49 years in the Offing: The Altgens Reenactment

There was a cuff around his right hand that was attached to Detective Leavelle in the white suit. But, Oswald’s left hand was free, and he brought it over to clasp his right hand. It was a matter of habit.

Now, we’ll return to Doorman’s relationship to Black Tie Man, and we’ll examine a Tri-X image by Tim.

Look closely, and you’ll see that I have a “point” to my shoulder. My shoulder goes across horizontally, and then my arm goes down vertically, and where they meet is the” point” of the shoulder. I have one. Doorman does not. We have been saying all along that his shoulder was cut off, and now we have confirmed it. Below, I have marked the point of my shoulder in white. There is no comparable point on Doorman.

I was cinched up closely to Black Tie Man- as closely as possible. It was the only way to come anywhere close to what we see in the Altgens. Some bloggers have maintained that BT Man was actually standing some distance away from Doorman. Well, he wasn’t because we tried it that way, and it didn’t work. If we placed him apart, he looked apart. And if we placed him deep, he was totally shrouded in darkness. It was hard enough for me to stay out of darkness standing at the edge of the landing.

In the Altgens, Black Tie Man looks fused to Doorman, and the only way we could approximate that was to cinch them together as tightly as possible, with Doorman in front and Black Tie Man in back, but diagonal to him. If anyone thinks that isn’t correct, feel free to go to Dealey Plaza on a weekend and try it yourself.

Compare the expanse of my left shoulder to Doorman’s. I have one, and he doesn’t. There is no way that Black Tie Man, standing next to me but also behind me, could cover up my shoulder, or any other part of me. Someone behind cannot cover up someone in front. We believe that in the Altgens photo, they squeezed Black Tie Man in there- after the fact. They added him in, and what we see in the Altgens is a photographic lie– an impossibility. Doorman and Black Tie Man look like conjoined twins.

But, is it possible that Doorman was just twisted and contorted so that his shoulder was severely depressed on that side? As a chiropractor with nearly 40 years’ experience, I can tell you emphatically: No! You can tell from the neutrality of Doorman’s head position that he is not contorting his shoulders. Doorman’s head is vertical. Compare it to the white column, which is vertical. They are in parallel. He is not doing anything but standing there watching the parade with his hands clasped in front. He wasn’t straining and twisting to look down Elm St.- and he had no need to. Again, I’ve been there, and the view of Elm St. from the top of those steps is just fine. You can see everything quite easily. A slight, subtle turn to the right is all he had to do to keep Kennedy in view, and he didn’t have to do anything with his shoulders. He was just standing there comfortably, in balance, watching the parade, with his hands clasped.

As an aside, I realize now that no one should claim anything about Doorman’s position without first going to Dealey Plaza and trying it. You can’t have an informed opinion about this without doing that.

But, let’s ask Doug about Doorman’s left shoulder.

Ralph: “Doug, what do you make of Doorman’s left shoulder in the Altgens?”

Doug: “I have a problem with it. It looks compromised. Look at the line of the man’s coat- the one you call Black Tie Man. That diagonal line is the inside margin of his coat. And that means that there is more of him- quite a lot more of him- going to the left, and yet, we are already encroaching upon Doorman. And, the idea that Doorman is dropping his shoulder way down on his left is not plausible. It’s nothing he had to do or would have done. This photo does not make sense.”

Now, let’s examine Obfuscated Man. The image of him on the right was taken by Doug using Tri-X film from Altgens position.

Note that in this particular shot, Black Hole Man was standing too close in, and we fixed that later. But, it has no effect on Obfuscated Man., and again, this was Tri-X, not digital. Some people have trouble seeing Obfuscated Man in the Altgens photo. He is standing on the right side of the image wearing a white shirt and narrow tie. And he had his arms folded across his chest. I suspect he is grabbing his right elbow with his left hand, and that way each arm is suspending the other. What you see on the right is actually quite ridiculous. I had the poser do it that way just to silence people like Robin Unger and Craig Lamson, who claim that that was what he was doing: vizoring his eyes with his right hand. 

They can’t deny that his left arm is going across his midsection. But, no one would do that with just one arm. It can be relaxing to do it with two arms because each arm can suspend the other. But, to do it with one arm alone is just useless, senseless, pointless work. No one would do it. He must have been crossing both arms, but they want to say he was vizoring his eyes with his right hand because they think it explains the white blotch that you see in the Altgens photo. But, as I suspected, we didn’t get a white blotch. Obfuscated Man came through bright and clear, and that was with Tri-X film and from Altgens position.

The white blotch is an amorphous, unintelligible, cloud-like area of whiteness strewn inexplicably in the picture. Someone described it, imaginatively, as a giant white tarantula mauling the guy’s face.

To me, that white cloud looks like a spot where someone applied some “Wite-Out” correction fluid. So, I had to chuckle when one of our senior members, Roy Schaeffer, a career photo processor for newspapers, who early on 11/23/63 in Dayton OH took the Altgens photo off the AP wire in an altered state, told me that it is technically know as “opaquing.” And, he said that it is applied much like Wite-Out. But, let’s let Doug describe it.

Ralph: “Doug, what do you make of that white blotch in the Altgens photo?”

Doug: “It looks like opaqing to me, and the way it would have been done is that with a very fine, sharp instrument and under bright light and magnification, the emulsion would have been scraped off that exact spot on the film. Then, dark opaquing solution would have been applied, and since it was a negative, once the film was developed, it would appear as white.”

If you’re wondering what they were aiming for, it was to vanish Obfuscated Man from the photo.

Do you see above how he is completely gone? Do you see how, on this scale, the white opaquing blends in very well with the white shirt of Black Hole Man? We think it was a two-step process. They used the white opaquing to cover up his face. Then they expanded the hair of the African-American woman in front of him to cover up his torso. The result was that they removed Obfuscated Man from the picture entirely.

There is only one copy of the Altgens photo on display at the Sixth Floor Museum. It’s small; it’s distant; and it looks exactly like what you see above.

The problem for the evil-doers is that in 1963, they didn’t anticipate the coming of home computing and the internet. They thought that people were going to be limited forever to small, distant, grainy images on newsprint. Advances in consumer technology have been their undoing.

For the record, we think Obfuscated Man was Bill Shelley, who was wearing a white shirt and thin tie. Oswald used Shelley as his alibi, referring to him as someone he saw outside while watching the motorcade. Shelley denied it, but Shelley was a career CIA agent, and we have reasons to believe he was deeply involved in the plot.

Now, we’ll compare the patterns of the two outer shirts. Note that we are comparing only the upper right quadrants of the shirts, which is the most reliable section to compare. The reason I am doing that is that the body of Doorman’s shirt and his left sleeve have a weird pattern which really doesn’t match Oswald or Lovelady. Richard Hooke is satisfied that it’s just light reflecting weirdly off Oswald’s tweed shirt, and he may be right. However, just to be safe, I am going to restrict the comparison to the upper right sides because it’s the only part of the shirt that I am 100% certain was not tampered with. We’ll be comparing that area across the board, so it’s still a fair test, and no one should have any reason to complain. We’ll start with me wearing my Oswald shirt, and note that this was Doug’s work using Tri-X film.

On the right, it’s me in my Oswald shirt, which was plain brown. I think the color was a pretty good match to Oswald’s. His shirt was tweed, which gave it a fine graininess which mine lacked. However, it was very subtle, and this was the best I could do to match it. Believe me, it was a very difficult shirt to match. I searched high and low.

His shirt looks mottled, but that’s from the pixelation of the enlargement, so you can just ignore it. And when you ignore it, you realize that it was a bland, uniform shirt like mine.

Now, look at me in the Lovelady shirt.

With the Lovelady shirt on the right, you can see that the complex geometric pattern- with the boxes and contrast- visibly manifested all the way up to, and including, the collar. And again: this was Tri-X film and taken from Altgens position. The Lovelady and Oswald shirts photographed very differently, but which one does Doorman’s resemble? On Doorman, you are not seeing the lines and boxes which are so clearly evident on the Lovelady shirt, and that’s because Doorman was not wearing such a shirt. He was wearing Oswald’s plain, bland, uniform, shirt which had no lines and boxes. Let’s look at one more collage of this: