How do adherents of the Oswald-as-lone-assassin theory explain the fatal head shot that pushes JFK back and to his left?
How could a bullet fired from behind JFK do this?
There are probably a billion websites that explain this. It’s also been done on this board, if you do a search.
Penn & Teller show how you can debunk it yourself, with a melon and some tape (and a rifle).
Short, horrible explanation:
When the bullet exits the head, on the side away from the shooter, it takes a lot of brain & skull with it. Conservation of momentum means the rest of the head moves in the opposite direction, toward the shooter.
Bullets tend to do penetration damage. They do not knock people about a whole bunch.
JFK’s head moved for one of several reasons from the jet Effect to a neurological effect.
It has been explained many times.
I did do a search of both this board and the web, but am unable to spend hours distilling and consolidating the billions of words. Hence, this post.
Have you seen the fatal head shot? His brains are sprayed forward. The movement of his head from a rear shot is entirely consistent with the Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Here is a simple and elegant demonstration of how it works.
The bullet didn’t push his head back and to the left. The laws of physics don’t allow it because the bullet didn’t have enough momentum. Here’s one explanation.
Because the assassins used a wormhole to make the shots they fired come from the space near the muzzle of Oswald’s gun. I mean, he was there and all, and he fired a few shots, but it wasn’t THOSE shots that killed him, it was fired from the shooter on a grassy knoll and redirected by wormhole to come out from Oswald.
I mean, duh. What other explanation could there be?
Are you calling JFK a melonhead ? 
Well, if the bullet had been contained inside his skull, it would be expected to move. A 10.5 g bullet moving at 660 m/s has a momentum of 6.93 kg-m/sec, so if it impacted and was captured by a 5kg head, the resulting system would have a velocity of 1.386 m/s. It’s the fact that the bullet exited the skull that changes things, not that the bullet didn’t have enough momentum.
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This topic has been debated for decades. You’re not going to find a factual answer here.
Moving thread from General Questions to Great Debates.
In the Zapruder film you can also see a big hunk of skull go spinning upwards and slightly forwards (about 1 o’clock) in frame 313. That is presumably the piece that was later found on the grass - Google “Harper fragment”.
Exactly. By conservation of momentum:
momentum of bullet entering head = momentum of bullet exiting head + momentum brains and skull pushed forward + momentum of remainder of head pushed forward.
By conservation of energy, substitute “kinetic energy” for “momentum” above.
Knowing the three masses and the entry/exit velocity of the bullet you can find the find the velocity of the brain/skull pieces and the velocity of what remained.
The point that CTs don’t get is that since the velocity of the bullet entering and exiting the head are almost the same you get a math problem that is pretty close to m1v1 = -m2v2 and m1v1^2 = -m2v2^2. That first equation tells us that as brain/skull slurry went forward, the rest of the head went backwards since v1 and v2 are opposite signs.
There a definite factual answer here. It’s not our fault paranoid conspiracy theorists keep rejecting it.
For a long time, I was convinced that the fatal shot came from the front. The motion just didn’t look right for a shot from the rear. I had seen a lot of explanations similar to the one done by Penn and Teller and they just didn’t seem right.
I read in a book (don’t remember which one) that JFK’s head actually moved forward before snapping back. In the book, there were all kinds of explanations tossed around for this, such as a reaction of his nerves that made his body twitch. I didn’t buy the explanations, and it was hard to tell from the still pictures if they even had the movement right.
Then came the internet, and someone posted a stabilized version of the Zapruder film. I downloaded the video and freeze-framed it just before the fatal shot. Then I put a yellow sticky on the computer screen and advanced it frame by frame. That made it clear that JFK’s head does not move back and to the left. It moves forward first, then snaps back.
To be honest, this confused me for quite a bit. I kept staring at the video, over and over, trying to understand it, and finally I reached an understanding about it (which you are free to disagree with, of course). The key to my understanding of it is that you are looking at the film in two dimensions, but JFK’s head is moving in three dimensions. His head isn’t moving forward. It isn’t moving back and to the left. It’s rolling around its pivot point, his neck.
If you viewed the head shot from above, the motion of the head would be more ore less circular, not forward or backwards. When viewed from the side, this makes the head appear to go forward, then backward, but it’s really one smooth circular motion. And the only shot that explains that motion comes from the rear, and strikes the head off center.
That’s what it looks like to me, and you’re going to have a hard time convincing me of anything else. In my opinion, Penn and Teller are wrong, as are the folks who think the shot came from the front.
A thirty second search of this board found a thread in February of this year that addresses exactly your topic.
Tests using melons and actual human skulls show mixed results, which means you can’t look at the movement of the head when shot and determine where the bullet came from. However, you can look at evidence of a guy in a book depository shooting from a window and make some determinations from that.
Agreed. This is not a matter of opinion, nor is it really debatable.
There are the facts. Take it or leave it.
Regards,
Shodan
Huh? It’s been debated for decades in the same way “Is the earth hollow” has been. It’s a looney conspiracy theory with a very clear explanation that is widely known and has been already answered in this thread. IMO this is definitely a factual question with a clear factual answer.