UMD News Releases

A national conference on the Death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), will bring together the most outstanding experts and scholars (including physicians and scientists) to ever study the assassination of President Kennedy. The conference is set for May 14-16 at the Carlson School of Management on the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. Speakers for the conference have never appeared all together in the same forum before.

Expert presenters are:
Judge John Tunheim
George Michael Evica, PhD
John Newman, PhD
Douglas Weldon, JD
Gary Aguilar, MD
Douglas Horne
David Mantik, MD, PhD
David Lifton
John Armstrong
Robert Groden
Danny Schechter

The three-day conference is sponsored by University College Duluth and the University of Minnesota Duluth.

"This will be the most comprehensive, the most contemporary, the most up-to-date presentation of what we know about the assassination that has ever been presented to the American people," said Dr. James H. Fetzer, McKnight Professor and program chair.

Conference presenters are nationally known experts from across the country. They will discuss alternative explanations for the assassination including specific examination of the medical evidence, media coverage, the Kennedy limousine, and the Zapruder film, as well as recent insights and discoveries from the Assassination Records Review Board. Expert commentators will critique each session and promote discussion.

The Assassination Records Review Board, which came into existence by an act of Congress as a result of the surge of public interest in the assassination generated by Oliver Stone's film JFK, has now expired after releasing previously classified documents and records. The conference provides an occasion to assimilate this new evidence into previous assassination studies and explore their significance in an academic setting.

"It's astonishing and profoundly disturbing," Fetzer said. "What we've discovered is that the most basic evidence in this case--the autopsy report, the autopsy photographs, the diagrams and photographs in the National Archives, and even the Zapruder film--have been fabricated, faked, reprocessed, rewritten, and revised in order to conform to a predetermined view of the assassination. There is no access route into the study of the assassination that doesn't lead to the same conclusions."

The conference registration fee for all three days is $150. There is an option to earn four undergraduate or graduate quarter credits through University College Duluth.