Customer Reviews

The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK

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1 star:		(16)

 

 

If there was ever another textbook to add to any forensic researcher's library, this is the one. Each section is painstakingly detailed with information, much of which has been declassified since The JFK Act was put into effect following the Oliver Stone film, "JFK", in 1991. This book covers the falsification of evidence following the President's ssassination in Dallas at the hands of the FBI and the Secret Service, with a little help from their friends. One of the principal pieces of evidence allowed to be entered into the Warren Report was a home movie of the event called the Zapruder film, which according to Zapruder himself, on being examined by the Commission, expressed not his memory of the sequence of events as he observed it through the lens of his Bell & Howell the day of the filming, but how they now appeared in what he was being shown by the Commission. "Is that what happened?", he's been quoted as saying, almost off-handedly, during his deposition.
The way in which the film could have been altered is discussed in detail and many proofs are presented of what was done to it. Some may find parts of this book a tad too technical, and may pass over those aspects due to the amount of data generated here, yet there is much valuable information to be gleaned from its pages, including chapters by leading experts in the field,
such as Jack White, David Mantik and David Lifton.
A short appendix on the possibility of listening devices in Dealey Plaza, although difficult to assess, suggests how far things appear to have deteriorated in relation to The Sixth Floor Museum, which several contributors--not only John Costella, but also David Lifton and editor James Fetzer--suspect of taking an active, perhaps leading, role in the continued dissemination of false information regarding this case.
This book is a treasure chest and presents to everyone who seeks it, hard evidence coupled with viable analysis, as well as, quality research compiled by some of the finest scientists in the field today.

This book describes the results of painstaking work by Fetzer and others, using simple tools of geometry and measurements of the still-existing concrete structures at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, to prove that the Zapruder film was heavily and professionally modified to show an incorrect series of events.

Fetzer et. al. got started on to path to their discovery when they noticed a few years ago that the photo taken by one of the girls shown in the background of the Zapruder film contained a sight line that would only be correct if the girl (Moorman) was standing on the street next to the curb. Yet, the Zapruder film inexplicably was showing the girl standing on the grass above the curb. Which was correct? Looking first at the Moorman photo, the researchers were able to establish that the perspective in the original photo taken by Moorman had not been altered after the photo was taken since that photo had been published worldwide by the wire services within an hour after the assassination. Then, working backwards, using simple geometry and careful survey measurements they were able to determine the exact spot where Moorman stood when she snapped her picture, which turned out to be 2 feet into the street next to the curb, just as she had said in her signed, sworn, statement to the police on the day of the assassination. The authors showed that it is a physical impossibility for Moorman to have taken her photo from the position on the grass, approximately 12 inches higher in elevation, where she is shown in the Zapruder film. With that as a starting point, the researchers were able to show that there were other alterations in the Zapruder film including two missing sequences of frames, a series of altered frames (including those with Moorman) where the back ground has been cut, enlarged 130 percent, and repasted into modified frames, and a series of frames modified with a slightly relocated freeway sign, apparently to obscure something taking place behind the sign.

I started off reading this book with deep skepticism over the claim implied by its title but after seeing the results of their work, they have proven every one of their claims without leaving room for even a shadow of doubt.

This is a classic real-life detective story that is fascinating reading. The best evidence that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy is now the very existence of the doctored-up Zapruder film since only a large conspiracy would have had the physical and technical resources to do such a thing in 1963. Certainly the original suspect in the crime, Lee Harvey Oswald, would not have been able to produce the doctored film and he would not have cared anyway since he was himself killed two days after the crime.

Does the crime matter anymore? Probably not since after 42 years, all of the players in the conspiracy are either dead or in a nursing home but it's still important to establish the truth, even for a crime from the distant past, and Fetzer has done this in superb fashion. This work will finally bring closure to the troubling assassination for those who read it.

For some the Zapruder film is the most dramatic, and best, evidence of conspiracy in the murder of John Kennedy. As everyone knows, the film shows President Kennedy being slammed back and to his left apparently from a shot coming from the right front, evidence, apparently of a shooter other than Oswald and thus proof of a conspiracy.

Yet, James Fetzer, a conspiracy believer himself, tells us in his book that the film has been altered, leading one to ask why would anyone alter the film and not eliminate all evidence that conflicted with the official version, especially the backward head snap? One would think that if you are going to alter the film, presumably to eliminate any visual evidence of conspiracy, the head-snap would be the first thing you edited out of the film. By contesting the validity of this film, Fetzer has done what almost no one else has been able to do: He has united conspiracists (some of them anyway) and lone-assassin defenders who believe the film is authentic and divided the conspiracy community.

I don't know why those who altered this film left the head-snap in the final product but I do know that this book makes an extremely compelling case that the film has been altered in several places leaving us with an unreliable piece of evidence and wondering what it could all mean. Fetzer plunges us even deeper into the labyrinth.

In one sequence, the driver of the President's limousine turns his head more than 90 degrees in one frame, a physical impossibility. The closest 50 or so witnesses all say the limousine stopped but the Zapruder film shows no such stop. In several other places, frames are missing. Inexplicable anomalies exist. What other explanation is there except that the film, for whatever reason, has been altered?

In another article, one researcher shows people who appear in another film (taken by another photographer in Dealey Plaza that day) but who do not appear in the Zapruder film. How can that be? (I think I found a peculiar and suspicious series of images in the film. In one sequence in which a researcher shows people missing from the Zapruder film, the Franzen family is shown in the Zapruder standing on the south side of Elm Street, watching the wounded President's limousine drive by. Jackie Kennedy is on the trunk of the car. The scene is bedlam. Yet throughout the shooting sequence and as the rest of Dealey Plaza was plunged into chaos, the three Franzens are just standing there, frozen, not moving, not ducking, not reacting, not flinching, not screaming. After reading this book, one wonders whether these images are indeed authentic.)

Fetzer presents experts who explain how the film was altered, which was the most technical and difficult part of the book and one of these experts concludes without equivocation that the film is a fake. He also includes an article by an expert who says that the technology available in 1963 was more than sufficient to accomplish the fakery Fetzer surmises occurred in the Zapruder film.

I noted several negative reviews of this book but I did not see any of these reviewers actually try to explain the anomalies in the film.

I recommend the book as well as Fetzer's two previous compendia of assassination articles, "Murder in Dealey Plaza," (which also contains several articles regarding the probable inauthenticity of the Zapruder film) and "Assassination Science."

If you don't buy another book this year, you should buy this one: THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX: DECEIT AND DECEPTION IN THE DEATH OF JFK by James H. Fetzer. I sat and read most of this book while still in the bookstore. It's so well-written that it is an easy read despite the complexity of the subject matter. Fetzer explains things very clearly, step by step. He is a professor, after all, and a very experienced teacher. He connects the dots for you. After so much conflicting information on the Kennedy assassination over the years, this book makes me confident that we can truly get to the bottom of this matter, finally. And why should we care? Because we are very likely living under a military coup that began with the Kennedy assassination. If it's true that the combined forces presented in this book did indeed murder Kennedy - and it is obvious that they did - then it follows that we are still living today under the same blackmail from those same "forces". The events that are occurring today, our economy, the leaders who succeed in getting elected or succeed in staying in office today, all have to make a similar "deal" with those same powerful, dark, and self-protective forces that murdered Kennedy and would murder today's leaders if they tried to stop or dismantle them. As Americans who care about our country, we should be VERY concerned about all of this. If the executive office of the United States is being controlled by the military, the CIA, and organized crime, that amounts to a treasonous situation, undermining the very principles this country is built upon, undermining the balance of power among the three branches of government - the executive, the judicial, and the legislative. It means we are being interfered with. It is affecting us in many ways we probably do not even know about. The Kennedy assassination - it happened so long ago, you might say, but these "forces" are still around, still alive, still affecting our economy, still affecting our young people who go to war and get killed and maimed, still tying the hands of our leaders under threat of death. We need to end these conditions, or we risk being pulled into continuous wars so that these underlying "forces" can continue reaping the incredible war profits - billions of dollars, and all of it going to a very few people. And we risk having our good, honest leaders murdered or controlled or driven out of office. This book represents an outstanding depth of research, and it will make you an expert. The only question left will be "What can we do to stop this situation?" I only hope that, if enough people embrace the education available in this book, we will find a way to end our slavery to these powerful, intimidating forces.

I find it all very interesting how intelligent the conspirators (if there were any) were to plan such a beautifully orchestrated manuever. As in many mob or organized crime trials the most incriminating piece of evidence seems to come from a Stooley or a member who has turned in order to receive a break of prison time. Th defense then turns and discredits this witness and their credibility for that very reason they agreed to testify in the first place. The Kennedy assassination has proven no different. If their was a conspiracy by any or multiple organizations they were smart enough to involve either individuals who could not be trusted or the true dregs of society so that any investigation into the murder could be squashed easily by crushing the credibility of witnesses and evidence. Quite possibly the biggest fear I have is no one will ever have the proper evidence to truly know what happened. After the murder there was an enormous amount of evidence collected and even more mistakes made. This evidence was then Classified and held away from the American public by the very organizations that most have indicted in a conspiracy (The CIA, FBI, and Federal government.) It took years for even some items like the Zapruder film to even reach prosecutors hands much less the publics eyes and trickles of documents have followed after. My issue with this is how reliable can any of this evidence be regardless of which side of the fence you are on. Either way those indicted by investigators where holding all the cards and had ample time to destroy, modify, and prepare the evidence however they saw fit. If you wanted to stimulate conspiracy ideas that involved the mob or even more the editing of the Zapruder film seems just however the Secret Service has admitted repeated to lying about numerous mistakes made on that day, and they spent an awful lot of time attempting to cover up those mistakes and thus motive for removing the scene of the stopped limosuine appears. So you can play both sides again. After Stone's film JFK in 91 there was a lot of preassure placed on Washington to release more of the documents sooner than 2032 or whenever so they hired a committee to trudge through the millions of documents and condense them to a 400,000 page report that all Americans can see. This some 30 years or more after the assassination and what about the other 1.6 million documents. What information in those documents does the government feel inadequate or useless. And how much have these documents changed over 30 years. So however this information is used, either pro-conspiracy or con I really cannot endorse either side since the evidence has been in the hands of the accussed for so long it no longer holds any validity. Remember it was our government who basically said we are too stupid of a nation to handle this information and thus we never saw it until recently. It is also our government that developed the CIA in the 40's to act completely in secrecy of the people and without regard to Federal rules. America lost a lot more than a president that day regardless of who killed him. We lost a lot of our liberty and our freedom. We no longer have the power over our government.

I found Dr. Fetzer's book to be fascinating, provocative, and ultimately compelling. That there are those who still insist that the Zapruder film is intact puzzles me because, to begin with, Life magazine, who originally owned the print, has indicated that there were a few splices made to it, and no less a personage than J. Edgar Hoover admitted that frames 313 and 314 were reversed. So it never really WAS "intact," if you want to get technical. The extensive changes made to the film are detailed in the book-- it's a "must read." Others may vehemently disagree with my opinion-- I say, let the reader be the judge. Typically, when a book is so ludicrous that it's not to be taken seriously, no one bothers reviewing it. For some reason, that is not the case concerning "The Great Zapruder Hoax." If I hadn't read it already, I'd be mighty curious to know what some of the "critics" are trying so hard to hide.

"The Great Zapruder Film Hoax" finally puts to rest the question of the title film as a realistic timeline of the assassination of JKF. One of the contributors, Dr. John Costella, attacks the question using science and the scientific method. His findings reveal that the film was not merely edited but that it was in fact a complete fabrication (i.e. a composite).
There is an excellent section, written by David Healy, that details the state of the art in 1963 of film editing and composition techniques. This puts to rest the old arguements that "there wasn't enough time to alter the film" and that "the technology didn't exist at the time". In addition, Fetzer et al delve into some of the other photographic evidence involved in JFK's death. The conclusion that one must draw is that all of the photographic "evidence" is suspect. When one realizes that this is the case, then what is left is the only credible evidence in this case that survives to this date - eyewitness testimony.
This book is a must read for everyone who is interested in the truth.

The Fetzer Team has outdone themselves again. But this time their continuing, scientifically documented exposure of the JFK assassination cover up is so hard hitting it generates shock waves in the reader's mind like the crack of the original rifle shots echoing in dealy plaza.

In their recent release, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, the Fetzer Team discloses and meticulously documents their monumental discovery that the Zapruder Film was actually concocted in a film lab. This key revelation is shown to be a clear example of the sophisticated and yet paradoxical methods the gov't has used to continue the cover up and even advance it. The Team has shown conclusively that even now, years and years after the Warren Commission delivered its conclusions, the gov't and media instituted cover up continues.

The Team's first book in the series, Assassination Science, was a blockbuster that systematically proved for the first time ever, that the autopsy X-rays had been altered and that another brain had been substituted for that of JFK, which meant that previous gov't investigations had been based on faked evidence. It also proved that Arlen Spector's magic bullet theory was indefensible. And these findings by the Team were entirely based on meticulous scientific studies and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the gov't itself instituted the cover up.

The Team's second book, Murder in Dealy Plaza, also a blockbuster, showed conclusively, also with very strong scientific evidence, that the Warren Commission was but one part of a carefully crafted conspiratorial gov't cover up of the truth that the assassination involved at least two shooters and more than three bullets. Convincing circumstantial evidence was also presented suggesting that in addition to the gov't instituting a cover up, it planned and orchestrated the assassination as a sophisticated domestic covert operation.

I predict that the Team's third book, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, will be an even bigger blockbuster than the first two in the series due to its shocking and well documented discoveries. This book goes further in breaking new ground to expose the cover up than any other book so far and its revelations are explosive. The Team has again carefully applied the scientific method to conclusively prove just how extreme the measures are that various gov't entities have taken in order to fabricate evidence to confuse the truth and generate a contradictory evidence trail. The team has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the Zapruder film was created in a film lab to generate cognitive dissonance among assassination researchers to neutralize any real progress uncovering the true facts of the assassination. This book tells me that the Z film was concocted to exaggerate the JFK head snap backward to convince that JFK was hit with a high velocity hard hitting shot to his right temple from the right front. Paradoxically then while the gov't created the Z film to provide false evidence proving a conspiracy of more than one shooter, it was also simultaneously continuing to support the "king's new clothes" hypothesis of the Warren Commission. The Team's ability to clearly prove by the scientific method that the cover up involved the systematic use of sophisticated misinformation tactics as well as the controlled release of faked evidence, illustrates just how advanced the cover up operation has been as a continuing covert operation.

Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist would have understood that "knowing truth" in our contemporary society can only occur when the "moral density" of the mass media is used to reflect truth back to a public that trusts it in mass because it supports their actual beliefs. This can never happen in our society at present because of the massive amount of cognitive dissonance which has been generated by the gov't and media by habitually telling the public a lie and forcing them to operate as if it was true and then allowing them to see evidence compelling them to believe it is really a lie.
Much of this "evidence" is at least partially based on falsities which can later be exposed to discredit the "truth" if desired. Pretty soon the citizen trusts nothing the gov't or media states even though he or she must carry on in society as if it is true to avoid being labeled and discredited. The citizen must continue to acknowledge the "king's new clothes" just to be able to exist and function normally in society. Surveys have shown that most of the public have come to believe that JFK was killed by more than one shooter, thus by a conspiracy, and most also believe that at a minimum the gov't instituted a cover up of this conspiracy. Many believe that the gov't itself could have orchestrated the assassination. Although citizens believe these things in mass they can never know them in mass because of the sophisticated misinformation ops that have been employed against them by the gov't and the media. Thus the citizens have become deeply alienated from themselves, each other and their society.

What reasonable person (unless they are knowledgeable about "trade craft") could ever conceive that gov't misinformation ops are so sophisticated that contradictory evidence from both sides of the argument has been and continues to be concocted by the gov't and espoused by a willing media? Who would ever guess that the gov't would desire to elicit true thinking that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy by concocting and releasing dramatic false evidence? These types of practices have been referred to as black politics, the black arts, Machiavellian ops, the art of low intensity warfare, fifth column tactics, or the practice of deceiving by equivocation which is the arguing that black is white and white is black by emphasizing flimsy common threads.

Are the gov't entities responsible for instituting this continuing and most sophisticated cover up op aware that the average citizen believes that the gov't conspired to cover up the JFK assassination? After reading this book
one is compelled to believe that these gov't entities understand that the public generally believes there was a conspiracy to kill the President. It also becomes clear that this is what they want the public to believe and have conducted sophisticated activities to insure this. What they don't want is for the public to know this to an absolute certainty which would be characterized by the mass media clearly regurgitating the facts supporting this belief, thereby allowing mass society in general to know this as being factually true. Public knowing cannot exist without the mass media serving up the facts supporting this belief back to the public on a regular basis. The gov't has known for a long time that if it controls the mainstream mass media, the public can be prevented from knowing that the king is actually naked. It is also aware that it can then feed the public a certain selection of "facts" for eliciting the type of believing or limited knowing which it allows.

What would the gov't have to gain by making sure that the public believed in the conspiracy without knowing it to exist with absolute certainty? In simple terms, quite a lot! Such a condition provides a clear statement to the public that gov't departments and agencies have attained enough absolute Caesarian power to rule over the citizen, Congress and the mass media, and that they have been able to maintain it over many different administrations regardless of who is elected to political office from the citizenry. Those who enter gov't (elected or appointed) come to know quickly that even though the king is naked, they must pay homage by acting as if they believe that he is clothed with the finest fashions. And they come to know quickly what will happen to them if they don't pay such homage, that the full force of Caesarian authority will be brought against them "with prejudice".

"With prejudice" is a legal term which means that a judgment is absolute and final and cannot be challenged. Caesarian power is unlimited "with-prejudice" authority that uses legal and extra-legal means at its disposal consisting of overt and covert acts of varying viciousness as judged necessary to attain the desired outcome (end justifies the means value system). Of course this was the same authority which authorized the assassination of JFK in the first place and ordered the cover up. Certainly it would be reasonable to view the murder of a U.S. President as an act of extreme viciousness, just as the various "with prejudice" terminations instituted during the first twenty years of the cover up should be viewed. Such terminations "with extreme prejudice" are no longer necessary as a part of the assassination cover up, since the continuing misinformation ops have been successful beyond the gov't's wildest expectations and can withstand any "assaults" from independent assassination researchers. The gov't entities which hold and exercise this absolute Caesarian power believe and know that if necessary they must be willing to act with much more viciousness than any of those who might challenge their authority, if they want to maintain rule over them. But most of the time it is only necessary to keep the gov't misinformation machine dispensing contradictory "facts".

It was 1969 and I was showing bootlegged copies of the Zapruder film to my fellow classmates at Arizona State University when I got a call from my father (a noted photographic expert on the Assassination) Fred Newcomb. He was quite agitated..."Lifton has solved the JFK Assassination!!" "What?" I said..."He has it all figured out...even has films of the assassins coming into Delay Plaza, firing and exiting"...I was stunned...and excited..."he has proof way beyond a reasonable doubt". I returned to Los Angeles and saw the "proof" and was convinced. It changed my life forever..We were all full of revolutionary zeal back then. And way too idealistic as I look back now in hindsight.

Years later Dad and David went there seperate ways(after parting as associates working together). David revealed his "surgery of the head area" thesis in his 1980 book Best Evidence which was a best seller. My father wrote his tome Murder From Within in 1974 with his "The Driver did it" thesis and it gained a lot of note worthy attention from the JFK Assassination underground community where it was circulated via xerox from a shady Canadian entreprenuer.

Back then and even today everything seemed to revolve around that Zapruder Film . What does it show?? Shots from the front?? Side? Rear? 4 shots? 3 Shots? Grassy Knoll?? Secret Service? CIA? Anti-Castro Cubans?? What???

A 10 year old kid in my Dads living room was the first to say out loud "The driver shot the President"!! That was 1969 and years ahead of William Cooper and others who proclaimed the same.

But what does it really show??? Is it all in the eye of the beholder? Is the most famous historical 8mm film of all time a subjective "cartoon"??

After reading the assembled articles in James Fetzer's book (including David's "Pig On A Leash")I have to say that not a single frame in the 400 some odd frames of that historical film can be trusted as "real". It's all Alice in Wonderland. And we have all been left to agrue about it forever. "They" must have known this from the outset...and smiled to themselves knowlingly..."If you can pollute a river at it's source all facts downstream are polluted as well" is what Lifton once told me...

Is there "proof" here of "fakery"?..I think so.

What say you???

Read it...5 Stars...

Ty Newcomb

Steve writes:

<<The Z-film hoax book is also both interesting & disappointing. The stuff by
Jack White is so embarassingly drivelsome I skipped it entirely. Others are
so disorganized as to be unreadable--much like David's long-ago Ramparts
article on the possibility of 3 shooters (which I personally rate the most
soporific essay since the Book of Mormon).

The John Costella article is interesting only in it's odd combination of
scientific rigor juxtaposed with far-fetched theories and excessive

detailing of shadowy figures who follow him about--not only in Dallas, but
in Melbourne, Australia. Alas, like Mark Lane and Jim Fetzer, he shares
their instinct for the capillaries, giving extraordinary lengths of print to
photographic artifacts so obsessively minute and muddy that the reader
begins to wonder if perhaps the really obvious & glaring things aren't
figments of a hypercritical perspective. There is also an oddly revealing
passage where he describes hearing Lifton describe Abe Zapruder as a lucky
bystander with a movie camera--a novel perspective he'd never before
considered, so automatically did he (Costella) assume that Abe was a
prepositioned agent of the CIA.

There's a very interesting appendix item in the back, a book review by one
George Costello (obviously no relation to Costella) from the 5/2000 issue of
Federal Lawyer explaining the salient points of Fetzer's Murder in Dealey
Plaza for guvmint lawyers in clear, straight-to-the-point terms that I'm
sure Jim Fetzer never used. The concise summary at the end was dynamite in
print. You wish that all books on the JFK debacle had been written by such
writers. I wonder how many people read this review.

The only other part I found readable and informative was David's. It's
amazing how far his writing has come since Ramparts. It covers nothing
remarkably new as it is mostly a historical narrative told in a series of
very illuminating anecdotes. Hey, didja know that Livingstone tried to sue
David for $50,000,000 for being part of a conspiracy to kill him?

The contrast between David's stuff & the others is also interesting in that
he seems the only person in this book with any active interest in or
knowledge of psychology & human nature. None of these other writers seem to
see the limits of extrapolating vast conspiracies from single pieces of
suspicious evidence, a common failing which I think probably accounts for
the odd fact that most Americans vest little more confidence in conspiracy
theorists than they do in the Warren Report--despite the obvious logic that
some theory of conspiracy is a virtually mandatory alternative.

David apparently has been working heavily on assembling material on the WC's
bogus evidence incriminating Oswald, a fact which fills me with some hope,
since I think that this material is the most flagrantly-exposable jugular of
the No-Conspiracy dogma. I think one clearly-written book on this subject
could mean the end to this embarrassing 40 year coverup. I wonder if he
could be persuaded to work with George Costello.

Another point of disappointment is the astonishing number of typos and whole
sentences rendered meaningless by missing words. I'd bet that an errata
sheet for David's essay alone would run to half-dozen pages. Oswald's name
is misspelled, Langley (CIA hometown) is consistently spelled Langely, and
even you are once renamed "Newomb".>>