I had never heard this theory before. It’s an instant favorite.
Someone tell me — has anyone ever proposed that Kennedy was hit in the head by a small meteor?
*For the love of God, man, don’t give them any ideas!!! *
Don’t be ridiculous. The force field from the alien flying saucer may not have been able to protect him from a rifle bullet, but it was 100% perfect against meteors.
I read the Warren Report. I believe they declared it a very determined case of suicide.
At the risk of ruining Starving Artist’s day, I have to point out that a lot of the above post is hooey.
While several people claimed to have seen an armed man on the sixth-floor before the shooting, only one that anyone knows of - Howard Brennan - actually saw Oswald fire the rifle.
You’ll have to provide a cite to those folks in another building watching Oswald fire; I’ve never heard of that. I do recall that there was speculation that some folks in the county jail might have seen something. It was checked into and nothing came of it.
The three employees on the fifth floor didn’t stick their heads out the windows until after the shooting. (However they all did swear that it sounded like the shots were being fired right above them. One even claimed to hear the rifle’s bolt action being worked.)
The second paragraph simply flabbergasts me. What room? The sixth floor was an open storage area. What long thin box? Oswald is believed to have brought his rifle to work in a homemade paper “sack”. He was not seen running away from the “room”, or even from the whole sixth floor - he was first seen after the shooting in the second floor lunch room, and was not running at the time. The “box” (bag) was found near the southeast corner of the sixth floor adjacent to the “sniper’s nest”; the rifle was found near the northwest corner of the sixth floor, near the stairwell and freight elevators.
You are quite right that it was Oswald’s rifle and that his prints are on it.
It simply astounds me that so much evidence can be misstated in so little space. Makes me wonder if your post wasn’t intended as some sort of whoosh. Or some sort of satire. Or mebbe you’re talking about some other JFK assassination. . . .
Thanks for the consideration, but I myself had never heard more than the sightings you mentioned.
And as long as I’m here I should probably point out to Shodan that I was speaking of the head shot rather than the neck shot when I talked about the movement of Kennedy’s body and that it didn’t seem to me to be the result of neurological reflex. If you haven’t seen the Zapruder film recently, take a look at this version I just found starting at about 3:25. Link. (**Very, very graphic!) **I’m not a neurologist but I just can’t see Kennedy’s movement here being caused by neurological reflex. (Nor can I imagine a bullet coming from behind and high to the right causing his body to move in this way. Does anyone know if an experiment has ever been done to observe what would happen in the event of a shot coming from in front and to the right?)
Also, I can sympathize with your back pain, Shodan. I screwed my back up doing rowing exercises back in the eighties. The problem I have is with muscle spasms pulling the discs out of alignment and pinching the nerves. About three or four times a year I’ll do something radical like picking up a towel and it’ll twist up and I’ll find myself walking just like you described. Not fun.
I’ve seen simulations of the three shots both computer generated and using reasonable facsimiles (watermelons and even skulls in ballistic gel) and there really is no mystery. Once you take into account the body attitude of Kennedy wrt Oswald’s shooting position (the ‘magic bullet’ becomes less magical once you see how Kennedy was leaning in the car as well as the body attitude of Connally) as well as how a body actually reacts to such a bullet strike (it’s not intuitive as to what happens when the head is hit by a bullet) it’s not all that mysterious.
I’m too tired (and lazy) to look it up, but I’ve seen lots of simulations of the shots so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find one online. Or maybe the Mythbusters will do an episode on this someday.
-XT
Okay, thanks. I’ll check around later and see if I can find some. Like I said, I haven’t thought about this much in years. It’d be nice to put the issue to rest…in my own mind at least.
Interestingly there is going to be a special on Discovery Sunday night to answer this very question…it’s all about the forensics behind the shots it looks like. Check it out if you can…I know I’ll be watching it assuming I’m home or that my hotel room gets Discovery if I’m not.
-XT
Great! Thanks, I’ll put it on my calendar. 
The explanation was based on the trajectory of the final shot. It enters at the base of the skull and travels up and to the right. And instead of passing through his skull intact the bullet fragmented creating a shockwave. The premise of the book was that it was a street level shot with a different type of bullet (one that would fragment).
Oswald had a straight shot (in line with the car) so kennedy’s head would have to be twisted around for the trajectory to make sense. The exit hole would have to be lower than the entry point for the shot to line up and kennedy’s head wasn’t close to this position.
As an aside, as I read Mortal Error many years ago: to say that “That couldn’t happen!” is to ignore all sorts of bizarro-flukey gun accidents down through the years. Murphy’s Law most certainly applies, which is why shooting ranges are uncompromisingly anal about safety (as they should be).
One other comment on the “back and to the left” matter: I’ve read that folks who actually know about this stuff insist that an object as small as a bullet simply doesn’t have enough mass to shove around a body as we see in the Zapruder film, no matter how hard you throw it. So we’re left with some combination of neurological spasm and “jet effect” to explain what happened. (One other possibility that we’ll never be able to answer is how much force Jackie was applying to her husband’s arm, and in what direction.)
(The conspiracy folks have my sympathy on this point. Even though I know better, my gut reaction when watching the Zapruder film, even today, is that he is being shoved back by some external force. Course, the hot wave in the conspiracy community these days is to declare the Zapruder film a fake in part or in whole. So I guess we can’t even be sure that the head snap actually happened. 
)
This weekend Discovery Channel will take another look at the shooting. Their conclusion: a single shooter, from the Depository window.
The scary part is that there is good evidence that this is how Bobby Kennedy was shot.
I’m going to tape it out of general interest but we already know the entry and exit wounds. I’d like to see how someone shooting from the high ground can create a wound that travels up and to the right. Kennedy would need to be facing down. And I would expect the heavy jacketed bullet to survive. It didn’t.
See, this has always been my problem…how does someone shooting high from behind and to the right create a wound that moves forcefully up and to the left.
To me the idea that Oswald caused the fatal head wound is every bit as hard to fathom as the scenario you describe.
If he was shot in the back of the head from high above right, why didn’t the bullet exit left of entry? And how does a downward shot from the right blow someone upward to the left?
Like I said before, I would welcome convincing evidence that Oswald did indeed fire the fatal shot, but up til now I just haven’t been able to buy it.
It’ll be interesting to see what the Discovery program finds, though I’m leery because from what I’ve read it seems the program only finds it ‘likely’ that Oswald fired the fatal shot. I was expecting – and would prefer – incontrovertible proof! 
I fear that once the program’s over we might be right back where we started.
Actually, this question is rather easily answered by looking at the photographic record. At the moment of the fatal shot Kennedy’s head is turned somewhat to the left and tilted downward. You might want to try this with a friend (preferably without the use of firearms). Given a fixed reference line, you’ll find you can position your friend’s head to produce all sorts of relative trajectories.
A guy named Dale Myers has put together an elaborate 3-D animation of the shooting. (Sorry I don’t have the time now to hunt up the link - you might be able to get to it through the McAdams site referenced earlier, and McAdams probably has more on the issue.)
Incontrovertible proof, eh? You’re touching on what I’ve come to call The Dirty Little Secret of Historians; viz., that absolute certainty about any past event is impossible. It’s this fact that keeps the CTs in business. We’ve seen this upthread: “Isn’t is possible . . .?”, “Could it be that . . .?”, &c. &c. Sure. Anything is possible. But after all these years the evidence points toward the conclusion that Lee Oswald definitely was involved in this mess, and that is damned unlikely that Oswald was (or even would have been) in cahoots with anyone else.
Am I correct in concluding that both of you are predisposed to disbelieve anything that suggests that a shot from high and behind could produce the wound that killed Kennedy?
What evidence would you find “convincing”? Re-enactments? Computer simulations? Reverse engineering? How many times would a scenario have to be repeated with the same results to constitute “incontrovertible proof”? If 100 eyewitnesses say they saw the same thing, and 3 say they saw something different, is that convincing enough?
we’re talking about basic physics here. Oswald used a specific type of amunition that stays intact. It should have passed through the President without desintegrating. The bullet that struck him fragmmented and created a shockwave of pellets that blew a large hole upon exiting.
Aside from that the trajectory isn’t even close.