuminating and very interesting, so we are going to have to encourage people to go get your book and go through all the fine tune points that you have.
Horne - Right, and that’s covered in two chapters chapter four and chapter twelve. Now the next area won’t take nearly as long to talk about but it is perhaps even more important to talk about. And the next area of fraud, what I call area four is the autopsy report. In any normal death case, or murder case the autopsy report is the medical legal record of what happened and normally it trumps all other evidence, normally it is the best evidence. Normally it trumps any eyewitness observations that would be in conflict with the autopsy report or what anyone says they recalled seeing, even trauma room physicians who are occasionally noted to have made errors in observation because they were more concerned with saving someone’s life rather than recording exactly how they had been killed. Normally their observations are trumped by an autopsy report. In this case we can’t do that and I’ll tell you why. It’s clear that the version of the autopsy report that is in the National Archives today Commission Exhibit 387 is the third written version of that report. We know for a fact, it’s incontrovertible, Len, that the first written version, a type written draft was burned by Dr. Humes in his fireplace on Sunday morning at his home on the weekend of the assassination, two days later. He had, he was essentially hoisted on his own petard during his deposition by Jeremy Gunn, who did a great job of questioning him in this area. Dr. Humes had told Arlen Specter under oath in 1964 when he testified before the Warren Commission, he had told Specter that he burned the first draft of the autopsy report. He told the House Committee that he burned notes, that he burned blood stained notes, and he no longer was saying that he had burned a draft. And so we wanted to get to the bottom of that and after an extensive series of questions Humes finally admitted under oath in 1996 to Jeremy Gunn that during his deposition that, well, yes, I did both, I burned the first draft and blood stained notes. So, that’s the first autopsy report that is destroyed.
We also know that a second version was destroyed, what I call the first signed version, was destroyed because we know that it existed in 1965 and we know that it had disappeared a year and a half later. So, let me explain what that means. I mentioned earlier in the interview that Robert Kennedy wanted the autopsy materials transferred to his custody in 1965, April ‘65. Those autopsy materials included “gross biological material in a container,” that was I think 7 by 8 inches in size, which was the remains of a brain, biological tissue slides, blood slides and memos pertaining to autopsy photography, and, one of the other items on this inventory that was prepared was signed original of the autopsy report, and not only were autopsy photos and X-rays and the brain turned over to Robert Kennedy in ‘65 but also an original autopsy report. Now a year and a half later the Justice Department and the Archives had gotten very nervous because congress had passed a law saying that all assassination materials needed to be turned over to the National Archives that they shouldn’t be in the hands of private individuals. So, this applied not only to the purported weapon and things like that but also to these pictures of the autopsy and the X-rays. So, the Justice Department approached Robert Kennedy, who never should have received these materials in the first place, I mean its remarkable that the government gave them to a private individual like that, it’s remarkable that it even happened but it did. So, the Justice Department engaged in negotiations and the Kennedy family, meaning Robert Kennedy agreed to return these materials to the government provided that he could control, that the family could control who had access to them. So, a deed of gift was drawn up, and the deed of gift was signed and prepared by Burke Marshal, who was the Kennedy family attorney for years, and who was the guardian of the autopsy materials for years, for years, if you wanted to see these things if you were Cyril Wecht, or David Mantik, or anyone else, you wanted to see the materials you needed Burke Marshall’s permission. Well, Burke Marshall, a year and a half later in October 1966 returns “the autopsy materials,” to the archives but something was missing, the one thing that was on the original inventory in ‘65, turned over to Robert Kennedy that is not on the list of materials given back to the government is everything in paragraph nine. And the materials in paragraph nine were a brain, tissue slides, a memo about autopsy photography, and the original autopsy report. And it’s not returned. And the archives noticed this a day later when they opened, I take that back they opened it the same day they received the footlocker. As soon as the footlocker was opened the Kennedy family representatives beat feet and left the room, they got out of there. So, the archives people were standing there doing their own inventory on October 31st, 1966 and they are looking at the 1965 inventory of what Burkley gave up and they are looking at what’s being turned back into the government and paragraph nine, all of the materials are missing. Well, that’s really interesting because in 1967 a year later the Secret Service turns over another autopsy report to the National Archives.
Now, let me back up a minute and explain what I am getting at here. In 1965 Admiral Burkley and the Secret Service turned over an autopsy report to Robert Kennedy. He did something with it to make it disappear, because it wasn’t given back to the government in ‘66. And yet in 1967 the Secret Service, with receipts and everything, signed and countersigned turns over the original autopsy report to the National Archives and the Archives signs for it in ‘67. You can’t turn something over twice. If there’s only one report. If you turn an autopsy report, if you relinquish a report twice it means there were two autopsy reports. Now there is an indication that the missing report that RFK received in ‘65 had a different content than the one in the archives today and that indication is from formerly Top Secret transcripts of a Warren Commission executive session in late January 1964 in which J. Lee Rankin, the chief counsel for the Warren Commission staff says to the assembled group, he says you know we’ve got to get to the bottom of these wounds, it’s confusing, and he says, for example here in the autopsy, he doesn’t say the word report but it’s clear he means autopsy report, here in the autopsy it says that a bullet fragment came out the front of the throat and its clear from the context of that transcript that he’s talking about a fragment from the head shot came out the front of the throat and, of course, that is not, that is not what is in the autopsy report today. What is in the autopsy report today, the one in the archives today is that a bullet transited from high in the president’s back, supposedly through his neck and came out his throat and went on to hit Governor Connally, the so called magic bullet theory. But, the context of Rankin’s conversation implies a content change in the autopsy report. So, if the autopsy report in the archives today is the third written version which it certainly appears to be, there is no way we can have any confidence in what it says whatsoever. And in fact, it’s even worse than that, there is a witness to what was probably in the first draft that Dr. Humes burned and the content changes are even greater from that to what we have today. The witness was Richard Lipsey. Richard Lipsey was the military aide to General Wehle. General Wehle was the Commandant of the Military District of Washington, MDW, the Military District of Washington is the Army outfit that conducts all the ceremonial functions be people in uniform in the nation’s capital, and he and his junior office Lt. [Samuel A.] Bird were in charge of the joint service casket team that night, people from different branches of the Armed service showed up at Andrews Air Force to meet the plane from Texas and Lt. Bird took people from each service, there were too many people there to help, and they formed a joint service casket team, people from all the different armed services, and so General Wehle was in charge of those people, and his aide was Richard Lipsey. Now Richard Lipsey told the House Committee in 1978 that he recalled the autopsy pathologist discussing not two bullets hitting the president, which is what’s in the autopsy report today, he recalled them specifically stating that three bullets hit the president. He was absolutely certain about that and even drew a diagram. Now this is all in my book, and this would have been buried for 50 years also, this is one of those interview reports that Robert Blakey decided to bury for 50 years and which was forced open by the JFK Records Act in 1993. So, Lipsey recalls a conclusion of three hits that the FBI agents never heard. The FBI agents who left at 11 o’clock heard a two hit scenario, Richard Lipsey hears a three hit scenario and I conclude that that happened later that night as the conclusions were evolving after the FBI agents left. And I also concluded that that was abandoned a day later and that’s why Humes had to burn the autopsy report in his fireplace. Because what I think happened was the people in charge of this cover up found out Saturday that a shot had missed and that it hit a curb on Main Street and that it ricocheted up and hit James Tague in the face, and they knew if they had a missed shot and a purported murder weapon, what I call the stage prop in the book depository, and they had three shell casings in evidence, by then they had three, originally they had two, but by Saturday they had three shell casings in evidence, and there was a missed shot they couldn’t have a three shot scenario. So, Richard Lipsey heard the pathologist conclude three hits on the president after the FBI agents left. And I think that’s what was in the first draft. And I think that’s why Humes had to burn it Sunday morning because that became untenable on Saturday when the world found out that a shot had missed. So, there’s no reason to have any confidence in the autopsy report in the archives today. I think it’s useless as a medical legal document and all it really serves now is as proof of a cover up. So, that’s my fourth area of fraud in the evidence.
Osanic - Okay, very interesting, let’s keep going.
Horne - Okay, let’s keep going. Let’s talk about the brain exam. Len, when you’re killed by a gunshot to the brain, or by blunt trauma to the brain, at the autopsy they are going to remove your brain and then preserve it, and examine it later, after the autopsy on the body is over because when the brain is removed, you know, when it is in its live state, and when it’s basically very soft it’s the consistency of bread pudding I’ve been told, so before the brain can be examined it has to be fixed in preservative, which you know most of us call formaldehyde, the medical community calls it formalin solution, it’s formaldehyde mixed with water, usually about a 10% solution, in water. So, we know that President Kennedy’s brain was placed in a bucket at the autopsy, what was left of his brain was. And it was preserved by a combined technique of both soaking and injection, okay? So, it was soaking in formalin solution, it hangs in a net inside the bucket, but it also is placed in there upside down so that one of the technicians, James Jenkins in this case, used needles and injected a drip into the arteries of the brain and then they use a gravity feed, they use a gravity feed to inject a formaldehyde solution into the brain’s arterial system while its soaking so that combined technique is, I was told, is called profusion. The person who explained all of this to me was Dr. Richard Davis, who was the number two guy, the number two pathologist at the AFIP in 1963, that is the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology located at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, a joint service institution at the Army Hospital, AFIP. He explained that this was the normal way for the people at Bethesda to preserve brains. And if you study the interview given out by james Jenkins over the years to different researchers it’s clear that that was the technique used, that is was both soaked and injected with formaldehyde. So, normally the brain is examined once, after the autopsy on the body and normally at that examination the brain is sectioned, serially sectioned, which means that there is a cut made horizontally from left to right every inch or so. They are called bread loaf incisions by some people and by doing so one can determine the pattern of damage. Is there a bullet tract? And where did it go in? And where did it come out? And the way you would preserve that evidence is to photograph the sections that are taken, just photograph the serial sections of tissue as the are laid on top of a light box and illuminated from both above and below. We have evidence and this is something I am very proud of that the Review Board staff, namely myself and Jeremy Gunn came up with during our examination of the evidence, we had discovered that there had been two rain examinations, not one, two. There was timeline evidence in support of this, and eyewitness evidence in support of this, and photographic evidence. So, the timeline evidence goes as follows, we’ve got two witnesses to a very early brain exam, actually two and a half if you want to count Dr. Humes who later changed his mind, the two strongest witnesses to an early brain exam on Monday, this is on Monday, the day of the funeral Len, on November 25th, ‘63, just three days after the autopsy, really two and a half days later, the two witnesses to an early brain exam are Dr. Boswell, who is Dr. Humes’ colleague, he was the other Navy pathologist and John Stringer, the photographer, the autopsy photographer who photographed the autopsy on the body, and [who] photographed a brain exam. They both insisted it was Monday. It was very clear in their minds, both when they were interviewed by the House committee, and when they were interviewed by us under oath, you know, years later in 1996. Dr. Humes when interviewed by the Journal of the AMA in 1992 Dr. Humes implied that it was an early brain exam when he told JAMA, the magazine, when he told JAMA that well, you know, we wanted to examine it, we wanted to examine the brain but I had to give it up because Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body. Well, that’s a cop out, but, that statement that Dr. Burkley wanted to bury it with the body makes it very clear that the exam was on Monday morning, which is exactly when Boswell and Stringer said it was. So, later, under oath, with us, [Dr.] Humes tried to deny that a brain exam had been conducted that early but he gave away the store during the JAMA article.
[End Part One]
Horne - We have evidence in the record for a later brain exam, a week later, a week after the autopsy on the body, not Monday, but a week later. And that one occurred sometime between November 29th and December 2nd, and the reason we know that is [are] two reasons, Dr. [Pierre] Finck, the third military pathologist, Finck was from the Army, he was an outsider in a Navy setting, Dr. Finck took meticulous notes about everything, he was very anally retentive, and he wrote in his notes and later produced in a report for his Army superiors, he wrote in his notes, his personal notes that Dr. Humes called me on November 29th and said there would be an examination of the brain, now Finck didn’t say when the examination was but he does give us the earliest possible date, “Humes called me the 29th of November.” Well, we have a Navy corpsman, Chief [Chester H.] Boyers who told the House Committee in two different interview in 1978 that he processed President Kennedy’s brain, well, let me put it this way, brain tissue on December 2, 1963. So, that brain tissue could have been from a brain examination on November 29th the one Finck was told to attend on the telephone, or it could mean that Finck was notified on the 29th and then the brain exam was conducted one or two days later. So, we have a window there for the second event. Not only that but the brain photographs in the archives today do not show any serially sections of the brain. They show an intact organ, okay? Now, John Stringer the autopsy photographer who also photographed a brain exam insisted under oath to the Review Board that he photographed a brain that had been serially sectioned in front of him. He photographed each section of tissue as it was laid on a light box, illuminated from below and from above. And of course, there are no such pictures of a sectioned brain in the archives collection. Stringer also told us under oath in 1996 that he did not shoot basilar views of the brain, basilar means from the underneath, from the bottom side. He only shot superior views from the top. Well, the brain photos in the National Archives today half of the pictures are taken from above, they are superior, but half of them are basilar. And as if that isn’t bad enough, Stringer recalled that he used Ektachrome color transparency film, and he used, I believe it was Portrait Pan Black and White Duplex negatives, in other words these were individual sheets of film, these black and white negatives, they were not on a roll, okay? When Stringer examined the brain photos in the national archives he noted that they were from a press pack, they were from a continuous roll of black and white film, which were numbered and of course after it was developed they are cut so that they form individual sections of negatives, individual images. But he noticed that it was very, very thin film, it wasn’t thick like duplex film, and they each had a number on them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 et cetera. And he says I did not use a press pack, I did not use this kind of film to photograph the brain. So, the brain photos in the archives are inconsistent with what Stringer did, in the sense that they are on the wrong kind of film and they do not show the brain to be sectioned. So, they also don’t show any damage to the right cerebellum. Now the major portion of someone’s brain, the top part of your brain, the thinking part of your brain is called the cerebrum and the portion of the back of your head, down low on the back of your head which controls your coordination and other functions is called the cerebellum. And it’s a very different type of tissue, than the cerebrum, it looks very different and its a very localized part of the brain, it’s only in the back of the head, down low. The Dallas doctors, four of them, recalled severe damage to the cerebellum when they examined the head wound in Dallas, and that part of the cerebellum was missing, and part of it was macerated and torn and actually hanging out of the wound. In the brain photos in the archives the cerebellum is undamaged, the right cerebellum is undamaged. We asked Mr. Stringer under oath do you recall damage to the right cerebellum and he said yes. The brain photos in the archives don’t show any damage to the right cerebellum. We asked FBI agent Frank O’Neil where was the damage; we said do you recall seeing the president’s brain at the autopsy, his partner Sibert didn’t have any recollection of seeing the brain, he just didn’t remember, either it wasn’t important to him or he had forgotten. O’Neil had a definite recollection. He said yes I remember seeing the brain after it was removed. He said, first of all it was over half gone, over half of it was missing, and he said, then he put his hand on the back of his head, took his right hand put it on the back of his head, behind his right ear and he said this was where most of it was, that most of the severe damage was, it was blown, it was gone, behind the right ear, and of course that would be where the cerebellum is, and also the occipital lobe of the cerebrum, the right cerebral hemisphere. That is where he put his hand on his head. Well, the cerebellum is intact in these photos. So, they have been impugned, you know, summarizing, the brain photos in the archives have been impugned for the following reasons. Number one, they don’t show sections of the brain, which Stringer recalls photographing. Number two they are on the wrong kind of film. They are not only on film from a press pack which is numbered, but the brand name of the film is ANSCO and the brand name that Stringer recalled using was EKTACHROME. So, that’s it. And, of course the damage depicted is in the wrong part of the head. And the damage depicted in the brain photographs is in the top and right side of the brain, and it doesn’t appear to be so much missing as just, it’s a disruption in the tissue, as if there were a very large furrow-
Osanic - Now what comes to my mind is just these points that you’re elaborating on, is reason to re-open the case.
Horne - Absolutely. Absolutely.
Osanic - I mean a, you know a farcical comment could be, you could say well, how the hell could Lee Oswald do all of this, you know? So, I mean, wrong kind of film, wounds not in the right place, guys know what they were doing, and what they saw-
Horne - Right.
Osanic - and, this is just from, you know, that Sunday, Monday on, you were saying, evidence of massive fraud.
Horne - Right. And I’m glad you jogged my memory there because there is one other thing i failed to cover earlier, Dr. Boswell made a diagram at the autopsy of the damage to the skull, that’s what you would expect, that’s what a good pathologist would do, but in this case he only sketched the damage to the top of the skull, now this is the diagram that many of your audience will have seen in books already, he drew it on the back of a body chart, there was a body chart called an autopsy descriptive sheet, it was a Navy home made form, so on the front of this sheet is the front and back of the body, where you can depict where bullet holes might have been, and on the back is a blank sheet of paper, and he drew a sketch damage to the skull, well he drew a sketch of the top of the head. It doesn’t show the back of the head, it’s only the top of the head, and this is the famous sketch which has the big dotted line circled almost the entire top of the head is surrounded by a dotted line, and he made the notation, 10 x 17 missing, and, of course he explained to the House Committee on Assassination to their forensic pathology panel,a nd also to us, that yes. what I meant was the bone was missing in this area, 10 by 17 centimeters, which is huge. And so the intent of this diagram, that was apparently to shows, “damage by the bullet,” and everybody accepted it at face value for decades. Well, I had an inspiration before we deposed Dr. Boswell, and I said to Jeremy Gunn, let us take a skull model, an anatomically correct model of the human skull and ask Dr. Boswell to draw on the skull model the extent of the damage to President Kennedy’s skull because his diagram doesn’t show the back of the head, it’s just not part of the picture, it only shows the top so we asked him to do that, and he did, and in the diagram he made on this skull model, not only is the entire top and right side of the head missing, and this is the bone he is talking about, but the entire right rear of the head is missing too. And no one really understood this until we asked him to draw a sketch on this skull model. And so Boswell, there he is under oath, in 1996 telling us that not only is the top of the head and right side gone, but the right rear of the head is gone too, the bone. And that’s when the lightbulb came on for me, and that’s when I really knew, deep down inside, you know between what Tom Robinson had told us, and between what Boswell had told us, there was post mortem surgery on this body before the autopsy. Because Boswell was describing not only the right rear of the head missing which is consistent with Dallas but the top and the right side too. And it’s my conclusion, and I don’t derive any pleasure from saying this but it’s my conclusion that Boswell’s sketch is a con job, it’s designed to fool history, and it did for three decades. Boswell’s sketch shows the top of the president’s skull missing and it has blood stains on it, and yet Humes didn’t burn it, you see? And when Jeremy Gunn asked Dr. Humes you said you burned all the notes that were blood stained why didn’t you burn this document, and Humes had no answer, no answer whatsoever, he just gave us a flippant, “oh, I don’t know,” response and just clammed up on us. I think the reason Humes didn’t destroy that diagram is because it’s a con job. Humes performed the post mortem surgery because he was ordered to by his superiors. Boswell observed it and drew a sketch and then represented the sketch of post mortem surgery as damage done by the bullet. So, it’s part of a cover up, and it tells us that the cover up was in place the minute the body arrived at Bethesda. So, yes, there is medical, legal evidence, there are medical, legal reasons, all this fraud in the evidence to re-open the case.
(the talk over each other a little bit)
Osanic - Now several times you’ve made, you’ve made mention here of missing bone do you have any opinion of the authenticity of something called the Harper fragment?
Horne - Oh, sure I do. Thank you, Len, for reminding me. The Harper fragment is a key piece of evidence in this case. The Harper fragment is one of three pieces of bone found in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination or the following day. Now, the Harper fragment was found on Saturday, the next day, in the grass, by a pre-med student, he turned it over to his uncle, Jack Harper, Billie Harper turned it over to Jack Harper, who was a pathologist, and he turned it over to Dr. Cairns, Dr. A. B. Cairns, was the head of pathology at one of the local hospitals and it was the unanimous consensus of those pathologists who examined the piece of bone was that it was human bone, and that it had fresh blood on it, and that it was occipital bone. Now the occipital bone is shaped like a triangle it is in the back of your head, and the base of the triangle is at the bottom of your head and the pointy part of the triangle is at the top where your cowlick is. So, that’s the occipital bone; that it was occipital bone, and they decided that it is occipital bone because of the pattern of the um, there are indentions in the bone of the blood vessels on the inside of the skull, on the brain, the blood vessels on the outside of the brain make an indentation in the bone as the bone grows around it. So, thank god these people photographed the Harper fragment. I mean, I am just so grateful for them. They had a professional medical photographer at this local hospital. He photographed the Harper fragment, the exterior surface, next to a ruler! And you can read the numbers on the ruler. It’s about two and a half inches wide, and you can see all the details on the bone, and he also photographed the interior section where you can see these blood vessel markings.
And the fragment was reported to the FBI. And they took it to Washington. And it was given to Dr. Burkley, whose name keeps coming up over and over again in this case, as the man in charge of all the bone fragments, which are all missing now. And the man in charge of the autopsy photographs and X-rays, and we know that many autopsy photos are missing, the one’s that are in the collection present a dishonest picture of the wounding. And we know that two skull X-rays are missing, and three are forgeries. So, Burkley had this Harper fragment. Many months later the FBI returned and said we want the photos, but at least they turned them into their bosses and didn’t destroy them, you know, at least we have the Harper fragment photos today. The Harper fragment was occipital bone. Dr. Cairns told the FBI that. He also told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that, he told the staff. And that’s another interview report that G. Robert Blakey decided to seal for 50 years. This man made some interesting decisions. [G.] Robert Blakey, he decided to publish the sworn testimony of Dr. Humes on television in which they got Humes to recant about where the entrance wound was located in the photograph and he decided to publish a long running technical interview of Humes and Boswell by the medical panel, but he did not publish any of the staff interviews of autopsy witnesses and people like Dr. Cairns, they were all sealed for 50 years. He also sealed the depositions of Dr. Finck, Dr. Ebersole, and of Robert Knudsen for 50 years, but thanks to Oliver Stone he didn’t get away with it. Anyway, back to the story, so, yes, the Harper fragment is evidence of the fact that there is an exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head because the bone is from the back of his head. And Josiah Thompson and I, you know, we disagree on the Zapruder film which will be out next big topic, we disagree on whether the film’s authentic or not, but I want to credit Josiah Thompson with something here, he did a great study in his book in 1967, “Six Seconds in Dallas,” which was the first attempt to write a scientific analysis of the forensics and ballistics evidence. he did a study of the impact debris. Where did the debris go after the president’s head exploded? And, of course, everyone familiar with this case knows primarily it went to the left rear. Some of it went straight up into the air, and slightly forward, but most of the debris went back and to the left with such great force that the entire trunk lid of the limousine was covered with bloody water, and the two motorcycle cops to the left rear of the car, their windshields and their faceshields were covered with bloody water. And one of them, Officer Hargis was hit with a piece of bone so hard that he thought he had been shot. So, that study that Josiah Thompson did of the impact debris pattern, and for that matter his study, and his study of the eyewitness and earwitness testimony, he was the first person, I think, to catalogue it, in a large appendix in his book, the catalogue he made of eyewitness and earwitness testimony proves there is a crossfire, without question, shots from in front and from behind and the impact debris went to the left rear, most of it. So, the impact debris going to the left rear is consistent with an exit wound in the back of the head and the Harper fragment is consistent with an exit wound at the back of the head, which are both consistent with the Dallas doctors and nurses observations. So, it’s a shame the fragment is missing but at least we have the photographs of it, and I believe the FBI X-rayed it too and those are in the archives also. So, there were two other fragments found that day, the Burris fragment, found by David Burris and the Weitzman fragment found by the curb by Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman.
[Information about David Burris and the skull fragment he found from researcher John Hunt
"The ARRB claimed to have determined that “David Burros” was a DPD motorcycle officer and that he turned a skull fragment over to Weitzman . Yet as far as the City of Dallas was concerned, no one by the name of David Burros had ever worked for the DPD, which is what they twice told the ARRB. Margaret McGee told me in a telephone conversation on September 16, 2002 that she vaguely recalled the ARRB initiated search for “Burros.” She also related that her records went back no farther than 1975 and would not have covered the period of the assassination. At my request, she checked her files for a “David Burros or Burris” and reported that no record of could be found. However, she did find a “David Burroughs” who was “hired in 1982.” Obviously, this is not the 1963 “Burros” being sought by the ARRB. Additionally, an employee of the DPD payroll records office checked payroll files at my request. A day later she reported that no payroll records existed for a “David Burros, Burroughs, or Burris” from 1964 going back as far as the records reached, which was the “mid-1920’s.” Intriguingly, according to the information in CE-5002, there was a Burris on the DPD payroll in November 1963. His first name was not David, but Homer, and he worked in CID- Burglary and Theft <19H146>. It is interesting to note that “Dallas motorcycle policeman” “David Burros’ ” supposed historic recollections are not recounted anywhere in the ARRB files. Indeed, no ARRB information about “David Burros” and his story exists outside that single, slim paragraph in the ARRB Final Report."
Below is a portion of my chapter on Burris:
"New Evidence and a New Old Witness
Thanks to the JFK Act, a mountain of once secret files from various government agencies and official investigations of the Kennedy assassination are today available for viewing. To date, I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time rooting through the files of the Warren Commission, HSCA, FBI, CIA, and Secret Service at the National Archives. It was while looking through box #7 of the U.S. Secret Service Official Case File of the Assassination of President Kennedy records group, that I ran across a folder marked “Exhibit #5.” That file contained a single 8x10 black and white photograph.
The Burris Photograph
The view is of Dealey Plaza as seen from the sidewalk between where Elm and Main Sts. converge to pass beneath the triple underpass. Looking generally eastward, the photograph shows a portion of the Grassy Knoll fence on the left and the infield grass south of Elm St. across from Abraham Zapruder’s position, as well as the TSBD, the Dal-Tex, Dallas County Records, and Dallas County Criminal Courts buildings. In the photograph’s foreground can be seen the shadow of the photographer and his lens, as well as what appears to be that of a Dallas Police Department (DPD) uniformed officer. A DPD patrol car is seen parked on the north curb of Elm St. just beyond the steps leading up to the pergola and shelter, and another is proceeding west on Elm in the slow lane.
My eye was immediately drawn to blue ink which had been applied to the surface of the photograph with a ballpoint pen. The notation reads: “SKULL,” and from it a line extends to an asterisk drawn over the infield grass. (See Figures 1 and 2.)
Figure 1 – The Burris photograph.
Figure 2 - Notation on the surface of the Burris photograph.
As I flipped the photograph over onto the flatbed scanner I’d brought to the Archives, I noticed additional writing in the same hand and blue pen. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3 - Notation on the back of the Burris photograph
The inscription on the back of the photograph reads:
Skull portion found on pkway by
David Burris W/M/20
4416 Travis Apt 211
LA-8-3321
1100 Rio Grande BLDG.
This given to Det. R. L. Studebaker By The
Above Subject
Located 40’ North East of Manhole Cover and 15’ South of Curbline
The inscription indicates that David Burris, a 20-year-old white male, found a fragment of JFK’s skull and turned it over to DPD Detective, Robert Lee Studebaker. In addition to Burris’ address, phone number, and apparent workplace, the point where Burris found the fragment is denoted with specific measurements related to fixed landmarks. Using the information “40' North East of Manhole Cover and 15' South of Curbline,” I was able to plot the Dealey Plaza location of the fragment in relation to Kennedy at Zapruder film frame 313 (Z-313). (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4 - Scale representation of the location of the Burris fragment.
Two locations for the Burris fragment are shown in Figure 4. This is necessitated by the fact that it is unclear whether or not the distance “15' south of the curbline” is related to due south or perpendicular to the curb in a southerly direction. Therefore, two locations for the fragment are plotted. The blue dot on the left represents the fragment’s location using the information “15’ south of the curbline” literally. That is to say, strictly due south from the curb. The blue dot on the right represents a spot 15’ perpendicular to the curb from the point “40' North East of Manhole Cover.”
Because it is unclear from the extant record whether or not David Burris found the fragment at the time of the assassination, the measurements on the photograph may or may not represent where the fragment actually landed. If, like William Harper, Burris found the bone fragment some significant time after the assassination, any number of scenarios could account for the fragment’s having been moved from where it actually landed to the point where Burris found it.
The question arises: did David Burris watch the skull fragment land at the location listed on the photograph? Did he recover it within minutes of the assassination?"]
Back to Black Op Radio interview of Doug Horne.
Horne - And all three of those fragments were turned over to [dr.] Burkley as far as we know, and they’re all missing.
Osanic - Again, not surprised, right? Along with a chunk of the curb missing as well.
Horne - Oh, are you talking about the curb from Main Street?
Osanic - Yeah, when they cut it out and send it to the archives.
Horne - Fascinating. You know there’s one other area of fraud in the evidence and that is probably the hottest topic in the JFK research community in the last 15 years and that’s the Zapruder film, of course.
Osanic (having some fun with Horne, jokes) And we’ve run out of time now.
Horne - (Laughs.) Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, you sound like Wesley Liebler, we’ve run out of time, thank you very much for your testimony. (Laughs)
Osanic - No, we haven’t but like you said, this is a hot topic now.
Horne - It’s a hot topic, and I’m going to try to make it simple because when it’s boiled down, I’ve done some new research into this area and when its boiled down to its essentials it has become a simple problem.
Osanic - Well, I’ll tell you one thing, I’m somewhat neutral on it and I kinda feel strange, I feel uncomfortable, to think that the Zapruder film is fraudulent because it somewhat paints a picture for me of what happened since I wasn’t there, on the same token when I look at every other field of evidence, like you’re mentioning, photographs, X-rays, autopsy, whatever, there is fraud and manipulation in every other area-
Horne - Yes.
Osanic - so I should not be surprised that people are claiming that there are [is] fraud and manipulation in that as well. So, go ahead, go ahead.
Horne - Okay, well, you know, I thought that the Zapruder film was authentic for decades. I think, everyone did. I think for the first 30 years after the assassination everyone presumed it was authentic, and were intent upon analyzing the image content, and they presumed it was the closest thing to ground truth in the assassination, and that it was the best evidence we have of what really happened and that was the natural way for people to think. And then starting in the early 1990’s the debate shifted from what does the film show to is the film authentic? And most of what I call the old guard researchers, or the first generation researchers are still of the firm belief that the film is an authentic film, and I am going to give you a scoop tonight, I am going to give you my first detailed interview on the reasons why I am convinced it cannot be. And I am a convert. I didn’t used to think this way.
First of all, I am going to talk about three areas, the Zavada report, which was done for the Review Board by KODAK, I am going to talk about the serious, very serious chain of custody problems with the film the weekend of the assassination in which it was in the hands of the Secret Service and the CIA, and the third thing I am going to talk about is a new analysis of the image content of this film conducted by motion picture experts in Hollywood, California, something new. I can’t believe no one ever thought of this before, it’s almost unbelievable now that somebody didn’t think of this 15 years ago, but someone had and that will be the final part of my story, that’s the clincher.
Let’s talk about the Zavada report. I knew as an employee on the Review Board staff that the Review Board was going to take the Zapruder film, legally take it. Let’s explain to the listeners tonight, that it was owned by TIME-LIFE for twelve years. In fact it, well; and then it was sold back to the Zapruder family and they placed it in the Archives for courtesy storage so that it would be in controlled environment conditions, 25 degrees Fahrenheit, below freezing, in a film vault. And then when the JFK Act was passed in October 1992 everyone was aware that the Review Board was going to have the power to determine what was an assassination record and what wasn’t. And everybody knew from the language in the Act that assassination records belonged in the National Archives forever in a collection that the American people could see themselves at anytime as individuals, and that assassination records should not be in private hands or classified by the government.
So, the [Zapruder] family got pretty nervous, understandably, and they tried to withdraw the film from courtesy storage and the Archives said not so fast. This might be declared an assassination record you can’t have it. But, then they tried a second time through an attorney and the archives said the same thing, not so fast. The fate of this film has [yet] to be determined. We are going to keep it under courtesy storage. The Review Board will determine later whether its an assassination record and whether its going to be taken by the government.
So, guess what happens. We knew that it was just a matter of time before the Review Board would officially, legally take the film. And we also knew that if we took the film that the family would be the recipient of just compensation by the government, the government, somebody in the government, would have to give them, would have to cough up some money to assuage their hurt feelings, if somebody took their film, because they had been making money off of it as the copyright holder.
So, knowing that all of this was going to happen I said to Jeremy Gunn, my boss, I said Jeremy, you know because of all these questions about the authenticity of the film I said I think we should do an authenticity study if we can get someone to do it for us to just try to assess the facts, whatever they are, no matter which way what the answer is, whether it’s determined to be authentic or not we should do one if we can because theoretically that would go into determining the film’s value and whether or not it should be taken also.
So, he agreed and we sought out KODAK for various types of pro bono work and KODAK ending up helping us. They agreed to digitize the autopsy photos for us and preserve them forever in digital format. And they also agreed to do an authenticity study, and they called a gentleman out of retirement, Roland Zavada, whose knickname is Rollie, a retired film chemist from KODAK, called him out of retirement and had him do a limited authenticity study for which the Review Board set the terms. We did not want him analyzing image content in the film. We wanted him to look at the date code and the edge printing. Now there is edge printing from the factory, there is edge printing from the developing lab, and there’s a date code, also placed on there by the factory. And also we wanted him to explain the various anomalies which some researchers had noted in the film and to see if he could explain what had caused some of these anomalies. So, we didn’t want him to examine image content, as in who got shot and when, and all that type of thing.
So, he did. And the study took a lot longer than we all thought it would. And he turned it into us, I think, two days before we shut down in September 1998. But, he produced a very thick report, put a lot of work into it. And meanwhile, while he was working on the authenticity report the Review Board held hearings on the Zapruder film, and took the testimony of experts about why it was important and all this, and should the government take the film, and they decided to take the film.
So, they decided in April of ‘97 to take the film and the effective date of the taking was August 1st, 1998 and the government, kind of blew it, in my opinion, and the opinion of a lot of people, the government blew it, the Justice Department, not the Review Board. The Justice Department was in charge of the negotiations, for just compensation for the family. And they had a panel which decided, the panel was split by a 2 to 1 vote, a 2 to 1 vote, with one member bitterly dissenting, the panel decided that the film was worth $16 million dollars, and, of course, that’s what congress eventually gave the family. That doesn’t bother me too much, what bother’s me is that the Justice Department gave the store away. They decided, the government, even though it was going to take the film, even though it was going to pay some huge amount of money that the government would not take the copyright. I think that’s egregious. It’s unsupportable. It’s just outrageous. So, the government did not take the copyright when it took the film. It not only paid the family big bucks for the film, the government allowed them to keep making money on it and control access to it, which is, to the images, which is not what the Review Board had in mind.
So, to make a long story short after the family got it’s windfall profit of $16 million dollars from congress, congress had to vote the money, the family then; the heat was on, so they donated the copyright to The Sixth Floor Museum.
And now The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, “The Oswald Did It Museum,” controls the access to the images of the Zapruder film, which is really unfortunate. The Review Board had in mind that the Archives would make digital copies of the film and make them freely available to researchers at low cost. The archives has not made digital copies of the film, and you cannot get any copy of the extant film from the Archives at low cost. If you want a copy of the film you have to get a film copy and it costs $800. So, this thing went badly awry. But, that’s all background, that’s all backstory.
So, Rollie Zavada did his limited authenticity study and he turned it into us two days before we shut down. I studied it a little bit in 1999 and there were a few things that bothered me but I didn’t really study the report in great detail until this year and there’s two points I’d like to make. There are some characteristics of the film that are consistent with authenticity, but they don’t prove it. There are other aspects of the film that are inconsistent with authenticity and which actually may be dispositive in nature.
So, the things about the film as noted by Rollie Zavada that are consistent with it possibly being authentic are the date code, the film was made in 1961. Okay, fine, that’s fine. It possesses edge printing on it from the developing lab, you know, KODAK and D, D for Dallas, that’s consistent with it’s authenticity. And it’s KODOCHROME film which is what was in the affidavits that were signed that weekend by the film processing people. Abraham Zapruder asked people to sign affidavits attesting to what they had done for him in the way of developing. However, there are some indicators in Mr. Zavada’s report that are inconsistent with authenticity also.
One of them remains a question mark, but it’s of great concern to me and it’s been written about by David Lifton in his article, “Pig on a Leash.” The article has a humorous title but believe me it’s a very serious article. The article, “Pig on a Leash,” in Dr. Fetzer’s book, “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax,” from 2003, this article by Lifton points out the full flush left problem, let me explain that in very simple terms. If you look at the extant film, the extant Zapruder film, I’m not going to call it the original because I don’t think it is an original anymore, so I am going to call it the extant film, the existing film in the Archives, in every single frame the image extends not only from the part of the film that gets projected onto the screen but the image projects into the inter sprocket area. Now young people today may not be attuned to all of this but if you were growing up when I was in the 60’s everybody had a home movie camera and they knew that it had to be threaded in the camera. And it’s threaded with these little gears with teeth on them, and the teeth in these little gears move the film along in the camera, they get grabed, they grab the sprocket holes in the film and they move the film past the shutter, as the shutter is opening and closing. So, there are sprocket holes on the edge of any home movie and on a double 8 mm film, which is what this is, double 8mm film, the sprocket holes are on one side. So, on this one side of the extant Zapruder film you have the images shot [which] are not only in the part that gets projected onto the movie screen but it goes all the way to the left of the sprocket holes. So, there is image content for each frame that is not projected onto the screen but are still valuable images that were captured all the way to the edge of the holes in the film. Now Rollie Zavada as it turns out purchased several used Bell & Howell cameras of the same make and model that Zapruder had used on the day of the assassination. He shot test film and he published in his report images from his test film. He shot pictures of his wife in front of his garage door, and at telephoto, now Abraham Zapruder shot at full telephoto that’s what he testified to, so Rollie is shooting at full telephoto and the inter-sprocket images on the frames of his wife in front of the garage door they only go about half way to the left between the sprocket holes, they don’t go all the way to the left. And yet every single frame on the Z film in the Archives the image goes all the way to the left of the sprocket holes, sometimes beyond. He also shot images of his wife standing on a sidewalk, in fact on the Elm Street sidewalk in Dealey Plaza. And those inter-sprocket images go about 80% of the way to the left. They don’t go 100% [to the left.] And then he shot some images of a red truck going down the street, and one of those, he published seven test frames of the red truck, one of those frames goes all the way to the left inter-sprocket penetration goes all the way, one of them is about 95%, one is 90%, one is 80%. It’s uneven. So, we have a problem here which raises questions which are not resolved yet. And the problem is why doesn’t the test film shot in the same make and model cameras exhibit the same degree of inner sprocket penetration of the image that is on the film in the Archives? So, that’s an unresolved question. It’s a possible indicator of inauthenticity. But we need to do film tests in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 in the afternoon on November 22nd on a day when the sun is out and see, in the same make and model camera, and see if we get the full inner sprocket penetration in every single frame of the test film that you see [in the extant Zapruder film] in the Archives. You see, it’s not good enough to say well one of the red truck frames goes all the way to the left. So? So, what? Every single frame of the extant Zapruder film the image goes all the way to the left of the sprocket hole. Only in one or two test frames that Rollie published does it do this, in the other test frames it doesn’t even come close. So, that is one unresolved issue that raises questions.
Osanic - Well, let’s talk about that for a minute, because, what would that mean? And, for instance, I say that well if the sprocket gears had any play at all could the film be going back or forth? And could that account for-
Horne - No.
Osanic - I’m just asking that right-
Horne - Yeah. The issue is the exit window from the lens. In other words, Rollie hypothesized, Rollie Zavada hypothesized in his report that the telephoto lens had such a large exit window that it was feeding into the aperture of the camera, that instead of the image stopping at the edge of the part of the frame that gets projected it went all the way to the edge of the film. Well, if that’s the case, if that hypothesis is correct then why doesn’t it do that in the test film that he shot? And why doesn’t it do it consistently for every single frame? So, the question is, is the extant film in the Archives really shot in a Bell & Howell camera or is it something reproduced in an optical printer at a photo lab? And this question, your listeners will understand why it is important later in my discussion when I show that the film was at a sophisticated photo lab, a classified photo lab the weekend of the assassination. So, the question is, is the film in the Archives a camera original film, from a Bell & Howell camera or is this full flush left inner sprocket penetration that was not consistently reproduced in test film, is this an indication that it’s not a camera original film and something made on an optical printer? That’s the question.
But, there’s something else that’s even worse than this. When I studied Rollie’s report this year, I noticed that the original opinions; well, let me back up a minute, Zapruder took his original film developed at KODAK in Dallas the day of the assassination, he took it over to another film lab after it was developed and he said I want three copies run off, that’s the Jamieson film lab. So, you see the lab that developed it at KODAK they had the proprietary formula, the chemicals to develop KODACHROME film but they didn’t have a contact printer. So, Zapruder had to take his brand new original film over to a film lab and before, this is when it was still 16mm wide it had not been slit down the middle yet, it is still 16mm wide, Double 8mm film is originally 16mm wide when shot, sprocket holes on both sides images going in opposite directions from side A and side B, he takes it over to the Jamieson film lab, they run off three copies. All they do is expose the copies in their contact printer. They expose three copies. He takes the copies and the original back to the KODAK lab. The three copies are then developed and then the KODAK lab slits all the film. They slit it right down the middle and turn 16mm wide film with perfs on both sides into 8mm [wide] film with perfs on one side, and so they are all slit down to 8mm.
So, what Rollie did, he did the right things, I mean, he ascertained, number one, that the original film was developed in Dallas at the KODAK lab. He found three surviving witnesses who are all very credible, and they not only said we developed it but we viewed it as a 16mm unslit film, twice, at fast speed, then Mr. Z went over and had his three copies exposed, then he came back, we developed the three copies, then we slit all four of the films. That’s what they said, we slit them all to 8mm, then we watched ‘em again, we watched the original again, and one of the copies, I think.
So, he also interviewed the people at the Jamieson lab, the copying lab, the one that exposed the three contact prints for Mr. Zapruder. Well, the original opinion that Rollie got from these people was that you know when we made these copies that inner sprocket image basically should have been copied onto the copies. In other words, that their opinion was when he first approached them that the three first day copies made from Zapruder’s film should have had should have had this inner sprocket image transferred onto the copies. And, of course, they’re not! If you look at the, if you look at the three copies today that are in existence, two of them are the so called Secret Service copies, and they are in the archives, and one was held by LIFE magazine and then later given back to the Zapruder family, and its now in the hands of The Sixth Floor Museum. These three so called first generation copies do not show any images between the sprocket holes. And, you see Len, that’s inconsistent with the original opinion of what they should show from the people who made the exposures. And Rollie was acutely aware that this was a problem, and he, and I’ll be doggone, he went back and jawboned his witness, Mr. Jamieson, and got him to change his mind, and say, well, ya know, I must have been wrong with what I told since the first generation copies today don’t show that, gee, I guess we didn’t expose that part when we made the copy. But, you know, that’s not how science is supposed to be done. Mr. Zavada jawboned his witness until his witness changed his mind. That’s not how you do an authenticity study.
It gets even worse. I wanted Mr. Zavada to shoot test film in the actual Zapruder camera, not the same make and model, I didn’t want that because I know that every machine is just a little bit different from another machine. They may be mass produced but they are all just a little bit different. I wanted test film shot in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 noon on November 22nd, 1997 in the actual camera to see if these film anomalies that other researchers had noted would appear, and if they appear then they are probably no big deal but if they didn’t appear then it would be a big deal. And it was entirely feasible to do this because the Zapruder camera at the time was on loan to The Sixth Floor Museum it was actually in Dallas, it was in the city, in a glass display case. And all the Archives would have had to do was get permission. They could have even sent a person down there to supervise it all to make sure that nothing was damaged. So, I recommended this in the strongest possible terms. My boss, Jeremy Gunn wasn’t real happy because he envisaged a nightmare scenario where the newspaper would get hold of a story and there would be a big headline that said, “Review Board Questions Authenticity of the Zapruder Film!” and it would become a big brouhaha. So, he called Rollie Zavada on the phone that day, this is October ‘97 when I made my demand and Rollie Zavada said, oh no, we don’t need to do that with the original film [camera] it’s sufficient to use the same make and model camera, we don’t need, we don’t need the actual camera we can use the same make and model, it doesn’t have to be the actual camera. And I was stunned by that answer. I was absolutely stunned. And since that time, namely this year, 2009, I have spoke to people in Hollywood and they have said that was an unforgivable decision which is beyond their understanding. They said every camera has a unique optical footprint and they said if this guy, Mr. Zavada was the expert he claimed he was he should have known this, that every camera has a unique optical footprint, just like every XEROX machine has a unique optical footprint. And you use the optical footprint produced in a test copy in a xerox machine or test film shot filmed in a camera to determine the authenticity of a questioned object. And he didn’t want to do it in the original camera, in the Zapruder camera, he wanted to use same make and model. And then, of course, when he did use the same make and model lo and behold there’s not full flush left. Now at the time, at the time we did not identify full flush left penetration of the inner sprocket area as an issue, we were concerned about double images between the sprocket holes, double images, and strange flares of light and the fact that they are actually darker, the images between the sprocket holes are actually darker than the projected part of the image. These were the anomalies we were concerned with. It is only after his report is published that I became aware in 1999 of this full flush left problem. It’s like, oh my god, he shot test film and it doesn’t match the film in the archives, the image doesn’t go far enough to the left. Well, now we know, I know now this year, since talking to people in Hollywood that of course you would shoot test film, they said, it’s the first thing that anyone doing a bon fide authenticity study would do is to shoot test film in the camera that was used to shoot the film in question and have an optical footprint. But, he didn’t want to do that.
So, to summarize here and make it simple, the Zavada report on the film’s authenticity is very long, it’s very complex. I’ve dealt with it in tremendous detail in my Zapruder film chapter, my chapter is 194 pages long, it is almost book length. It raises more questions than it answers. That is my final conclusion, it raises more questions than it answers. And anyone who wants to immerse themselves inside baseball can go read my chapter.
So, next, chain of custody, Len, this is where the story really gets interesting and it becomes a mystery thriller, quite frankly.
Osanic - Well, Doug, let me, I want to ask you something here because we are a little past two hours already.
Horne - Oh, my goodness.
Osanic - You have three sections left, or two?
Horne - I can wrap this up in fifteen minutes.
Osanic - Fine. Or, I was going to ask you if it was quite extensive, maybe I should just have you back another week to, um...
Horne - No, I think it would be unfair to your listeners to have launched into the Z film and then to cut off that discussion, I’ll tell you what we can do, we can finish talking about the Zapruder film tonight and then I could come back and we could talk about the historical context in which the assassination took place, you know, the Cold War, and Lyndon Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover. We could do that in a second interview.
Osanic - Right. Well, you had outlined six major areas that you had wanted to get to, and was that number three, or four?
Horne - Right, right. No, that was the follow on. We’re on number six now, this is the final topic that we could cover tonight is the Z film.
Osanic - Sure, sure.
Horne - And then when I finish up here in about ten or fifteen minutes-
Osanic - all right, yeah.
Horne - If I could come back another time we could talk about history
Osanic - I’d be glad to have you back again, yeah
Horne - Okay, super. So, let me tell you this mystery story, about the film the weekend of the assassination. We know that Zapruder sold his film to LIFE on Saturday afternoon, the day after the assassination. We know that. First of all we know that he was showing the original to perspective buyers Saturday morning (emphasizing) on an 8mm projector. Now, remember this, this is very important. Rollie Zavada’s witnesses all confirmed, all three of them confirmed, yes, the original film was slit after the copies were made Zapruder came back we slit it to 8mm, we know that Zapruder was showing it to perspective buyers Saturday morning on an 8mm movie projector, his own home movie projector. We know that he sold it to LIFE for $50,000 on Saturday, but he only sold them still picture rights, still picture rights, and the deal was that they would return the original film to him after a week. LIFE magazine, Sunday night, re-approached Mr. Zapruder, late Sunday afternoon and Sunday night, and they said, something unprecedented that I had never heard of before, someone who has already purchased a product, who has already paid a certain amount of money, re-approaches the buyer and said I’d like to buy this again and give you a whole lot more money except that now we want to keep it forever, and we want motion picture rights too. So, he said, hey sure! So, he got an attorney, Sam Passman, and they negotiated, and what happened on Monday, the next day was that instead of giving Mr. Zapruder $50,000 TIME incorporated and LIFE magazine gave him $150,000 for all rights, including motion picture rights, and no, you don’t get it back either, and we get all the copies. That was the deal on Monday. Now, that becomes suspicious later when we realize that LIFE magazine, never once, never once, Len, did they show the motion picture for profit as a motion picture film. They never once exercised their motion picture rights and showed the film as a movie in twelve years. All they did was release selected still frames when it was convenient for them to do so. So, they paid $100,000 extra for something and then didn’t use the rights they paid for. And after Robert Groden and Dick Gregory showed Robert Groden’s bootleg copy of the film on “Goodnight America,” on ABC-TV in March 1975 and showed this dramatic apparent evidence of shots from the front, the rapid motion of the president’s body, you know, back and to the left, after that uproar began then TIME, incorporated just caved in and they sold it back to the Zapruder family for one dollar. So, it’s clear to me that the extra money was spent on the film, on Monday, for purposes of suppression.
So, then the question then becomes, well what are they suppressing? Well, here we go. There were two distinct events with a film, purported to be an original Zapruder film, two distinct events on the weekend of the assassination at the CIA’s photo lab in Washington, D.C. Now, I want to make it very clear, this photo lab is the lab does analysis, it doesn’t, it doesn’t copy movies. It does analysis, most of the time of U-2 photographs and CORONA satellite photographs, but it’s the preeminent photo analysis lab in the world, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, NPIC, I’ll try to speed this up. The NPIC conducted two specific events with the Zapruder film the weekend of the assassination, the first one, which I’ll call Event One was on Saturday night, November 23rd the event started about 10:00 p.m. and the witness in this case is unimpeachable, the witness is Dino Brugioni who was the chief information officer at NPIC for a couple of decades. He was the right hand man of the director, the director was Arthur Lundahl. Anytime they needed a briefing board prepared with still pictures on it of some national security subject Dino supervised the making of the briefing boards. So, while Dino had been interviewed by a couple of researchers, two or three researchers in the past, I don’t think those interviews were conducted in depth. Someone this year, Peter Janney of Beverly, Massachusetts, Peter Janney conducted 7 interview with Dino Brugioni. Dino opened up to him, they are all recorded. I have the recordings. Peter Janney has the recordings. Dino Brugioni said the following, we had an 8mm Zapruder film, they didn’t call it that that night but that is what it was, we know it was 8mm because we had to go out and buy a projector, we had to go out and buy a projector at midnight at 11:00 p.m., 11:30 p.m. open up a store, the CIA’s favorite photo store and buy a projector. It was brought to the NPIC by two Secret Service agents and Dino called in two of his close colleagues who he named in the interviews to help him, Ralph Pierce and Bill Bamfield to help him make these briefing boards. And they blew up individual frames of the film, blew them up photographically and made prints. And put prints on the briefing boards so that the director, Art Lundahl, could brief the director of the CIA John McCone on the next morning, Sunday morning. And he says we created two briefing boards that were six feet long each. Each briefing board was a three foot by three foot panel joined by a metal hinge in the middle with Zapruder frames on them. And he prepared briefing notes for Lundahl. And then Lundahl took the two briefing boards early Sunday morning over to John McCone, briefed him, and then brought them back.
Well, guess what happened at NPIC the next night, Sunday night? Sunday night, November 24th, very late at night, a completely different work crew was called in to the NPIC. Dino Brugioni was not involved, even though he was the duty officer. Ralph Pierce and Bill Bamfield were not involved. I’m telling you, Len, this was a compartmentalized operation, a different audience is brought in to do some more briefing boards. But, on what?
They were brought a Zapruder film, and it was not 8mm wide, it was 16mm wide. It was an unslit double 8mm film, not yet slit down the middle and the Secret Service agent who brought it to NPIC Sunday night told the head of the color lab, Homer McMahon, that this was the original film and it was developed in Rochester, New York at “Hawkeye Works.” Now, “Hawkeye Works,” was the code word for a secret CIA photo lab at the KODAK, get it, KODAK, at the KODAK main industrial facility headquarters in Rochester, New York. The agent who couriered the film to NPIC Sunday night said, this was developed at “Hawkeye Works,” it’s the original. I just brought it from there. So, he couldn’t have been wrong. And this had a special meaning to Homer McMahon. Now, the Homer McMahon interviews were done by me in 1997, by the Review board staff. And we did three interviews of him and one was tape recorded.
So, we have a second team of workers, Ben Hunter and Homer McMahon doing briefing boards the next night. And I believe they are doing briefing boards from an altered film that has been recreated at “Hawkeye Works,” in Rochester and made to mimic the original film. So, what they are clearly doing in my mind is they are making sanitized, they are making briefing boards from a sanitized Zapruder film, a changed Zapruder film. So, the question, of course, then becomes, well, what was changed?
Well, because of the work done by this Hollywood group this year, which is the end of the story tonight, it’s clear that the exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head has been blacked out on the Zapruder film. It’s undeniable. The exit wound has been blacked out, and, of course, if you’re going to black out a wound, you have to put a wound, you have to put a wound in somewhere else. And it’s my conclusion that this enormous head wound seen in the Zapruder film in the top and right side of the head is art work. It’s art work just like the blacked out portion of the head is. And it’s art work intended on Sunday at “Hawkeye Works,” to mimic the autopsy photographs! Everything is inter-related here. The huge head wound in the Z film is intended to mimic the results of post mortem surgery that is seen in the autopsy photos and that’s possible because we know that the first autopsy photos were developed Saturday by Robert Knudsen.
So, anyway, the reason I am absolutely convinced that these are two compartmentalized operations on different nights by different people is, we asked Dino, (corrects himself), uh, we, Peter Janney, using some input from me, Peter Janney asked Dino Brugioni did you know Ben Hunter, one of the two people who was at the Sunday event, did you know Ben Hunter? He says, oh yeah, I knew Ben Hunter. He (Dino) says he (Ben Hunter) wasn’t there that night. He says no, he wasn’t there. And Dino, you know, after repeated questioning was quite positive that his event was on Saturday night, that it was not Friday night, and that it was not Sunday, it was Saturday night. So, he says no Ben Hunter wasn’t there. And then so we, so Peter Janney asked Dino this year he said well, Mr. Homer McMahon and Ben Hunter from Sunday night they remember a man named Captain Sands being there at their event. And Dino said well, I know Captain Sands he ws the deputy director of the NPIC but he wasn’t there at my event, Captain Sands wasn’t there.
So, there is no doubt whatsoever [that] you have two different events here. One with the 8mm camera original film Saturday night, the one that was developed in Dallas the day before. One with an alteration, an altered product Sunday night, [with] a different group of people creating a sanitized set of briefing boards. Now the first set of briefing boards produced is missing today. The sanitized briefing boards, one set of those exists and is in the National Archives turned in by the CIA in 1993 and it contains images that are consistent with the film today.
So, let me move onto the final part of the story and explain what I mean by the Hollywood research group. There is a patriot in California named Sydney Wilkinson, it’s [she is] a gal that has worked in the film industry her entire life. She’s a marketing person in post production film services in Hollywood. She knows all the major film companies, all the major labs, a lot of the editors and special effects people. She decided; she was really intrigued by this Zapruder film authenticity question last year. And on her own she went about finding out how, she asked how do I get a copy of the film in the Archives? And it turned out the only way you could get a copy was to do this, the Archives took the extant film and in 2002 they sent it to a film lab, to the low bidder, in California, Monico Film Labs and they had a forensic copy made. They blew it up from 8mm to 35mm in an optical printer, so it’s slightly enlarged, and they made a forensic copy, scratches, dirt and everything. By the way, the film is in terrible condition now, it’s really in bad shape. So, they made a forensic copy. So, Sidney Wilkinson was allowed and any other American would be allowed to pay $795 dollars and 90 cents to a contractor selected by the Archives, they give you a list of six contractors, you choose the one you like, it turned out only one of them would make a film copy, so that Sidney didn’t have a choice, she had to pay $795 for a copy of the forensic copy. But, what she got was, what she got was an inter negative, she wanted this 35mm inter-negative of the forensic copy of the Z film. It’s provenance cannot be questioned. This is provable that this comes from the extant film in the Archives. It is not a bootleg copy passed around by researchers for years. This is directly from what is in the Archives. And it has been studied now by experts in the motion picture film industry in Hollywood. Sidney Wilkinson and her team of loyal associates, they have done a high definition scan of each frame of this inter-negative, a high definition scan for those of you who have high def televisions you will understand what this means, it is 1080 pixels by 1920 pixels per frame. You know, you’ve got your 1080p Blue-Ray [DVD] movies, right?, you’re 1080p high def TV, so that’s very high resolution. So, the first digital pass they did on this inter-negative, Sidney Wilkinson and her team, was an HD scan of each frame. Then they did a 6k scan. let me tell you, Len, how significant that is, a 6K scan. The state of the art for Hollywood movie restoration today is a 4K scan, that’s 4,000 pixels per frame of a movie film. So, when Ridley Scott did his restoration of Blade Runner of his classic film noir of science fiction, Blade Runner, he did a 4K scan of each frame. Sidney Wilkinson did a 6K scan of each frame, state of the art of this inner-negative. She then assembled a team of experts in the post production of movies. Two of these people, one was a film editor for 30 years, the other two were experts in film restoration. Let me tell you how important that is, experts in film restoration have been looking for decades at films of the 40’s 50’s and 60’s. They know what optical visual effects look like. This is before the era of digital CGI, this is not computer generated imagery. They are familiar with the old fashioned visual effects because they have been restoring those films for decades. One of these men is the head of restoration at a major motion picture studio. That’s pretty impressive credentials. The other one owns a film restoration company. This panel of three people in August of this year examined the 6K, the 6,000 pixels per frame digital scans of the inner negative which came from the archives and they unanimously decided that the back of President Kennedy’s head has been crudely altered, blacked out in all of the frames they looked at, they spent a lot of time looking at frame 313, the so called head explosion through frames 337, those are the frames that they focused on, that the film was not only altered but that it was a bad job. In fact, I’ll give you the quote, the actual quote, from Ned Price was “Oh my god, that’s horrible, that’s terrible. I can’t believe it’s such a bad fake.” These people know what they are talking about. It was the consensus decision of all three, since that time four other people, some of them in the industry, some of them visual effects people have also come to the same conclusion. So, now we have seven out of seven experts who have viewed the film who have decided that the Zapruder film is an alteration, not only that, it’s badly done.
So, I tell you Len, the film was suppressed as a motion picture by LIFE magazine, not only because of the head snap, back and to the left, but also because the film is an altered film, and it wasn’t a very good job. So, there are many other questions that are unresolved about the Zapruder film, you know, was there a car stop? We know we got 52 witnesses that said the limousine came to a complete stop, for an instant. So, if there was really a car stop, if these witnesses were all right that would also mean that frames have been excised and that a car stop has been removed. That question is unresolved. But, I am here tonight to tell you that it is a fact, as far as I am concerned, it is a fact that the exit wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head has been blacked out and that a wound has been painted on the right front of his head, an enormous wound that no one saw in Dallas. The president’s wife didn’t see a wound there, neither did the treatment staff at Parkland hospital. The wound has been painted on the head in the film to emulate what’s shown in the dishonest autopsy photos.
So, I would conclude tonight by saying the following, rather than being the bedrock evidence in the assassination, as it was believed to be for so long, the Zapruder film now constitutes irrefutable evidence of a U.S. government coverup in the assassination of President Kennedy. And I’ve also laid out in my Z chapter the theoretical foundation for how this could have been done. And the technique is not a traveling matte, the technique I believe, that was used, was aerial imaging.
So, to anyone who wants to know more about this the textbook that I used, the 1965 textbook is “The Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography,” by Raymond Fielding. I was made aware of this through Jim Fetzer’s conference in 2003 on Zapruder film alteration in which David Healey, a very experienced film editor talked about this textbook which was the first book ever written about the black arts of Hollywood. And it was written in 1965. So, clearly the book is describing techniques that had been in place for decades, since [at least] WWII. And this book in figures 9.4 and 9.5 shows an aerial imaging optical printer and exactly how this would have been done. And, oh, by the way, Peter Janney, my partner in Massachusetts, he asked Dino Brugioni this year, he said, well you were in the film analysis business for years, for the CIA, he said have you ever heard of “Hawkeye Works?” And Dino said, oh yes, he said, I’ve heard of “Hawkeye Works,” he said I’ve visited the place several times in Rochester. He says it was a clean room, you had to wear a mask over your hair and a white suit and little sticky booties over your shoes, and he said, and so Peter asked him, could they process motion picture film? And Dino Brugioni said, yes, “they could do anything with motion picture film at Hawkeye Works.”
So, that’s quite a story, it’s been a long discussion tonight. But, there is fraud in the evidence. And I think my message tonight is that this fraud in the evidence in the Zapruder film it goes hand in glove with the fraud in the evidence in the autopsy photos and X-rays. And for anyone who wants to learn more about this I would say buy “Inside the ARRB,” and you’ll go on the ride of your life and you’ll have a good six months to when you read, because it is in five volumes and it is two thousand and two pages.
So, Len, I want to thank you so much tonight for this opportunity. I know it’s been an extended show but I hope it’s been worth the time of the listeners. And before I close I must thank one person, I must thank Rex Bradford of the Mary Ferrell Foundation. Rex is one of the two people that run this crucial website for the research community. It’s the world’s preeminent site for online documents. And Rex has been my software guru, to help me interface with the self-publishing world, and to help me assemble all of my chapters into the enormous PDF files that are required to print a book. It’s stuff that was beyond my kin. So, I want to commend Rex for his support and his patience in dealing with me. And without him my book would not have been possible. So, thank you.
Osanic - Okay, well I’ll make a link to your book. We will encourage people to write in and then I’m sure. I’d be glad to have you back on to further the discussion.
Horne - Yeah, thanks, Len, when I come back I think we should talk about the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the why, the who and the why, particularly the why-
Osanic - Yeah, and even spend more time-
Horne - the cabal that didn’t want President Kennedy to serve a second term.
Osanic - Yeah, yeah. But, I’d even enjoy more anecdotes from the ARRB since you were there for three years-
Horne - Oh sure.
Osanic - and we could probably spend another couple of hours just on that.
Horne - Yeah, I got a few war stories.
Osanic - Right, well, I just wanted to give you time to bring up at least these six points. I didn’t even get to my questions that I have-
Horne - I’m sorry Len.
Osanic - but I see that’s another; no, don’t worry about that, that’s the idea of these interviews to let the guest speak, and, like I say, I hate it when they cut people off all the time and they change topics. So, people are getting this point of view, you know, I wanted what you’ve got to say it’s on interest. People can write in their questions, accumulate them, and we’ll have you back on and we’ll elaborate more.
Horne - Len, that’s fantastic. And I thank you, because I just appeared on “Coast-to-Coast,” and I was very grateful for that, but when you do a one hour show and there’s about 30 minutes of commercials you have very limited time and you have to, you have to really summarize. So, this oppor-
Osanic - Well, sometimes they even on that show they, I get the feeling they have to kind of give both sides some kind of play, so they, you know, they kind of take a counter-point, well prove to me that the Warren Commission is wrong then.
Horne - Right.
Osanic - And then you’ve got to spend half your time just going over some of the fallacies of that, right?
Horne - Right, but this was a unique opportunity for me. And I really appreciate it. Thank you, Len.
Osanic - Right. Okay, good. Well, we’ll speak to you in the future. If people want to hear some more from you then write in. And write me some questions, and, of course, Doug is available online there too, But, let’s just leave it for there for now, and it was a good interview, and we’ll pick it up next time.
Horne - Okay, thank you so much.
Osanic - Alright, thanks Doug
Horne - Bye-bye
Osanic - Good night.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
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