Umbrella Man - The Best Explanation I'd Never Heard Before

After my years on this board, I now know that there are those people who would honestly believe that opening a black umbrella as Kennedy's motorcade drove by would be an effective protest against Joe Kennedy's embrace of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy of the late 30's. No better than Norman Bates' "I'd never hurt a fly" display in the last scene of "Psycho" (as far as convincing anyone that he was innocent of the murder charges), but in that umbrella guy's mind, he was giving JFK a real poignant zinger with that black "Chamberlain" umbrella.

The human mind is a miracle. It really is.

Sorry if this subject and/or video link has already been hammered on this forum this year, but I didn't see it listed, so...

Nice video, and one I hope many people will watch, digest, and learn from.

I'm sharing that across other mediums so thank you for the link.

My first guess would have been that seeing the sun was out and maybe a bit bright for the gentleman that might have been heading home from a few nights with the secret mistress and just happened to catch the show ..First I have heard of this and find it interesting .. Got to go look some stuff up to read ...tks .

reply to post by NorEaster


Good video.

A cautionary tale indeed.

Some of the Sandy Hook nuts would do well to watch this I think.

reply to post by NorEaster


Yep, good find, never knew this about Umbrella Man. And the observation he makes in the vid that those six or eight seconds are like a macro-quantum event has been one I've been talking about for over 20 years. The short time and space in Dallas, focused on like a laser for 50 years, contains almost every conceivable variation on a theme, conspiracy data (any theory you come up with will have physical facts to back it up), and shows the malleability of everyday reality when perceived by individual minds. It's a great teaching tool to show the "We create our own reality" phenomena.

reply to post by NorEaster





Ahhh. Thankyou. So because there is a prosaic explanation for umbrella man, therefore oswald.

Makes perfect sense.

reply to post by NorEaster


Chamberlain's appeasement policy huh?

Okay I know I'm gonna take some flame for this but he looks like a targeting marker to me. The only thing missing is a florescent orange vest.

Bassago
reply to post by NorEaster

 

Chamberlain's appeasement policy huh?

Okay I know I'm gonna take some flame for this but he looks like a targeting marker to me. The only thing missing is a florescent orange vest.

I have to agree about being a targeting marker. Not only do we have no proof that the guy who came forward was the man in the video, but the location is so precise compared to when the shooting starts.

Fascinating that you can see Abraham Zapruder's lower legs up on the marble fence-base just to the side of the Stemmons Freeway sign and above the Secret Service agent's head in that shot.

I'm pretty sure JFK's last thought wasn't about Chamberlain's umbrella...

reply to post by Bassago


I tend to agree with you on this. The explanation would have been more plausible years earlier, but in 1963, really?

So the take-home message is : "Hey conspiracy theorists! You might be wrong!". Well thanks a bunch "Tink". I think we've heard this before, but the fact remains, we might be right. He just happens to believe Umbrella Man's story. Not everyone will.

Random thoughts:

A "protest", huh? Aren't they supposed to be obvious, like with signs and banners? Plenty of people protested Kennedy that day. They did it with placards, not an umbrella(?).

It was the perfect all clear signal from someone who was in perfect position to see that everyone in the car was seated where they were supposed to be.

Who on high could miss that umbrella?

Ever hear of the balloon is going up? It meant ready for action.

Nobody else had one out that day except him and it was eminently visible from everywhere in that plaza.

AlphaHawk
reply to post by NorEaster

 

Good video.

A cautionary tale indeed.

Some of the Sandy Hook nuts would do well to watch this I think.

Definitely. I was thinking about that when I decided to post this. If you don't know the full context of an intriguing piece of information, you can completely misinterpret what that information should suggest, and it can send you off on a trajectory that ultimately....well, the truth is that we've seen way too much of that here on ATS and in the media in the last several years. I don't even need to finish that sentence with an example of how wrong you can end up being if you're not careful and disciplined in your investigations.

Odd little details happen, but they shouldn't steer the direction of an investigation, no matter how odd they are. Only on TV crime shows and in mystery novels is this common, but then, if an odd detail is presented within a fictional story, it's NOT a "little detail". It's already a significant detail as a result of the fact that it exists at all within the confines of an extremely defined and exclusive gathering of details that made it into the story itself. Real life isn't like that. In reality, the details that exist haven't been intentionally included by the author as carefully placed clues. Some of them aren't clues at all. In fact, in larger events, most details aren't clues, and the JFK Assassination is a perfect example of that being true.

I'm a total believer in the existence of high-level conspiracies, and I don't believe that Oswald was a lone-gunman screwball. Still, the fact that there has been so much disorganized and undisciplined independent investigation that's been given so much media attention and blanket cultural credibility over the years since that murder has turned that public murder into a game of Clue that will never be anything more than a game. I worry that the same is happening to the 9/11 Attacks mass murder, and that the full cast of perpetra(i)tors in that case will never be brought to justice either.

Freedom of thought and expression are valuable aspects of our open society, and I don't want that to ever change. I guess I just get frustrated when I see how easy it is to manipulate this most wonderful part of being an individual American citizen in the modern era, and turn it into a weapon that can be used against us as a whole society. Probably, in the last year or so, the Sandy Hook disgrace is the most obvious example of this. The stink on that one will permeate all attempts to expose real conspiracies and official cover-ups for quite a while. I guess we had to expect the Mad Men to strike back at any and all attempts to expose the big evil of this world, and to do it through our own mismanagement of the very freedom that we have to expose that evil. They didn't get those marketing contracts as a result of being stupid or lazy.

reply to post by DeadSeraph



Nah.. there is no changing the fact that Oswald is a Patsy. The guy in the video even believes there is possibly/probably a conspiracy (though he believes that Oswald was one of the shooters, I do not, if there is a conspiracy then they aren't going to let half the shooting team be any less than distinguished).

Here's the thing though.. if it was (and it likely is) a compartmentalized cia op, then how hard would it be to get someone to say "I was the umbrella man." Really? They asked "Umbrella man" come forward, and a guy did, must be the real guy.

And such an absurd explanation is brilliant and not too weird to be true. It's something that would make people roll their eyes and move past him quickly apologizing for wasting his time.

Now i am not saying this video isn't absolutely correct, but it like most things shouldn't be taken at face value based solely on it's own confidence. You have to also be aware that the hearing that had the Umbrella man show up also concluded that there was a conspiracy (78 house committee on assassinations).

Did they ask the umbrella man in court which direction he thought the shots came from since he was front row center stage?

intrptr
Random thoughts:

A "protest", huh? Aren't they supposed to be obvious, like with signs and banners? Plenty of people protested Kennedy that day. They did it with placards, not an umbrella(?).

It was the perfect all clear signal from someone who was in perfect position to see that everyone in the car was seated where they were supposed to be.

Who on high could miss that umbrella?

Ever hear of the balloon is going up? It meant ready for action.

Nobody else had one out that day except him and it was eminently visible from everywhere in that plaza.

It wasn't so much a protest as an attempt to insult him. No shooter in that kill zone would've needed a guy with an umbrella to tell them that the car was in position. Seriously. They had wireless radios at that time. They had a wide range of methods to keep all event participants in sync that wouldn't include something as blatantly obvious as a guy with a black umbrella opened at the point of crossfire impact.

Real killers don't stage cartoonish clues like that. As much as I honestly believe that JFK was a sitting duck for at least two shooters, the umbrella man seems like one of those bizarre coincidences that litter human history. I think that he chose the Dealy Plaza area after he saw that it was the one stretch of downtown where the crowds were thinned out enough for Kennedy to actually see his protest display. It would have been his last shot at (in his own mind) "powning" the president by mocking his father's infamous political crash-and-burn moment. He probably saw it as something that JFK would immediately understand, since Chamberlain (and that infernal black umbrella) was the very famous reason that Joe Kennedy's political fortunes vanished at the height of their promise. He'd be thinking "Like father, like son" with that umbrella display. Not very clear to the rest of us here in the 21st century, or probably for most folks in that time period, but I've definitely seen much more obscure "gotchas" here on this board. It's certainly plausible that this guy was thinking "Here's one for you and your loser dad!" with that open umbrella.

DeadSeraph
reply to post by NorEaster

 

Ahhh. Thankyou. So because there is a prosaic explanation for umbrella man, therefore oswald.

Makes perfect sense.

No. Oswald was involved, but not alone. There's a documentary that's based on the book "Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 hours to live" and it's really good for anyone wanting to fully understand how Oswald came to be arrested and charged with the assassination. There's one piece of testimony from his wife and his mom that cinched for me that he wasn't a lone gunman, and that was the last conversation he had with them on Saturday. He told them, "Don't worry. It'll be alright. I got friends and it's all going to be okay." He wasn't worried, as he would've been if he'd be alone in this thing. He believed that he was part of a much larger, much more powerful process, and that he'd be spirited out of Dallas once the in-processing effort was finalized. He probably believed he was CIA, and his handlers did what they had to to make him believe that.

Personally, I see LBJ as being the ringleader here, and his longtime criminal cabal as being the ones who supplied the "handler" who posed as CIA to Oswald and put in their own 2nd shooter. Oswald definitely was a shooter, but not the only one.

The most rational explanation I can come up with is that certain medications makes people's skin highly photosensitive. Some people are born with a condition that is similar. I was never aware this man testified in front of Congress. If his intent was to make a statement about Chamberlain I think it's meaning would be lost on everyone including Kennedy.
Waving a piece of paper would be a more easily recognizable reference imo.

NorEaster

intrptr
Random thoughts:

A "protest", huh? Aren't they supposed to be obvious, like with signs and banners? Plenty of people protested Kennedy that day. They did it with placards, not an umbrella(?).

It was the perfect all clear signal from someone who was in perfect position to see that everyone in the car was seated where they were supposed to be.

Who on high could miss that umbrella?

Ever hear of the balloon is going up? It meant ready for action.

Nobody else had one out that day except him and it was eminently visible from everywhere in that plaza.

It wasn't so much a protest as an attempt to insult him. No shooter in that kill zone would've needed a guy with an umbrella to tell them that the car was in position. Seriously. They had wireless radios at that time. They had a wide range of methods to keep all event participants in sync that wouldn't include something as blatantly obvious as a guy with a black umbrella opened at the point of crossfire impact.

Real killers don't stage cartoonish clues like that. As much as I honestly believe that JFK was a sitting duck for at least two shooters, the umbrella man seems like one of those bizarre coincidences that litter human history. I think that he chose the Dealy Plaza area after he saw that it was the one stretch of downtown where the crowds were thinned out enough for Kennedy to actually see his protest display. It would have been his last shot at (in his own mind) "powning" the president by mocking his father's infamous political crash-and-burn moment. He probably saw it as something that JFK would immediately understand, since Chamberlain (and that infernal black umbrella) was the very famous reason that Joe Kennedy's political fortunes vanished at the height of their promise. He'd be thinking "Like father, like son" with that umbrella display. Not very clear to the rest of us here in the 21st century, or probably for most folks in that time period, but I've definitely seen much more obscure "gotchas" here on this board. It's certainly plausible that this guy was thinking "Here's one for you and your loser dad!" with that open umbrella.

edit on 11/24/2013 by NorEaster because: (no reason given)

No.. they wouldn't need an umbrella to know when to shoot, but if you knew there would be shooting, wouldnt an umbrella be a good way to hide your head behind a big black thing that says "DONT ACCIDENTALLY SHOOT THIS!"

Like I said, not saying theres anything to it, but Kennedy wouldn't have caught the reference at all. So unless this guy was an artsy fartsy symbolic because I want to - protestor then that's such a dumb explanation. However it would make sense as a hunter wearing orange (and you can bet if there was a conspiracy, and there was, there were up close observers.

He would be in the perfect position umbrella as his hunters orange to the school book depo shooter, and right in front of the sign of the grassy knoll shooter.

NorEaster
No shooter in that kill zone would've needed a guy with an umbrella to tell them that the car was in position.

Agreed. A shooter would be more distracted trying to judge when to shoot ... right at the time they need to be focused on the mechanics of the shot itself.

I also heard something about ensuring range estimation. The bullet's trajectory from any hypothetical hide would have been flat at those distances.

reply to post by NorEaster

With all respect I am aware of Chamberlin's folly. But I thought it related more to the promise of peace when all else understood it was blatantly obvious there was going to be war. In fact there already was. The focus claimed by the umbrella man was the umbrella Chamberlain carried? He was also holding a signed document from Hitler (failed promises). In my mind that is what is more important. I also get that the British had to swagger with their swagger sticks, canes and yes, umbrellas. They all did it.

Maybe you could help me understand more how that relates to an umbrella? And how father and son Kennedy compares to Hitler and Chamberlin? Something to read would be good. I respect your opinions here, this is a serious request.

reply to post by Snarl

Agreed. A shooter would be more distracted trying to judge when to shoot … right at the time they need to be focused on the mechanics of the shot itself.

The umbrella wouldn't interfere with that. It was out already so all clear. If it hadn't been (up) that would mean there was a problem. Like a last minute abort signal, not a last second one.

Not much of a distraction, as quickly noticeable to a trained shooters eye as where Kennedy was in the car.
Of course Umbrella Mans story is even more of a reach.

I can't buy that either.