To check that the Elm Street shown in the Zapruder film agrees with the real Elm Street in Dallas, Texas, scientists made use of three sets of photographs taken from Zapruder’s filming location:
Using a precise survey map of the area made for the congressional committee that re-investigated the assassination in the mid-1970s, and advanced computer programs, the scientists constructed a panoramic view overlaying all three sets of photographs (click to open the full image in a new tab):
The small color Zapruder film images are overlaid on the three large black and white 1963 Dallas Police Department photos (in which you can see memorial wreaths, an American flag, and ropes and No Parking signs cordoning off the area), which are themselves overlaid on the 2002 color photos (which are mainly only visible in the gaps not covered by the Dallas Police Department photos). All of the images were corrected for pincushion distortion and perspective effects before being “stitched together” using advanced computer programs.
Overall, the Zapruder film agrees with the real Elm Street of 1963 extremely well. As a whole, the Zapruder film has the correct pincushion distortion and perspective effects.
But there are two things that don’t match up properly.
One is the road sign, which comes out blurry. This is because it was pasted into the film incorrectly, as described on the last page, and so is in different places when mapped back to the real world in different frames of the Zapruder film.
The other is the lamppost to the right of the sign. In the panorama above you can see the top half of the lamppost as shown in the Zapruder film. Just to its right is the real lamppost as of November 1963. (Ignore the lamppost further to the left: this is where it had been moved to by 2002.)
It does not matter that the lamppost is shown in the Zapruder film slightly to the left of where it is in the Dallas Police Department photo. That is explained by the police taking the photo from a slightly different position from that of Abraham Zapruder. (This is called “parallax”.)
What is important is that the angle of the lamppost is wrong. You can see this more clearly in the comparison below:
If you look at the white wall and the bushes in the background, you can see that the two panoramic views line up exactly (even though the lighting from the Sun is different, as they were taken at different times of the day). But the lamppost changes its angle.
This is even clearer if we draw a line down the middle of the lamppost:
The Zapruder film shows the lamppost leaning slightly to the right. Even though it is only a small lean, it is something that could not happen if the film was genuine.
The angle of this lamppost is another small mistake that the forgers made. Frames showing the lamppost were published in Life magazine within days of the assassination. Once that was done, it was impossible to fix the mistake.
To be fair, the forgers had no idea that computers would become as powerful as they are today. Computers in 1964 didn’t do any graphics at all! It took 39 years for this small mistake to be found.
The lamppost mistake