5. What happened to the lost footage?
Although The Zapruder film would be the most famous piece of footage associated with the assassination, what Orville Nix captured on his camera from a different angle stirred up some questions that are still being asked to this day.
The Nix footage reportedly shows the now infamous ‘Grassy Knoll’ in the background. People who have viewed this footage claim to see anything from a puff of gun smoke or even a second shooter. However, this footage has supposedly gone missing.
When the film was examined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Nix would claim that the film he received back may not have been identical to the one that he taken. He maintained that the shots had come from behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll, but would later suggested he had been convinced the shots only came from the Texas School Book Depository after he was proved with ‘conclusive proof’.
Despite Orville Nix going to his grave in 1972, satisfied with the official narrative, his granddaughter would be less than convinced. In 2015, Gayle Nix-Jackson would file a lawsuit against the US government for the return of the original film or compensation seeking $10m.
When Ms. Jackson’s suit was “dismissed without prejudice” in 2017, she noted that “it was incomprehensible authorities would lose an important piece of historical evidence. I can understand little clerical issues. I don’t understand the loss of evidence like this.”
Many still hold out hope that this footage, with its seemingly contradictory evidence, will one day find its way back to the public domain so it can be scrutinized and dissected to see what secrets it might still reveal.
