US President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Within hours of his death, a gun was found in a nearby building,
And police arrested the accused killer: Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald denied it.
OSWALD: I didn’t shoot anybody.
He said somebody had set him up.
OSWALD: I’m just a patsy! REPORTER: Did you shoot the president?
But when the Dallas police searched his belongings, they found these: two photos of Oswald posing
in his backyard.
Holding the gun that killed the president.
The photos definitively linked Oswald to the murder weapon,
and made the case against him “airtight” in the minds of investigators.
But when they showed Oswald the photos, he insisted they were fakes.
And that his head had been superimposed onto someone else’s body – to frame him.
The next day, Oswald was shot to death while in police custody.
Sparking rumors that the US government was covering up the real story of the assassination
– and who else might be involved.
And this photo — which has been scrutinized, deconstructed, and reconstructed ever since
— is at the heart of it.
After Kennedy’s assassination, government investigators spent 10 months compiling evidence
and concluded that Oswald alone killed the president.
An explanation the public has doubted ever since.
Conspiracy theorists argue that a powerful entity like the KGB, CIA, mafia, or Kennedy’s
successor to the presidency had to be involved in such a high-profile murder.
And if these photos are fake, it suggests that a far-reaching conspiracy framed Oswald
for a crime he said he didn’t commit — or, at least, didn’t commit on his own.
This is the most notorious of the backyard photos.
It appeared on the cover of Life magazine in February 1964
and circulated in global newspapers.
People were quick to notice something odd: the rifle on the cover of Life had a telescopic sight —
and in other news outlets, the scope was gone.
The news outlets explained they retouched the photo before printing, and “inadvertently
altered the appearance of the rifle.”
But the controversy convinced people around the world the photo was fake.
FARID: And of course, if it was fake, now, who faked it and why did they fake it and
it opens up this whole can of worms.
This guy knows a lot about photo fakes.
FARID: My name is Hany Farid, I'm a professor here at the University of California, Berkeley,
and I specialize in digital imaging forensics.
FARID: I work on criminal cases and civil cases where the authenticity of an image or
a video has been called into question.
Farid is also the latest in a long line of experts that have used science to try to figure out
if the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald is real.
FARID: Oh, that's amazing. You have the original!
COLEMAN: Yeah.
FARID: Oh, that's beautiful.
COLEMAN: So what is the problem with this photo?
FARID: Okay, first of all, I assume I can keep this.
FARID: There were four things that people consistently point to in the photo as purported
evidence of manipulation.
FARID: First and foremost is: people have argued that the lighting and the shadows in
the photo are physically impossible.
In particular, if you look on the ground, there is this long shadow to his right.
But if you look on his face, the shadow from his nose seems to be coming directly down.
So people were saying, ‘Oh, his head was spliced into a photo of somebody else
holding the gun and the lighting was wrong.’ That was number one.
Number two is if you look at Oswald in the photo, he has this pretty bulky chin.
It's quite broad. But if you look at his mug shots and other photos of him, he seems to have
this very tapered chin.
So that added to the “evidence,” if you want to call it that, that this isn't really
his face, that the chin seems to be too broad.
The contradictory shadows and the broad chin are the most commonly cited signs of alleged
tampering. This theory even made its way into this scene in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK,
starring Gary Oldman as Oswald.
OLDMAN AS OSWALD: I never saw this picture. That is my face but my face has been superimposed.
WOMAN: Look how the shadows on the nose fall in a straight line like it’s high noon.
But the shadow down here on the ground reads more like late afternoon or early morning.
FARID: Number three is that in the photo, the gun seems to be shorter than the actual
gun that was used to kill the president.
And then number four was that his posture seems odd. It seems like he's sort of leaning
back and he should be unstable holding that gun like that.
FARID: So when you look at the photo, yeah, at first glance, something looks a little weird there.
And so that's what has been around this photo for a long time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, forensic experts tried just about everything to test the authenticity
of this photo.
Examined it at various exposures to check for signs of tampering: didn’t find any.
Photographed the rifle that killed Kennedy at various distances and angles to compare
it to the weapon in the backyard photo: the dimensions matched.
Side-by-side analysis with Oswald’s mugshot confirmed it was him.
They also took photos with Oswald’s seized camera to check if the unique artifacts specific
to the negatives produced by that camera, in this case these 11 scratch marks, would
appear across other photos.
They did: meaning the backyard photos were taken with Oswald’s camera.
Investigators even recreated the photo numerous times,
to see if the shadow angles were possible in a single image.
Most successfully in this one, taken exactly four years after the original,
at the same hour, in Oswald’s former backyard.
The shadows matched up. Straight down on the face, at an angle for the body.
They concluded, again and again, that the backyard photos were taken with Oswald’s
camera and there were no signs of fakery.
But, even presented with the facts, the controversy surrounding this photo persisted.
FARID: And I think that is baked into conspiracies.
Anything that is inconsistent with your core belief is simply evidence that that person
is part of the conspiracy to keep information from you.
Check out this mail-order videotape, “Fake,” made by famous conspiracy theorist and amateur
photographer Jack D. White, who was obsessed with debunking the authenticity of this photo.
WHITE: Let me show you the results of my photo analysis and see if you too can detect the
graphics blunders which prove that a powerful conspiracy resulted in the death of President Kennedy.
This guy was quoted in national media as an “expert,” and in a 1978 BBC television documentary,
an actual forensics expert felt confident that:
ARCHIVE: One can only conclude that Oswald’s head has been stuck onto a chin.
The flaw in these approaches is that people overestimate their ability to determine real-world
physics from a single, two-dimensional image.
FARID: And it turns out we're really, really bad at it when it comes to certain things
like shadows, like reflections and mirrored surfaces.
But if you think about it, that shouldn’t be surprising. This thing here, the visual
system, didn’t evolve over millions and millions of years to reason about a flat piece of paper
So Farid and his team reconstructed the scene using 3D modeling software.
To rule out the four “problems” of the photo:
FARID: The shadows, the shape of the chin, the length of the gun, and the posture.
Here’s how they built it.
FARID: So we know a couple of things about Oswald, we know how tall he was and what his
weight was around the time that he was arrested.
FARID: So what you're seeing here is a three-dimensional model that has been scaled to his height in
real-world units.
They added Oswald’s known weight to the model and posed it to match the stance in the photo
adding the weight of the gun he’s holding to test its balance.
Oswald’s mugshot provided a reference for the narrow chin and shape of the nose.
Finally, they lit the scene with a single light source, moving it around until the shadow
looked just right.
You can see how closely the 3D model matches the original photo in this overlay image:
FARID: And it means that we have a three-dimensional model of Oswald and the sun and the ground
plane that is consistent with whatever was happening in that physical scene in 1963.
Now they could examine the shadows.
FARID: He has this long shadow down from his nose. He has this long shadow cast back and
to his right, and those are consistent with a single light source.
FARID: So it just turns out that shadows sometimes look weird.
FARID: So what happens to that very tapered chin is it suddenly becomes very fat.
FARID: Well, why?
FARID: It's actually not the shape of his chin. It's just a shadow.
FARID: So, number two, the chin of Oswald is consistent with what you see in the photo.
FARID: The gun, which we know the measurement of,
is perfectly consistent with the photo, there's nothing wrong with it, it's exactly the right size.
And lastly, the physics of the pose.
FARID OFFICE: You are stable standing up when that center of mass that projects straight
down onto the floor is encompassed by your feet.
FARID: We have a 3D model of Oswald. We know where his mass is. We project that downward.
FARID: And what you see here is that it is well within the bounding area of his feet, which means
the pose with the gun and the weird backward tilt that he's doing is perfectly physically
plausible.
Some people might never let this photo go.
But, ultimately, the simplest explanation is usually the strongest.
FARID: I think you've got to start to ask, how complicated is your explanation of what happened
Is it plausible that in 1963, somebody manipulated a photo to be fully consistent in a way that
an analysis 50 years later cannot find evidence of manipulation? I don't find that a compelling argument.
So when you start to chip away that any artifact in the image, anything in the image that you
think is evidence of tampering that we can start to now explain away, at some point you
get to the end and you say, ‘Okay, the only plausible explanation that is left is that
the image is authentic.' And now you have to move on.
I talked to another scientist, Pawan Sinha, about light and shadows.
He’s a professor of visual neuroscience at MIT, and described a study he and his colleagues
designed to test just how bad humans are at recognizing inconsistent lighting in images.
The subjects were shown several pairs of real-world scenes: one digitally altered to introduce
lighting inconsistencies, the other unaltered.
They were instructed to spot the original.
The test went like this:
2 seconds for the first image.
A gray screen.
Then 2 seconds for the second image.
People picked the right image only 50% of the time.
Upping the view time to 5 seconds increased that rate to 70%, but the study concluded
that humans just don’t naturally recognize illumination inconsistencies in images.
There’s a link to the paper in the description of this video, plus Hany Farid’s full study
of the Oswald photo, along with everything you need to read up on the investigations
into this photo over the years.