My review of JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies by Dan Noyes and Josiah Thompson
This movie by San Francisco ABC News investigative reporter Dan Noyes is hailed in the comments as the best documentary they have ever seen, or the best JFK Assassination documentary. I disagree. I respond to the claims here.
The Warren Commission did not examine all the evidence, and Josiah Thompson was one of the early researchers who showed this fact, and is widely respected for this. That does not prove that the Warren Commission's conclusion was wrong, however. Evidence has continued to come to light since then that the commission had not examined, and much of it proves their conclusion. Meanwhile, Josiah Thompson had been momentarily arrested along with another Warren Commission critic Mr. Salandria in January 1966, during a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Opposition to the war and opposition to the account that Oswald acted alone grew up together from 1966 onward. It became alleged that JFK might have been killed so that the war could proceed. Thompson, further motivated by the anti-war movement and by his meeting with Salandria, investigated further and published his famous book Six Seconds in Dallas in 1967. But it had to be revised later, and in 2021 he put a new book out. All those years later people such as Thompson still claimed that JFK was killed by a conspiracy just because the Warren Commission was inadequate, or because Connally or LBJ or other figures involved disputed the Warren Report. Many, including filmmaker Oliver Stone, still claim the motive for the assassination was to stop JFK from changing his foreign policies. But these claims do not disprove that Oswald killed JFK.
President Johnson and other officials did not want to have the idea circulated that, because Oswald had been a communist, that a communist conspiracy had killed JFK, for fear of causing World War Three (a nuclear war). That is quite understandable, but for Thompson or others to conclude from this that the Warren Commission wanted only to blame Oswald is unfair, since the Commission had many investigators who wanted to get to the truth whatever it was. Warren and others forbade investigations into Oswald's communist connections, such as his trip to Mexico City to defect again. He also did not want to put out disturbing images such as the autopsy photos and the entire Zapruder film. That was wrong, and these and other problems with the Warren Commission are fully explained on my other link here of the interview with Philip Shenon, but all this does not prove that the Commission wanted only to prosecute Oswald on orders from J. Edgar Hoover.
Commentators in this film refer to witnesses near the grassy knoll, rather than to the witnesses near the Depository and/or that saw Oswald that day which I have linked on my essay: The Reason for Conspiracies
Witness evidence is unreliable, but Thompson relies heavily on it. Some of these witnesses have embellished their stories later to fit the conspiracy theories. But OK, let's review the witnesses mentioned in this film. Witnesses mentioned at 35 to 40+ minutes into the film include Bill Newman, who thought the shots were overhead. But he was so close to the street, in fact, that the shot from the 6th floor almost was indeed overhead. From just behind Bill Newman, witness Cheryl McKinnon wrote later that she heard at least two shots from behind where she stood on the knoll, and that she saw some smoke hanging there. Lots of people thought they heard shots coming from the knoll, but the alternate explanation is that what people heard there were reverberations and echoes from the buildings in Dealey Plaza. Lee Bowers from the railroad switching tower behind the parking lot said he saw two men and "a flash of light or smoke or something" behind the fence. It is not clear from this account just when Lee saw this, and his actual affidavit on Nov.22, 1963 says nothing about this. "Skinny" Holland and others on the railroad overpass ran over behind the fence after the shooting and saw "the smoke" and footprints. Another explanation for the "smoke" is exhaust from the motorcycles that accelerated after the third shot. It could also be that "the smoke" was the tissue and blood that was shot out from JFK's skull and which hung in the air briefly.
Two men may indeed have been hanging out there behind the fence on the grassy knoll. Perhaps one man was the famous "badgeman" whom officer Smith met there. Smith's description of badgeman wearing a sport shirt and having dirty fingernails were added later, and was not in his affadavit. Or they may have been two men who had rushed over there just like the others who came there soon afterward. It's just my speculation in turn, but couldn't the smoke have come from two guys hanging out there who were smoking, since cigarette butts were seen there? Dealey Plaza is filled with law enforcement officers and officials working in the buildings there, and they park in the lot behind the fence. Could one of them been the badgeman on his lunch break hoping to see the president? Some say the head shot sounded different. It would have, hitting hard bone as Clint Hill implied instead of going through flesh like the second "magic bullet" shot did, or like the first shot that missed entirely. And no-one saw a rifle being used behind the grassy knoll fence. By contrast, witnesses clearly saw Oswald holding and even shooting his rifle from the 6th floor window.
Thompson mentions the Mary Moorman photo that he says shows a "shape" that looks like a head behind the fence. But those who have studied this photo further and more closely say it is not a head. This supposed evidence has not "gotten better", as Josiah says, but worse. See the wikipedia article I have linked to my essay.
Thompson admitted that, on closer examination, the film showed that Kennedy's head initially moved forward after the head shot, which proved a shot from behind. Then Thompson makes one of his most-obvious mistakes. He said here on this documentary that the forward movement is seen because Zapruder moved his camera. But if this had happened, the car seat and the whole scene would have moved too, not just JFK's head, and the film does not show this. In frame 313 it shows a sudden wider gap between JFK's head and the car seat backing than the gap shown in frame 312. This Noyes film even shows this clearly. The Zapruder film showed JFK's head moving backward a few frames later, and then forward again and to the left, but it was a delayed nervous reaction, as Sturdivan said, and was not caused because a bullet or bullets moved his head in those ways. Theorists say the film shows the shot entering the right side of his head, and they also say there must have been an entry wound there, and the hole further back is an exit wound. But the medical Xrays and photos, never examined by the Warren Commission but analyzed later, showed no bullet entry wound on the right front of JFK's head, and no exit wound on the back of his skull. Just the large hole in the upper back of his skull. The film clearly shows blood and debris pushed out and exiting on the upper right front of JFK's head. But the theorists like Thompson say the debris came out of the back of his head, and so that was the exit wound. Some debris did come out in back, but the film clearly shows the blood and tissue pushed out from the upper front right side. This was from the bullet striking from behind.
The Noyes/Thompson film shows the entry wound for the single "magic" bullet in Kennedy's upper neck, as drawn inaccurately by Dr. Humes, but not from the actual autopsy photos in the National Archives. A common error is to compare the second shot's "magic bullet" CE399 that hit JFK's neck and wounded Connally to other demonstration bullets that were more deformed, and people such as Thompson and Dr. Wecht claim that the bullet was pristine and so couldn't have gone through two men. But it wasn't pristine, but flattened and open on one end, and in fact there was metal residue from it that was found on Connally.
The bullet that hit JFK's head was shattered so completely that of course lead would have been found from it in his skull. Far from proving a second shot to the head from another kind of bullet, as Thompson alleges, the lead in the back of JFK's skull proved the shot came from behind. We know that Oswald's bullets had lead in them. The small bullet hole in the scalp shown in the autopsy photos, and the lines radiating from it on JFK's scull, showed the impact of the bullet as it hit Kennedy's skull and shattered and hollowed out his brain. It is amazing that the esteemed author and investigator Mr. Thompson can so misinterpret this evidence. It is the conspiracy theorists like him, NOT the government-employed officials and the other scientists linked here who investigated the crime, who WANT to believe a certain narrative.
Josiah Thompson mentions that John Connally did not believe that he was hit by the single bullet that also hit Kennedy, as the majority of the Warren Commission concluded. But elsewhere on this site I have quoted Connally's early account that coincided with the official account, and also that by the 1990s he no longer disagreed with this official account, as he had in his statements shown in this film. Thompson also dismisses the revised view on the motorcycle recording revealed by the House Committee that it was made minutes after the assassination, saying "channel 2" of the recording was spliced or edited, and that "hums" showed it had been passed through several machines. But this is inconclusive, because it does not prove any changes were made, and there is no ballistic, visual or wound evidence of another shot hitting JFK's head right after the previous one, as Thompson and James Barger claim, much less 2 or 3 shots that missed among 5 shots being fired. How can Thompson and Barger correlate 5 supposed shot sounds with the Zapruder film that only shows two shots? In the original recording, the "shots" are so vague that they can be anything, and I suspect Thompson is cherry-picking vague sounds to correlate with the Zapruder film.
Thompson and Noyes make much of where the debris went after the head shot. I don't see how a hard bullet hitting hard bone would not produce debris coming off in many directions. Josiah says debris hit motorcycle cops on the left of the car, but not the right, showing it was pushed to the left side by the shot hitting JFK on the right. But the film shows the motorcycle cops on the right were further back. There was no damage on the left side of JFK's head, so how could debris have come from there? Maybe it came out as Kennedy's head moved back and to the left because of his delayed reaction due to the nervous spasm. What we see clearly on the famous film is blood and tissue pushed forward out of JFK's skull. Why is that not evidence that the shots came from the rear? If debris pushed backward proves the shot came from the front, as Thompson claims, why doesn't debris pushed forward prove the shot came from behind? Some of the debris rose above JFK's head initially, and then went "backward" because the president's car and the motorcycle cops on the left were moving forward and accelerating. Josiah Thompson even claims that another shot besides the grassy knoll shot, fired by Oswald, hit JFK's head from behind, and that's why his head moved forward again; but the Zapruder film only shows two shots hitting the president. The bullet fragments from the actual only-one head shot from behind that was shown in the Zapruder film went forward into the car, or were lodged in JFK's skull, not backward into the motorcycle cops. The fragments proved how thoroughly Oswald's military "jacketed" bullet had shattered, which meant lead would certainly have come out as the bullet was shattered while hitting JFK's skull in the back of the head from behind.
This film raises some questions, which some believe are good questions. The answers I have given to them here might seem inadequate to conspiracy theory believers. But this tragic event offers so many reasons to raise questions that such questions are infinite in scope, and as the 6th floor museum director said in the film, conspiracy claims come and then die away and then come to life again indefinitely. No-one, certainly not Thompson, has any evidence of who the shooter was, if it was not Lee Harvey Oswald. I agree with Robert Blakey's claim in the PBS documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald that, had the victim of this shooting not been JFK, Oswald would have been tried and convicted in 3 days. "There was no defense" of Oswald, said Thompson about the Warren Commission. But in fact the Commission reviewed all the contrary theories which they were acquainted with. We know just from accounts of trials today that most defendants are convicted, even on circumstantial evidence. Oswald had far more evidence against him than almost any other murder defendant ever tried. There's no doubt he would have been convicted had he gone to trial. The evidence against Oswald remains open and shut. Some of it was even mentioned early in the film. Be sure to watch Bugliosi's video in which he explains the mock trial, with a capable lawyer defending Oswald, in which he obtained a guilty verdict against Oswald.