JOHN COSTELLA - A Simple Introduction to The JFK Assassination Film Hoax

John will go through his “simple introduction to the JFK assassination film hoax” available on his website at johncostella.com/jfk/intro, and then present our best current understanding of the timeline of the creation of “the Zapruder film.” At the time of the Zapruder Film Symposium in May 2003 (available on YouTube and linked on his website), he speculated that “intermediate,” quickly-edited versions of the film were likely being created from the weekend of the assassination onwards, using film editing techniques, for highly classified purposes only. (Publicly, only a small number of still photographs were published in LIFE magazine before September 1964.) This conjecture was spectacularly bolstered between 2009 and 2011 by Peter Janney and Doug Horne, who uncovered strong evidence that the entire film was significantly edited—as an apparently “camera-original” film—between Saturday night and Sunday night. John will explain why the Sunday night film could not feasibly be the extant “Zapruder film,” which was fabricated frame by frame over a longer time period.

JOHN COSTELLA received his Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 1994. Between 2001 and 2003 he carried out intensive investigations of digital copies of the photographic evidence of the JFK assassination, ultimately proving that “the Zapruder film” that has been extant from November 1964 to today is an extremely sophisticated forgery, created photographically and scientifically, frame by frame, not simply by editing an existing film by optical or aerial printing techniques.

Since 2012 he has worked as a software engineer and data scientist at Facebook (now Meta). His image processing research has powered all the photos on Facebook since 2013 and Instagram since 2015. John and his wife Sally are now dual citizens and live in Washington DC. His JFK work is available at johncostella.com/jfk and in The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003, ed. James H. Fetzer).
https://johncostella.com/jfk