Check out: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm
And by the way, it isn’t my belief that a conspiracy occurred in the sense that the Mafia, the CIA and Russia all participated in the assassination; but I do believe that the shooting was carried out by multiple shooters – Oswald being one of them – and that Kennedy was hit in the back (the throat shot) by a bullet fired from behind and roughly at street level, and in the head by a bullet fired from the front and to his right.
And on preview, thanks Carnac…I’ll check it out.
No. The point of the experiment is to show that what really happens is counterintuitive. You’d THINK that the force of the bullets impact would drive the pumpkin away from the shooter, but the truth is, it doesn’t. That’s because as far as the bullet is concerned the pumpkin may as well be warm butter, it cuts right through the shell of the pumpkin so fast that the impact doesn’t actually knock the pumpkin over. In fact, the impact is minimal. What does the trick is the jet action of the bullet coming out of the exit wound.
Just like the sucking action of the wind that drags behind a big truck, the bullet does the same thing as it travels through the head. So out of the exit wound comes blood and brain like water shooting from a hose, and like a hose, the head gets pushed in the direction opposite that of the stream.
Hence, back and to the left.
Diceman also mentioned how good Kennedy looked “for a guy who’s supposedly had his brains blasted out the front of his head”.
For one thing he had been cleaned up a bit by then, but more importantly, the exit wound was like a flap that closed semi-neatly, the opening of which was on part of his head where hair was, so it’s not readily clear in that picture.
I believe that anybody looking for relevance or direction on this message board (or, perhaps, any other) is in for a sad disappointment.
A cursory glance at today’s page one of General Question has one concerning Penis Yeast and a Penis pictured on currency.
In this context, I believe that my OP can be called not only relevant, but revelatory.
hh
The "one’ , of course, would be athe OP.
hh
One conspiracy theory book I read “Best Evidence” explained the slight foward movement like this.
The head sits on the neck. (duh) The neck is not a joint like a the knee with strict back anf forth movements. The grassy knoll is not only to the front and right but above the president in the motorcade. When the fatal shot impacted his head is alread going foward. The bullet hits and pushes his head down, bending his neck and pulling him foward and then the head rolls back. (Bend you neck like JFK and then try to imagin the head shot coming in near the hair line and from slightly above.
The book then goes on to say that before the official autopsey, JFK’s body was ‘borrowed’ so the bullet could be removed and the wounds altered so as to look like it came from behind.
Riiiiiiight.
Thanks for taking the time for this detailed explanation, but again it raises some questions. (Sorry, Carnac, as you may be aware I have this problem where my monitor goes out for long periods of time, which happened right after nmy post to you. I just got back on and haven’t had time yet to check out the page you linked to.)
I’m thinking that you are saying that a shot from Oswald could have caused Kennedy’s movement. Is that right?
If so, according to your explanation wouldn’t the shot have to have come from in front and to the right, given that the brain material from the exit wound (which in my opinion was caused by more of a glancing type of hit on the right side of his head as he slumped leftward toward his wife) flew up, back, and to his left? If the shot had come from Oswald, and according to the hose analogy, wouldn’t the brain matter have exited downward and to Kennedy’s left rather than up and back? And accordingly, wouldn’t the jet action have driven his head back in the direction of the bullet’s path?
But even more importantly, his brains weren’t blasted out the front of his head. He was hit by a glancing type of blow that barely managed to hit him at all, given that the shot was probably lined up just as Kennedy began to slump leftward toward his wife. (Had he begun to slump few thousanths of a second sooner, the bullet would have missed him altogether.) But be that as it may, the Zapruder film clearly shows that he was hit above his right ear and there was no damage to his face.
Yes, I think he’s saying that, although I’m doubtful that it explains it entirely, and muscular spasms seem to fit the motion better.
No, not at all. The head shot wasn’t as much a glancing hit, as simply an off-center hit. He hit above and to the right of the center of the head. The shock pressure, together with the bullet breaking the bones, ejected the top right portion of his skull, above the ear, I think a little behind it. The path of stuff ejected was perpindicular to the bullet path in this case. The ejection of that material would cause the remainder of his skull to get a push to the left. You can look at the physics as conservation of momentum, where the momentum of ejecta is balanced by a kick to the left, or you can think of it as pressures, and the concentric pressure wave that blew off the stuff to the right, pushed the remainder of the skull to the left without shattering it.
[sub]Completely surrendering to the pressure of most posters to force the thread away from the OP and towards GD …[/sub]
In the course of digging up links for one of my earlier posts, I happened to realise that a scan of Luis Alvarez’s classic paper “A Physicist Examines the Kennedy Assassination Film” - which is the origin of these arguments - is now available online (a pdf).
Thanks very much for the explanation, CurtC. I must admit that my notion of events has been shaken somewhat by the info I’ve learned from this thread. I’ve only just gotten back online still have to check out the link from Carnac and the new one posted by bonzer. I’ll back out of here now, with apologies to the OP, and go do some research as to how to think about this.
Thanks again to everyone who posted regarding my comments.
I know that you are not saying that this is necessarily your viewpoint. But it is amazing how some people try to discredit him in that time period based on his fame now. Part of a coverup? He was such small potatoes then. I had never heard of Dan Rather until that day. The first time I remember hearing his voice ever was in a live phone call to Walter Cronkite from what I think was the emergency room area in the hospital. He was still wet behind the ears.
One (of numerous) problems with the idea of an assassin in front of Kennedy is that there was basically no place where a sniper could shoot from in front of Kennedy’s limousine unseen. A CAD rendition of Dealey Plaza.
The oft-mentioned stockade fence separating the grassy knoll from a parking lot was exposed on three sides. Zapruder and his secretary were standing parallel to and above that stockade fence. Behind the stockade fence was a two-story tower where railroad switchman Lee Bowers had an unobstructed view
of the back of the fence.
People were standing on the Triple Underpass only steps from the far end of the stockade fence.