Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Let's take a look at that so-called hand that is waving. On the left is what was published in LIFE magazine in October 1964, and I got that by laying the magazine down on the printer and scanning it. It's from the inset next to the Altgens photo which was also cropped. And on the right, is the HSCA version.

You notice that the LIFE version looks lighter, and that's partly because of the problem of not being able to seal the lid to the printer when I scanned it because of the bulky magazine. But, when you look at it closely, you can make out what looks to be a thumb nail. Can you see that? And that is how it looks in the magazine when I look at it with a magnifying glass: like his thumb is pointing straight up and you can make out the nail. The nail! We are supposed to believe that from Altgens' distance, he was able to visualize and capture a guy's thumbnail. 

But, let's look at it mechanically. A guy is on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, and he is waving his arm. For some reason, he is not waving straight out towards Elm; he is waving east, where he is facing the corner of Elm and Houston and waving to someone who is there. So, he has his back to Kennedy. He's not interested in Kennedy. 

But, his thumb is on the wrong side. If he was standing there on the sidewalk, facing east, and waving, his thumb would be on the INSIDE, not the outside. Look at it again.

The only way that could be right is if he was waving with his palm facing himself. But, that's not how people wave. They wave with the back of their hand facing themselves and their palm facing the other way. So, his thumb should be on the other side- unless he had his wrist rotated to the point of dislocation. 

But there are other problems with the hand in the image. It's too high and too vertical. People don't raise their hands that high when they wave. It puts too much strain on the shoulder. Little kids might because they are so flexible in their joints. But not adults. To remain comfortable, most adults won't even raise their arm more than about 35 degrees. Of course, they can always bend their elbow, but as I look at this from the perspective of it being someone's arm going up, I don't see it as the elbow being bent. I see it as the wrist being bent- arched backward.

But, there are other problems with this image. The fingers are too long. Look at your own hand. The mitt part of your hand is larger than the finger part- unless you have unusually long fingers. And the thumb is way too long- and I don't care who you are. And, I'll say again that the idea that Altgens would have caught the guy's thumbnail is ridiculous. But, that is what they published in LIFE magazine. Doesn't it look like they drew the thumb in? The fingers are also too curled. 

I have been saying for a long time that they put Black Tie Man into the picture, and in the process they distorted Doorman. They distorted his ear, his face, and they cut off his left shoulder. And in the process, they also distorted his arm. This "hand" may be a shabby attempt to doctor the butchered image. But, it can't be real because there is no tenable story to go along with it. The guy wasn't "Thing" from the Addams Family consisting of a hand and nothing else. Where was the rest of him? How could none of the rest of him be visualized? Where was his bulky body as not to be seen? 

Then, as I said, the hand is oriented the wrong way, with the thumb on the wrong side. It's too high; too vertical, too long. And if that is a guy's sleeved rolled up on his arm (rather than a cuff), how could it be so neat and tidy? Try rolling up your sleeves. See how it looks. And why would the guy have his sleeves rolled up at all? It's not as though that happens a lot. And what reason would anyone have to roll up their sleeves on that day and in that situation? Who would go to the trouble? What for? To watch the President? And how could it possibly look like that?

As far as I know, the long deceased Richard E. Sprague (who claimed that there was a weaponized umbrella that shot a "flechette" at Kennedy) and Joseph Backes are the only ones who have ever endorsed this "other African-American" theory. And as I've pointed out, there is nothing about the tone and color of the area in question that matches the tone and color of African-American skin as seen in three other individuals in the picture. And yet, the area in question does match perfectly the tone and color of Doorman's shirt as seen contiguously in the picture. What are the chances that a black man's skin would reproduce in an image exactly the same as the shirt he was wearing?  

So to me, the only question about this image is not whose arm it is. It is Doorman's arm, which is to say, Oswald's arm. But, to what extent was there a deliberate fabrication to suggest something else? But, if they did that, they went about it all wrong, putting the thumb on the wrong side, etc. When you analyze it bio-mechanically and correctly, you realize that what is being intimated there does not work; it is not physically possible.  

Furthermore, it is definitely Oswald's cuff in front of Roy Lewis' neck and not because he had 12 foot long arms but because they pieced Roy Lewis' head in above Oswald's cuff, and a weird shamrock-shaped torso in below his cuff. They really did that.