Doug Horne and Jim Fetzer Part III

http://religionandmorality.net/Doug-Horne/3-DHorne(13Jan2010).mp3

Part III


Fetzer - This is Jim Fetzer, your host on “The Real Deal,” returning to continue my conversation with Doug Horne the senior analyst for military affairs for the Assassination Records Review Board who has just published his five volume, in my opinion, masterpiece, “Inside the ARRB.”  I would like to say for those of you  unfamiliar with Doug that I have been so impressed by his effort, his diligence, his intillegence, his organization, his clarity of writing that I have devoted three blogs [postings] to his efforts on my blog site, www.jamesfetzer.blogspot.com where my very talented web master Lola Heavey has done a magnificent job of presenting Doug’s work in a very; extremely informative and fascinating manner.  So, I invite any of you to check out the blogs [postings] about Doug Horne on www.jamesfetzer.blogspot.com

Horne - And if I can interject here Jim, that’s very generous of you to have done that, and I too, I am truly impressed with her work. She has put some of the really important data tables and charts from my book, and some of the conclusions at the  end of a couple of chapters in there, and she has just made it extremely visually appealing, so kudos to her.  

Fetzer - I’ll just say, I mean she’s a genuis at this, Doug, and believe me I heard a lot about those tables. (laughs)  Those were not easy to translate to the web page, okay?

Horne - She got it done though, she did it! 

Fetzer - Yeah.  Brilliant work, brilliant work.  Okay, we’ve already discovered that there are three major arguments that are given by those who are opposed to the thesis of alteration of the film.  One is that the technical properties of the extant film are those that we would expect from the authentic film.  Rollie Zavada was brought in to support that argument.  It turns out that what he discovered actually contradicts his conclusion.  It’s complete rubbish to make that claim.  And anyone who henceforth cites Rollie Zavada in defense of anti-alteration arguments is using a phoney move, that’s just blatant deception. The second argument has been that there is no break in the chain of custody.  We found David Wrone in his book about, “Reframing the Zapruder Film,” made that pitch very strongly, even though he knew better.  We have, we learned from Doug Horne even as long ago as in 2000 in “Murder in Dealey Plaza,” that in fact two different films were brought to the National Photographic Interpretation Center on two different nights.  The first on Saturday night appears to have been the original Zapruder film, a slit 8mm where they even had to go out and buy a, buy a projector in order to project it, the second night, with a different team of NPIC employees a 16mm unslit version brought down from Rochester, the original briefing boards were abandoned in favor of the second set of briefing boards and it appears for the obvious reason that they had recreated the film, substantial alterations, removing crucial events such as the driver William Greer pulling the limousine to the left, and to a halt, and, of course, indications of shots from the front as well as from the rear- 
[Fetzer seems to have left his cell phone nearby, and on, it’s ringing.]

Fetzer - (continuing) were deceptions that we will talk about are related to that mode of recreation, but then third of all Josiah Thompson has been particulalry [out in] the forefront making the claim that all of the films are completely and utterly consistent that no one has shown any discrepency between any of the assassination films.  And if you were going to alter one you would have to alter them all.  And he has implied that’s impossible- 

Horne - It is impossible, and they don’t agree today.

Fetzer - (Laughing) Well, this is where we’re going Doug.  So, I am going to read a few parts from some very, very informative pages that begin on 1317 through 1319 and there’s much more here than I am able to read, but just to give you the flavor of the evidence that Doug is presenting.  This will take just a couple minutes, and then Doug can elaborate on this. 

The question he poses, “If the Zapruder film is an alteration doesn’t this mean that other films of the assassination must have been altered also? And are there inconsistencies between other films and the Zapruder film?” 

Doug’s answer, “Absolutely - alteration of the Zapruder film does indeed imply  that in a perfect conspiracy that other films must have been altered also and in the same way as the Zapruder film.  If they were not altered, and the Zapruder film was this would have left undeniable evidence in the photographic record that “the” pre-eminent record of the assassination is indeed an alteration. In fact, what we do find in the evidence is one suggestion of identical alteration, and numerous instances of disagreement between various Dealey Plaza films, and the Zapruder [film.]”

Now here I’ll read abbrviated portions of his discussion, so just know that there is more than I am reading here. 

The fist point he makes, the turn from Houston onto Elm may have been removed from the Zapruder film, the Nix film, and the Muchmore film.

First, let us examine the suggested identical alteration of the Zapruder film, the Nix film, and the Muchmore film.  Neithr the Nix film, the Muchmore film, nor the Zapruder film show the Presidentil limousine turning left from Houston Street onto Elm Street. Orville Nix told Mark Lane (on film) in 1966 that his film had been initially “lost” by the processing plant and that when the FBI returned his film to him, some frames had been “damaged” and were missing.  The originals of both the Nix film and the Muchmore film (taken from the opposite side of the plaza from which Zapruder was shooting his film, and from much further away) are missing today.  How convienent.”

“The fact that the originals of the Nix and Muchmore films are missing is extremely suspicious; they may have been removed from circulation to prevent detection of their alteration--specifically, removal of the limousine’s turn onto Elm from Houston and of the car stop during the assassination.  If ever found one of the first things that should be checked is to see whether the limousine’s turn onto Elm Street in these two films has been excised -- either crudely with splices or via reprinting of those films in an optical printer.”

Another issue, “Clint Hill’s interactions with Jackie Kennedy on the trunk of the limousine appar to be inconsistent in the Nix film and the Zapruder film.  There is also significant apparent disagreement between the Nix Film and the Zapruder film.  In Harry Livingstone’s 2004 book about the Zapruder film he discusses differences between the images of Clint Hill and Jackie Kennedy on the trunk of the limousine in the Nix film, versus what is shown in the Zapruder film.  Livingstone correctly points out that in the Nix film, Clint Hill appears to place his left arm around Jackie Kennedy’s right shoulder and push her back into her seat--wheras in the Zapruder film, he barely touches her with his right hand, and is not seen embracing her with his left arm at all. 

Another point, is the head snap different in the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore Films? The head snap in the Nix film appears to be slightly slower and less violent than in the Zapruder film; in the Muchmore film, there appears to be no head snap visible at all but this may be inconclusive because of the camera angle at the time of the headshot(s), and because the line of sight to the President’s head is obstructed by Dealey Plaza bystanders immediately afterwards.”

“The perceived differences between the headshot(s) in the Zapruder, Nix, and Muchmore films suggests that when debris exiting from the back of President Kennedy’s head was removed from the three films, that it was not done uniformly, resulting in three slightly different versions of the motion of the President’s head caused by the fatal shot(s). This has not been conclusively proven, but is worthy of further investigation.”

Another point, undeniable differences exist between the Zapruder film and other Dealey Plaza films. Researcehr jack White has conclusively demonstrted a major difference between the Zapruder film and other films of the assassination, notably the Marie Muchmore home movie (seen in its entirety in Groden’s DVD JFK Assassination Films), and a slide taken by Charles Bronson during the assassination. Jean Hill and her friend Mary Moorman both told interviewers for years that they were standing in the street (actually in front of the curb on the south side of Elm street) - not in the grass.  They didn’t make a big deal about it, but both consistently recalled that they were standing in the street for many years.”

“The Zapruder film evidence was used by many persons who wanted to believe the film was authentic as further evidence of the “notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony” and of all human recollections. The problem is the Muchmore film and the bronson slide show Moorman and Hill standing not in the greass, but below the level of the grass, in the street.”

“Clearly, it is the Zapruder film that has been altered in this instance, for Jack White has conclusively demonstrated that the shoes they were wearing the day of the assassinaiton are not shown in the Zapruder film.  On page 42 of “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax,” Jack White published pictures taken of each other by Jean Hill and Mary Moorman on the day of the assassination, revealing that both women were wearing black shoes on November 22, 1963.  Mary Moorman was wearing black penny loafers and Jean Hill was wearing black canvass “boat shoes.”  And yet seen in the vicinity of frames 300-310 of the Zapruder film, the Jean Hill and Mary Moorman that are depicted standing on the grass are both wearing white shoes!  Their location on the grass instead of in the street (where the Muchmore film and the Bronson slide show them to really be standing), and the fact that the black shoes they were wearing that day are not shown in the Zapruder film, together constitute dispositive evidence proving that the extant Zapruder film is an altered film. 

A second mater, and I’m paraphrasing momentarily is that Jack discovered a line of sight internal to the Moorman photograph that indicated the photograph had to have been taken on that line of sight, and here I’ll just mention in part here “the follow on study performed with the assistance of Jim Fetzer and David Mantik was described in detail at Fetzer’s conference in May of 2003, and is described in writing, with illustrations, on pages 88-92 of “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax”.  Two excellent articles on “the Mary Moorman problem” written by Jack White and by John Costella were published in Fetzer’s 2003 anthology “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax,” “Was Mary Standing in the Street?” by Jack White and “Mary Moorman and her Polaroids,” by John Costella.  Jack White has decades of practical experience in photography and graphic arts, and John Costella is an Australian with a PhD in physics (electromagnetism, I add is his specialization)  who has an intimate theoritical understanding of the mathmatics of optics.  These scientific proofs - based on line of sight studies - that Mary Moorman must have been standing in the street when she took her Polaroid picture, constitute additional dispositive evidence that the Zapruder film, which shows Mary Moorman in the grass has been altered.”

There is more, but for now that is enough. Doug?

Horne - Yeah.  I mean Thompson’s point that if you alter one film you have to alter the other ones or you give away the store is correct. And the store has been given away.  You know, Jim, if this wasn’t such a serious subject this whole cover-up of the JFK assassination would be laughable. It’s almost like a Keystone Cops operation it was so badly done.  But, when you don’t have a trial and the investigators only present a prosecutorial brief, and then you compartmentalize the evidence, and you don’t let witnesses speak to each other, you don’t let the autopsy witnesses speak to the Dallas doctors, that’s how you get away with something like this.  So this film, this issue of films not matching each other it is symptomatic of the whole case.

Fetzer - Well, I think it’s devastating to the anti-alterationist argument I mean we’ve already discovered that the physical properties of the celluloid itself are not what they ought to be, we’ve discovered there was a clear breach of the chain of custody and a substitution of a re-created film for the original, and now that the various assassination films which Josiah Thompson has tauted endlessly, for year upon year as being flawlessly consistent with one another, in fact, are not. I think this is all shameless deception on the part of those who are trying to defeat the alterationist argument and that they have completely run out of gas, that they have come to their turning point, they’ve got enough rope, there is enough rope here now to, figuritively, hang them and thier ridiculous charade.

Horne - (Laughs) Touche! And maybe it’s time to segue into the next topic which is the fact that although the Review Board did not ask Rollie Zavada to examine the image content of the Zapruder film there are some other people now in the process of doing that, that’s what I call the Hollywood story. 

Fetzer - That’s absolutley right, and I think that’s a wonderful appendix.  And why don’t you tell us about Cyndi Wilkerson and how you encountered her?

Horne - Sure.  Just at the time, Jim, when I thought I had finished writing this chapter on the Z film.  I was contacted through third parties by someone who had been looking for me for over six monthss.  And that was a wonderful woman  named Cyndi Wilkerson.  And she’s had a lifetime in marketing in the motion picture industry, marketing, and post-production film services  And she on her own initiative had purchased a duplicate negative of the extant Zapruder film in the Archives.  Now she purchased this from the National Archives, from its authorized contractor, and, so it’s provenance cannot be questioned.  And when she contacted me she had already conducted, she and her research group had already conducted two sets of scans of each frame of this 35mm dupe negative.  The first scan was a high def, HD scan what I would call a 1080p, everybody that has a High Def televsion, they know what 1080p means.  The 1080p is the number of pixels on the vertical axis of your TV screen and, of course, on the upper axis it’s even more pixels. [? Isn’t “vertical” and “upper” the same thing?] it’s 1920 on the top axis. But, if you say 1080p to somebody they know what that means.  It means a high def picture.  So, she conducted a HD 1080p scan of every frame, a flat neutral scan, which actually captured more information than you would normally see in a picture that has been doctored to make it look better for the human eye, and then she also had scanned a 6K scan, which, actually I need to make a correction here of what I had said previously.  I had previously described a 6K scan incorrectly, a 6K doesn’t mean 6,000 pixels per frame which is what I have said in other interviews, that’s not the right way to explain it 6K is the number of pixels on the long horizontal access.  So, a 6K scan is really, is an image that is 6,000 pixels on one axis and about, roughly, roughly 3,500 or 4,000 on the other-

Fetzer - (laughs) Wow!

Horne - (continuing) so it would have about 24,000 pixels.

Fetzer - (laughs) Wow! 

Horne - Yeah.

Fetzer - That’s amazing isn’t it? At least in desribing it the other way you were not exagerating, you were grossly underestimating

Horne - Yeah, I was under desribing.

Fetzer - Yeah.

Horne - So, what we have here are two sets of high quality, high definition digital scans of the extant film in the Archives from an authorized source, from the U.S. government, which cannot be questioned, it is not a bootleg copy of the film.  And this is what she would then and is now doing is gathering up professionals in the motion picture industry in the Hollywood [movie] industry, to study the image content of these frames and to ask these people do you see evidence of anything amiss? Do you see anything wrong with the image content? And the neat thing about her concept is that these people are disinterested observers.  They are not JFK assassination researchers with strong biases one way or the other.  These are people that really haven’t paid much attention to the ongoing debate about the assassination, much less the debate about the film.  So, they don’t have any axe to grind.  And I was priviedged to be present in August when she had her first panel of experts examine the image content, that was three people.  Since then she has shown it to four additional people.  And there is a strong consensus, Jim, of all seven of these people that the image content in the area of the back of JFK’s head, the area behind the right ear, the entire back of his head had been blacked out, and very crudely blacked out. In all of the frames subsequent to the head shot I would say from, definitely from frame 314, certainly at a minimum through frame 337 and a few frames beyond that.  And it’s really a heck of a story.  Now the national media has not awakened yet and become aware of this story, or they have and they don’t want to report it, or their editors won’t let them report it.  This is really a big story that you’ve got seven out of seven professionals in the motion picture industry who know what visual effects look like.

Fetzer - And if we kick in Roderick Ryan-

Horne - Yes

Fetzer - (continuing) who was a consultant to Noel Tywman when he was preparing “Bloody Treason,”-

Horne - And we should, we should include him

Fetzer - (continuing) for publication in 1997, when Noel asked him about the features of the film such as “the “blob,” this apparent gushing out of brains to the right front, which Noel thought looked very peculiar Roderick Ryan told him that it appeared to him that it had been painted in, and indeed the [forward] blood spray had been too.  So, you have three major features of the frame 313, 314, 315, 316 and beyond to wit the blowout to the back of the head which was what actually took place has been concealed by painting over in black [and] the massive blob has been added to the right front, and then the blood spray which as John Costella has observed dissipates entirely too fast to be genuine-

Horne - Way too fast. Right.

Fetzer - these are all artifacts of the recreation of the film and they were done using, what is it called, aerial?

Horne - Aerial imaging.

Fetzer - Aerial imaging, which actually turns out to be painting, (laughs) painting them into the film. And  I guess it may be done the way David Healy has described [See - http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v1n1/healy1.html] using a piece of glass, you do the paint on the glass, and then you put it over the frame, and then, you know, to alter it, and then you photograph.

Horne - Right, you paint on an acetate cell, a clear piece of plastic which has been used by animators for fifty years, and you paint the artwork, for example if you are going to black out a wound, you place the acetate cell over the animation stand in the optical printer, you are projecting the real image from below you are going to paint what you want to change on the acetate cell, and you re-photograph each frame from above with a process camera, and you are photographing a composite image and you do it in one pass of the camera so you maintain high fidelity and high resolution.

So you have seven people so far who’s professional judgement is that we are looking at artwork blacking out the back of the head, where the Dallas doctors all saw a wound, and you have Dr. Ryan who also had a very long and distinguished career in the motion picture industry. Ironically, Dr. Ryan of KODAK who said that he thought that the large so called exit wound in the right front of the head seen in the Z film was a painting, was also artwork.  So, that’s a heck of a story, and for the listening audience I would just say this research is just in it’s beginning phases it’s continuing as I speak, all kinds of scans are going to be done on the film-

Fetzer - Oh, I think you’ve initiated something Doug that is going to have an enormous payoff.  And I have longed believed by the way that exposing the deception in the film is much more effective and convincing to the American public than esoteric arguments about weapons and locations and all that as they pertain to the purported assassin because we live in a visual society-

Horne - Yes

Fetzer - we are used to seeing deception in films all the time, and suspending our disbelief, and yet it’s going to be so easy, so intelligible when they explain the massiveness of the deception and the crudity with which it was executed.

Horne - And Jim let me tell you, when you see, and one day you will, one day everyone will, it might be late this year, it might be early the following year, but soon in the near future there will be a public roll out of these images that clearly show alteration of the Zapruder film image content.  And the world and the nation will be stunned, because in some cases seeing is deception, but in some cases seeing is believing, and when people see how crude these alterations were at the high resolution which they were scanned, they are self explanatory, I mean the people will say oh my god,  no wonder LIFE magazine wouldn’t project this as a motion picture for 12 years until Robert Groden showed his bootleg copy on national TV.  And I’m just here to tell that although I did publish a couple of black and white frames of the film which show some of these anamolies that are being studied in Hollywood they don’t do, they don’t do the scans justice.  When you publish a black and white book you are dealing with 300 dots per inch printing on non-glossy paper and when it’s black and white it doesn’t show the same contrast of the image that you would see in a color image.  So, if people will just be a little patient, the images in my book which are certainly tantalizing and provocative when they see the color HD scans, rolled out at the appropriate time when the research is much more fully developed, when they see those scans, they will be stunned. 

Fetzer - I think that’s absolutley right, and you also have reported that there are at least two frames in which the blob is not evident.

Horne - That is correct, sir.

Fetzer - And that the absence of the blob from those two frames is also proof positive that they were added, that “the blob,” was added in to all the successive frames that show it.

Horne - That’s right, it’s frame 456 and 466 now that, that may be too much inside baseball for an audience that’s not familiar with the film, but those two frames which are, as the car is well down the street, the limousine is well down the street, about to go under the overpass, what happened was apparently Jackie propped her husband up for about two seconds, or two and a half seconds, she just propped him up to look at him for a moment, and during that brief period of time when she propped him up there are many frames captured of him suddenly sitting upright in the back of the seat and then you get a view of the back of his head in which I see, and those are the two frames that are in focus, where many of the others are out of focus, those two frames where it is in focus, and when you look at it on a high definition monitor you can see what appears to be a wound behind the right ear, a large black spot, or defect behind the right ear and absolutely no damage whatsoever on the top of the head, or on the right side of the head, or the right front of the head.  And I think they are pretty damning images

Fetzer - And, of course, as we know from Jackie’s own testimony she said from the front he looked just fine-

Horne - That’s right.

Fetzer - but she had a terrible time holding the back of his head and skull together.

Horne - Correct

Fetzer - And as you now know, Doug, I pointed out in “The Great Zapruder Film Hoax,” that in frame 374 you can actually see the blow out through the back of his head and if anyone would like to compare that with David Mantik’s brilliant work on the X-rays you can see a comparison because I have them virtually side-by-side in the chapter of a book entitled Revisting Dealey Plaza, er, Dealey Plaza Revisited, which you can also find on that blog where there are the three wonderful stories about Doug Horne, go to jamesfetzer.blogspot.com and look for Revisiting Dealey Plaza while you’re there reviewing our articles, our studies about Doug Horne’s work.  This is Jim Fetzer your host on the “The Real Deal” we’ll be right back to conclude my conversation with Doug Horne, the author of the five volume masterpiece, “Inside the ARRB.”