JFK assassination film hoax

A simple introduction

On November 22, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while traveling down Elm Street, Dallas, Texas, in an open car in a motorcade. Everyone agrees about that.

Many people think that agencies of the U.S. Government have lied about or covered up details of the assassination.

For three decades, people thought the best proof of foul play was a 27-second home movie of the assassination taken by a Dallas dressmaker, Abraham Zapruder. It shows JFK’s head being blasted backwards and to his left:

This seems to tell us that the shooter was in front of the car on the right side, on the “grassy knoll” (small hill) next to Elm Street. But the U.S. Government insisted that JFK was shot by just one man hiding in a building far behind the limousine.

Things get more complicated when we look at the film frame-by-frame. As the bullet hits, JFK’s head first moves forwards:

This makes things confusing. There seemed to be three possible explanations:

1. He was hit by two bullets at almost the same time (one from behind and then one from the front).

2. He was hit from behind, and a jet of brain matter exploding from the front caused his head to recoil backwards.

3. He was hit from behind and some sort of muscle reaction caused his head to fly backwards.

People tried to figure this out for three decades. Instead of clearing up the mystery, Zapruder’s film just made things more confusing.

In the 1990s, researchers started to realize that there was a fourth possible explanation. Zapruder’s film might also be a part of the lies and cover-up that agencies of the U.S. Government had weaved around the JFK assassination!

The Zapruder film was scientifically examined. It was found that, while most of it looks completely genuine, some of the images are impossible. They violate the laws of physics. They could not have come from Zapruder’s home movie camera.

Zapruder’s film is a very good forgery. It is almost perfect. Some mistakes took almost 40 years to find.

It was scientifically proven that Zapruder’s film could not be just changed a little bit. For any of it to be altered in this way, the whole film must be created. The whole film is a fake!

A movie film is just a strip of little photos (“frames”). The fake film was made by cutting and pasting real photos and film frames together to make new frames.

Because the Zapruder film is only 27 seconds long, less than 500 photos needed to be made. The forgers had at least several months to create them. Most were not published for a year after the assassination. This would require sophisticated photographic work, but well within the technological capabilities of 1963 and 1964. People had been creating high quality fake photos since the 1850s!

But what about the people who watched Zapruder’s film in the days after the assassination?

Film experts believe that a real film of the assassination was quickly altered on the evening of the assassination, using machines that could create Hollywood-style special effects (like Mary Poppins, created in 1964). Since the film was not shown on television, no one knows exactly what these people saw. But we do know that they described a film that is different to the film published in November 1964 as the “Zapruder film”!

In May 2003, scientists and researchers presented their latest findings at a conference in Duluth, Minnesota. This has now been described in a book, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, published in September 2003. The entire conference can also be viewed on YouTube.

The web pages below describe the best proofs that the Zapruder film is a fake. They describe some of the mistakes that the forgers made.

You can save any of these web pages from your web browser. The images and small movie clips shown on each page will also be automatically saved with each web page.

In the end, you have to decide for yourself what to believe. But don’t just believe what the U.S. Government tells you!

Introduction page ◄ You are here!

The fast-forward mistakes