By Dr. Jerome R. Corsi
On January 4, 2023, Dr. David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., published The JFK Assassination Decoded: Criminal Forgery in the Autopsy Photographs and X-rays, a beautifully printed more than 400 page magnum opus complete with color illustrations compiling his decades-long investigation into the case. The JFK Assassination Decoded is not just another Kennedy assassination book.
Mantik deserves an honored place in the pantheon of JFK researchers for his definitive forensic proof that JFK was shot from the front, hit by two shots from the right front, and one shot from the rear. Mantik’s book is a “must-read” JFK book that belongs in the library of every serious study of the assassination for its definitive treatment of the JFK headshots. Perhaps even more critical, Mantik allows us to see disinformation campaign parallels, suggesting both the JFK assassination and the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency were both Deep State planned and executed coup d’états.
Mantik’s forensic analysis of the JFK autopsy X-rays proves Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the assassin. Equally important, Mantik’s new book allows us to see the Deep State parallel between the JFK assassination and the DOJ/CIA conspiracy to remove President Trump from office. The Justice Department and the CIA conspired to infiltrate and control social media to conceal the Deep State’s role in fabricating the Russian collusion hoax to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency. So too, Alan Dulles penetrated the Warren Commission to cover the Justice Department and CIA’s complicity in the crossfire in Dealey Plaza that removed JFK from the White House.
In nine separate trips to the National Archives over multiple years, armed with scientific apparatus including a Tobias optical densitometer, Mantik spent a record time examining the original JFK autopsy X-ray films. His brilliantly conducted optical density measurements proved that the autopsy X-rays had been altered to mask the frontal shots. Mantik traced and measured bullet fragments that transited Kennedy’s brain from the front to the back, establishing indisputable “case closed” proof that the official government narrative pinning Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin was false. Mantik is eminently qualified to conduct this forensic analysis. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin and his M.D. from the University of Michigan. Mantik has spent some 40 years practicing as a board-certified radiation oncologist.
Mantik teamed with Douglas Horne, author of the five-volume Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, to conduct an equally rigorous examination of the front windshield of the presidential limousine. Mantik obtained first-hand testimony from George Whitaker, Sr., a Ford Motor Company supervisor, that he saw the JFK limousine in Dearborn, Michigan, on Monday, November 25, 1963, the day of JFK’s funeral.
Whitaker and a second Dearborn witness (the father of Mantik’s Michigan Medical School roommate) saw a hole in the windshield from a frontal shot. Within minutes of the assassination, the Secret Service began cleaning the blood from the limousine, obviously destroying crime scene evidence. The Secret Service secreted the limousine, not allowing an inspection of the front window while it was yet in the limousine. In an August 1993 interview, Whitaker claimed to have replaced the windshield on Monday, November 25, at the River Rouge Assembly Plant, Building B, in Dearborn, Michigan. Whitaker recalled a hole in the windshield, 4-6 inches to the driver’s side of the rear-view mirror. He claimed the shot came from the front and the significant damage was on the inside of the windshield, as would be expected for standard contemporaneous safety glass. Mantik published in the book a photograph showing the JFK limousine stripped down to its frame at the Hess and Eisenhardt factory in Cincinnati in December 1963.
Mantik established through photographic evidence several images where a bullet appears to hit the limousine’s front window at Z-255 [Zapruder Film, Frame 255, coincident with Altgen’s Photo #6], well ahead of the headshots that occurred after Z-300. Mantik documented that during the JFK autopsy, the pathologists recognized that the 5-centimeter contusion at the right lung apex was not caused by Dr. Malcolm Perry’s tracheotomy performed on JFK at Parkland Hospital in a desperate attempt to save his life. Mantik noted a bullet entered near the midline of JFK’s throat at about the third tracheal ring and traveled obliquely to the right lung apex, where it stopped. As further confirmation that the bullet causing the throat wound had a limited (non-exiting) trajectory, Mantik noted the pathologists conducting the autopsy found no deep penetration from JFK’s back wound. “They ignored this,” Mantik wrote, “and instead invented the single-bullet theory.”
In a review of Mantik’s book, Douglas Horne notes that Mantik’s analysis of the JFK X-rays confirms Horne’s analysis in Chapter 13 of Inside the Assassinations Review Board. Both Horne and Mantik agree three headshots hit JFK:
- a shot low in the posterior skull, from the rear (probably fired from the second-floor window of the Dal-Tex building), blowing out the “head flap” on JFK’s that the Zapruder film shows prominently.
- an almost simultaneous shot from the right front (probably fired from well down the grassy knoll, near where the triple overpass meets the knoll); and
- a third almost simultaneous shot from the right front (fired from near the corner of the grassy knoll stockade fence), hitting JFK above and slightly behind the right ear.
In his review of Mantik’s book, Horne comments that Mantik’s book, “backstopped by extraordinary detail and footnoting, and by brilliant clarifying illustrations, is the “final word” on the JFK headshots. “Dr. Mantik brings his expertise as an M.D.—a radiation oncologist quite familiar with and qualified to read skull X-rays—and as a physicist to this extensive, illustrated monograph.” Horne added that equally important is that “Mantik’s conclusions about the three headshots, and the alteration of the extant skull X-rays, prove there was a massive U.S. government cover-up regarding how JFK was killed.”
Since 2004, Jerome R. Corsi has published 25 books on economics, history, and politics, including two #1 New York Times bestsellers. In 1972, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University. He currently resides in New Jersey with his family. His current book, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, was published on June 28, 2022. Dr. Corsi’s new website, www.drjeromecorsi.com, is now on the Internet in its first phase of development.
