What is there to corroborate those witnesses? Oh, yeah. Other witnesses.

You seem not to understand that independent reports of the same fact make them reliable.  It is just a simple application of the mathematics of probability.

Example: One witness reports a licence plate no. beginning AZR at the scene.  Another independently reports seeing licence plate AZR 109 while another says they saw the car with licence AZR 1O4.  You would say that means nothing and the fact that none of them agree completely shows that they are unreliable. I say that the licence plate almost certainly began with AZR if the reports were independent.

They all heard the shot pattern that occurred.

Not everyone paid attention to the rhythm of the shots. Of those who recalled a pattern without prompting almost all said that the last two were closer together. 

Those who didn’t notice a pattern, when asked said they were about equally spaced.  James Romack was asked about the spacing in his WC testimony on April 8, 1964:
"Mr. ROMACK. Oh, they happened pretty fast. I would say maybe 3 or 4 seconds apart.
Mr. BELIN. Were they equally spaced, or did one sound like it was closer than another one in time?
Mr. ROMACK. It sounded like to me that they were evenly spaced. They rang out pretty fast.
Mr. BELIN. Have you ever operated a bolt action rifle?
Mr. ROMACK. Yes, sir.
Mr. BELIN. Do you own one?
Mr. ROMACK. Yes, sir.
Mr. BELIN. Did it sound like the shots were faster than it could be operated with a bolt action rifle?
Mr. ROMACK. No, sir."

A few did not offer a recollection about the shot spacing in their initial statement but, later, in describing the shots gave their opinion of how they were spaced.  For example, Steven Wilson said this in his detailed statement to the WC on March 25, 1964 (22H685):

“In a matter of ten seconds or less after car and occupants were obscured from my view by the trees, I heard three shots. I am positive there were three shots, no more and no less. It is my opinion there was a greater space of time between the second and third shots than between the first and second. The three shots were fired within a matter of less than five seconds”.

Note: Wilson was observing from the third floor TSBD on the south-east corner almost directly below the SN. If the first shot had occurred early before JFK passed under the oak tree, as is required by the SBT, Wilson’s view of the car would not have been obscured by a tree. So Wilson’s observation that the shots occured after his view of the car was obscured by a tree means there was no early shot.

Although the first shot was fired before the car passed under the tree, it is not a requirement of the SBT. The WC proposed several possible scenarios including one in which all three shots were fired after the car came into the clear. That is the one with the second shot missing and all three shots being fired in 5.6 seconds or less. For reasons I do not understand, that became the accepted WC scenario even though the WC never concluded that. It was only one possibility. Even clueless Walter Cronkite bought into that myth. It was the basis for Tink Thompson's book Six Seconds in Dallas.

The formula appears to be this:

1. No one can agree on what the Z film actually shows.
2. Eyewitness and earwitness evidence is unreliable.
3. Ergo, whatever I want to think happened is what happened and you can't prove it didn't.

Isn't that about it?

Not quite. I KNOW what happened. The only thing I want to think happened is what actually happened. If there were 12 gunmen shooting at JFK, that is what I would want to know happened. My only agenda is knowing the truth. And I do.

What puzzles me about the JFKA is why so many people have such a hard time figuring it out. It's really not that hard.

I just posted this on another thread. Mary Woodward's excellent 2015 interview for the Sixth Floor Museum. She was highly embarrassed by her participation in "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" and had thought she was participating in a serious historical BBC documentary.

Lance, in my experience, you won't encourage the "53 words, max" reader to read and consider the points presented in longer forum posts
if short attention span readers or those prejudiced against you generally don't take kindly to your criticism.

As a former Ed Forum JFK Debate moderator and the 2015 - 2016 comments editor of jfkfacts.org, my main observation is that unsolvable topics like
Pitzer's death are much more popular than issues that are much more likely to be solved by putting in adequate research time and trial and error search strings.

If you're not tribal you tend to be dismissed by both sides. Verifiable facts are of little to no consequence if they conflict with preconceived notions influenced
by much earlier personalities attempting to achieve sufficient notoriety to make a buck off of JFKA. Two who come to mind were Penn Jones and Mark Lane.
Harold Weisberg attempted to straddle the middle, commercially successful book author and long laboring and suffering researcher complaining about his postage
expenses.

My sense that learning anything new is resented as least as often as it is appreciated is strengthened by anecdotal experience. A prime example is my success at finding
things. I'm in the 18th year of my search for JFKA answers and contradictions to "what everybody knows is what actually happened." I receive few enough requests to put my
research abilities to work to accept that most just do not want to know. This supports why "Oswald in the Doorway," an escape from reality much more than it is an
area of serious research, can be such a popular and enduring attention getter, right up there with "Oswald is Innocent!!!!"

A result is one with a common theme of US Crony Capitalism. Discourage asking who potentially had the most to lose if JFK had lived and who did benefit
the most politically or financially because he did not survive his first Presidential term. The answer to the first question was the largest holder of General Dynamics
stock in 1963, Henry Crown, and the two politicians, father and son, who post assassination, 1964 - 2009, "served" a combined 20 years as either VPOTUS or POTUS, despite the brothers Kennedy in possession of so much influence of appearance, position, political, and financial power earlier in November, 1963.

How much has been spent by so few to demonize progressive taxation, the IRS, actual Social Democratic political goals and resulting quality of life comparison, compared to print and electronic media coverage of "Buy, Borrow, Die" income tax avoidance strategy or the result of state legislated abortions being the poorest, least resourced women being almost exclusively the ones trapped in those jurisdictions to experience compulsory full term pregnancy and delivery or back alley abortion methods?

Try this, but read it after the first and second linked topics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517015211/http://www.manuscriptservice.com/Pitzer/opinion.html

Thanks, Tom. There is much wisdom in what you say. My "53 word" quip was prompted by a post by one of the Local Gods (in his own mind anyway), which was quickly removed by Duncan, characterizing me as a "pathetic dipshit" who "thinks he's the smartest guy in the room" and writes unreadable "books" that no one cares about.  And that was in response to a post of mine that had nothing to do with the JFKA! (If anyone wants to see what a "book" looks like, try reading Keven Hofeling's 20,000-word AI-generated posts at the Ed Forum. Yes, there is a point at which "this really doesn't belong on an internet forum.")

The problem with internet forums is that they are a hopeless mix of ages, educational levels, psychological quirks, emotional maturity levels, personal hot buttons, etc., etc. I always say it's like standing in the middle of a crowded Walmart and shouting "So, what does everyone think about Bayes theorem anyway?" - and expecting a productive discussion.

In addition, there is also a certain type who is likely to become a forum regular. I used to limit myself to a maximum of 300 posts on any forum precisely to avoid becoming one of "them." I've never accumulated anywhere near as many posts on any forum as I have here. That type - across all forums, even ones dealing with completely mundane, non-controversial subjects - tends to be ultra-assertive and always looking for a fight. He views the forum as his turf, and woe to you if you fail to acquiesce to his dominance. I have a friend who participates on several completely non-controversial (or so you would think) forums like those devoted to photography, and he says they are exactly the same way. Ditto with my experience on golf forums.

Most people just aren't into deep research or thought. Forums like this really are just 95% mental masturbation, little echo chambers to strut your stuff in 20-word (or less) bites and generate 20-word (or less) responses from those who cheer you on or call you a kook. It's just the reality. My participation is truly for an audience of one - me. It's just self-amusement and putting in writing what I think I've learned simply because I enjoy doing it. If someone actually gains something from it, so much the better - but I have no expectations and don't really care.

---

Now back to Pitzer: Thanks to one of Mark Ulrik's posts at the Ed Forum, I had seen and taken into consideration Allan Eaglesham's work that is still on the Wayback Machine. To his great credit, Eaglesham had the intellectual honesty to disavow "Dangerous Dan" Marvin after first buying into his schtick and to change his verdict on Pitzer from murder to suicide when the evidence demanded it. However, he seemed to have lost interest at that point. Kent Heiner's 2019 update of his excellent little e-book was the latest thinking I could find.

The notion that Pitzer was experiencing some sort of personal crisis at the time of his suicide just doesn't seem likely to me. He was about to retire at age 50 after a 30-year Navy career and take a low-key teaching position with a local junior college with which he'd been previously affiliated. His lady friend in Florida accepted the relationship for what it was and placed no demands on him. He had a 29-year marriage, including one son who was still a teenager, and no huge domestic problems. He left no note for anyone, and the letter to his lady friend written 90 minutes before his death indicated he would see her in a few months. His wife said he was "quite enthused" about his teaching position, and he in fact went into the office that Saturday ostensibly to work on a speech he would be giving at the junior college in a few days.

It's very difficult for me to find the vaguest inkling of a reason for a suicide in the above, which is what causes me to wonder "Could there have been something else? Could it have been related to what Dennis David described?"

By all accounts, including his lady friend and Eaglesham's work that you linked, Pitzer was a perfectionist and a dedicated "company (Navy) man" who took great pride in his work and career. He was about to retire with an unblemished reputation. Could something that threatened that reputation have sent him off the deep end? As I noted, Lifton first went to Liebeler with his body-alteration theory just days before Pitzer's suicide. The Kennedy family announced that the autopsy materials would be released to the National Archives at exactly the same time. Did Pitzer in fact know more about the autopsy than even David suggested and fear that it was all going to come crashing down after he was out of the Navy and no longer even in a position to contribute to damage control? Perhaps not - perhaps such speculation is 110% off-base. But such speculation doesn't seem preposterous to me in the context of a suicide that has no other plausible explanation.

This little exercise has also been useful to me in steering my thinking toward the possibility that perhaps there actually were autopsy-related shenanigans but that these were not related to the assassination per se but were simply in furtherance of what was seen as a patriotic, WW3-avoiding exercise in maintaining the lone nut explanation. This to me is not necessarily "likely" (although there is certainly evidence pointing in this direction) but is 1000% more likely than the Lifton/Horne-type scenarios where a huge, preplanned operation to alter the body was part and parcel of an almost comically complex conspiracy.

Voila, I've written another book!