Lee Harvey Oswald in his backyard.

According to a Dartmouth computer scientist, the infamous photograph of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle in his backyard would have been almost impossible to fake.

After being arrested and charged with the murder of President John F. Kennedy, Oswald was interrogated by Dallas police and shown the picture of himself with a rifle in one hand and Marxist newspapers in the other. Oswald claimed the photo had been doctored, and over the years there have been numerous conspiracy theories that allege the photograph has unusual lighting and shadows.

Now, Hany Farid, a pioneer in the field of digital forensics at the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth, has digitally analyzed the photograph and concluded that all the shadows are exactly where they should be.

“You can never really prove an image is real, but the evidence that people have pointed to that the photo is fake is incorrect,” Farid said Thursday. “As an academic and a scientist, I don’t like to say it’s absolutely authentic… but it’s extremely unlikely to have been a fake.”

In order to test how the light could hit in such a strange way (Farid himself found the photograph odd), he constructed a 3D model of Oswald’s head and the backyard scene and determined that the photo’s single source of light, the sun, was capable of producing all of the shadows.

In all, Farid’s findings have fallen in line with his earlier work, showing that the human visual system is not very good at “making judgments regarding 3-D geometry, lighting, and shadows.” His study will be published in a forthcoming issue of the peer-reviewed journal Perception.