Understanding the New ARRB Info and the Documents Released in 2017

[Gerry Down]

Not really. He's given numerous interviews, including at least two after his book was published, and he's spoken at at least two JFK conferences that I know of.

But this is relatively few given the book was written 11 years ago.

[Joffrey van de Wiel]

Basically, yes.

The autopsy skull x-rays and the Harper fragment are two keys to orienting the photo correctly. And, as Dr. Mantik has explained, the presence of the fatty tissue in the upper-left corner is also a key indicator.

Dr. Mantik viewed F8 in stereo and noted that the upper left corner of F8 shows fat tissue and even a nipple extending outward from the skin of the chest. As Dr. Mantik explains, this fatty tissue would only be visible if F8 showed a posterior view of the head:

On a side note, Humes told the ARRB that F8 showed the EOP entry wound, and Dr. Mantik has confirmed that F8 does show an EOP entry wound almost exactly where Humes placed it (John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds, pp. 25-29, 62-65).

I would recommend reading Dr. Mantik's section on autopsy photo F8 in his online paper "The Medical Evidence Decoded," pp. 80-83.
https://themantikview.com/pdf/The_Medical_Evidence_Decoded.pdf

Dr. Mantik's best and most up-to-date analysis of F8 is in his JFK's Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis. On page 28 he has a picture of F8 with overlaid orienting graphics to help the read understand what F8 shows.

Michael,

Thanks for posting the link to Dr. Mantik's The Medical Evidence Decoded. I am about half way through and impressed so far. The editing is a bit sloppy but overall a good read.

It is hard to understand why important evidence in the Crime of the Century was handled so carelessly by the Federal Government that things got lost, like the brain and microscopic tissue slides. More sinister is the willing destruction of evidence by federal agents, and the disappearance of various autopsy photographs and X-rays. Dr. Mantik even claims, and not without good reason, that a number of photos/X-rays were faked or altered and that the head wound moved up by 4 inches from the level of the EOP to the top of the head!

The Zapruder film shows that a bullet entry at the EOP and exit in the right parietal/temporal area can not possibly be matched up to a shot fired from the 'sniper's nest.' I hypothesize therefore that as soon as the Zapruder film was released to the public, and the impossibility of the abovementioned trajectory became apparent to all, the entrance wound HAD TO BE MOVED UP in order to maintain the single assassin solution of the Warren Commission. In reality, as Dr. Mantik writes, there is no wound there and all three pathologists agreed.

More later.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Michael,

Thanks for posting the link to Dr. Mantik's The Medical Evidence Decoded. I am about half way through and impressed so far. The editing is a bit sloppy but overall a good read.

It is hard to understand why important evidence in the Crime of the Century was handled so carelessly by the Federal Government that things got lost, like the brain and microscopic tissue slides. More sinister is the willing destruction of evidence by federal agents, and the disappearance of various autopsy photographs and X-rays. Dr. Mantik even claims, and not without good reason, that a number of photos/X-rays were faked or altered and that the head wound moved up by 4 inches from the level of the EOP to the top of the head!

The Zapruder film shows that a bullet entry at the EOP and exit in the right parietal/temporal area can not possibly be matched up to a shot fired from the 'sniper's nest.' I hypothesize therefore that as soon as the Zapruder film was released to the public, and the impossibility of the abovementioned trajectory became apparent to all, the entrance wound HAD TO BE MOVED UP in order to maintain the single assassin solution of the Warren Commission. In reality, as Dr. Mantik writes, there is no wound there and all three pathologists agreed.

More later.

Yes, that much seems clear, i.e., that early on, some of the conspirators realized that the autopsy doctors' rear head entry wound posed an impossible trajectory back to the alleged sniper's nest. To make that wound work, you would have to assume that JFK was leaning about 60 degrees forward when the bullet struck, but the Zapruder film refutes that assumption.

Another problem with the autopsy doctors' rear head entry wound is that it does not even come close to lining up with the fragment trail near the top of the head. Equally problematic is the fact that the extant autopsy x-rays do not show the fragment trail described in the autopsy report.

So, when the Clark Panel came along, they moved up the wound by a whopping 4 inches, into the cowlick, and announced that the only fragment trail is near the top of the head. So did the Rockefeller Commission's medical panel. The HSCA's medical panel did the same, although some of the panel's outside consultants raised questions about the cowlick entry wound, but Baden (the chairman) ignored them.

[Michael T. Griffith]

The features Mantik imagines are at the photo's edge and out of focus.

Oh, really? You sure about that? That part of the photo is only visible on the original at the National Archives. And, by the way, Dr. Kirschner, one of the ARRB experts, also noted the presence of the fatty tissue on that part of the photo. Did you overlook/forget this fact?

Little confidence can be placed in Mantik's claim.

     "Livingstone traveled to Dallas and showed these images (actually copies
     of drawings of the back of the head, based on the work of the HSCA) for the
     first time to the Parkland medical witnesses. What he discovered was truly
     astonishing; the Parkland personnel radically disagreed with their authenticity."

The Parkland doctors were shown a viewpoint of the cleaned-up back of the head that none of them ever saw in the first place. So naturally they couldn't confirm a view they had never seen.

You are myth-repeating machine. I'll give you that. The "cleaned-up" back of the head had an golf-ball-/orange-sized hole in it, according to Tom Robinson, the mortician who reassembled the skull after the autopsy, and according to Saundra Spencer, the head of the White House photographic office who developed some of the autopsy photos. Robinson saw the same back-of-head hole that the Parkland doctors and nurses saw and described, the same hole that James Sibert and Clint Hill described--and Hill got two prolonged looks at it.

I could go on and on with all the witnesses who saw a large back-of-head wound. You're only answer is that these witnesses, who saw the wound at three different times, were all "mistaken." This must have been the greatest case of mass hallucination in the history of the world.

    "In fact, in their detailed medical notes of 22 November 1963, none of these
     doctors had mentioned such a small entry site, a truly astonishing oversight,
     if indeed, this "entry" site had existed at all that day."

The doctors explained that the wound could have been there and they not notice it.

Sigh. . . . It just never ends with you. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just didn't notice that Mantik is talking about the debunked cowlick entry site, the site with the very noticeable red spot, where it was supposedly located, on the back-of-head photos. It is hard to imagine how Clark and McClelland would have missed this obvious red spot. Nor can I imagine how Nurse Bowron could have missed it when she washed the head to prepare the body for the casket.

Of course, the ARRB medical experts, including the forensic radiologist, all concluded that there is no entry point in the cowlick. Go back and read the first post in the thread.

    "The first individual to recognize this paradox was John Nichols, M.D., A pathologist
     at the University of Kansas, (John Nichols, ''The Wounding of Governor John
     Connally of Texas, "The Maryland State Medical Journal, October 1977). He drew
     a model crosssection of anatomy, and concluded that a bullet fired from the lateral
     angle of the sniper's nests imply could not exit at the midline of the throat without
     striking bone."

Endorsing the Nichols cartoon shows how bewildered Mantik is in regards to anatomy.

Kennedy's neck-tie knot was not as wide as model's.

I've already dealt with this nonsense. But, of course, you just keep re-posting refuted claims and goofy graphics and never acknowledge, much less address, the counter arguments that you know have been made to them.

[Joffrey van de Wiel]

An individual called Michael Walton composed a picture of a combination of the F8 'mystery' photo and the Back Of The Head autopsy photo:



Note that the large head wound extends to the area behind the ear, and one half of a circular defect is visible in the center-back area. The scalp has been reflected to the left. I still can't see the entry described at autopsy nor the revised entrance wound as presented by the HSCA.

Therefore: is this composition correct?

[Michael T. Griffith]

An individual called Michael Walton composed a picture of a combination of the F8 'mystery' photo and the Back Of The Head autopsy photo:



Note that the large head wound extends to the area behind the ear, and one half of a circular defect is visible in the center-back area. The scalp has been reflected to the left. I still can't see the entry described at autopsy nor the revised entrance wound as presented by the HSCA.

Therefore: is this composition correct?

No, the orientation is off substantially. Dr. Mantik's overlay shows the correct orientation. Walton's overlay has the large wound barely extending into the occiput, whereas we now know that the Harper fragment is occipital bone, and that the x-rays indicate missing occipital bone.

Additionally, we have a mass of eyewitness testimony, from three different locations and at several different times, that there was a golf-ball-sized/orange-sized hole in the back of the head and that cerebellar tissue was extruding from it. Cerebellar tissue could not have extruded from the large wound in Walton's overlay. The overwhelming majority of the people who saw the large head wound said it was in the rear or right-rear part of the head. Almost nobody saw the large head wound that we see in the problematic autopsy photos of the head, which is the wound that Walton is trying to support with his misorientation of F8.

[Joffrey van de Wiel]

Basically, yes.

The autopsy skull x-rays and the Harper fragment are two keys to orienting the photo correctly. And, as Dr. Mantik has explained, the presence of the fatty tissue in the upper-left corner is also a key indicator.

Dr. Mantik viewed F8 in stereo and noted that the upper left corner of F8 shows fat tissue and even a nipple extending outward from the skin of the chest. As Dr. Mantik explains, this fatty tissue would only be visible if F8 showed a posterior view of the head:

On a side note, Humes told the ARRB that F8 showed the EOP entry wound, and Dr. Mantik has confirmed that F8 does show an EOP entry wound almost exactly where Humes placed it (John F. Kennedy’s Head Wounds, pp. 25-29, 62-65).

I would recommend reading Dr. Mantik's section on autopsy photo F8 in his online paper "The Medical Evidence Decoded," pp. 80-83.
https://themantikview.com/pdf/The_Medical_Evidence_Decoded.pdf

Dr. Mantik's best and most up-to-date analysis of F8 is in his JFK's Head Wounds: A Final Synthesis. On page 28 he has a picture of F8 with overlaid orienting graphics to help the read understand what F8 shows.

Michael,

Can you perhaps post Mantik's overlay of the F8 autopsy photo with overlaid graphics? There is one in The Medical Evidence Decoded but it is tremendously unclear.

Dr. Mantik's study is impressive, but two of his conclusions bother me.

Conclusion #5:

Something struck the back (probably from the first shot fired), but did not penetrate. Besides a bullet, other possible projectiles include shrapnel, or even a piece of the
street or sidewalk.

The FBI found traces of copper on the holes in the President's jacket and shirt in the back. Shrapnel and pieces of street/sidewalk will not leave these traces.

Conclusion #6:

A projectile entered the throat, but did not exit. The nature of this projectile is still debated, with some (e.g., Lifton) arguing that it was a bullet that was (illegally) extracted before the autopsy, while I have here proposed a second possible projectile, namely, a glass fragment from the windshield. The available evidence does not permit a final choice. That the tracheotomy wound was enlarged, during a surreptitious search for such a projectile, is likely.

He overlooks the fact that the Parkland physicians determined that the hole in the anterior neck was round, 3-5 mm in size, and had all the characteristics of a bullet entrance wound. Therefore, it could not have been a piece of glass.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Dr. Mantik's study is impressive, but two of his conclusions bother me.

Conclusion #5:

Something struck the back (probably from the first shot fired), but did not penetrate. Besides a bullet, other possible projectiles include shrapnel, or even a piece of the street or sidewalk.

The FBI found traces of copper on the holes in the President's jacket and shirt in the back. Shrapnel and pieces of street/sidewalk will not leave these traces.

I'm pretty certain that Dr. Mantik was talking about the back of the head, not Kennedy's back. I'd have to go back and check his article to be certain, but the wording you quote seems to me to be talking about the back of the head. I know that Dr. Mantik accepts the fact that a bullet hit JFK in the back at about T1-T3.

Conclusion #6:

A projectile entered the throat, but did not exit. The nature of this projectile is still debated, with some (e.g., Lifton) arguing that it was a bullet that was (illegally) extracted before the autopsy, while I have here proposed a second possible projectile, namely, a glass fragment from the windshield. The available evidence does not permit a final choice. That the tracheotomy wound was enlarged, during a surreptitious search for such a projectile, is likely.

He overlooks the fact that the Parkland physicians determined that the hole in the anterior neck was round, 3-5 mm in size, and had all the characteristics of a bullet entrance wound. Therefore, it could not have been a piece of glass.

A glass fragment could have been essentially round in shape and thus could have created a round-looking wound.