When you look at Zapruder’s film, a large road sign blocks the view of the President when he first gets shot:
Now, Zapruder’s home movie camera was state of the art for 1963, but it was not perfect. The lens slightly distorted each frame by pulling out the corners, called a “pincushion” effect. On the film, lines that are straight in real life end up being bent toward the corners.
Almost all of the frames of the Zapruder film correctly show this pincushion effect.
It is possible to use a computer to remove the pincushion effect, using properties of the lens specified in the patent for the home movie camera. An example is shown below:
When scientists removed the pincushion effect from the film, everything that should be straight—like the edges of the straight wall shown above—went from being bent to being straight. This proved that they had removed the pincushion effect properly.
But there was one huge surprise: the road sign bent and twisted as it traveled across the bottom of the film!
A real sign would not do this. When the pincushion effect is removed, a real sign would just sit there, remaining lined up with the background as the limo passed.
The easiest way to see the bending and twisting of the sign is to flip between two frames of the film that have had the pincushion effect removed, one showing the right edge of the sign at the lower right of the frame, the other showing it at the lower left of the frame. This is useful because the pincushion effect pulls these corners in opposite directions, and removing the pincushion effect should undo this pulling.
We can line up the white wall with the square holes that we can see in the background of each of the two frames:
If we now flip between these two frames, the sign should just stay in the same place:
It doesn’t! It flips and flops, depending on which part of the camera lens it went through! If these frames were genuine, it would not do this.
We can see this even more clearly if we draw some lines on the images:
The two blue lines are lined up with the white wall in the background: the last set of square holes, and the corner of the wall. The two orange lines are lined up with the road sign: down the middle of the pole, and just to the right of the right edge of the sign.
If Zapruder’s camera had moved a little between filming these two frames, the sign would appear to shift left or right, or up or down, compared to the background: this is called parallax. In other words, the orange lines could shift sideways compared to the blue lines. But the angles cannot change, like they do here. It violates the laws of physics. It shows that the sign in the Zapruder film is a forgery!
The road sign is a mistake made by the forgers. They pasted a perfectly rectangular sign into the film frames, without realizing that they should have included the pincushion effect. They must have realized their mistake too late: two frames showing this wrong sign were published in Life magazine, just days after the assassination, and millions of printed copies were mailed out to subscribers. The toothpaste was out of the tube! The forgers had to keep this wrong sign in all of the frames that they created for their fake Zapruder film, and hope that no one ever noticed their mistake!
For a very long time, they succeeded: it took 39 years for this mistake to be discovered!
The sign mistake