Was Fletcher Prouty's Trip to Antarctica Unusual?

On September 24, 1996, L. Fletcher Prouty was interviewed by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). You can click here to read a very good summary of his interview.

Prouty was unable to back up any of the allegations from his books and articles.

In fact, the ARRB interviewers were so unimpressed with Prouty that they decided to have a full transcript typed up. Have a look at this memo:

Tim Wray notes at the bottom of the first page:

"More importantly, however, we need to do a full transcript of his interview with us because -- given the fact that it is so full of retractions, contradictions and diqualifications of his other statements -- there's no way we can fairly represent the interview in summary form without it looking like a hatchet job."

I thought it would be useful to go over Prouty's allegations, one by one, and post his exact testimony. Here is an excerpt from the ARRB summary memo:

Here is some dialogue from the film JFK:

X (voice over) ... a strange thing happened. I was sent by my superior officer, call him Y, to the South Pole as the military escort for group of international VIPs. This trip had nothing to do with my nine years of work in Special Operations. It was sort of a "paid vacation."

Here is Prouty's testimony to the ARRB regarding his trip to Antarctica:

Wray: But I guess my question now about the Antarctica trip [is]; do you feel that you were sent to Antarctica for some sinister purpose to get you out of the --

Prouty: Oh, no. I'd been working with them since 1959. It was so routine for them to call me, that I didn't give it a thought. And when they said 'we've got this team of people going down in a military airplane;' it's the military custom to put an escort officer in board. And so my boss said, "You're escort officer for this flight to Antarctica." [I thought] Fine. And that's all it was. It was just like that. And then when I found out it was this nuclear plant, I thought, "Gee, this is interesting." I got all the books I could and everything, so I would know what the hell was going on. But I had nothing ... I never figured Kennedy was gong to be killed, or anything else. And even afterwards, when I heard people extrapolating in that sense, thinking that it wasn't my job; they didn't know that I'd already been working with Antarctica people since 1959. I've never heard one of them say that. Yet that's a record. I mean, apparently, they haven't taken out the records from the Antarctica offices, because that's a record there' signed by the man who sent me this very nice commendation letter, among other things.

The conclusion of the ARRB:

"The trip to Antarctica, ascribed sinister intent in the film JFK, was a routine duty for Col. Prouty, and was not particularly unusual. Since there was nothing unusual about the trip, nor is there any apparent connection to the assassination beyond Prouty's having been on a trip at the time of the shooting, no further research is recommended by the ARRB staff. No records relating to the assassination could be reasonable expected to be obtained. Prouty made no statements for the records to back up suspicions he mentioned in the excerpt from his book cited above."

You can download the ARRB interview with Fletcher Prouty on the Documents page.