Good morning, afternoon or evening, lads.
You can call me Matt.
I've been interested in researching the assassination after I was slacking off from math homework one day and decided to watch the video of JFK's assassination. At first, the name 'Zapruder' wasn't familiar to me at all. I honestly assumed it was some obscure film from some weird news station. Obviously, I later learned that wasn't the case.
I wasn't really disgusted or disturbed by the film when I first saw it. What caught my attention was the footage itself. After a while, I kept going back to it, and then I started finding more films: Nix, Muchmore, Martin, Hughes. None of these names meant anything to me at first, but I kept digging.
Then I started finding all the different eyewitness claims and interpretations: people talking about smoke, flashes, wounds, the grassy knoll, and everything else surrounding the assassination. Eventually I got deep enough into it that I even built my own JFK video archive. I had to take it off Google Drive when it went past the 15 GB limit, so now it's hosted on my own machine instead.
More recently, I got my hands on the MPI DVD of the Zapruder film, and it looks fire, frankly. Best R$98,00 i've ever spent.
So what am I actually planning to do?
I'm interested in learning how to enhance and work with frames from the home movies. I think having the best possible copies and frames available is important before we start drawing conclusions from them. A lot of the material is scattered around, and sometimes researchers don't clearly credit where their individual frame images or enlargements came from. On top of that, getting high-quality archival material directly can be expensive.
*cough* Emailing the Sixth Floor Museum and NARA and getting no answer back *cough*
I'm not claiming to have everything figured out. I'm new to this.
What I'd like to do is learn, organize the material I can get access to, improve the quality of frames where possible, and hopefully contribute something useful to the research. I'm interested in the footage first, and the conclusions second.
Someone get me off the Oliver Stone coke, that stuff cannot be good for me.
I'll probably be banned for this post anyway.
For starters, you are wise not to be taken in by Oliver Stone's fictitious version of the assassination. There are over 100 mistakes and outright lies that have been identified in that movie. So many people seem to have gotten most, if not all of their information about the JFKA from that movie. Although it was entertaining, trying to learn about the JFKA by watching that movie would be like studying the Civil War by watching Gone With the Wind.
I would also advise you not to put too much faith in eye and ear witness accounts. Those are notoriously unreliable not just in this case but in any case. Witnesses simply do not perfectly recall events. They tend to get some things right and somethings wrong. The way you tell the difference is by comparing their accounts to the hard, physical evidence to see if it corroborates or refutes a given witness. You can literally find dozens of different versions of the shooting and people tend to put their faith in witnesses who confirm their biases. They believe the witnesses who told a story they want to believe. Witnesses will sharply disagree on important details such as the number of shots, the source of the shots, the spacing of the shots. They will disagree about the sequence of events. There really is only one reliable witness and that is Zapruder's camera. It has perfect recall and tells the same story every time. Unfortunately, it has no sound and the resolution is not great but by looking carefully at enhanced frames there are a lot of excellent clues to help you to figure out what happened.
My last piece of advice is not to believe the hype. There are numerous myths that have grown out of the assassination that have been repeated so many times they have become accepted as facts. Be skeptical about everything you read from both sides of the conspiracy question. There is an old saying that says, "Trust but verify." I would advise, "Don't trust. Just verify". When you read an account of the event or an argument, say to yourself, "That might be right, but it might be wrong". Don't believe anything until you have verified it. There is an old adage that journalism students have been told over the years that says, "If your mother says she loves you, get confirmation.". Don't believe anything just because somebody says something. If you look at the evidence and the arguments objectively but with a healthy dose of skepticism, you should have no trouble figuring out what happened. It's not terribly difficult.
