Tampering with the limo in the JFK Altgens6

Tampering with the limo in the JFK Altgens6

by Dennis Cimino and Jim Fetzer

 
A significant amount of speculation has taken place over the years, regarding the photograph known to the world as the Altgens6, taken by AP photographer James “Ike “Altgens in Dealey Plaza, with his camera, on the day that President John F. Kennedy was brutally murdered by the CIA and other elements of the US Government, including the Secret Service and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff of our own American armed services.

In the following work, some layers of the onion will be peeled back to expose that Altgens6 is not only the key to establishing that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t even a shooter–because he was clearly photographed in the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository at the moment that a shot from in front of the President’s limousine penetrated the vehicle’s windshield, struck and spun the vehicle’s rear view mirror and caused the passenger seat Secret Service Agent, Roy Kellerman, to gawk in astonishment at the spun mirror, necessitating his face be obscured by later alterations–but that a disinformation program to alter evidence has been ongoing for nearly 50 years.

For a bullet to have obviously come from forward and to the left of the vehicle, as it came down Elm Street, means that at least one assassin who took part in this “turkey shoot” was located forward of the vehicle, which means that not all the shots came from above and behind.  In addition, Oswald wore such a unique shirtt that day that it was impossible for the CIA murderers to obtain that same shirt for Billy Lovelady to claim that he had been in that doorway standing on the left, when he was instead standing on the right (as we view the photo).  That shirt was so distinctive it forced the CIA to try to alter it out of existence, where alterations to Altens6 were even made to impose facial features of Lovelady on Lee.

The Faxed Photo

Ironically, that very shirt is one and the same with the shirt worn by Lee Oswald when arrested by the Dallas Police Department, where a series of studies published on Veterans Today have confirmed that Lee was wearing the same shirt as Doorman and have refuted the alternatives that Doorman could have been either Billy Lovelady or “Checkered Shirt Man”, which illustrates the importance of falsification in the study of these questions.

Although the claim has been made that the photograph was faxed shortly after the film was processed, Roy Schaeffer, who was working for a Dayton, OH, newspaper at the time, took it off the photo-fax the next morning.  This time window created ample opportunity for the initial alterations and re-shooting of the negatives in a photo lab, so that Altgens did not get his original negative back.  Here is a partial of the faxed photo, which was the subject of an important article by Douglas Weldon, J.D., “The Kennedy Limousine”, which appeared in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000):

Weldon identified the hole in the windshield, which Douglas P. Horne, who served as the Senior Analyst for Military Records for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), has discussed in an 2012 article on LewRockwell’s website.  This specific image was faxed (clearly visible as a fax) showing the location that Horne (in 2009) believed proved that  alterations to the photo to hide the bullet hole had not yet occurred.  In later versions of this photo, this area has been so modified to obscure SSA Roy Kellerman’s facial reaction  to the bullet impact and the rear view mirror which was struck by the bullet as it passed through the glass, but the hole itself remains visible.

The Throat Wound

The bullet hit the President in the throat, the second of four hits he would sustain, where Malcolm Perry, M.D., would subsequently perform a simple tracheotomy incision though the wound after JFK was brought to Parkland.  Dr. Perry thereafter described it three times as a wound of entry during the Parkland Press Conference, the transcript of which appears in Assassination Science (1998), as Appendix C; and Charles Crenshaw, M.D., who was also present in Trauma Room #1, drew diagrams at Jim Fetzer’s request based upon his direct personal observations, which also appear there as Appendix A:

In this much clearer shot, which was not faxed and lacks the grainy pattern of pixels that are features of the fax, the approximate location of the hole that Weldon and Horne identified in the windshield is distinguishable as a small, white spiral nebula with a dark hole in the center, where lateral cracks (discussed below) that appear to have been made by the bullet impact are not visible, because they had been masked out of the shot before THIS VERSION was released to the photographer:

As we are about to discover, multiple alterations were made to the image of the limousine in the Altgens6, where simply whiting out the dark hole at the center was the simplest move that tended to conceal the existence of the bullet hole, but it can still be seen where JFK’s left ear would be visible had it not been obscured by that image.  Well aware of the problem that it posed, which revealed the existence of at least one shooter who was firing from in front of the limo rather than above and behind, as the “lone assassin” scenario requires, the Secret Service would deftly respond by effecting a substitution.

The Windshield Switch

The limo was sent to Ford its manufacturer, Ford Motor Company in Detroit, MI, on Monday, 25 November 1963, stripped down to bare metal and  completely rebuilt, including replacing it with a new windshield, where the presence of the through-and-though hole was confirmed by the Ford official, George Whitaker, Sr., who had supervised its replacement, whom Doug Weldon had tracked down and interviewed. The Secret Service, however, would later release the image of yet a third windshield and claim that it had actually been on the limousine in Dealey Plaza:

In addition to Doug Weldon’s brilliant study, Douglas Horne would pursue this issue and published his confirmations of Doug Weldon’s work in his own masterful five-volume work,  Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (2009), Vol. V, pages 1439-50.  There and in several other articles, including “JFK Conspiracy: The bullet hole in the Windshield” (2012), Horne summarized the testimony of a half-dozen witnesses who had observed the through-and-through bullet hole, whose existence is not in doubt, as the following testimony confirms.

The Witnesses Speak

(1) Dallas motorcycle patrolmen Stavis Ellis and H. R. Freeman both observed a penetrating bullet hole in the limousine windshield at Parkland Hospital. Ellis told interviewer Gil Toff in 1971: “There was a hole in the left front windshield … You could put a pencil through it … you could take a regular standard writing pencil … and stick [it] through there.” Freeman corroborated this, saying: “[I was] right beside it. I could of [sic] touched it … it was a bullet hole. You could tell what it was.” [David Lifton published these quotations in his 1980 book, Best Evidence.]

(2) St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Richard Dudman wrote an article published in The New Republic on December 21, 1963 [and reprinted in Assassination Science (1998)], in which he stated: “A few of us noted the hole in the windshield when the limousine was standing at the emergency entrance after the President had been carried inside. I could not approach close enough to see which side was the cup-shaped spot which indicates a bullet had pierced the glass from the opposite side.”

(3) Second year medical student Evalea Glanges, enrolled at Southwestern Medical University in Dallas, right next door to Parkland Hospital, told attorney Doug Weldon in 1999: “It was a real clean hole.” In a videotaped interview aired in the suppressed Episode 7 of Nigel Turner’s series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, titled “The Smoking Guns”, she said: “… it was very clear, it was a through-and-through bullet hole through the windshield of the car, from the front to the back … it seemed like a high-velocity bullet that had penetrated from front-to-back in that glass pane.” At the time of the interview, Glanges had risen to the position of Chairperson of the Department of Surgery, at John Peter Smith Hospital, in Fort Worth. She had been a firearms expert all her adult life.

(4) Mr. George Whitaker, Sr., a senior manager at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant in Detroit, Michigan, told attorney (and professor of criminal justice) Doug Weldon in August of 1993, in a tape recorded conversation, that after reporting to work on Monday, 25 November 1963, he discovered the JFK limousine – a unique, one-of-a-kind item that he unequivocally identified – in the Rouge Plant’s B building, with the interior stripped out and in the process of being replaced, and with the windshield removed. He was then contacted by one of the Vice Presidents of the division for which he worked, and directed to report to the glass plant lab, immediately. After knocking on the locked door (which he found most unusual), he was let in by two of his subordinates and discovered that they were in possession of the windshield that had been removed from the JFK limousine.

They had been told to use it as a template, and to make a new windshield identical to it in shape – and to then get the new windshield back to the B building for installation in the Presidential limousine that was quickly being rebuilt. Whitaker told Weldon (quoting from the audiotape of the 1993 interview): “And the windshield had a bullet hole in it, coming from the outside through…it was a good, clean bullet hole, right straight through, from the front. And you can tell, when the bullet hits the windshield, like when you hit a rock or something, what happens? The back chips out and the front may just have a pinhole in it…this had a clean round hole in the front and fragmentation coming out the back.” Whitaker told Weldon that he eventually became superintendent of his division and was placed in charge of five plant divisions. He also told Weldon that the original windshield, with the bullet hole in it, had been broken up and scrapped – as ordered – after the new windshield had been made.

When Doug Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, his witness insisted on anonymity. Weldon reported on the story without releasing Whitaker’s name in his excellent and comprehensive article titled: “The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963,” which was published in Jim Fetzer’s anthology, Murder in Dealey Plaza, in 2000. After Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, Mr. Whitaker subsequently – on 22 November 1993 (the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination) – wrote down all he could remember about the events he witnessed involving the Presidential limousine and its windshield. After George Whitaker’s death in 2001, his family released his written testament to Nigel Turner, who with their permission revealed Mr. Whitaker’s name, as well as the text of his “memo for history,” in Episode 7 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, “The Smoking Guns.”

In “The Smoking Guns,” the text of Whitaker’s memo can be read on the screen employing freeze frame technology with the DVD of the episode. It said, in part: “When [I] arrived at the lab the door was locked. I was let in. There were 2 glass engineers there. They had a car windshield that had a bullet hole in it. The hole was about 4 or 6 inches to the right of the rear view mirror [as viewed from the front]. The impact had come from the front of the windshield. (If you have spent 40 years in the glass [illegible] you know which way the impack [sic] was from.”

(5) The sixth credible witness to a bullet hole in the windshield of the limousine was Secret Service agent Charles Taylor, Jr., who wrote a report on November 27, 1963 in which he detailed his activities providing security for the limousine immediately after the car’s return to Washington following the assassination. The JFK limousine and the Secret Service follow-up car known as the “Queen Mary” arrived at Andrews AFB aboard a C-130 propeller-driven cargo plane at about 8:00 PM on 22 November 1963. Agent Taylor rode in the Presidential limousine as it was driven from Andrews AFB to the White House garage at 22nd and M Streets, N.W. In his report about what he witnessed inside the White House garage during the vehicle’s inspection, he wrote: “In addition, of particular note was the small hole just left of center in the windshield from which what appeared to be bullet fragments were removed.”

Outward Cracking

As Horne emphasizes, six credible witnesses–Stavis Ellis, H.R. Freeman, Richard Dudman, Evalea Glanges, George Whitaker, and Charles Taylor (who was subsequently forced to recant his report)–all testified to observing a through-and-through bullet hole in the windshield either on the day of the assassination itself (for five of the six) or the following day (for Whitaker, who observed it at Ford when he came in to work on Monday, 25 November 1963).  Two were positive it had been caused by a shot fired from in front, which by itself falsifies the “official account” of the death of our 35th president.

Moreover, Dennis Cimino has discovered that the rear view mirror of the vehicle had bullet scuff marks on the front side facing the windshield, where it was struck by the bullet passing through from front to rear.  In the below photo, taken at the Parkland Memorial Hospital after the slain president was removed from the car, both the bullet hole and some lateral outward cracking from both sides of the hole is discernible.  He has marked that area with CYAN to highlight the bullet strike area:

Close examination of the vehicle’s rear view mirror also seems to show the possibility of a hairline crack running from one side of that to the other side of it. The mirror partially obscures the actual bullet entry hole and some of that stress cracking, which extends for at least six or more inches behind the mirror blocked portion of the windshield, as other photos show. Some of the crack extends from upper windshield down to about mid-level on passenger front.  [NOTE:  Evidence of patching done to the flip up driver’s visor as well seems visible in this shot, but because it was taken so soon after the assassination, it’s difficult to imagine them taping that over so quickly; but it does look very odd and appears to be worth mentioning.]

The Deeper Tint

Below is a shot of the limo, taken on 23 November 1963, the day after the assassination.  Carefully compare the visibility of the doctor’s coat above in this shot, showing how ‘non tinted’ the windshield is in the upper region, because in the lower shot, this is clearly NOT THE SAME WINDSHIELD when compared to the deeper tint below the top of the windshield, an extension of the tinting in the REPLACEMENT.   One might ask why a six or more inch strip of window tinting could be acceptable on a vehicle with any dignitary in it, let alone the President.  The Secret Service’s job is to see ahead and upwards with clarity, looking for snipers or anyone who could harm the passengers of this particular car.

It doesn’t make much sense that the glass would have much  more than a modest narrow tint across the very top, as was the case in the Parkland Memorial Hospital photograph clearly showing.  The doctor’s smock is easily seen just inches from the rear view mirror.  From this photograph in the garage at the White House, it’s evident that this windshield is not the same one. The tinting extends easily six or more inches downward and is NOT PRESENT in the photo above, taken at Parkland Memorial the day before.

Below is a side shot, where you can again see the tint gradient, much deeper down into the windshield compared to the top photo taken immediately after the assassination occurred in Dealey Plaza that day.

So, one might well ask, given the other damage to the vehicle, including the blood and brain tissue and other parts of the now dead president, why was it imperative to change out the windshield and replace it with a much more heavily TINTED ONE?  That is a very interesting question–especially on a car where exceptionally unobscured forward visibility not only was desired, but mandatory for protection of the President and any dignitaries who may ride with him in this vehicle.

A couple of glitches

Take a good look at this one.  They masked the windshield to hide the tinting, but overlapped the mask onto the chrome frame of the windshield and blowing it badly.  This reveals their concern about the tint:

Here is anopther shot taken in the garage, from behind, showing that someone now has dropped down the glare shields on both sides to make sure we don’t really get a good look at the heavy tinting of this windshield.  Why?  I don’t think sun was a problem in the parking garage.

The Rear View Mirror

Here’s a shot of the rear view mirror, facing the windshield, showing the bullet scuffing that was evident at Parkland that day after the assassination took place. There is a scuff center of the mirror, and further to the left, another scuff, as well as the possible hint of clear scotch tape from one side of the mirror to the other, covering the dark outer rim on both sides of the inexplicably damaged mirror.

This mirror appears to have been dented in and scratched by the entering bullet, after spinning it on its post, which comes down from the top of the windshield frame.  Normal hand wear on this mirror using the anti-glare rotator tab, for example, would not account for these scuffs.

And, once again, the tinting gradient is positively not there in this mirror shot, certainly not to the extent it is in the “changed out” windshield put in before the car went back to Washington, D.C. the next day.  In this photo, the scotch tape is much more clearly evident.  It appears to extend from one side of the mirror to the other, covering the dark outer rim on both sides.  Did it crack when it was struck by the bullet?

Back at Parkland

Below is another shot of the limousine at Parkland, showing the tint gradient is not there on the car at Parkland Memorial not long after the shooting took place.   Notice the bullet-proof glass leaning against the left-rear fender, which was NOT USED that day, which may have protected the president had it been installed.  But of course the plan was NOT TO PROTECT THE PRESIDENT BUT TO SET HIM UP. If you look closely at the second nurse on the right, her hands and smock are clearly visible with minimal tint.

Now, I have taken the liberty to add in this shot of the very very visible windshield and rear view mirror scuffing, taken at Parkland, where the bullet hole and lateral cracking is clearly evident and clearly visible to the eye.   if you look closely at the rear view mirror, you can easily see the scuffing on the rear view mirror.  It’s very evident on the lower portion of the mirror.

This is an especially important photograph, because this appears to be the third of the three windshields, which the Secret Service would produce and which would become Warren Commission Exhibit 350 (shown above).  It shows cracking caused by (what would be claimed to have been) a fragment of a shot fired from in front, where the through-and-through hole visible in some versions of the Altgens6, which six witnesses confirmed having observed, no longer exists.  Notice, moreover, the absence of tinting.

And another look at the mirror.  Something struck this mirror pretty hard in the front side of it, facing the windshield, and scuffed it not only on the middle but on the left (to us) side.  With such a long scuff pattern on the rear view mirror, something more than the driver’s hand has to have done this.  (SCUFFS MARKED IN CYAN)

The Beat Goes On

With regard to the Altgens6 shot, we have barely touched upon the other much more significant alterations done to hide the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was standing in the doorway at the Texas Book Depository at precisely the moment this bullet made a hole in the windshield and struck the rear view mirror and JFK that morning. Other alterations to the photo, however, are the result not only of what the CIA did on that day to the original negatives and their processing but later, through the years, DIGITAL ALTERATIONS to this photo have been facilitated by the emergence of new technology.

Here is a much much later version of Altgens6, which came from the internet and cannot be tracked or validated as to who’s custody it was in before it was published online.  In this shot, you can clearly see that the Secret Service agents are very concerned, as they look at Lee Harvey Oswald and others in a very retouched portion of the photograph.

Notice the fact that JFK is clutching his throat and Texas Gov. John Connally is turning.  The face of Roy Kellerman is obscured here, whereas in FACSIMILE VERSION, you can see facial features much more clearly. NOTE: In this photo, the windshield damage has been altered out so it is not visible to the naked eye, and there is heavy digital alteration as well as manual cut and paste alteration in the top of the windshield.  By taking that shot and turning it into a NEGATIVE, Dennis has been able to highlight the areas of alteration with regard to the windshield itself.

Thus, has marked the most heavily altered portions of the photo with RED.  Once again, comparison to the grainy FAX shot on the top of this article shows much more detail in some of these areas.   Clearly, the upper windshield area has been hazed out or altered, which is much more visible in NEGATIVE, revealing the tinting gradient on the day of the assassination.  The windshield tinting was not there, which means that someone made an effort to add it in or obscure the upper windshield.  The area where the bullet damage has occurred has been altered here, while the face of SSA Roy Kellerman has been obscured.

What is also evident is that in the area where Jackie Kennedy and SSA William Greer, the vehicle driver, are situated, has also been ALTERED To obfuscate them.  If you look closely at this shot in both NORMAL and in NEGATIVE, you can see what appear to be alterations to the shot. On some of these later Altgens6 photos, indications of DIGITAL alteration are in place over the more crudely done alterations when the film was first re-mastered by the CIA, proof that the agency has an ongoing program to fake evidence in the death of our 35th president that continues to this day.

Dennis has also zoomed in to accent the obfuscation of Kellerman’s face, presumably because his expression would have drawn attention to the occurrence of something that had startled him as the bullet passed through the windshield. The scuffing on the mirror is discernible, where making a change from the white of the spiral nebula to the dark of his ear and head must have been regarded as too conspicuous to undertake.

The upper portion of the windshield appears to have been masked using a rectangular pasted object in black (on our right), then later it was decided to dab on black to obscure the upper windshield.  Notice again, there is no tint on the upper portion of this windshield or it would be over Kellerman’s face and uniformly across the upper portion of the windshield. Dennis has identified the portions that appear to have been altered in CYAN.

What this means is that interior portions of the limousine have also been heavily altered to obscure collateral damage from the impact while obscuring the facial expressions of both SSA Roy Kellerman and William Greer from the photograph.  It also would appear that obscuration of Jackie’s face took place here as well.  The reason may have been that she was looking at and reacting to the bullet hole in the windshield as she held her husband’s arm.

Dennis Cimino, who has extensive engineering and support experience with military electronics, predominantly US Navy Combat Systems, was the Navy’s top EMI troubleshooter before he went to work for Raytheon in the 1980s.

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

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