JFK
assassination film hoax
The
lamppost mistake
To check that
the Elm Street shown in the Zapruder film agrees with the real Elm Street in
Dallas, Texas, scientists made use of photographs taken in 2002, as well as
photographs taken in the week after the assassination by the Dallas police,
together with precise survey maps of the area, to construct a panoramic view
from the place from which Zapruder said he took his film.
A small-size
copy of that panorama is shown here:
The Zapruder
film images are overlaid on the black-and-white 1963 photos, which are themselves
overlaid on the 2002 photos. The images were corrected for pincushion
distortion and perspective effects before being “stitched together” using
advanced computer programs.
Overall, the
Zapruder film agrees with real
But there are
two things that don’t match up properly.
One is the road
sign, which comes out blurry. This is because it was pasted into the film
incorrectly, as described on the last page.
The other is the
lamppost to the right of the sign. In the panorama above you can see the top
half of the lamppost as shown in the Zapruder film. Just to its right is the
real lamppost as of November 1963. (Ignore the lamppost further to the left:
this is where it had been moved to by 2002.)
It does not
matter that the Zapruder film lamppost is slightly to the left of the Dallas Police
Department photo. That is explained by the police taking the photo from a
slightly different position to Abraham Zapruder. (This is called “parallax”.)
What is important is that the angle of the lamppost is wrong. You can see this more clearly in the comparison below:
If you look at
the white wall and the bushes in the background, you can see that the two
panoramic views line up exactly. But the lamppost changes its angle.
This is even
clearer if we draw a line down the middle of the lamppost:
The Zapruder
film shows the lamppost leaning slightly to the right. Even though it is only a
small lean, it is something that could not happen if the film was genuine.
The angle of the lamppost is another small mistake that the forgers made. Frames showing the lamppost were published in Life magazine within days. Once that was done, it was impossible to fix the mistake.
To be fair, the forgers had no idea that computers would become as powerful as they are today. Computers in 1964 didn’t do any graphics at all! It took almost 40 years for this small mistake to be found.
This is an example of how modern science can sometimes solve murder mysteries that are decades old. This case just happens to be the most famous murder mystery of all time.
The
lamppost mistake ◄ You are here!