120. Dr. James Fetzer Separates JFK Assassination Science From Fiction
Scholar and author Dr. James Fetzer discuses how his research into the JFK assassination and 9/11 attacks has allowed him to sort out the real evidence.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with one of the world’s leading authorities on the JFK assassination, Jim Fetzer. During the interview Dr. Fetzer explains why it’s still hard for many Americans to accept the mountains of research contradicting the official story about the JFK assassination, “we place so much confidence in the government that we want to believe it’s there to nurture and protect us from our enemies, that any indication, even if it turns out to the powerful evidence, that this core belief might be false is too threatening to acknowledge. So a lot of Americans find it easier to adopt an ostrich policy and just bury their heads in the sand and ignore discussions and demonstrations such as the books that I publish that prove to the contrary.”
While the show is a departure from topics usually covered on Skeptiko, according to host Alex Tsakiris it has many similarities, “Skeptiko has focused on the science of human consciousness… Psi, near-death experience, parapsychology. But Dr. Fetzer’s work is relevant to Skeptiko because the process he’s gone through in terms of sorting through a lot of scientific evidence on very controversial topics is exactly what we’ve been talking about on the last 100+ episodes of Skeptiko.”
Dr. Fetzer, who has authored three books and dozens of papers on JFK assassination science, also discusses how his career teaching philosophy of science and critical thinking courses at the University of Minnesota provides him a unique perspective on competing theories regarding the JFK case, “I recognize that in science the convergence of opinion only obtains when you’re looking at the same range of hypotheses, using the same body of evidence, and using the same rules of reasoning. I know a great deal about these cases because I’ve investigated the full range of hypotheses, looked at all of the evidence, as much as is available, and sorted it out in terms of the authentic and the falsified and fabricated. I know the rules of reasoning because that’s been my professional obligation as a philosopher of science. So I’m in a position to analyze these things in a way that most others simply are not.”
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
Well, this show is going to be quite a departure-or at least it’s going to seem like quite a departure-from the topics we normally cover on Skeptiko. Today we’re going to talk about the JFK assassination. Yeah, we’re going to talk about the JFK assassination with one of the leading scholar/researchers on the topic, who also happens to be someone who’s taught critical thinking and scientific analysis for 35 years and is a very highly regarded philosopher/scholar on a number of topics.
But the reason I wanted to cover the JFK assassination really does have to do with what Skeptiko is all about, because the JFK assassination, at the end of the day, is about two competing narratives. One narrative says that there was this lone, nut assassin who killed the President back in the 1960’s; and another narrative says that the government has lied and covered up its involvement in essentially a coup d’état.
And the reason I think this is particularly relevant to Skeptiko is that I think the process you have to go through to sort through all the evidence and try and come to your own understanding, your own belief about what really happened, is very similar to the kind of process we’ve been talking about on the last 100+ shows of Skeptiko.
Now while our guest on today’s show is one of the foremost authorities on the JFK assassination, it was really a quote from one of the “experts” on the other side of this debate that really sparked my interest and made me want to do this show. The quote was from the rather famous attorney turned author, Vincent Bugliosi, who’s written a 1,600 page book on the JFK assassination that basically says that the original story that the government spun is all correct and all these conspiracy theories don’t have any substance to them at all.
But the quote that I heard from him in one of the many JFK documentaries that I’ve watched was something along the lines that “you know, I’d really recommend that people don’t get into this research. I’ve seen so many people waste their lives, becoming obsessed with the JFK case.” It’s one of those quotes that as soon as I heard it, it just struck me as strange. But the more I thought about it and when I went back and listened to it again, it became the entry point into this seemingly upside-down world that we often find ourselves in in terms of public debates about the most important issues.
Now, the most important issues that we’ve talked about on Skeptiko have to do with human consciousness and who we really are. What happens to us after we die? And we’ve decided to answer those questions by looking at the best scientific data and following the best scientific methods we can. In this case, the issue at hand, although it’s in a different arena, seems to me to be clearly as monumental.
If the United States government did in fact orchestrate a coup at the highest levels of government, that included the complicity of our most respected law enforcement agencies, the FBI and also our intelligence agencies, the CIA-if that is true, that would seem to have a fundamental bearing on our understanding of who we are. What our country is. What we’re all about.
So here’s the twist: Mr. Bugliosi is suggesting ‘don’t look over here. Don’t waste your time on the JFK assassination.’ He warns that so many have become obsessed with this case and wasted their lives. Wasted their lives? What a bizarre twist of logic.
Let me put it another way. Perhaps you’re considering entering government service. Don’t you need to know the nature of the government you’re serving? Perhaps you’re interested in entering politics. Don’t you need to know whether the system we have is fundamentally, at its core, rotten and corrupt? I think you do. Or maybe you want to go into law enforcement. Maybe you want to join the FBI or the CIA. Don’t you need to know whether those organizations are legitimately following their charter, their purpose? Whether they are what they present themselves to be? Obviously I think you do.
So let’s twist Mr. Bugliosi’s comment around and turn it upside-down. I’d say before you do anything involved with government service you’d better study the JFK assassination. You’d better obsess about it. You’d better spend however many years or hours, whatever it takes, to get to the bottom of it for you personally. Because it’s fundamental to any other decisions you’d make.
And I guess that’s the link back to Skeptiko, and that’s the link back to I think the topics that drive me and drive this show. I can look at the numerous episodes we’ve done on, for example, near-death experience science and how we’ve driven it over and over and over again. You go over to our forums and there are hundreds of posts on this same topic, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to sort through the data and figure out who’s really right, which science really matters.
Is it worth it? Are we wasting our time? Are we obsessing? Or are we the ones that have taken the rational approach? Are we the ones who have said, “These are the most fundamental questions I could ask about who I am and about how I fit into the world. So therefore, from an intellectual standpoint these questions really demand to be front and center.”
I think you know what my answer to that question is. But I’ll leave it up to you to answer it for yourself as you’re listening to my interview with a guy I greatly admire for his bravery in tackling issues in a serious, intellectual, scholarly way that most folks would run away from just as fast as they possibly could.
Here’s my interview with Dr. James Fetzer:
Alex Tsakiris: We’re joined today by a scholar and researcher. He’s a distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus from the University of Minnesota Duluth. He’s also the author, having written 20 books on the philosophy of science, theoretical foundations of computer science, cognitive science-I could go on and on. But Dr. Jim Fetzer is best known for his work on modern conspiracies like the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks. So we’re going to have a very interesting dialogue coming up.
First, I want to welcome you, Jim, and thank you for joining me on Skeptiko.
Dr. James Fetzer: Alex, thanks. It’s great. My most recent book, which was a co-edited piece with a friend of mine who recently died, Ellery Eells, is entitled, The Place of Probability in Science, and it’s actually my 29th book.
Alex Tsakiris: Twenty-ninth book. Wow. Added to the-how many papers? Probably over 100 papers.
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh, 150 or more, yeah. You can find my academic website where there’s a complete list. Well, almost complete. There’s some stuff in the popular press that isn’t listed there. Just put in “Jim Fetzer” and apart from my Wikipedia entry you can find my home page which has a pretty complete listing of all my publications.
But Alex, I like so much that you started off by mentioning conspiracies because you’re really right. This has become an area of specialization for me. I had begun getting serious about the research about JFK back in 1992, when I recognized a research group consisting of the best qualified individuals to ever study the case.
That eventuated in the publication of three books that were collections of studies by experts on different aspects. I think one of my virtues is that I know my own limitations and when there’s an area that requires technical or scientific competence I do not personally possess, I invite others who do have those capacities to contribute. So my first book on JFK assassination science, published in 1998, had 11 contributors. My second, Murder in Dealey Plaza, in 2000 had nine. And the third, The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, in 2003 had six.
Plus, of course, I’ve published lots of articles that also address the nature of conspiracies directly, including for example, a recent article that might be of some interest to your audience entitled “Conspiracies and Conspiracism” which was published in onlinejournal.com in which I’m taking apart the abusive use of the phrase, “conspiracy theorists” as a kind of club to subjugate or discount those who have views that may be significantly different than what is espoused by the government.
But in relation to 9/11 as another illustration, when I founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, whose home page is at 911scholars.org, it was with the objective of bringing together experts in different fields-pilots, physicists, electrical or mechanical or structural or aeronautical engineers-of whole diverse backgrounds…
Alex Tsakiris: Jim, let me jump in there because I’ve got to tell you already, I guarantee you we’ve just lost about half of my audience because #1 there’s going to be a lot of people who are just astounded and frankly, put off that I’m even getting into conspiracy theories. It’s something I’ve never talked about and have never had any inclination for doing. So let me back up and tell folks why I thought this topic that we’re talking about here-in particular, a couple of the papers you mentioned are very relevant to the topics we’ve been talking about here on Skeptiko.
In particular our approach, because I have to tell you, I’m not a conspiracy buff. I never was really even interested in conspiracies up until really about a year or so ago after doing 100 or so Skeptiko shows in this little corner of the world that we’ve been dealing with in terms of the controversial science regarding human consciousness.
When I saw the shenanigans that were going on with researchers and how they were fudging the data and presenting one side and using all sorts of pretty devious tactics, some knowingly and some just kind of unknowingly, it opened me up to say, “What else did I think that I knew that maybe I need to go back and re-examine?”
The first thing that that led me to was the JFK assassination because, I have to say, I’m not nearly enough of an expert on 9/11 to formulate a really hard opinion. But I’ll tell you that the work that you’ve done on the JFK assassination and the way you lay that out, the meticulous detail, the various experts you bring in, really reminds me of some of the topics we’ve covered here where it’s just so overwhelming. The amount of data and the quality of data, that I think it’s almost impossible for someone to really confront that information, that evidence, straight on and dismiss it, or stick to the story that was first spread out there when the thing happened in terms of this lone nut assassin.
So what I really want to talk about is this challenging of authority, driving for truth, critical thinking, and all the problems that that can create and the challenges it creates, but how it’s something that is really at the core of what anyone who considers themselves a free-thinking person needs to do.
Dr. James Fetzer: Well, I agree with all that, Alex. Let me make three quick points and then we’ll turn to the real heart of the matter, which is how to sort things out for yourself and figure out who’s telling the truth and who isn’t.
The first is that the last article I mentioned, entitled, “Thinking About Conspiracy Theories: 9/11 and JFK,” I conclude by going through an issue of The New York Times and pointing out that on virtually every single page was an article about a significant development in the world or in the United States that involved a conspiracy. It wasn’t always described that way, but it involved illegal activities by two or more individuals to bring about a certain end, which means even today conspiracies are ubiquitous.
If you stop and think about it, what would Shakespeare have to write about if it weren’t for plots against the king and the queen? You go all the way back to Julius Caesar, who was, of course, taken out by conspiracy. The Lincoln assassination involved a minimum of eight different co-conspirators, four of whom were hung on the same gallows at the same time. One was the first woman ever put to death by the United States. It was simultaneous attacks on Lincoln, on his Vice-President and his Secretary of State.
Similar events extend right up to this day, so that one of the major obstacles-this might be the first point I would make in that regard-to overcoming our capacity to deal with these issues, based on logic and evidence, is the belief in American exceptionalism. That we’re supposed to be an exception to the rest of the world. You might have plots, assassinations, covert coups and all that sort of thing all over the world but not in the United States.
I’m just terribly sorry if I’m disillusioning anyone out there. But it ain’t so. And indeed I think it was Will Rogers who observed that “It’s not what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we think we know that ain’t so.” And I would suggest that with regard to popular beliefs about a lot of these matters, just because a whole lot of people think something is true doesn’t mean that it actually is true. I would offer some of the cases that might trouble some of your listeners as examples thereof. In fact, Alex, that’s a fallacy known as the appeal to popular sentiments.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me pull that apart in a slightly different way and see what you think because I think I’m onboard with you on that. But instead of using the word “conspiracy,” I’d insert the word “skepticism.” I think there’s a certain skepticism and it’s certainly a popular movement in the United States and to a certain extent Europe, that denies anything that goes against-or really what it denies is anything that goes against our cultural myths. And they’re defended so strongly in a way that I think it’s obscured.
I think your examples, and I’ll focus on the JFK assassination example, are a perfect illustration of this. It’s not about the data. You know, we dance around and you look at all the JFK stuff out there and it always seems to be about the data. The magic bullet and where it was shot from and the FBI and the CIA and mafia connection. It’s about the data, data, data. It’s not about the data.
It’s about what the implications of that data are. It’s the second question in that I think this is the question people very quickly, almost instinctively go through and that’s: If this is true, then that means…” And the answer to that means, like in the case of the JFK assassination, if this is true then that means this whole idea of American exceptionalism isn’t true. We really did have a coup. Rich and powerful men really can overthrow a President. And I think that’s what hangs people up.
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh yeah, no doubt about it, Alex. It’s what psychologists refer to as “cognitive dissonance” when you’re confronted with evidence or indications that something you dearly believe might not be true. It’s the phenomenon displayed by a mother who discovers indications that her husband might be molesting their daughter. It’s so traumatizing-it’s so threatening to her core beliefs-that she can’t bring herself to acknowledge it so she winds up in suppression and denial.
Years later when the truth finally emerges and she’s asked why she didn’t do something about it, she’s virtually paralyzed having to admit she just couldn’t bring herself to believe it. So she’ll cast aspersion on the child and suggest the child is making it up in order to defend her husband and so forth.
I think it’s just the same with regard to events like JFK and 9/11. We place so much confidence in the government that we want to believe it’s there to nurture and protect us and keep us safe from our enemies, that any indication-even if it turns out to the powerful evidence that that core belief might be false-is too threatening to acknowledge. So a lot of Americans find it easier to adopt an ostrich policy and just bury their heads in the sand and ignore discussions and demonstrations-such as the books that I publish-that prove to the contrary.
Alex Tsakiris: You know, there are really two dimensions to that and it’s the same in consciousness research that we’ve looked at. If you look at the idea like we have that the evidence seems quite strong that consciousness seems to, in some way we don’t understand, survive death. Well, from a personal standpoint, a lot of people find that very challenging. What does that mean? What does that mean in terms of all these kind of spiritual issues that I thought I had resolved one way or another? What does it mean for me personally in terms of who I really am?
But then the second dimension to that is the institutional dimension. I think this this is another direct parallel between what we’ve done on Skeptiko and in your work. And certainly moreso in your case. In your case, there is this institutional skepticism that wants to keep things on track, in a certain way, towards a certain story.
And there’s a parallel in what we’ve done in that any research that comes out that supports this idea that materialism, brain equals mind that’s true, those stories-we’ve focused on this show some tiny little studies that come out. The last one was from this group of Slovenian doctors who did this tiny little study and it just blows up. It’s national, it’s international news on all the science pages that this explains it. There’s just no proportionality to it because any information that comes out that supports this institutional message just gets fast-tracked.
So you kind of get it from both sides if you’re trying to sort this out. Personally you have the cognitive dissonance and then institutionally you’re pointed in a certain direction.
Dr. James Fetzer: Let me just make a couple of observations. One is that as a professional philosopher who has concentrated on the hard areas of philosophy, which include the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, but where I taught logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning for 35 years, [I have been] trying to instill in my students the tools that would enable them to sort things out.
What I have sought to do with regard to politically significant developments where there’s reason to suspect the government might have a powerful motive for lying to the American people is to attempt to investigate those. To take rumor and speculation out of them and place them on an objective and scientific foundation. That’s what I have done with JFK and that’s what I’ve done with 9/11. I consulted work with a much smaller group in relation to the plane crash that took the life of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone.
So, Alex, I do think what we’re talking about is extraordinarily important and I’m certainly interested in providing those tools. You may have heard me remark they are on the order of teaching a man how to fish rather than giving him a fish because these are tools you can use to sort things out for the entire rest of your life.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s get into those tools. As a jumping off point though, because I think it’s an interesting story at least as well as I know it, tell us how you originally became interested in the JFK assassination.
Dr. James Fetzer: Well, I was actually a 1st Lieutenant in the Marine Corps. I was anchored out in Kaohsiung Harbor in Formosa aboard the LPH Iwo Jima (Landing Platform Helicopter), that’s designed like a carrier but has a shallow draft because helicopters don’t require a very stable take-off and landing platform [like that] provided by ordinary carriers.
I was awakened at 3:30 in the morning by the officer of the deck who told me that JFK had been shot. Then he awakened me an hour later and told me they’d caught the guy who’d done it and he was a Communist, which I thought then was pretty fast work.
But it wasn’t until I got back to the United States and wound up serving two years at the recruit depot in San Diego, which just happened to be the same depot and the same rifle range where Lee Oswald took his recruit training [that I began reading about it].
I was a Series Commander. I had 15 DI’s and 300 recruits under my control going through the training cycle. So I became very familiar with the elements of recruit training, etc. I can tell you that Oswald was actually quite a mediocre shot. Now while he was a recruit, he fired 212 out of 250 with a rifle. I fired 212 myself at various points. But he did not qualify at all-that was in ’57.
He didn’t qualify at all in ’58 which is very peculiar because there’s a general order that requires all Marines, from the highest-ranking General to the lowest-ranking private, to qualify with a rifle every year. This tells me he was on some kind of special assignment, which I expect was studying Russian language at the Foreign Language Institute run by the military in Monterrey, California.
Alex Tsakiris: But Jim, let me jump in here. What I want you to get to is you responded to an article that a surgeon had written that you thought just didn’t measure up from a scholarly academic…
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh, you’re absolutely right. I was just lying in bed, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper. This was in 1992. My wife came in and flipped on the TV and said, “You’re not going to believe this.”
So I saw this very distinguished-looking man standing behind a lectern with the logo of the AMA (American Medical Association). He was berating everyone who had ever done any serious work on JFK, from the earliest, [such as] Mark Lane, Josiah Thompson, David Lifton, Robert Groden. He was attacking a physician who’d actually been present during the vain attempt to save the President, Charles Crenshaw.
He was describing Oliver Stone’s film, which had recently been released, as “docu-fiction.” This was a clear abuse of his position as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, because that’s who he turned out to be. Lundgren was his name, of The Journal of the American Medical Association. It seemed to me that if persons of his stature were going to abuse their position, then perhaps some of us with special background abilities ought to become involved.
I knew a lot about journals and editing. I’d already edited for ten years an international journal in methodology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, named Synthese. I founded another journal entitled Minds and Machines, about artificial intelligence philosophy and cognitive science, which I would edit for 10 years and then another year co-edit, making a transition.
When I decided to pursue this, that’s when I got serious. The issue that the gentleman was talking about in violation of the AMA’s own standards because you’re not supposed to talk about articles until the issue of the magazine is in everybody’s hands has appeared, which would not have happened for a couple more weeks. I found in a second subsequent issue letters of complaint from members of the AMA who were unhappy with what he was doing.
One was from a guy who had a background of both a Ph.D. and an M.D. that I liked very much-his name is David W. Mantik. I contacted David and suggested we collaborate on a long article or a book, with which he agreed. Soon a couple others wanted to come in with us on this research project and I put together the group I was talking about in the beginning-of the best qualified individuals to ever study the case.
But you’re absolutely right. That was how I got into it in a serious fashion.
Alex Tsakiris: This to me is the essence of the response to this skepticism that we immediately say, “Hey, that doesn’t feel right.” So you were obviously well-versed enough in JFK and had researched it yourself. But then the real launching point was when you saw this person in position of power spouting a lot of stuff that you knew from your research wasn’t true and, moreover, wasn’t proper in the way he was doing it. That’s what really propelled you.
Dr. James Fetzer: That’s exactly right.
Alex Tsakiris: So then, with that let’s jump into the methodology you took in ’92, and maybe you want to weave in there the basic principles that you think are important and that you’ve taught in terms of how somebody wades through this kind of stuff, where there’s a lot of controversies swirling around. There’s a lot of conflicting opinion…
Dr. James Fetzer: It’s always worthwhile if you do some kind of literature research. Try to figure out what the basic positions are. That’s greatly facilitated by the Internet, of course, since you can do a great deal of research there. If you can figure out some outstanding figure that has a position that you think sounds right to you, that might be a reasonable place to start.
When I got serious, the first book from which I learned an immense amount was by David Lifton entitled, Best Evidence-published in 1980-in which he talks about the transit of the body from Parkland Hospital to Bethesda and the ways in which changes appear to have taken place to the body. Included in what he talked about then was surgery to the head, which many have thought was a far-out hypothesis, but where the Assassination Records Review Board, five members as a civilian group, which was entrusted with the responsibility to declassify documents and records that had been sealed by the Warren Commission for 75 years.
Alex Tsakiris: So let’s just fill people in a little bit there. I don’t want to go into too much of that detail, but it’s kind of important because there’s the Warren Commission that everyone knows about. And then there’s the Senate Committee on…
Dr. James Fetzer: The House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) reinvestigated in ’77-’78.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. And then there’s the Oliver Stone movie. And then there’s the board that says, “Okay, we’re going to let the American people know. We’re going to declassify all of this information.” And that’s the board…
Dr. James Fetzer: That’s exactly right. Now the Warren Commission claimed there were three shots and only three shots by only one shooter from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald. Case closed.
Now what’s interesting is they classified all the documents and records related to this case on the grounds of national security. And yet, Alex, if their theory about the case was true, there was no national security aspect to the case. So there’s an incoherence to the government’s official rationale for locking up all these documents and records.
Robert Groden, whom I mentioned, was able to get a copy of the extant version of the Zapruder film onto television on Geraldo’s program in 1975. He and Dick Gregory made an appearance there. When everyone saw this film, which shows the body moving back-and-to-the-left, back- and-to-the-left, they knew this had to be from a shot from the right front. Well, if there was a shot from the right front, then there couldn’t have been only shots from above and behind, where Lee Oswald was allegedly located. So this created quite a sensation.
The House Select Committee was constituted to reinvestigate not only the assassination of JFK but also of Martin Luther King. And, in relation to JFK, based upon some disputed acoustical evidence that which appears to be quite good, they determined that there had been at least one more shot from the grassy knoll. So you have this revision and the conclusion that JFK was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy based upon the HSCA.
In the meanwhile after that, Oliver Stone did this brilliant movie, which in my opinion is the most comprehensive, detailed and precise depiction of what happened in Dealey Plaza itself ever presented to the public through the mass media. Now our research suggests it’s too simple by half, because he shows three shooting locations, whereas our research-based on the medical evidence, ballistics, and analysis of the film in sorting out the genuine evidence from the fabricated-indicates there were actually six. And that eight, nine, or ten shots were fired.
JFK was hit four times. He was hit in the throat by a shot from in front; he was hit in the back by a shot from behind. And then, believe it or not Alex, after the driver brought the limousine to a halt, he was hit in the back of the head and fell forward and then was eased up by Jackie, who was looking him in the face when he was hit in the right temple by yet another shot that blew his brains out to the left-rear.
Now, Oliver Stone presented that and it was offset by a book by a fellow named Gerald Posner entitled, Case Closed, which was like a simplified version of the Warren Commission report. All of this was predicated upon the assumption that a bullet entered the back of JFK’s neck and transited his neck without hitting any bony structures and exited his throat, went into Connelly and did all these other wounds-which had to be fabricated, because it turned out that one of the three shots that had been postulated had missed and injured a distant bystander by the name of James Tague [so they only had two shots to account for all those wounds].
So the way in which they accounted for that was changing the initial report of the Secret Service and the FBI from the very day of the assassination. They had claimed there had been three shots with three hits. Jack had been hit in the back about 5-1/2 inches below the collar to the right of his spinal column. Connelly had been hit in the back. And Jack had been hit in the head.
But since they were only postulating three shots and one had missed, they had to subtract and back up to just two shots, which they did then by having Gerald Ford move the description of the wound to the back up to the-base-of-the-back-of-the-neck and falsely conjecturing that the bullet had passed through Jack’s neck and hit Connally to do all that other damage.
It turns out the shot through the neck, if it had come in there. wouldn’t have come out his throat because it’s anatomically impossible-since cervical vertebrae intervene. That was the sort of thing that was going on. As you say then, in the wake of “JFK” the film, the controversy, the Congress passed the JFK Records Act and created a five-person civilian board entrusted with the responsibility to declassify all those documents and records.
And George Herbert Walker Bush, President at the time, adamantly opposed and refused to appoint the members, which had to await the incoming Clinton administration. So the whole thing was delayed by 18 months, really telegraphing to those agencies they had plenty of time to clean up their records. But, nevertheless, they managed to declassify some 60,000 documents and records the very first of which actually, believe it or not Alex, included that Gerald Ford-it was even recorded in an article in The New York Times-had changed the description of that wound, which was just in time for me to include it in Assassination Science, the first of the three books I published on JFK.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me jump in there because there are a couple of things. One before we get too into the JFK data, which is there for anyone to pull apart, and I encourage someone to do it. It’s a great starting point. If someone is turned off by 9/11 or if that’s too close, go to JFK. Just go to JFK and see if you don’t come to the same conclusion as Dr. Fetzer here, whose evidence is quite compelling.
But the methodology, and you touched on it a little bit there, I thought was very interesting and just great advice for anyone, and for our audience as well. That’s that you said you had to sort through the evidence and find out what was the real evidence and what was the fake evidence. Do you want to pick up on that a little?
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh, absolutely, Alex. That was the principal contribution that we made. Among those that I brought together was a world authority on the human brain who is also an expert on wound ballistics. His name was Bob Livingston. The fellow whose letter came into the Journal of the AMA, is David Mantik, who has a Ph.D. in physics but is also an M.D. and is board certified in radiation oncology, which is the treatment of cancer using x-ray therapy. So he’s an expert on the interpretation of x-rays.
Jack White, a legendary photo analyst who testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and advised Oliver Stone in preparing his film, “JFK.” Charles Crenshaw was actually present in Trauma Room #1 when JFK was brought in. He was the last physician to see him before he was wrapped in sheets.
Alex Tsakiris: But Jim, what I was driving at is hey, here’s a person who’s sitting out there and they’re trying to sort through this stuff. They’re trying to sort through my thing on consciousness survives death. They’re trying to sort through conspiracy theories. They’re trying to sort through all that. I think personally one of the things they have to do is to be able to sort through the evidence.
I’ve encountered this a lot in the topics we’ve covered. There’s a lot of contrary evidence out there and it looks pretty damn good at first blush. I think the same is true with JFK. If someone steps into this, they’re going to read what you say and then they’re doing to do what we all do. We’re going to go Google the other side to find out what they have to say.
Dr. James Fetzer: Sure. The reason for that preface, Alex, was that what we’re talking about here are the alteration of x-rays, the substitution of another brain, the recreation of a whole movie of the assassination. It involved very technical scientific issues, which is the reason I had to have people with a high degree of technical and scientific competence to sort them out. This is not the sort of thing the man in the street can do.
That’s why I brought together these experts in different areas to go through this very challenging task, which by the way had never been done before. Neither the Warren Commission nor the House Select Committee or anyone else had ever before tested the authenticity of the x-rays, for example. Or questioned the diagrams and photographs in the National Archives of the brain. Nor raised the question of whether the Zapruder film might be a fabrication. We did that. We established all those points and they fundamentally alter your understanding of what happened to JFK.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. So let’s jump into that. Just to give a concrete example, so we have the Zapruder film, the film that everyone’s seen where JFK is horrendously hit by the bullet and killed. Your point that, if I understand it correctly, is you go and you dig into the Zapruder film as it’s commonly understood. From following your research a little bit, one of the first things you find out is that there isn’t one, there are several. And there are probably several other ones that we’ve missed, but at the very least you have to qualify what people are really looking at.
And then if you really tear those films apart as you’ve done in an unbelievably thorough and convincing way, it totally affects the timeline and it totally affects what you’re seeing. It affects so many things that until you really wrap your arms around it and really dig in in great detail to that one data point, you really can’t say much.
You can’t build a case either way and that’s the hard work that has to be done. You’re saying you had to do that not only with the film but with the x-rays. From what I understand, your work has then been corroborated subsequent to that by information that’s actually been released from the board, right?
Dr. James Fetzer: Yeah, that’s exactly right. There are many ways to approach this but it turns out that there are fundamental inconsistencies between the Zapruder film on the one hand and the medical and ballistic evidence on the other. The film was used to create a false premise, so if you assume the film is authentic, then because there have been so many changes, so much has been taken out, and other events have been introduced using methods of optical printing and special effects, that the timeline’s been contracted. It becomes impossible to reconstruct what actually happened if you assume the film is authentic.
Let me make just two or three points very specific about how we know the film is a fake, that anyone can test for themselves.
One is that the bullet, the back-and-left-motion, of course, indicates a bullet from the right front. But his brains are bulging out to the right front. Now the brains bulging out to the right front turns out to have been painted in to create the impression that this could have occurred as a result from a shot from behind.
We know that the blowout to the back of his head was painted over in the key frames 313, 314, 315, and 316, but it occurred to me that maybe those who had been working on the film had overlooked that the blowout to his brain might be visible elsewhere. In frame 374 I actually found where you can see the blowout to the back of his head, which is sort of shaped like a cashew. It’s very similar to David Mantik’s study of the lateral cranial, the right side x-ray of JFK’s skull, where he determined that there was an area covered over as his “Area P” for patch. And its outline corresponds very closely to what we actually see in frame 374. So they just weren’t just quite as thorough-going as they might have been.
It turns out that, as you observed, Douglas Horne, who was a Senior Analyst for Military Affairs [for the ARRB] not only has confirmed the ways in which the switch was made between the original film-which was brought back to Washington for study at the National Photographic Interpretation Center, run by the CIA on Saturday-but that a second film was brought from Rochester down to the National Photographic Interpretation Center on Sunday.
Two different teams of workers studied these two different films. There were five different physical properties that distinguished the original from the substitute. Horne did a wonderful discussion about it in his books, but I also summarized it in an article entitled, “U.S. Government Official: JFK Cover-Up, Film Fabrication.” So if you want a distillation of how we know the film’s a fake, you can go there.
But when you study the deception of the x-rays and all that, this was very, very elaborate, Alex. It would have been impossible for the Mafia, for example, to extend its reach into the Bethesda Naval Hospital and alter x-rays under the control of medical officers of the U.S. Navy, agents of the Secret Service, and the President’s personal physician.
Just as they substituted another brain. And that couldn’t have been done by pro- or anti-Castro Cubans, for example. Nor could the KBG, for example, have gotten ahold of the Zapruder and subject it to alterations. So the discoveries we made about the meticulousness of the cover-up is powerful evidence that some theories that are floating around can’t be true. Certainly the Mafia could have supported the assassination and maybe even put up gunmen, but it couldn’t have been responsible for the cover-up.
I mean, the limousine, which was a crime scene on wheels, after all, was sent back to the Ford Motor Company on Monday, the day of the formal State funeral, stripped down to bare metal and had the windshield-which had a through and through hole from the bullet that transited to hit JFK in the throat-replaced. It was completely dismantled and rebuilt, which is absurd. It belonged in the Smithsonian. I mean, this destruction of evidence can only have been directed at a level of government comparable to J. Edgar Hoover or Lyndon Johnson, then President of the United States.
Alex Tsakiris: So Jim, a couple points, but first is, what do we do? There’s a ton of evidence that you’ve just laid out. I don’t mean what do we do in terms of JFK and political activism or whatever the heck that means. But what do we do as someone who’s sitting there and going, “Wow. How do I process that? This guy’s written 29 books. Every one topic that he’s just touched on probably has four or five books that I could read on it.”
You wind up back at the same place where you have to just trust somebody, and that’s not where we want to be. So what is the average person to do? How do they get through it? Especially when it’s uncomfortable? Especially when you know going in…
Dr. James Fetzer: Well, I have a lot of confidence in the American people to do the right thing if only they know the truth. But we are being systematically deprived of our right to even influence political decisions in this country.
Alex Tsakiris: But Jim, wait, let me challenge you on that because as you just demonstrated there, the JFK stuff, most of the stuff you laid out has been out there for a long time. The other part of it that I want you to comment on is the other part of the story is that the narrative that we want to believe and that in this case the government wants us to believe, the narrative seems to be impervious to any data.
So wind it all the way back just at a very high level when you say, okay, you believe that someone in the 60s, when they’re told this lone nut did it. Okay, he was a Commie and he killed the President. But then as the years roll by and the narrative, the myth, breaks down.
Hey, you know what? Now it’s proven the CIA was in bed with the Mafia. Oh, wow, how does that change the story? Well, it doesn’t. Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was CIA. That comes out. Does that change the narrative? No, it doesn’t. Maybe our government has lied to us in other places and has assassinated other people in other countries. We find out. So what I’m saying is, the story though, the public perception of it has been impervious to all…
Dr. James Fetzer: What you’re really saying, Alex, is that the government has an enormous influence over the media, which today has been so consolidated that it virtually only parrots what the government says. William Colby observed that the CIA owned everyone of significance in the major medias. So you can’t take for granted what the mass media tell you is true. You’ve got to be able to sort it out. Once you sort it out, I think you’ll, within the confines of what is possible, I think individuals will do the right thing.
The reason I started talking about problems in influencing the course of our government by the political process is because that’s normally the way we would do this. But yet we’ve been subverted in doing that by electronic voting machines, by unlimited money from corporations affecting elections, by the role of lobbyists in Washington. Those are the kinds of things that have to be affected or changed, if we’re going to regain control over our own government, our own political destiny.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me take the other side of that. And that’s that no, they’re not. People are not going to “do the right thing” because the right thing for them at another deeper level that they don’t really want to deal with is to leave everything the way that it is. And to not take their life and shake it, twist it upside-down. People are going to say, “You know what? I’m going home, flip on the ball game, have a beer, and say ‘God bless America, this is still the greatest place on earth.”
Dr. James Fetzer: [Laughs] Well, Alex, look. Let me say I can’t claim that you’re wrong about that. I can give a couple of tips as to how you can tell who’s lying and who’s not when you look at any and alternative positions. One of the most common fallacies by those who want to preserve, for example, the theory that Lee Oswald was the lone assassin, is called “special pleading.” You only cite the evidence favorable to your side and you ignore the rest.
The Warren Commission Report is an outstanding case because-as the great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, observed when he raised 16 questions about the course of the inquiry before its final report was published-when it was well known what the sections of the report would be, he said, “Well, why isn’t there a section about who killed JFK?” [Laughs]
That’s a very nice point. If you find one side is really concealing evidence, for example, if they’re taking for granted that the x-rays are authentic and Zapruder film is authentic, you’ve got to look at the other side and see if the arguments there are powerful or not. If you go to my website assassinationscience.com right now, for example, you can find new studies by David Mantik on his multiple returns or visits to the National Archives to study the x-rays. He demonstrates how the x-rays are fabricated.
And if you go further down you’ll find an introduction to the film fabrication by John Costella, who has a Ph.D. in electromagnetism, which involves the properties of light and the physics of moving objects. He’s giving you a visual tutorial. Now I say, if you’ve got people who say it’s authentic and people who say it isn’t, or the x-rays are authentic or the x-rays aren’t, just look at all the evidence and you’ll then sort it out.
Another common fallacy, of course, is the ad hominem. We attack the person who’s delivering the message instead of the message itself. I mean, if the President of Iran, for example, says that there are important questions that are unanswered about 9/11, it’s not an answer to that question to say, “Well, but he’s the President of Iran.” Okay, he is the President of Iran. but maybe what he’s saying is true. In fact, those of us who have looked into 9/11 know what he’s saying is true. It can’t be dismissed just by an ad hominem. Ad hominems are fairly prevalent, just as special pleading is fairly prevalent.
A third common fallacy is the straw man-exaggerating the position that you want to attack in order to make it easier, more vulnerable to criticism. There was a guy named Robert Artwohl, for example. When I first got into this, he was arguing in essence that if there had been a conspiracy for JFK, there must have been all kinds of direct communication, as though they held pep rallies in Washington stadium prior to the assassination. Well, that’s ridiculous. With all kinds of classified compartmentalized operations, most of those involved don’t have any idea what anyone else is doing and there are only a very small number of persons at the top who actually have the big picture.
So if you can master just those three or four fallacies, popular sentiments, for example, just because most people think it’s true doesn’t mean it is true.
Special pleading, make sure you’re not being deceived by somebody who’s citing only part of the evidence rather than all of the evidence.
The ad hominem by attacking the person who’s presenting the argument rather than the argument itself. Even a lunatic might actually be onto something in some particular situation even though we might be skeptical. What he’s saying might be true. So you can’t just discount it as the way they would like to discount questions about 9/11 because the President of Iran raised them.
Finally, the straw man, giving an exaggerated version of a position in order to destroy it.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. The only problem I have with those logical fallacies is that the skeptical community has turned that into a parlor game, where they drag those out every time somebody says something. It just becomes this side show of who’s more fallacious misuse of logic and reason and critical thinking. That doesn’t get us anywhere.
Instead, where I’d maybe draw your attention to, and love to get your comment on is maybe a deeper issue that I see going on. That’s this message of ‘don’t trust yourself, trust authority.’ It certainly comes up in the stuff we’ve looked at. You know, the near-death experience research. Now you have millions of people who have had these encounters and say, “Hey, this happened and it was real. I was there and I saw them bringing over the paddles and I went up.” And what we’re told by science is, “No. You didn’t have that. You didn’t see that. You didn’t experience it.” And the parallel for me and JFK is the film. The film, however doctored it is, you can put a 5th grader down, who’s ever been hunting or fired a rifle and say, “See that guy? He just got shot.” Any 5th grader will tell you, “He got shot in the front because his head blew to the back.” And yet what we’re told is, “No, you didn’t. Don’t trust what you think you saw because the authority is telling you that isn’t what you saw.”
Dr. James Fetzer: You’re absolutely right about appeals to authority, which fall into two categories. There are the fallacious and the non-fallacious. A non-fallacious appeal to authority is when you have somebody you’re citing who actually is an authority in the area in respect with which you’re citing him.
That’s why I mentioned Mantik’s background and credentials in relation to his research into the JFK autopsy x-rays. He’s an authority in that area and his work is completely credible. Or John Costella, the guy’s got a Ph.D. in electromagnetism and the physics of light and moving objects. His research on the film is exceptional. So these are non-fallacious appeals.
But there are all kinds of fallacious appeals. Look at Gerald Posner, who was a Wall Street lawyer, for crying out loud. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a scholar in a serious sense. His work on JFK is just not going to be comparable to that of persons who actually have the scientific and technical competence to evaluate these things.
Vincent Bugliosi is a very curious case because Vince did this massive book on JFK and yet he commits the very blunders we’re talking about-special pleading, ad hominem, and straw man and all that. It’s embarrassing because he’s a brilliant prosecutor. He actually, at one point Alex, says that my three are the only exclusively scientific books ever published on the assassination. But then he disregards them. So that’s a classic case of special pleading. He acknowledges they’re there but he doesn’t address our findings, which means he’s actually continuing to cite only the evidence favorable to his side.
Alex Tsakiris: Right. Let me drive into that one more time because I hear where you’re going in terms of the authority figures. You have to know what’s real authority and what isn’t. But what about the message that gets driven home to us, the average person, which is you really can’t trust yourself. So you can’t look at that film and say, “Well, he’s shot in the front.”
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh yeah. The old Richard Pryor joke, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” [Laughs] Alex, in the end we all have to believe in ourselves. If you can’t believe your own eyes then there’s nothing in the world to which you’re not going to be vulnerable. “If they can convince us to believe absurdities, they can convince us to commit atrocities” has been well said.
Alex Tsakiris: Yes. Yes. And I think that message is on the uptick every place we look. I think that message is coming through in so many different ways and it’s louder and louder. Don’t trust yourself. For example, let’s jump into Jim Fetzer’s work. You know what? Don’t trust that because you’re not competent to really deal with it and sort it through. Don’t trust any of that. Let us tell you what the story is. I tell you, I hear that. I hear that as a subtext to a lot of…
Dr. James Fetzer: It’s a little tricky with me, given as much research that I’ve done that I earned a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of sciences-the many forms of recognition I’ve received for my research contributions across a variety of disciplines. It’s going to be hard to pin that tail on me, but that doesn’t mean the people who don’t know who I am or what I have done might not be taken in, which is simply to say, if you’re confronted with a serious question here, do some research.
Do some probing. Kick it around. Figure out what the different sides are about a position. And then weigh and assess the evidence. I’m offering you some rules. Take different hypotheses and ask, “What’s the probability of this evidence if the hypothesis is true?” What you’re going to find as a rule is that one hypothesis confers a far higher probability on the evidence than the alternative. You ought to prefer the one that confers the higher probability on the evidence.
Just imagine a couple points about Lee Oswald. His weapon cannot even have fired the bullets that killed the President because it’s not high-velocity, but the Warren Commission and the death certificate and all that say Jack was killed by high-velocity bullets. They couldn’t have been fired by Oswald’s weapon, so they made a mistake.
He wasn’t even on the sixth floor. We have quoted workers who reported he was on the second floor around the lunchroom at 10 minutes to 12, at 12, at 12:15, and as late as 12:25. The assassination took place at 12:30. He was confronted by a motorcycle patrolman, Marrion Baker, who held him in his sights within 90 seconds. He wasn’t perspiring. He wasn’t agitated.
Except Roy Truly, his supervisor, who confirmed to the officer the man was an employee and belonged there, observed he was a little startled, as someone might be to find an officer with a drawn weapon pointed right at them. And in fact, the officer added in this written report that he was drinking a Coke. Marina, later, observed that Lee admired JFK and bore him no malice, which means the man the Warren Commission fingered for the assassination had neither the means, the motive, or the opportunity to kill him.
Alex Tsakiris: What about the fact that he was CIA?
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh yeah, there’s a whole story, right, right. It appears he had been recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence when he was in the Marine Corps. His defection to the Soviet Union appears to be in the interest of or working for the CIA. When he came back he wasn’t treated as a defector. He was given money by a CIA front organization that helped him relocate.
Down in New Orleans he was working with a former FBI agent, Guy Bannister. He was pretending to be anti-Castro and handing out these “Fair Play for Cuba” committee things, but that was to develop his persona as a Communist sympathizer who was pro-Castro, so that when he was later framed for the assassination, they could claim that Castro was behind it.
This was supposed to not only take out Jack and put in place the policies of Lyndon Johnson over those of JFK but also blame it on Castro and the American people were supposed to rise up and insist on an attack. Crunching Castro and Cuba, that didn’t happen. But that was the idea and why he was being given that persona in New Orleans.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me throw this in because I don’t know that I’m with you on 100% of the things that you take an opinion on. I’m certainly not qualified to argue the facts of either 9/11 or the JFK assassination. But one thing I think is often misunderstood in these debates is you don’t have to be right about 100% of everything. Right?
Dr. James Fetzer: Yes.
Alex Tsakiris: You’re open, as I’ve experienced you through reading your work, you’re open to “Hey, maybe I’m wrong. This is the best I’ve come up with right now.” And particularly this last little bit you did on Oswald. Hey, sounds pretty reasonable to me. But there are other people who might spin it a slightly different way-his association with Hoover and was he double-crossing the CIA or whatever. There are so many different ways to spin it, but being right on 100% of everything isn’t required to undermine the big picture of what we’ve…
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh, you’re so right, Alex. It’s got to do with the difference between verification and falsification. These stories about 9/11 and JFK and Oswald and the lone assassin are flimsy. They’re a house of cards. If you can puncture them in any significant way, they pretty much fall apart. That’s true in both cases. On the other hand, to sustain them you have to show the government has gotten it right in all these respects and it manifestly has not. So there’s a really gross asymmetry there.
I think that’s a very nice point that you make, sure. I’m always open to new hypotheses and new evidence that might change my mind. But if you’re rational, you’re going to look for the hypothesis that provides the best explanation of the available evidence in its totality.
When the evidence all seems to point in the same direction, which can occur in JFK or 9/11 by sorting out the real from the fabricated evidence, it tends to “settle down”. Then you’re entitled to accept those conclusions in the tentative and fallible fashion of science, which means that you’re always open to revising your point of view as new hypotheses and new evidence becomes available. So you’re making an impeccable point.
Alex Tsakiris: The last point that I want to get into with you, and I appreciate you spending this time. You’re just an encyclopedia of knowledge. We could do a million episodes if we were so inclined on about ten different points you’ve covered.
But bringing it back to the big picture in the world that intersects with my world is a phrase “and that’s the fringe,” you know? I’m sure there are many people who have labeled you as being “on the fringe” or your ideas are on the fringe.
I encountered that recently when I got into a dialogue with a pretty fundamentalist conservative Christian guy. I was explaining to him some of the science of consciousness and particularly near-death experience and how that seems to conflict with some Christian doctrine. Then I further went and said, “You know, there’s some progressive Christians who are embracing some of this science.” He was quick to point out that those progressives are on the fringe.
And it just struck me as interesting in a number of ways because we all have these fringes, you know? We all create our own little bubble and then we have these exclusionary words like “Oh, you’re on the fringe. You’re not quite there.”
Dr. James Fetzer: It’s just as one man’s “insurgent” can be another man’s “freedom fighter”. If you look at these invasions from the point of view of the indigent population, Americans are an invading force and they are resisting our invasion and occupation of their countries. Therefore they’re regarded as heroes, as freedom fighters. I’d say with regard to this guy, one man’s “fringe” is another man’s “cutting edge”. I mean, I’m doing all this research that’s out to advance the boundaries of our knowledge. It could be described as “on the fringe” because most of the population hasn’t caught up yet.
On the other hand, if you look at the thoroughness and detail and the amount of evidence that substantiates where I’ve gone with this, you have to say, “That’s cutting edge!”
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, maybe on a personal level, then. How does it feel? It has to be wearing. I know it has to be wearing to constantly be pushed to the fringe as you are, often.
Dr. James Fetzer: You mean in the minds of others? Well, I recognize that, in science, the convergence of opinion only obtains when you’re looking at the same range of hypotheses, using the same body of evidence, and using the same rules of reasoning.
I know a great deal about these cases because I’ve investigated the full range of hypotheses, looked at all of the evidence-as much as is available-and sorted it out in terms of the authentic and the falsified and fabricated. I know the rules of reasoning because that’s been my professional obligation as a philosopher of science. So I’m in a position to analyze these things in a way that most others simply are not. But all for very understandable reasons. They either don’t understand the principles of reasoning; they don’t know the full range of the evidence; or they haven’t considered the alternative hypotheses.
Alex Tsakiris: Let me just push that a tiny bit further. So you have your group. You have Scholars for 9/11. You certainly have a solid group of researchers that you rely on for JFK assassination work. But I’m sure in your day-to-day life you butt up against people either at the grocery store or elsewhere, or certainly during your many appearances in the media, where it must seem insurmountable to bridge that gap between where you’re at and what you know even if you’re confident in what you know, and where these other folks are.
Dr. James Fetzer: It may be because of my background and experience as a professor, as a teacher, but I’m trying to share the information and knowledge and the principles by which it’s assessed with the rest of the world. Frankly, I receive much more positive feedback and support than you could ever imagine, Alex. Actually, it’s not lonely out there at all.
By the way, let me mention that this coming Friday, the 19th, Jesse Ventura’s going to have a feature on JFK. He invited me to participate in the filming so, if I’m not left on the cutting room floor, you’re going to see some pretty interesting stuff about that event on television on TruTV, 10 o’clock Eastern, with Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory” show. Just by coincidence.
Alex Tsakiris: Great. We won’t be able to get this show out in time but we’ll get it out in time for people to catch the re-broadcast.
So, Jim, what else is going on with you? You mentioned a couple of the books and articles that people can get their hands on and new ones that are coming out.
Dr. James Fetzer: Yes, yes, the best place to go is assassinationscience.com. All my latest articles are there on JFK and other issues. There’s a lot about Wellstone.
For 9/11 go to 911scholars.org. There’s a forum for those who want to participate in research and discussion that you can link to from the Scholar’s home page. It’s 911scholars.ning.com. If you want to visit you can join.
I just encourage everyone to study these cases to sharpen their ability to reason them through, because they’re eminently solvable. It just requires paying attention to the evidence, considering all the hypotheses, and applying the appropriate principles of reasoning.
Alex Tsakiris: Jim, it’s been a great pleasure talking with you. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Dr. James Fetzer: Oh, it’s wonderful and I’m just delighted you have a program like this. Anytime. My pleasure.
Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. James Fetzer for joining me today on Skeptiko. If you’d like to follow some of the links that Jim talked about on the show, please visit the skeptiko website. It’s at Skeptiko.com. You’ll also find links to all our previous shows, an email and facebook link to me, and a link to our forums where you can join other folks and discuss the issues that we talk about here on Skeptiko.
I’d like to offer my thanks to all of you who have recommended Skeptiko to your friends and have written and posted comments about Skeptiko. The show seems to definitely be growing and it’s just great to see. I hope it continues.
So plenty more episodes coming up in the near future, some stuff I think you’re really going to like. Stick around for all that. Take care, and bye for now.