The Zapruder film, the autopsy, the magic bullet, and the acoustic recordings — sixty years on, what does the hard evidence actually confirm about the JFK assassination? This episode cuts through the mythology to examine what each piece of forensic evidence shows, and where the genuine uncertainty still lies.
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Twenty-six seconds of eight-millimeter film. That's what Abraham Zapruder captured from his position on a concrete pedestal in Dealey Plaza on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three.
Abraham Zapruder was a Dallas dressmaker who had almost left his camera at home that morning. He hadn't.
The autopsy, conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of the assassination, found that a bullet entered the rear of Kennedy's skull and exited through the right side. That finding is consistent with a shot from the Book Depository, positioned behind and above the motorcade's path.
The Warren Commission's reconstruction of the shooting produced what's become the most debated single claim in the entire case. The so-called magic bullet theory.
The Warren Commission had no acoustic analysis. What it had were witness statements, physical evidence at the scene, and the autopsy.
Throughout Dealey Plaza that day, dozens of people heard the shots. Their accounts conflict.
The Zapruder film has been enhanced, digitized, stabilized, and analyzed by experts across multiple disciplines. It has revealed extraordinary detail about the sequence and timing of what happened in those six seconds.
Here's where the record actually stands. The physical evidence, the cartridge cases on the sixth floor, the rifle found on the same floor, the fingerprints, the mail-order purchase under an alias, links Lee Harvey Oswald to the shooting.
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