The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination is three and a half months away. The usual conspiracy titillations will be reconsidered, but no one will ever know anything conclusive about an alleged conspiracy because two witnesses to the murder who had cameras (Abraham Zapruder and Mary Moorman) were too cheap to buy better cameras, and a third witness (Orville Nix, who died in 1972) has two strikes against him — he shot his Dealey Plaza footage with a mildly shitty 8mm camera, and was either too dumb or too lazy to shoot the Kennedy motorcade from a reasonable distance.
If Zapruder had shot the murder with color film inside a decent 16mm camera instead of an 8mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Model 414 PD…if Moorman had used a movie camera instead of a black-and-white Polaroid Highlander 80A…if Nix had used a 16mm color movie camera with a decent zoom lens….all three had their unique motives and economic limitations and that’s understandable, but from a forensic perspective they sorta kinda blew it.
Imagine being Orville Nix at 12:28 pm on 11.22.63, standing on the grass in Dealey Plaza between 80 and 100 feet away from Elm Street, all pumped and primed with his 8mm color camera…
Interior Nix dialogue: “Okay, I can hear the motorcycles and the cheering…the Kennedy motorcade is coming down Main Street and will be cruising down Elm in a minute or two…maybe I should run over to Elm to get a decent shot of the President and his wife and Governor Connally??…naahh, it’s better to stand 80 to 100 feet away…that way my family and friends can see the grassy knoll hillside and the plaster walls and the bright blue sky…who needs to capture film of the actual faces of President Kennedy and Jackie?…the green grass and the panoramic vistas are better.”
In the meantime, what about that mysterious muzzle flash and the legend of Badge Man?
HE to JFK conspiracy pallies (including Joseph McBride and Oliver Stone): “A rifle muzzle flash is said to be barely detectable above a grassy knoll wall. Or at least, so says assassination researcher Robert Groden.
Groden’s film A Case for Conspiracy shows a flash above the small concrete wall at frame # 24 in the Nix film, which is the same instant as frame # 313 in the Zapruder film.
