This should be looked at with a scientific point of view. When it does, conspiracy theorists have no argument.
How true could a conspiracy theory be, when, after so many people devote so much study on it, even the basic questions remain unanswered? Most real phenomenon will reveal themselves to study. Made-up phenomenon like UFO, huge conpspiracy theories, and government mind-control lasers remain just as mysterious now as they were when they were first “discovered”. In other words, there’s nothing to find out about them - they are not real.
Using Occam’s Razor, the lone gunman is the most parsimonious explanation. “But there’s so many unlikely things!” you say. Nonsense. How many incredibly unlikely things had to happen for your parents to be born, and to meet, and to have you as a child? Are you, in fact, impossible? …
Neobican sums it up nicely . . hit with a high speed projectile; the Presidents head snaps back in the same direction of travel of the projectile. mechanics of motion . . there was a second gun.
if his head snapping back were due to the limo driver putting the pedal to floor exactly at the moment of impact; then the other two passengers would be lurched back also.
It has been specifically proven that when a bullet enters the head (and I mean specifically in regards to the JFK assassination), the head jerks towards the direction that the bullet was fired from.
You’d think that the bullet hitting the head would cause a wallop that would push the head away from the direction of fire. But when the bullet exits through the back of the head, it carries so much brain tissue and fluid out with it, that it acts as a sort of jet propulsion out of the exit wound. Therefore, the major motion of the head is towards the shooter.
Kennedy’s head moved “back and to the left”,
Kennedy’s head moved towards the shooter,
Ergo, Kennedy was shot from someone behind him and to the left- Lee Harvey Oswald.
I make no claim that LHO was a solitary assassin. I merely point out that you cannot use the movement of Kennedy’s head as proof that there was a second gunman, as the movement of Kennedy’s head specifically indicates that he was shot by Oswald.
JMCJ
Just confirming that my ass is, in fact, the wisest part of my body.
bda: The problem with that theory is that the limo driver actually slowed down, almost to the point of stopping.
Corrado: Sorry, but the ‘Jet Effect’ is not proof of anything. It was first put forward as a possible theory for why the head moved backwards. After the theory came out, several experiments were done to try and ‘prove’ it. I believe experiments with shooting watermelons and pumpkins showed a ‘jet effect’-type response about one time in a hundred. It’s never been shown in humans, and it’s unlikely that it would work that way, since the skull is very hard and would absorb a lot of the impact energy, which would carry it in the direction of the bullet.
Why are we assuming that the jerking of the head had to have been caused only by the physics of object A (bullet) impacting with object B (head)? Isn’t it likely that a projectile tearing through the various neuronal networks in the brain could have set off nerve impulses causing muscles to spasm in all sorts of unpredictable patterns?
I have no special expertise to contribute on this question- just wondering.
from what i have seen; this is true . . there was no twitching . . herky jerky . . the man went back and down. no nuerological anomolies. . any hunters here?
i had the unpleasant experierance of having to go to war . . i served in the southeast asia theatre from 1972 till 1975. straight army . . and all of us there learned covert ops or we died. theres one thing i know about and thats seeing the enemy sniped . .
and a hundred times over . . i never saw a target fall back from a back hit.
I hope most people would agree with me that if LHO did not act alone, the odds are that it was at best a small conspiracy. That is to say, it did not involve any government agencies - or probably even the mafia. The bigger something like this is, the more inevitable it becomes that someone will expose it. These outlandish conspiracy theories do nothing but taint the credibility of the genuine evidence that contradicts the Warren report.
My personal opinion… Had to be more than one shooter. Like bda said - Jackie reached back on the trunk to grab for the back of his head. The shot had to come from the front.
This probably sounds absurd, but I’m convinced LBJ was the driving force behind it. Like Cooper said, it didn’t have to be a big conspiracy and I don’t think it could have been or we’d know about it nearly 40 years later. But that still doesn’t leave LBJ out of it to keep it small - especially if he’s the driving force.
“We love Him because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 †
John, I direct your attention to the links provided by Banks on the 21st. The “jet effect” is examined in detail and clearly and convincingly disproved. Personally, I’ve always thought it was ridiculous.
Just view the film, folks. Run it back and forth through that sequence of frames. Nerve impulses that might be generated by a bullet impacting the brain would not travel far enough in that time between the two frames.
And, IIRC (and I believe I do) Oswald’s alleged ‘perch’ was to the rear and slightly to the right.
I never said the jet effect was impossible. I said it only occurs in a minority of cases. The type of bullet and the nature of the impact have to be just right. Watermelons and pumpkins work great because they have soft, low-resistance outer skins and a lot of liquid material inside. Human skulls are much different. Also, a pumpkin might skid across the floor due to jet effect, because not much force is required to do that. How much will your pumpkin move when it’s got to drag a 180 lb body with it?
Phone Penn and Teller, and have them strap the pumpkin to a 180 lb sandbag. Then shoot it again and see how far it skids.
One big problem with the ‘jet effect’ in the Kennedy assassination is that it requires a large mass of brain tissue moving forwards out of the head to create the ‘jet’. However, most of Kennedy’s brain matter and skull fragments wound up on the back end of the limousine, and the men behind the car were splattered with blood and brain matter. Jackie did in fact climb back to retrieve a piece of his skull. Hard to explain how it got there if the entry wound was in the back of his head. The front of the limo was almost pristine. If the shot came from behind, Governor and Mrs. Connolly should have been pelted by blood are gore, and someone in the front would probably have been injured by bone shrapnel. And the windshield should have had blood all over it. It didn’t. And this can’t be explained by wind gusts over the car, either, as it was a fairly calm day, and the limo was only moving a few miles per hour.
So, dhanson, are you saying that you believe what caused his head to move back and to the left, was the momentum that the bullet delivered to his head? I don’t think this stands up to a conservation of momentum argument.
When a bullet leaves the rifle, it gets its momentum ultimately from the push against the shooter’s shoulder. This is not a large impulse - the shoulder hardly moves. Now if the bullet were to have stopped in his head, it would transfer all its momentum, and the head would be kicked with the same impulse that the shooter’s shoulder felt, which doesn’t seem to be enough to cause the reaction, as you state, dragging a 180-lb body with it.
However, I don’t think you’re saying that his head stopped the bullet, since part of your argument seems to be that it blew the back of his head off. In that case, it transfers much less of its momentum.
Put this together with the fact that on the Zapruder film, it’s obvious that the cranial matter is blown forward and right, exactly what you’d expect from an exit wound, and I don’t see how you can have any doubt that the shot came from the rear.
Unless you’re saying the Zapruder film was altered, which would bring the conspirator count to, what, hundreds, of people participating in the murder of their boss and keeping quiet for 26 years?
I posted earlier on the only solid evidence that was available to me (Zapruder film). I can clearly see that the head shot was done from the front - nobody had to tell me, I did not read it anywhere, its a commom sense plain-as-can-be observation. Frankly, I do not understand how anyone can see otherwise. I could not find the film on the web, but I did find a site that has a mountian of information supporting the conspiracy theory. You can order the film from this site however. There is way too much for me to mention, just check it out for yourself.
If you think that the head would “splash” when hit, like hitting the surface of water with a hammer, then you might expect cranial matter to be ejected towards the gun. But if you think about it for a few seconds, you should realize that when a bullet passes through a body, the matter will be ejected at the exit point. Bullets leave small entry wounds and large exit wounds.
But the very web site you posted should have told you this. It says:
So what do these conspiracy nuts at your site say to explain the fact that the Zapruder film disproves the shot-from-the-front? They think the Zapruder film was altered! Suddenly you’re left only with untenable positions such that I noted before, where hundreds of public servants would have been asked to cover up their boss’s murder.
Curt, you’re missing an important part of the energy problem - the bullet in the gun accelerates down 3ft of barrel, so the impulse is somewhat uniform and the energy is absorbed by the muscles of the body. When the bullet hits something, the energy is released very quickly.
Ask someone who has been shot while wearing a bulletproof vest. A bullet that is easily fired from a gun with one hand will leave black-and-blue marks all over the body when it hits a vest. And the impact of the bullet will stagger the person.
I would not unequivocably state that the shot to the head came from the back or the front, just from evidence on the Zapruder tape. You CAN make a case for neuromuscular spasm, for jet effect, and for momentum transfer. Maybe the limo driver tapped the gas at that instant. It’s hard to say. But the preponderance of evidence certainly indicates a frontal shot. Just the presence of the splash of brain matter all over the BACK of the limo would indicate that. The two secret servicemen running behind the limo were both splattered with gore. The front seat occupants weren’t.
I wonder if anyone has ever applied a computer analysis to the frame on the Zapruder film which shows the pink cloud over Kennedy’s head. You should be able to do a surface integral and figure out the center of mass of that cloud, and whether it’s ahead of or behind Kennedy. That’d be one more piece of data.