A bit more...

I got to thinking about that whitish "blob" in front of JFK's face, at the moment of the missile impact. It's inexplicable unless the bullet started to light up, just at the moment it touched his head. I mean, it looks like an actual explosion occurred, to give the lighting effect.

The spatter seemed to go out forward from his face as well, which is totally contradictory to a bullet going backward.

And then I suddenly got an idea...

What if they "cut" the actual impact area from the frame, rotated it and put it in front of his face to show tissue and blood going forward? Since they were intent on proving a lone assassin, shooting from the back, they couldn't very well show the film as it existed if the spray went up and backward, could they?

This cut and fit system works relatively easy with computers but back then, they didn't have such means at their disposal. They had to superimpose projected images on each other and "burn" and "dodge" areas to get a relatively decent deception. Perhaps they even used projectors and then refilmed the images they had projected onto a translucent backing. (Like projecting an image onto wax paper and viewing the back of the wax paper to see the image. This was quite a popular "funky" method back then).

So I thought I'd give it a try. I took frame 2 -the moment of impact- and cut out the white blob and spatter pattern. I then copied that and pasted it into frame 1, the one JUST before impact. I also cut out the small piece of the back of his head from frame 2 and pasted it into frame 1 to give me a reference for what was left of his head.

I ROTATED that blob and spray, about 160 degrees CCW and positioned it to look about "right" ... and then filled in over the cut lines with projected spray. Here's the result....



Doesn't that second row look a lot more plausible? His brain is visible and it's BRIGHTER than his face ... which makes sense, since his skin tone was always a bit "tanned" and a brain is essentially quite white. It sure makes more sense than being in front of his face.

Then I noticed something else, after having done that job. There's a whitish STREAK showing up in frame 1 lined up directly with Kennedy's head and "stopping" just about in the middle of Jackie's head. That streak doesn't show up in frames 2 and 3 in the top strip but it's there in my own doctored second frame (because I used frame 1 with superimposition for frame 2) ... and it draws attention because it's in frames 1 and 2 at the bottom but abruptly disappears in frame 3. What IS that?? It looks like it might be a reflection off of glass ... but there WAS NO GLASS between them and the camera.

Then it occurred to me that this might actually BE the BULLET ... caught in mid air just before impact. The low pressure wake would distort the air behind it, causing a different refraction of light from normal undisturbed air.

That's the only explanation I can think of, for that streak being there.

-Vince