Note: This is the simple introduction that I created and put on my website in 2003. The graphics are small and simple, because internet speeds were much slower back then. I am keeping it here in essentially its original form, with some minor edits to bring it into the 2020s, since many people still find it useful. — John Costella, December 2022
On November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while traveling down Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, in an open car in a motorcade. Everyone agrees about that.
Many people think that agencies of the U.S. Government have lied about or covered up details of the assassination.
For two decades, people thought the best proof of foul play was a 27-second home movie of the assassination taken by a Dallas dressmaker, Abraham Zapruder:
The part of the Zapruder film that shows JFK
This film caused excitement when it was first shown on TV in March 1975, as it shows JFK’s head being blasted back and to his left:
JFK’s reaction to the fatal head shot
This seems to tell us that the shooter was in front of the car on the right side, on the “grassy knoll” (small hill) next to Elm Street. But the U.S. Government insisted that JFK was shot by just one man hiding in a building far behind the limousine.
Things get even more complicated when we look at the film frame by frame. As the bullet hits, JFK’s head first moves forwards:
JFK’s reaction in the frame that the bullet hits
This makes things confusing. There seemed to be three possible explanations:
People tried to figure this out for two decades. Instead of clearing up the mystery, Zapruder’s film just made things more confusing.
In the 1990s, researchers started to realize that there was a fourth possible explanation: Zapruder’s film might also be a part of the lies and cover-up that agencies of the U.S. Government had weaved around the JFK assassination!
The Zapruder film was scientifically examined. It was found that, while most of it looks completely genuine, some of the images are impossible. They violate the laws of physics. They could not have come from Zapruder’s home movie camera.
Zapruder’s film is a very good forgery. It is almost perfect. Some mistakes took almost 40 years to find.
It was also scientifically proven that Zapruder’s film could not be just changed a little bit. For any of it to be altered in this way, a whole new film had to be created. The whole film is a fake!
A movie film is just a strip of little photos (“frames”). The fake film was made by using advanced cameras to cut and paste real photos and film frames together to make new frames.
Because the Zapruder film is only 27 seconds long, less than 500 photos needed to be made. The forgers had at least several months to create them. Most were not published until a year after the assassination. This was sophisticated work, but more than possible in 1963 and 1964. People had been creating high quality fake photos since the 1850s!
But what about the people who watched Zapruder’s film in the days after the assassination?
Film experts believe that a real film of the assassination was quickly altered on the evening of the assassination, using machines that could create Hollywood-style special effects (like Mary Poppins, created in 1964). Since the film was not shown on television, no one knows exactly what these people saw. But we do know that they described a film that is different from the film frames published by the U.S. Government in November 1964 as the “Zapruder film”!
In May 2003, scientists and researchers presented their latest findings at a conference in Duluth, Minnesota. This work was published in September 2003 in a book, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax. The entire conference can also be viewed on YouTube.
The pages below describe the best proofs that the Zapruder film is a fake. They describe some of the mistakes that the forgers made.
In the end, you have to decide for yourself what to believe. But don’t just believe what the U.S. Government tells you!
Introduction