Fair Play recently took some heat for the article about the #5 Man detail of the Moorman photo in our previous issue. We --- which means me, John Kelin, who wrote the article --- were ridiculed on the venerable newsgroup alt.conspiracy.jfk for having written an "embarrassingly bad" article. Well, I stand by the article, unembarrassed.

Recently I took a copy of the Moorman photo and scanned the hell out of it, creating my own version of #5 man (above). The result was, without question, inferior to what was shown in my article, but it does demonstrate what you can do with ten minutes, a Moorman print, and a scanner.

The versions used in the "#5 Man" article were scanned from a book by Ray Marcus. Like those versions, the print I used for my scans was from a "half tone" negative, which critics of the #5 man detail charge (without supplying any supporting data) helped create an illusion of light, shadow, and dots.

Readers would do well to remember that, on seeing a much clearer version than the one shown here, a photo expert at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California said in 1967, "You don't need an expert to tell you that's a man."

Critics of the image further allege, falsely, that #5 man doesn't appear in the original Moorman photo. The above scan reveals that he does. It was made from Mary Moorman's already-degraded original in 1967.

Any fair-minded person, I think, must conclude that the image designated "#5 man" thirty five years ago is indeed a man.

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