JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
It's not even that good. Robert's quote amounts to, "Someone said that someone else said the fairy photos were genuine." And yes, it's a red herring.
Robert originally hoped to show that Britain's "leading intellectual," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, could be fooled by "unsophisticated" girls, therefore it's plausible to suppose that photo experts in the 1980s could be fooled by fake x-rays and autopsy photos fabricated by relatively simple means. At best it's a red herring.
Conan Doyle, while a popular literary figure, was not seen as an intellectual, although there's considerable evidence he believed himself to be. While he could create a logical-thinking character such as Sherlock Holmes, who was brilliant within the world Conan Doyle created for him and according to the events and details he contrived to frame it, he did not fare so well in the real world. He was often pig-headed, and was said to simply ignore everything that did not fit his preconceptions. Thus rather than exemplify the Holmesian ideal, he tried to fashion his own world into the contrived world of his short stories. Even the most well-quoted Holmes line, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," speaks to the wrong-headed notion of inferential reasoning when trying to solve real-world mysteries.
As to the photographs and the fairies, Conan Doyle simply took the girls at their word when they presented themselves as innocent maidens who really knew nothing of photography, and cherry-picked what he wanted from expert opinion. In the final analysis, Conan Doyle really wanted to believe that the fairy photos were real, and in his carefully selective world where he was a supremely critical thinker (because he let no refutation through the door into it), he believed he had sewn up the case.
So it's not an example of a scientific man fooled by amateurs. It's an example of a gullible, credulous man fooled by people he was predisposed not to suspect, using simple tricks that others managed to see through.
Enough of Conan Doyle. HSCA authenticated the x-rays and photos. That much is black-and-white fact. Robert claimed otherwise, and he is a liar. What he likely means to argue is that the authentication should be disregarded because it was politically motivated or that it lacked a proper evidentiary or scientific basis. Arguing motivation is always the easy way to troll because it can be argued ad nauseam without coming to any resolution. Arguing it on scientific or evidentiary basis, in the JFK case, always means parading a bunch of charlatans around who claim, in their clearly unbiased and highly informed expert opinion, the autopsy photos and x-rays must have been faked, because of "anomalies" (i.e., things that the pseudo-experts don't understand).
Yeah, we're not going back through Jack White and Tom Wilson. But if he stays true to form, he'll just say that his "forty medical witnesses" prove the photos fake. It's the same old indirect, inferential nonsense.
