Gadgetory

any quote-unquote fact is always subject to finding new information I think down deep the people on the other side know that we're right that's why they have ferociously opposed any and every effort to do any and every scientific test to determine the truth these people are not real historians they're afraid they are afraid of the truth here's a Xerox of one of the main articles the Rolling Stone magazine article of July 1st 1976 they really sensationalized it a conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories the startling revelations of young Nathaniel Orlick I'm Nate Orlick and for nearly 40 years since I was 15 years old I have been involved in researching the question as to whether John Wilkes Booth was really the man killed and Garrett's pardon and have ended up becoming the leader of the group of people who believed that probably he was not killed in Garrett's barn the standard history is the John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln on the night of April 14 1865 and was able to escape out of Washington and of course Booth was with David Herold his henchmen and while they were in the storage barn of a family named Garrett federal soldiers surrounded the barn and demanded that the two of them surrender Harold by all accounts did surrender but the other man in the barn refused to surrender they set the barn on fire one of the soldiers put his pistol up in the air shot the bullet happened to just go through one of the slats of the barn and happened to exactly find the back of the neck of this other man in the barn and supposedly that man was John Wilkes Booth when I was 15 I was at a friend's house just up the street from here and saw a book called the web of conspiracy and the very last page of the section where they have like pictures was titled puzzle for history and it showed a picture John Wilkes Booth and then a man who had obviously been deceased sitting in a chair and he mentioned in that page that there was this alternative theory that John was with maybe wasn't the man killed in the barn and that this guy sitting in this chair named David II George who supposedly committed suicide by poison in 1903 was really John Wilkes Booth in the book and mentioned a book by a man named finest Elle Bates who was friendly with a man who claimed that he was John Wilkes Booth who ended up being David E George the basic idea of that book was that there was a man who said his name was John st. Helen living in in small town in Texas in the 1870s and his best friend his lawyer was this guy named finest Elle Bates one night Johnson Helen got very sick and thought he was about to die and he called Bates over and he said before I die I want to tell someone who I really am I'm really John Wilkes Booth the assassin of President Lincoln inform my brother Edwin if I die the guy recovered and a couple weeks later he said to Bates you remember when I told you I was really John Wilkes Booth and Bates said oh yeah yeah I remember but you were you know you were very sick you were hallucinating don't worry about it he says no I really am John Wilkes Booth and now that I've gotten off my chest I want to tell you the whole story all these things said to me wow there's something here and president resigns just to publish historical research and February NATO Orla WAC SGA president announced that he planned to resign from his office president or Lackey retired to his home to continue work on the history by proving the John Wilkes Booth did not die when reported appearances on regional television helped the president to gain Fame so there I am and Here I am with with my cabinet John Wilkes Booth in reality was not killed by the federal government officers in 1989 I decided to go on my vacation to Enid Oklahoma ended up meeting with one of the prominent civic leaders and he said you know we've been trying to get the TV show unsolved mysteries the NBC show on solve mysteries which at that time was one of the top-rated shows 30 million people saw it every week to do a story about this to John Wilkes Booth escape Union troops at Garrett farm only to kill himself 38 years later in an Oklahoma boardinghouse the history books say no John Wilkes Booth died in 1865 four years later his remains were returned to Maryland and buried in an unmarked grave in the family plot perhaps their rest the definitive answer to this unsolved mystery the very next day the cemetery got a call from some of the descendants of John Wilkes Booth collateral descendents saying if these guys want to exhume that body don't let them the same day I got a call from the Smithsonian Institution and they said we would love to do an exclamation and we want you to let us do the examination of it because we're the Smithsonian Institution of course I was delighted that that was the case they were going to do dental records and particularly something called photographic superimposition where you take pictures of someone and they're about 100 pictures that everyone agrees or John Wilkes Booth and you superimpose it on on a skull if it matches it doesn't mean that's the same person but if it doesn't match it can't be the same person and when they showed all the evidence that we had to the extended family 21 of the 22 the sentence agreed that we were probably right and they signed onto it hi I'm Joanne Hume I should have just gonna what do you want me to say do you want me to say I'm a descendent of the Bluth family what they just give me how far you want me to go well somewhere between fifth and sixth grade the summer that I was going to be going into sixth grade apparently I was being dramatic and my mother said oh stop being so dramatic she said you just like your relatives and I said well what do you mean and she said well you're related to a family of famous actors so he said oh who and she said Edwin Booth and I didn't know of too many other boots so I said oh is he related to John Wilkes Booth and I just expected the answer to be don't be ridiculous but the answer was yes he is John Wilkes Booth's brother and then she kind of like took a like a breath and then said listen you're going to be going into sixth grade you're going to be learning about the Civil War and I want you to understand now they're going to tell you that John Wilkes Booth died in the barn he did not die in the barn he lived many many years afterwards the family always knew it and that you're just going to have to kind of learn to live with the fact that what you're being told is incorrect we were just trying to get permission to exhume this body from the cemetery we didn't think anything of it we just thought okay let's dig this person up and let's see are we related or we not related and you know when my mother finally died and I always say she really died of a broken heart and she decided I want to know who's in there if this is not John Wilkes Booth then we need this person out every John Wilkes Booth then that's fine then we know and so it was all set to be done the Smithsonian was all set to do it and then a group of historians who believed that booth was killed in the barn contacted the president of the cemetery William Tribble and convinced him to try to block it as a human being I am fallible I've made many mistakes in my life and in fact I may even have made a mistake in concluding the John Wilkes Booth wasn't killed in the barn I'm not a hundred percent sure as I often say would be the first time I was wrong about something there's no shame in being wrong but there is shame for historians people who call themselves historians to block an attempt to get the truth Greenmount cemetery knows what the right thing to do is and in fact it would be much more scientifically feasible to do an exclamation now so I originally met Nate about two years ago originally Nate had just asked some questions if we have this type of material if we have these bones would it be possible to get DNA from them to address the question of the identity of John Wilkes Booth we would need a biological sample from the person who died in the barn because that's what we're testing to see if we can identify that person and DNA is essentially useless unless you have a comparison sample the plan that we were that we recently were going to do was to take the DNA from one of the three vertebrae that were taken out according to all accounts were taken out of the Mankell in the barn they've been at the National Museum of health and medicine all along and we can now compare the DNA there with the DNA from his brother Edwin Booth was the only member of that of the family not buried in green mound if the DNA in the vertebrae have the same mitochondrial DNA as Edwin booths actually wouldn't completely prove that they're brothers it would just prove that they're related but even I would concede at that point however if they did not match then with absolute 100% certainty they couldn't be brothers if they're not related they're not brothers and so within five minutes we'd have the answer if the museum were to grant our request for a sample for genetic analysis they would just be cutting a very small portion of this bone just a small enough amount as you see in this test tube here and that would be enough for us to be able to perform the Chan analysis unfortunately now just a short time ago we received the answer from the Department of the Army that even though they themselves say that they are tempted to do this that they do not want anything that's going to destroy their specimen despite the fact that our expert says it won't destroy the specimen on the one hand I completely understand because in order to do any type of DNA analysis on bone we do have to destroy a very small amount but on the other hand the technology is so sensitive today that we would use a very small amount just 0.2 grams our starting material of bone powders all we would need in order to do this type of analysis we the American people own that museum and we the American people have a right to know the truth if why are we spending millions of dollars to run a museum if when the the biggest crime in American history the issue of what happened to the man who killed my opinion in most people's opinion the greatest president we ever had but they won't even give us a fragment of their specimen why on earth do we have specimens when would it ever be used the American people should insist that this museum that we owned let us do this test and get the truth out whatever the truth is there or DNA hits being done all the time like I said if you can find richard the lionheart under a under a parking lot and if you can find Copernicus in the you know the ruins of a church and you can prove these people or we lead it to and or who they are then I just don't understand why history does not want to be either confirming this is history correct or this is history incorrect I am a scientist at heart I want to be able to use the scientific method and be able to approach these questions unbiased it just seems like there are so many things that could have potentially happened that we might not know the answers to and in terms of trying to solve this mystery it seems like the DNA might be the only chance we have to do that I just feel with what I know and what I've been told of what I've learned I don't know that I would ever believe if the government came and said okay we have proved that this is John Wilkes Booth I would have to say okay how you prove this to me I don't care who else you prove it to prove it to me so I don't see it putting it to rest in our and I think that's what people are afraid of they don't want to change history of 150 years ago I don't want to change history I just want to know at every step of the way that we talked about I felt like the story had so to speak ended because my goal always was to just do the best I could the only people who lose are the ones who don't try even I think our bitterest opponents would grant that we have given them one hell of a run for this and so I have never felt anything other than that we've succeeded other people now have to step forward and do their part if they do we can all in the end we can all win if we get the truth you