Scientists discovered that there is something obviously fake about the shot to JFK’s head in the forged film: the spray of blood that appears at the moment he is shot.
Frame 313 shows this spray of blood, as well as a gray “mist” above it:
Frame 313
but also shows a spinning chunk of bone flying up from JFK’s head, with a shiny side of the chunk catching the sunlight every time it made one spin, during the time that the shutter of Zapruder’s camera was open:
A wider view of Frame 313
This piece of bone can also be seen in Frame 314:
Frame 314
By carefully measuring the positions of this chunk of bone in Frames 313 and 314, and using knowledge of how Zapruder’s camera worked, scientists worked backwards using physics and determined that the bullet must have hit JFK‘s head right after the end of the exposure of Frame 312.
Frame 312
So the spray of blood we see in Frame 313 must have been expanding from JFK’s head over the full time between the end of Frame 312’s exposure and the end of Frame 313’s exposure.
The spray of blood in Frame 313
This spray of blood should continue to expand in Frames 314 and 315:
Frames 314 and 315
But it’s not there! It has disappeared into thin air! The gray “mist” is still there, but the blood is missing completely.
If the film was real, the blood should spread out after Frame 313, and then land on people or objects in and around the limo.
To test this, scientists analyzed the film frames around the shot to JFK’s head:
The frames around the shot at Frame 313
Now, every color picture can be broken down into red, green, and blue light. (If you look very closely at your phone or computer screen, you can see the little red, green and blue lights!) White or gray light is made up of all three colors.
Scientists used a computer to measure the total red, green, and blue light in each of the images shown above, and then put those numbers onto a graph:
The total amount of red, green, and blue light in the frames shown above
We can see that the amount of red light jumps up from Frame 312 to Frame 313. The amounts of green and blue light also jump, but not by as much. The jump in all three corresponds to the gray “mist.” This disappears after Frame 315! The extra jump in red light in Frame 313 corresponds to the spray of blood. It disappears even more quickly!
Where did it all go? It did not fly out of this part of the frame, because it is already missing in Frame 314. Scientists did calculations to show that it also cannot have “fallen down” into the limousine, because even a lead weight placed at JFK’s temple would have taken many more than three frames to fall out of view, and the laws of gravity mean that nothing can fall faster than a lead weight.
This is yet another proof of the Zapruder film being a fake version of what really happened on Elm Street.
Now, in real life (not the fake film), there was a lot of blood and brain matter that was exploded out of JFK’s head by the bullet. Where did all of this actually land?
According to many eyewitnesses, it went all over the Connallys sitting just in front of JFK and Jackie, all over the windows and interior of the limousine, and a thick blanket of it splattered the motorcycle cops to the left rear of the limousine.
Now, here’s where we can start to figure out what went so horribly wrong for the forgers of the film. Only weeks after the assassination, this high quality color frame from the film was published in Life magazine:
Frame from the film published weeks after the assassination
There is no blood or brain matter anywhere! There are some red roses from the bunch of flowers in front of Jackie, but nothing else at all. The shiny trunk of the limousine is completely clean! The forgers didn’t put any blood or brain matter anywhere in their fake frame!
Once this mistake was made, and printed copies mailed out to millions of subscribers of Life, the forgers were unable to add in any blood or brain matter for any frames that they created.
A week after the U.S. Government’s report into the assassination was published in late September 1964, Frame 323 was published in Life, which again showed no blood, but just a huge bloodless wound in JFK’s head:
Part of Frame 323 published in Life in early October 1964
You can see the roses much more clearly in this image.
Even at this late stage, the forgers were still grappling with the problems they had made. The same issue of Life showed Frame 311, two frames before JFK had been shot in the head:
Part of Frame 311 published in the same issue of Life
(Why did they not use Frame 312, which is much clearer? We don’t know—but maybe they hadn’t finalized that frame yet!) When the forgers sped up the action so that it would look like the limousine never stopped, it meant that these two frames were only two-thirds of a second apart. Somehow, in less than a second, the President had to be shot in the head, and any blood and brain matter had to disappear into thin air!
It is possible that the forgers were still trying to figure out how to put together the final version of the “Zapruder” film at this late date. The printing presses for this issue of Life were actually stopped, the printing plate for this page (they used physical plates back then) was broken, and the bloodless Frame 323 image shown above was taken out. But in a monumental blunder, it was replaced by Frame 313: the first time that the “blood spray” frame was ever published!
It is ironic that two different versions of the same issue of Life locked in the “blood spray” problem: a fake-looking spray of blood appears, and half a second later it has completely disappeared.
You can also see that the publication of the two images above locked in one of the “fast-forward” mistakes: all four people in the front of the limousine have moved a large distance in just two-thirds of a second.
This shows how difficult it was for the forgers to make the fake film. As the web of lies grew, they got so tangled up in it that they ended up making something that was so bad that it had to be hidden away from the public for 12 years.
The blood mistake