A grainy old home movie that’s been missing in action for nearly 50 years might finally get its day in court, and some people think it could rewrite the history of what really happened the day President Kennedy was killed. Back on November 22, 1963, a Dallas man named Orville Nix was out with his 8mm camera when shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. Unlike the much more famous Zapruder film, Nix pointed his lens toward the grassy knoll, the low hill where dozens of witnesses said they heard gunfire coming from behind a wooden fence.
His footage shows Jackie Kennedy climbing onto the back of the limousine right after her husband was hit, plus a clear view of that fence area. Conspiracy researchers have always said this is one of the few pieces of film that actually captured the spot many believe held a second shooter.
The original film hasn’t been seen publicly since 1978, as per a report from New York Post. That year it was sent to a company in Los Angeles for analysis. After that it bounced around, to the FBI, to United Press International, to Congress during the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings, and to a firm called The Aerospace Corporation. Everyone says they gave it back to someone else. The National Archives insists they only ever had a copy, not the camera-original.
Family’s Long Fight to Get It Back
Orville Nix died in 1972. His granddaughter, Linda Gayle Nix Jackson, picked up the legal battle her father started, as per the report. She’s convinced the film is worth more than $900 million and that it could finally prove Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. On January 15, a federal judge in the Court of Federal Claims ruled that the case can move forward. Judge Stephen Schwartz’s order opens the door for lawyers to dig into what really happened to the film and force the government to explain where it is.
Why the Family Says It’s Worth a Fortune
The lawsuit leans on the Fifth Amendment: the government can’t just take someone’s property without paying fair value. According to the report, the family’s attorney, Scott Watnik from Wilk Auslander LLP said that modern optics and AI tools in 2026 could pull out details nobody could see back in the 1970s.
“If we subjected the camera-original film to optics technology of 2026, we can certainly capture details in the film that we never could have captured when … the committee had the film in 1978,” Watnik said.
He points to the 1978 House committee report that concluded Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”, a finding partly based on acoustic evidence from the Nix film (though the FBI later called parts of that analysis inaccurate).
The family is using the famous Zapruder film as a benchmark. In 1999 an arbitration panel valued the Zapruder original at $16 million. Nix’s lawyers say if you start with a similar number in the early 1990s and add more than 30 years of compound interest, the figure climbs into the hundreds of millions, their preliminary estimate is around $930 million.
The Government’s Side and the Big Legal Hurdle
The 1992 JFK Records Act gave the federal government ownership of assassination-related materials while setting rules for eventual public release. That law could make it tough for the family to win big money. Still, the judge has green-lit discovery, so lawyers will now try to track down documents and answers about who had the film, when, and why it disappeared.
What Could Happen Next
If the original Nix film ever surfaces and gets examined with today’s technology, some believe it might show movement behind the fence or other clues that have been debated for six decades. The Warren Commission said Oswald acted alone from the Texas School Book Depository. The House committee in 1978 disagreed. Most official investigations since then have stuck with the lone-gunman conclusion.
For now, the film itself remains missing. Whether it turns up and what it might show is still anyone’s guess.
