A WC Apologist's Stunning Blunder on the Backyard Rifle Photos and the HSCA PEP

[Mitch Todd]

Okay, but let's back up and reestablish some basic facts so we don't miss the forest for the trees: Surely you will agree that the 30.4 mm and 32.1 mm numbers are indisputably measurements, and that the difference between them is only 1.7 mm, or only 0.06 inches, or 3/50ths of an inch, right?

The PEP said these numbers were the measurements of "the vertical distance from the center of the . . . gate bolt or latch to the bottom edge of the screen of the screen door in the background" of 133-A and 133-B (6 HSCA 178), and that the measurements were made to calculate "vertical parallax." So clearly the 30.4 mm and 32.1 mm numbers are indisputably the measurements of the vertical distances between the named background objects in 133-A and 133-B, before the scaling distances were factored, right?

And there can be no doubt that the scaling distance for 133-A was found to be 15.5 mm, and that the scaling distance for 133-B was found to be 15.2 mm, right?

Alright, so we're back to the same question I've been trying to get you to answer for days now: Again, all these numbers were introduced as "the results" of the measurements of the vertical distances between the gate bolt and the screen in the backgrounds, and the PEP specified these measurements were done to calculate vertical parallax: "Vertical parallax was calculated by measuring the vertical distance" from the gate bolt to the bottom edge of the screen door "in the background" (6 HSCA 178).

Ok, so where are the measurements for the vertical parallax after the scaling distances were applied? If the answer is that the PEP simply failed to provide them, let's put that on the table.

If the answer is that the scaling distances were applied merely in order to ratio the measurements, that the 30.4 mm and 32.1 mm numbers are the vertical parallax numbers, that 2.11 and 1.96 are ratios, then what does it say about the "very small" vertical camera movement if that movement was determined by these ratios?

This, then, would explain the PEP's conclusion that the camera moved only "slightly" downward between exposures, even though it was supposedly handed back and forth twice between exposures, and even though Oswald would have to put down the rifle and newspapers, take the camera, forward the film, hand the camera back to Marina, pick up the rifle and newspapers, and then resume posing. No one can really believe that photos taken in this manner would have only microscopic differences in the distances between background objects.

McCamy told the HSCA that the measured distances between background objects in the photos were "ratioed against another dimension here" so that "mere scale wouldn't change these things" (2 HSCA 416). Based on this, said McCamy, "we find that there has been some vertical movement also, very small, but it is there" (2 HSCA 416). They had to use computers and high magnification/microscopes to determine the distances between background objects and to determine the degree of camera movement.




What? This is an evasive circular argument. It also misses the main point. The PEP didn't need a survey of the backyard to determine the horizontal parallax. Why would they have needed a survey to determine the vertical parallax? Furthermore, as I noted in my reply, the PEP said they were able to establish the existence of vertical parallax based on their finding that the small black rectangle on the bottom edge of the upper horizontal part of the fence appears more elongated in the vertical direction in 133-A than it does in 133-B.

The main point is that photos taken with a cheap handheld camera that was handed back and forth twice between exposures would show far greater differences in the distances between background objects and would exhibit much more horizontal and vertical camera movement between exposures.

Finally, I again note the damning fact that the PEP did not publish any measurements to determine if the camera moved angularly in any direction, i.e., if there was any pitch, yaw, or roll in the camera’s position between exposures. The PEP’s silence on this issue implies the wildly unlikely assumption that there was no pitch, yaw, or roll in the camera’s position after being handed back and forth twice. This would have required the camera to be held perfectly horizontally and perfectly vertically for each picture, with no tilt in any direction whatsoever between exposures.

Only photos taken by a professional photographer using a high-quality camera and a sturdy tripod will not contain indications of any angular camera movement between exposures, and only photos taken in this manner will contain only tiny differences in the distances between background objects.

Let's get back to brass tacks here, back to what the issue was, what the PEP was trying to do, and what the PEP was not trying to do. A number of CTs, most prominently Jack White, were claiming that the backgrounds in the backyard photos were identical. Their implication was clear: the photos were composites made by someone inserting three images of Oswald over the same original background photo. The parallax test was performed to determine whether White's assertion was true or not. Since parallax was found, White's assertion was shown to be wrong, and the PEP needed to perform no other tests to determine pitch, roll, or yaw. Your implied demand that they do so is simply your attempt to move the goal posts.


MG: Ok, so where are the measurements for the vertical parallax after the scaling distances were applied?

You can't figure that out yourself?

The reference distance ("scaling distance") in measured on CE133A was given as 15.5mm. The corresponding measurement on CD133B is 15.2mm. Which means that a distance on CE133A has been magnified factor of  15.5mm/15.2mm = 1.02X over it's counterpart on CE133B. That is, something in the photo that measures 1.02mm on CE133A will measure 1.00mm on CE133B. If we correct for the magnification factor, the 30.4mm bolt-to-screen distance in CE133A would be 30.4mm/1.02 = 29.8mm. The magnification-corrected calculation for parallax between bolt-to-screem measurements in the two photos would then be 32.1mm - 29.8mm = 2.3mm. Since this is a mesurement made from photographic enlargments that are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the actual scene, the real-world parallax would have been something more on the order of 23mm or about 7/8".  Note that this is the amount of parallax, but not the distance the camera actually moved. Since both the gate and the screen door are well in the background, the distance the camera actually moved between the two exposures would have been greater than the bolt-screen parallax. Determining how much greater is what would have required the detailed 3D survey of the yard at Neely St. 


MG: even though {the camera} was supposedly handed back and forth twice between exposures, and even though Oswald would have to put down the rifle and newspapers, take the camera, forward the film, hand the camera back to Marina, pick up the rifle and newspapers, and then resume posing. No one can really believe that photos taken in this manner would have only microscopic differences in the distances between background objects.

Again, there are no "microscopic" distances. The parallax as determined from measuring the enlargements of CE133A/B corresponds to a significantly larger distance in the real world. Further, this larger distance is not the actual distance the camera would have moved. This distance would be expected to be somewhat larger than the parallax. Also, since Marina would have held the camera at about the same height for each exposure, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of vertical parallax anyway. 

[John Mytton]

Let's get back to brass tacks here, back to what the issue was, what the PEP was trying to do, and what the PEP was not trying to do. A number of CTs, most prominently Jack White, were claiming that the backgrounds in the backyard photos were identical. Their implication was clear: the photos were composites made by someone inserting three images of Oswald over the same original background photo. The parallax test was performed to determine whether White's assertion was true or not. Since parallax was found, White's assertion was shown to be wrong, and the PEP needed to perform no other tests to determine pitch, roll, or yaw. Your implied demand that they do so is simply your attempt to move the goal posts.


MG: Ok, so where are the measurements for the vertical parallax after the scaling distances were applied?

You can't figure that out yourself?

The reference distance ("scaling distance") in measured on CE133A was given as 15.5mm. The corresponding measurement on CD133B is 15.2mm. Which means that a distance on CE133A has been magnified factor of  15.5mm/15.2mm = 1.02X over it's counterpart on CE133B. That is, something in the photo that measures 1.02mm on CE133A will measure 1.00mm on CE133B. If we correct for the magnification factor, the 30.4mm bolt-to-screen distance in CE133A would be 30.4mm/1.02 = 29.8mm. The magnification-corrected calculation for parallax between bolt-to-screem measurements in the two photos would then be 32.1mm - 29.8mm = 2.3mm. Since this is a mesurement made from photographic enlargments that are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the actual scene, the real-world parallax would have been something more on the order of 23mm or about 7/8".  Note that this is the amount of parallax, but not the distance the camera actually moved. Since both the gate and the screen door are well in the background, the distance the camera actually moved between the two exposures would have been greater than the bolt-screen parallax. Determining how much greater is what would have required the detailed 3D survey of the yard at Neely St. 


MG: even though {the camera} was supposedly handed back and forth twice between exposures, and even though Oswald would have to put down the rifle and newspapers, take the camera, forward the film, hand the camera back to Marina, pick up the rifle and newspapers, and then resume posing. No one can really believe that photos taken in this manner would have only microscopic differences in the distances between background objects.

Again, there are no "microscopic" distances. The parallax as determined from measuring the enlargements of CE133A/B corresponds to a significantly larger distance in the real world. Further, this larger distance is not the actual distance the camera would have moved. This distance would be expected to be somewhat larger than the parallax. Also, since Marina would have held the camera at about the same height for each exposure, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of vertical parallax anyway.

Let's get back to brass tacks here, back to what the issue was, what the PEP was trying to do, and what the PEP was not trying to do. A number of CTs, most prominently Jack White, were claiming that the backgrounds in the backyard photos were identical.

Exactly, here is their overall goal spelled out in black and white.

Since this is a mesurement made from photographic enlargments that are roughly an order of magnitude smaller than the actual scene...
Again, there are no "microscopic" distances.

This isn't a difficult concept and even though multiple people have dumbed it down for Griffith, he still insists on repeating his stupid assertion.
In the following comparison shot, every object in the B&W photo is a scaled down version of it's real world counterpart and any "microscopic" differences in the B&W photo is simply a tiny fraction of what's seen in the actual objects.

And this is not to mention that the PEP remained revealingly silent about the camera's angular movement between exposures, i.e., pitch, yaw, and roll. We are left to infer the wildly implausible proposition that the camera did not tilt in the slightest degree between exposures.

Huh??
The camera definitely tilted between CE133A and CE133B, in these full frame slightly cropped photos the perspective change in the background between the post and the panel to Oswald's left is clear. In CE133A the camera is tilted more towards the sky which increased the splayed angle.





Here is a direct comparison between the full frame uncropped ce133a and the similarly slightly cropped ce133b and as is obvious, they were not produced from a stationary fixed perspective.



EDIT: I have edited this post and corrected my usage of uncropped to slightly cropped since the backyard photos I used had a tiny white border which originated when they were initially processed because the aesthetically pleasing white border was a standard procedure. But nevertheless, the HSCA did have full frame uncropped versions of 133a and 133b. 133b came from the original negative and 133a was from the de Mohrenschildt print.



de-Mohrenschildt-133a


JohnM

[Michael T. Griffith]

It is also revealing that the PEP did not do any measurements on 133-C to determine if there were any differences in the distances between the background objects in 133-C and those in 133-A and 133-B. They only provided measurements for 133-A and 133-B.

If the PEP did do parallax measurements on 133-C, they did not mention doing them and did not publish them. The odds that the camera would have returned to virtually the same horizontal, vertical, and angular position twice are so fantastically remote as to be effectively zero.

How could the PEP pretend to be proving that the backgrounds in the photos were not the same when they only did parallax measurements on two of the three photos?

133-C shows the backyard figure in a different pose than his pose in 133-A and 133-B. In 133-C, he is holding the rifle at a different angle and is holding the newspapers in a different position than in the two other photos. 133-C also shows him in a different position in relation to the bush on his left than his position in 133-A and 133-B. All of these changes would surely suggest a change in the camera's angular, horizontal, and vertical position. One would therefore think the PEP would have been anxious to do parallax measurements on 133-C and contrast them with the measurements for 133-A and 133-B--unless, of course, the measurements proved to be problematic and either indicated even smaller camera movement or no camera movement. 

[Tommy Shanks]

Boy, Michael Griffith never gives up, even when having his proverbial hat handed to him by Mitch Todd and John Mytton. Guess he beat everybody else to the sign-up sheet at the JFK Assassination Career Day to continue the laughable photo analysis legacy of Jack White and Ralph Cinque...

[John Mytton]

Boy, Michael Griffith never gives up, even when having his proverbial hat handed to him by Mitch Todd and John Milton. Guess he beat everybody else to the sign-up sheet at the JFK Assassination Career Day to continue the laughable photo analysis legacy of Jack White and Ralph Cinque...

Boy, Michael Griffith never gives up...

You're right, in Griffith's feeble attempts in his OP to humiliate me, all he has done is expose his inability to understand even the basics, from his lame brained "microscopic differences" through to his preschool understanding of mathematics.

Now in his most recent post, yet again, he's shifting the goal posts and is already making erroneous assertions based on his self-serving guesses. What a clown!

BTW, what's even funnier is who was behind Griffith's MASSIVE conspiracy? In a recent Ed forum post, he seriously believes that the Mafia and the CIA and the Military and the Secret Service and the FBI and LBJ and Hoover and an army of film/photo/document forgers all got together, presumably at some HUGE football stadium, and planned the assassination. Wow!

Posted @ Ed Forum by Michael Griffith, September 16
I believe that elements of a number of groups came together to assassinate JFK. I believe that some right-wing circles were aware that a plot to kill JFK was in the works—they did not know many details but knew that a plot was occurring, and that JFK would soon be killed (e.g., Joseph Milteer, the KKK informant discussed in CE 762, and possibly Homer Echevarria).

I believe the most logical and likely suspects are the following:

-- Rogue elements of the CIA (including anti-Castro Cubans funded by the CIA) who were viscerally bitter over the Bay of Pigs, over JFK's Cuba policy in general, and over other aspects of his foreign policy and defense policy.

-- Elements of the Mafia, since JFK posed a serious threat to the Mafia's very existence and since JFK and RFK had hounded and enraged Carlos Marcello, Jimmy Hoffa, Mickey Cohen, and Sam Giancana, especially Marcello.

-- Rogue elements of the military who believed that JFK was a threat to national security, that he did not have the grit to stand up to the Soviets, that he passed up a golden opportunity to nuke the Soviet Union, and that he was determined to eventually put the U.S. military under UN control.

-- LBJ, given that JFK and RFK were (1) actively trying to ruin him by leaking his wrongdoing to the press, (2) supporting the DOJ investigation into corruption among his staff, and (3) planning on dropping him from the ticket in '64.

-- High-ranking elements of the Secret Service who were outraged by JFK's personal conduct, who despised his policies on civil rights, and who shared many of the views of the CIA and the military hardliners regarding JFK's foreign and defense policies.

Everywhere we turn in the JFK case, we see the Secret Service playing a major role in wrongdoing, from stripping JFK of security in Dallas, to stealing his body to prevent a valid autopsy, to taking the Zapruder film to NPIC and Hawkeyeworks, to confiscating the film of the Parkland doctors' press conference, to pressuring witnesses to change their stories, to destroying key evidence, etc., etc.

-- High-ranking elements of the FBI, including J. Edgar Hoover, for largely the same reasons given for the Secret Service's involvement. Hoover and many FBI agents played a major role in the cover-up.

JohnM

[Tommy Shanks]

But wait! He forgot about Chauncey Holt! And Jean Pierre LaFitte! And Larry Crafard! And Roscoe White! And James Files! C'mon, Michael - don't short change all the plotters and their decades' worth of conspiratorial heavy lifting !

[Michael T. Griffith]

Boy, Michael Griffith never gives up, even when having his proverbial hat handed to him by Mitch Todd and John Mytton. Guess he beat everybody else to the sign-up sheet at the JFK Assassination Career Day to continue the laughable photo analysis legacy of Jack White and Ralph Cinque...

The funny thing about your reply is that you actually seem to believe it.

Mitch Todd didn't even know what "parallax" meant and kept misusing the term until I quoted the definition of the term from academic websites.

Mytton made the blundering claims that the HSCA PEP found "massive parallax" in the backyard photos and that the differences in the distances between background objects are "very visible" to the naked eye, and he still has not retracted these howlers. In fact, he doubled down on them in his reply to Mitch Todd.

Oh, yes, they took pounced on my mistake of taking the PEP literally about the "results" of the vertical parallax measurements and mistakenly assuming that the two sets of numbers after "The results are as follows" were measurements. But, notice that they danced all around my main point about the parallax measurements, i.e., that the differences in the measured distances between background objects should be far, far greater if the photos were made in the manner in which they were allegedly made.

Let's look at this jaw-dropper from Mytton's reply to Mitch Todd:

Again, there are no "microscopic" distances. The parallax as determined from measuring the enlargements of CE133A/B corresponds to a significantly larger distance in the real world. Further, this larger distance is not the actual distance the camera would have moved. This distance would be expected to be somewhat larger than the parallax. Also, since Marina would have held the camera at about the same height for each exposure, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of vertical parallax anyway.

I'll say again: I don't know how anyone takes this guy seriously after making such demonstrably erroneous claims.

The argument that the distances between background objects "correspond to a significantly larger distance in the real world" ignores the fact that the PEP adjusted for scale to account for differences in magnification. Even without the scaling distances applied by the PEP, the "real world" distances would not change the fact that the photos contain microscopic differences in the distances between background objects, distances that were so small they could only be detected with the aid of computers and microscopes.

I repeat my challenge to WC apologists to conduct a reenactment with people who don't know what they're reenacting. Have them use an Imperial Reflex camera and take three photos in the manner alleged for the backyard photos, and see if their photos contain the same microscopic differences in the distances between background objects and that exhibit "slight" and "very small" horizontal and vertical camera movement between exposures.

The parallax measurements were done to try to prove that the camera's position changed between exposures in order disprove the theory that the same background was used for all three photos. The PEP admitted that their parallax measurements showed that the camera's horizontal and vertical position changed only "slightly" between exposures, and they described the change in vertical position as "very small."

This is not a bit surprising because the differences in the distances between background objects were so tiny that they could only be detected with the aid of computer analysis and microscopes. You don't have to be a math whiz to grasp the obvious fact that the camera's movement would have had to be incredibly slight to produce such tiny differences in the distances between background objects.

And the PEP did not even include 133-C in their parallax analysis, a very odd omission given that they were supposed to be trying to prove that the same background was not used for all three photos.

Furthermore, the PEP fell strangely and revealingly silent about the camera's angular movement between exposures. When a person holds a cheap camera, hands the camera to someone else to forward the film, takes the camera back, snaps a picture, and then repeats this process, the odds are a zillion to one, effectively zero, that there will be no change in the camera's yaw, pitch, or roll between exposures, not to mention that the change in the camera's horizontal and vertical position will be so slight, so tiny, that it can only be determined by ratioing parallax measurements that are expressed in millimeters.

Allow me to once again note some of the microscopic differences in the distances between background objects as determined by the PEP's measurements to determine horizontal parallax.

The “a” distance was the distance from the left edge of the foreground post to the left edge of the picket to the left of it in 133-A and 133-B, and it was measured at three levels.

LOWER LEVEL
133-A:   6.8 mm
133-B:   6.0 mm

That's a difference of just 0.8 mm, or 0.03 inches, or 3/100ths of an inch.

MIDDLE LEVEL
133-A:   6.5 mm
133-B:   6.4 mm

That's a difference of just 0.1 mm, 0.003 inches, or 3/1000ths of an inch.

UPPER LEVEL
133-A:   7.0 mm
133-B:   5.9 mm

That's a difference of just 1.1 mm/0.04 inches or 1/25th of an inch. This was the largest of the differences in the horizontal parallax measurements. The naked eye cannot a detect a difference of 1.1 mm/0.04 inches in the distances between background objects. To detect a difference of just 1/25th of an inch in the distances between the same objects in two photos, a person would need the aid of high magnification or a microscope.

Let's continue by looking at the measurements of the "b" distance in 133-A and 133-B, and this distance, too, was measured at three levels. The "b" distance was the distance from the right edge of the foreground post to the right edge of the picket to the right of it.

LOWER LEVEL
133-A:   9.0 mm
133-B:   9.5 mm

That's a difference of just 0.5 mm, 0.019 inches, or 19/1000ths of an inch.
 
MIDDLE LEVEL
133-A:   9.3 mm
133-B:   10.0 mm

That's a difference of just 0.7 mm, 0.027 inches, or 27/1000ths of an inch.