The Zapruder film seems to show the front of JFK’s head being blasted open by a gunshot:
JFK’s head being blasted open by a gunshot
Researchers like Stewart Galanor, who were lucky enough to see the film in the 1960s (at a private screening at the U.S. National Archives), believed that this proved that JFK was killed by a shot coming from in front of him and to his right (i.e., from the “grassy knoll”), because his head is thrown backwards and to his left.
In the same way, when the film was first shown on TV in 1975, people were outraged. The U.S. Government’s story—that one man in a building far behind the President shot him—didn’t make sense. This led the U.S. House of Representatives to create a Select Committee to re-investigate the assassination.
But even in the 1960s, researcher David Lifton discovered that the Zapruder film not only gives us confusing information about where the fatal shot came from, but actually makes no sense at all!
Lifton was a graduate in engineering physics. In 1965 he took the black and white copies of the Zapruder film frames published in November 1964 by the U.S. Government to the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman. He thought that Feynman would conclude, from the laws of physics, that the fatal head shot must have come from the front.
Lifton was dismayed when Feynman ignored all of the frames except the two that show the President just before and just after the impact of the shot:
Frames 312 and 313
(These are modern copies of those frames.) Even though Frame 313 is blurred, Feynman was able to measure the position of JFK’s head compared to fixed parts of the limousine (like the door handle reflection between the Kennedys and the Connallys).
Feynman found that JFK’s head moved forwards at the moment of impact.
The laws of physics then tell us that the shot must have come from behind!
The backwards movement of JFK’s head after Frame 313 then became the real mystery. Were there two shots? Could there be some other physics explanation for this strange phenomenon? Did the red spray of blood force his head backwards, like a jet engine? Could his muscles have gone into a spasm because of brain damage and jerk him violently backwards?
In 2001, scientists used modern computers to remove as much of the blur from Frame 313 as possible. When the two clear frames are laid on top of each other, there is no doubt at all that JFK’s head moves forwards:
JFK’s head moves forwards when it gets hit by a bullet
The movement was checked by yet another method: Frame 312 was instead blurred by the same amount as Frame 313, and then the two frames were compared. Again, the President’s head was found to move forwards.
No surprise: Richard Feynman was right!
Now, you can also see something quite remarkable in this comparison above: the red spray of blood in Frame 313 is clearly in front of JFK’s head. Indeed, it blocks our view of his wife’s face, which we can see fully in Frame 312!
This seems to again tell us that the fatal gunshot came from behind JFK. There is no other way for bloody brain matter to be blasted forwards.
But Lifton made a discovery that was so incredible that for more than two decades it was not given much attention: the head wound shown on the Zapruder film does not at all match the wound described by eyewitnesses and the doctors that treated JFK in Dallas!
We can see the problem if we go forwards just one more frame, to Frame 314:
Frames 312, 313, and 314
The Zapruder film is telling us that the whole front top of JFK’s head gets blasted away! There is a huge crater where his forehead used to be, through which we can again see his wife.
This could make sense, if he was hit by a powerful enough bullet from behind.
But there is a huge problem with this idea: everyone who saw JFK after the shooting said that his face was not injured or damaged at all!
JFK autopsy photographs surfaced in the late 1980s, and showed his face to be completely intact:
JFK autopsy photo
Even the skeptics had to agree that either the Zapruder film or the autopsy photos (or both) have to be forgeries!
From the 1970s, David Lifton had argued that the bright reddish-white wound that seems to appear and “snake up” the side of JFK’s head, which he called “the blob,”
“The blob”
completely disagreed with the descriptions of the head wound given by the doctors and nurses at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, where the President was taken.
In a thousand-word footnote in his 1980 best-selling book, Best Evidence, Lifton argued that this tells us that the Zapruder film has been substantially altered, if not completely forged.
Unfortunately, Lifton would have to wait nearly a quarter of a century for scientists to prove that he was right!
Lifton’s hundred-page chapter in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax is a wonderful history of the Zapruder film, and the way it was used by the U.S. Government as propaganda to confuse and distract the American public from the truth about the assassination of the 35th President of the United States.
The wound mistake