Huffington has someone claiming Hickey did it...

[Albert Rossi]

1. Regarding your hypothesis that J. D. Tippit very well may have been the "Badge Man" figure allegedly firing at JFK from behind the picket fence...

I remember that Gary Mack's two favorite pieces of conspiracy evidence were "Badge Man" and the dictabelt recording, neither of which I ever felt much confidence about. Staring at that Rorschach test we call the Moorman Polaroid, you can see almost anything if you look hard enough. Raymond Marcus actually identified some more plausible shapes in the photo, but we're still in Wonderland. If only Mary had had a better quality, color camera.

Let me state, first, that I have Into the Nightmare in my stack of books, and have not yet gotten to it, but am anxious to read it. So I do not know what the arguments about Tippit are that Joseph musters for his hypothesis. But, FWIW, I do know -- outside of Buchanan -- that this identification has been proposed in at least one other place: Phillips, D.T. A Deeper, Darker Truth: Tom Wilson's Journey into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Illinois: DTP/Companion Books, 2009. The epilogue suggests that Badge Man is Tippit because of the supposed pock mark on his left cheek uncovered by Wilson's digital analysis. In my opinion the book is, to be kind, extremely dubious (I am inclined to say totally bogus junk; there is not enough detail in the presentation to understand exactly what the mathematics of Wilson's technique supposedly consists of), but I thought I'd just add this into the mix here for completeness sake.

I was in the Dallas ASK conference audiences for Wilson's first and second public presentations of his work and its products. The point I made then is the point I make now: Let us simply conduct a series of impartial tests of his machinery and methods. Use science to test science. It works, or it doesn't work. Or both.

For reasons that perhaps Peter Lemkin can speak to in detail, there are no public records of any such tests having been conducted.

Something I also wondered about: on what basis does Phillips make the assertion that this is a technique that has legal validity?

In retirement, Tom supplemented his income by serving as a consulting technical expert in criminal law cases where his image processing work was accepted as hard evidence in American courts of law (p. 240).

Unless this is a subtly misleading sentence (e.g., "his image processing work" does not strictly refer to the kind of image processing the book pretends to show), it would seem that law courts have granted scientific validity to this technique. But Phillips is not forthcoming as to the basis for this claim, nor does he cite specific cases.

Is this simply malarkey?