Since 2000 I have investigated the Zapruder film of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
On Thursday, March 24, 2011, I happened to be in Vancouver, British Columbia. I dropped in on Len Osanic in the Fiasco Bros recording studios, and he was kind enough to do an impromptu interview with me for the third segment of his live weekly radio show, Black Op Radio:
In 2003 I created this very simple introduction to the fundamental evidence of Zapruder film fakery, which I slightly refreshed in 2022:
In 2022 my wife Sally and I were catching up with the FX Australian TV series “Mr Inbetween” when we were flabbergasted to see that the Zapruder film work that had been known only to scores of people in the early 2000s has now filtered through to popular culture (and we were cheering all the way!) (transcript):
“Mr Inbetween” on the Zapruder film
Incredibly, in 2021, nearly 58 years after the assassination, a long-awaited new book by legendary JFK researcher Josiah Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, reopened this long-settled question. I had answered it comprehensively for Thompson himself 20 years earlier, in 2001, using a deblurring program that I had completed in September 2001 called UnBlur (I even included it in my 2003 simple introduction described above!), as well as with a more direct method that simply blurred Frame 312 to match Frame 313.
After preview versions of Thompson’s new book had begun to be sent to key JFK researchers in April 2021, I was inundated with so many requests for a copy of my 2001 work that I re-did the analysis anew, using my complete rewrite of UnBlur using modern coding practices:
JFK’s head movement from Frame 312 to Frame 313 of the Zapruder film
Thompson’s original 2001 idea was based on a misunderstanding of work by researcher David Wimp, which Wimp pointed out and refuted at the time (around 2003), and again explicitly refuted after Thompson’s new book emerged in 2021 (from here), as I describe in more detail in the last paragraph of this history of UnBlur.
It is sad that the formerly legendary Thompson bowed out of his JFK career by destroying the impact of his seminal and historic 1966 book, Six Seconds in Dallas, with such a sloppy and easily-avoided blunder.
In 2007 I compiled all of eyewitness statements I could find in the Warren Commission’s 18 volumes about what they saw on Elm Street on that fateful day, making use of the excellent compilation of resources by Stewart Galanor. I omitted the issues of the number of shots fired and their direction, as these had been the focus of Galanor’s analysis.
You can see on pages 85 and 86 of the above eyewitness compilation that senior law enforcement officials in the lead car, as well as motorcycle police officers behind the presidential limousine, unanimously testified that motorcycle cop James Chaney passed the presidential limousine while it was in Dealey Plaza and motored up to the lead car. As noted there, Chaney had said exactly this on the day of the assassination in a TV interview. This should be easily visible in the Zapruder film and the Nix film, but it isn’t there. This is perhaps the simplest way to see with your own eyes that both of these films are fake. New Zealand researcher Ant Davison created this video in 2013 which shows most clearly that Chaney’s passing the limo is missing from both the Nix and Zapruder films (the latter being mirror-flipped in the bottom sequence).
In 2006 I created seven stabilized HD versions of the Zapruder film, running at real-time speed:
Frames 133 to 486: Following the limo (YouTube version)
Frames Z-001 to Z-257: Fixed camera pointing at the top of Elm Street (YouTube version)
Frames Z-198 to Z-301: Fixed camera pointing at the white wall (YouTube version)
Frames Z-274 to Z-357: Fixed camera pointing at Mary Moorman (YouTube version)
Frames Z-325 to Z-389: Fixed camera pointing at Ike Altgens (YouTube version)
Frames Z-372 to Z-425: Fixed camera pointing at Main Street (YouTube version)
Frames Z-408 to Z-486: Fixed camera pointing at the triple underpass (YouTube version)
In 2002 I used 16 photographs taken by the late Jack White from the Zapruder pedestal in Dealey Plaza, and applied advanced scientific methods to create a single panoramic image. I registered this image using the House Select Committee on Assassinations’ topographic survey. I then overlaid three black and white photographs taken by the Dallas Police Department in the days after the assassination, and then finally frames from the Zapruder film itself. (Click any panorama below to open in a new tab.)
Dealey Plaza panorama
Dealey Plaza panorama, with gridlines, compass bearings, and angles of depression
Zapruder panorama only
Zapruder panorama only, with gridlines, compass bearings, and angles of depression
In 2003 I put together a reference set of all 486 frames of the extant Zapruder film. In 2006 I improved the processing steps and reissued the full set of frames.
Shortly before he passed away in 2010, Rich DellaRosa kindly uploaded to YouTube the DVDs of the Zapruder Film Symposium held in Duluth, Minnesota in 2003. At the time, YouTube only allowed videos up to ten minutes in length, which is why the videos are broken up into short clips.
(Jack White and David Lifton have also since passed away.)
Click on the links below for YouTube playlists, or on the numbers for the original parts uploaded by Rich. Note that the fourth and last part of Jim Fetzer’s presentation has been banned by YouTube; the link below goes to an alternative copy.
Based on the above symposium, I contributed two chapters to this book, published in November 2003.
It was out of print and expensive to buy second-hand for many years, but it is now available on Amazon Kindle.
My work on the JFK assassination has been personal research, and I have never profited financially from it.
© 2000–2024 John Costella