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

This AP wire-photo was NOT sold on EBAY.

I just talked to EBAY- for half an hour. Fortunately, I had a very helpful and patient customer service rep. She found out that the seller of this photo- intercountydeals- ended the listing early but not because it sold. The record showed that he supposedly ended the listing because he "was in talks with an interested buyer." But as of today, May 26, 2015, no sale has gone through. 

I have written to intercountydeals twice now about this photo, and he has not responded. Why not? Even if this one had sold, why wouldn't he respond? He says he's got a large collection of JFK photos, so why wouldn't he respond? He's in business, right? 

But, it has not sold because if it had sold EBAY would know about it. They get a cut, remember? 

I bought the Montreal Gazette paper for $8. The seller was asking $25, and I bid $8. And, when he saw my offer for $8, he ended the listing early. Why? He must have feared that I might change my mind and withdraw my bid, and he didn't want to take the chance. That tells me that either mine was the only bid, or the other bids came in ridiculously low, such as a dollar, which made mine stand out as exceptional. 

But, this other one was selling for $675. Who would pay that kind of money? You can buy an Altgens photo in perfect condition from the AP store for a small fraction of that price. Was it to get the caption and coding at the bottom? But, it was just some typing. One has no way of knowing that someone didn't just get out a typewriter and do it. It said nothing about the source of the photo. It didn't substantiate the source, but worse than that, it didn't give one. 

Without a proven trail of possession for that photo, it's nothing. But, the seller had to know something. It didn't drop in his lap. It didn't fall out of a tree. He got it from somewhere, so what did the person who sold it to him tell him about where it came from? What newspaper are we talking about that received the fax which resulted in the production of that photo?

And look at the stamp on the back:

    
It only says the date, and it happens to be November 23. According to my enemies, it arrived on November 22, but they were so busy, nobody thought to stamp it until November 23. 

But, why would they knowingly stamp the wrong date? What was the date supposed to indicate? The date that the fax was received? If so, then they should have stamped it November 22 regardless of what date they actually stamped it. Isn't accuracy about that kind of thing important? 

Or was November 23 the day that it got published? But, if so, that argues against it having been received on the 22nd.  

But regardless, this was a possession, a valuable possession, a historical possession. Wouldn't the newspaper stamp it with more than just the date? Something to identify it as their property? 

So far, we  have not found a single newspaper which published the caption shown with the picture. Not one. I wonder if that has ever happened before that every single newspaper in the country decided to edit the AP caption. 

But, it tell us something. It tells that the picture is the picture, and the caption is the caption, and it's not a package deal. So, was the caption actually faxed intact with the photo? But, the caption doesn't have to be developed like the photo. You get it immediately. It's just letters and words, which don't have to be processed. You have them immediately. It's not as though you put them up like a picture. Letters and words you typeset yourself. And again, in this case, nobody used their caption, and nobody published their coding, which was not part of the protocol. 

So, a photo is a photo, and text is text, and the two are not handled and processed as a unit. They are handled and processed separately. 

Below, you see that the caption/coding is overlapping the photo. Look at the lower right corner:

  
It's overlapping the photo. Can you see that? So, what do you think happened? Do you think the AP faxed the photo and the caption as a unit that way with the latter taped or glued to the photo? Do you think the newspaper received it like that, that it was all one fax that looked exactly like that? Or, did someone afterwards tape or glue the caption to the bottom of the photo, overlapping it a little?

The caption writing is extremely bad. It's bad for middle school. To say that "Secret Service men are looking from where shot came from" is deplorable. It is abysmal. The AP was the largest media organization in the world. They couldn't come up with better writing than that? 

And shouldn't there be hundreds of photos like this? Every newspaper in the network had to produce an Altgens photo from the fax in order to publish it. What happened to all those photos? 

Fact: this does not validate anything, on the contrary, the issues concerning this item suddenly popping up raise grave doubts about its authenticity. Without a proven chain of possession, it amounts to nothing. And without that proven chain of possession, the notion that anyone would pay $675 for it is preposterous. The credibility of the 1:03 claim of Altgens6 transmission has been damaged because of this. It's worse now than before.