You are somewhat correct. I am predisposed to disbelieve that a shot from high and behind to the right would cause a strike that would propel Kennedy’s head and body up and back to the left. It appears to me that a realistic recreation should be possible to demonstrate that it could if so, but to my knowledge no convincing replication has ever been done and this in itself makes me less inclined to believe it.
Well, you’re half right. The objective behind putting full-metal jackets on military bullets was that they would pass through the victim provided that they do not strike hard bone. Given how tough the skull is, one would expect even FMJ ammo to fragment. So the bullet that hit Kennedy’s neck readily passed through, having struck nothing harder than bone. (I’ll leave for another time the question of what became of that bullet.) The bullet that hit Kennedy’s head fragmented, as we would expect to happen.
I’m curious. Does your “trajectory analysis” factor in the fact that the two large fragments found in the limosine and the intact bullet found on a gurney at Parkland Hospital were both, without question, fired from Oswald’s rifle, which was found on the sixth floor of the TSBD building?
Sure, it’s possible (there’s that word again) that that evidence was planted. But think about it: they would have been planted when Kennedy’s corpse still lay in Trama Room One and John Connally had just gone into surgery. There is no way, no way at all, that any clever conspirator could have known at that time what bullets might be found in the victims. It would be just plain idiotic to plant “evidence” that could well be shown to be superfluous and, thus, planted.
Couple of things here. First, I’ll reiterate what I said earlier about experts saying that a bullet simply doesn’t have the mass to shove around a body the way we see in the Zapruder film.
Second, the forensic evidence shows beyond doubt that the head shot came from behind. The wound in the back of the skull was small and beveled inward - classic signs of an entry wound. The wound in the front right of the head was huge - an obvious exit wound. This is all CSI 101. That shot came from behind Kennedy. No doubt. (Unless you’re David Lifton.)
By the way - something that is often overlooked is the fact that that bullet did cause Kennedy’s head to rotate forward. The motion is clearly visible if you toggle back and forth between Zapruder frames 312 and 313 (i.e., before and after impact). Examination of the preceeding frames shows that this is not the continuation of a movement that started before the bullet hit. (For what it’s worth: Josiah Thompson was apparently the first to notice this forward movement. He coupled that with with the [erroneous] idea that the head snap was caused by a bullet to produce his theory that Kennedy’s head had been hit by two bullets nearly simultaneously.)
Somewhere on line is an essay by a mathmetician who crunched the numbers and concluded that the movements shown in the Zapruder film are consistent with the combination of a bullet impact from behind nudging the head forward and a “jet effect” pushing head and body backwards. If you’re up to wading through umpteen pages of calculations let me know and I’ll hunt up the link for you.
I’ll pass on the subject of recreations for now. I’ll just point out that the only valid recreation of what happens when you shoot a living person in the head is to shoot a living person in the head. For some reason they’re having a hard time getting volunteers for that experiment. . . .
I hate defending this theory because I’m not married to it. I’d like to see Dr. John Lattimer’s photo’s of his tests. And I believe one of the fragments in the car is missing, as is Kennedy’s brain.
If I ever contract painful, terminal cancer, I’ll meet you in Dallas.
Having said that… I don’t mean to sound jerkish but I get the sense that a lot of the analysis and argument over the way Kennedy moves when he’s shot is due to people’s experience of gunshot wounds being restricted to what they see in “Die Hard” and other such films. In the movies, when you shoot somebody they often fly backwards as if they’ve been hit by a bus. Bullets act more like cannonballs.
But in real life the movement of a human being hit by a bullet simply does not conform to such easy billard ball physics. There are plenty of eyewitness accounts of men shot with rifles in war who’ve pitched TOWARDS the gun that killed them, not away. People do not fly backwards and do somersaults like that guy in “Last Man Standing.” Sometimes there is motion away from the bullet’s impact, sometimes against, sometimes the person just falls down, sometimes they jump up and down and scream. There’s just no way to say for sure how a person receiving a severe gunshot wound will move except that he’ll probably not be standing up when it’s over.
And bullets don’t consistently behave the same way. Jacketed bullets do not always stay intact. They do not always pass through a person’s head on a perfect trajectory. Shit, they did a thing on “Mythbusters” where they fired bullets into a pool and some bullets fragmented just hitting water, much less a bag of water covered in hard bone. Bullets bounce and shatter sometimes. They aren’t perfectly predictable little straight lines like in “Max Payne.”
This analysis of Kennedy’s assassination just strikes me as being utterly preposterous. What we basically have in the Zapruder film is a grainy film of a guy’s head exploding. Given the unpredictability of such things and what forensic evidence we do have, a shot from Oswald’s position is as or more likely as any other hypothesis. And when you then add the fact that we KNOW a person IN Oswald’s position was shooting at Kennedy with a rifle, that he left behind a trail of evidence, that eyewitness accounts of his arrival and egress from the scene are consistent with his firing a rifle from there, that there is hard evidence linking Oswald to the rifle and the rifle to bullets that struck Kennedy and Connally - well, I’m sorry, but this is an open and shut case. One hundred juries out of one hundred would have convicted Oswald. It’s as solid a murder case as any you’ll ever construct.
I think it just goes back to the fact that people can’t seem to accept that Kennedy, the President of the United States and one who has since been built up into a super-President that he really was not, was killed by a loser. It’s hard to accept the plain truth that a loser can kill a great and powerful man. And then when they examine the mounds of evidence they find little and usually poorly understood details and cling onto them.
Using the same rules of logic and evidence that Kennedy conspiracy theorists use, I could prove the American Civil War never happened.
I generally agree with this but I don’t see how a bullet moving at roughly 18 degrees to the road can create a path that is upward and to the right. Yes, Kennedy is turned to the left and down but if you assume the worst case track of the bullet it doesn’t line up. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to a ground shot starting with the bullet path. by itself I would lean more towards Oswald but when you consider that people could smell gun powder on the overpass I don’t know how to explain that. It would be nice if Kennedy’s brain didn’t grow legs (a Monty Python image if ever there was one) or one of the fragments in the car didn’t disappear. All that feeds into the conspiracy theories. Too bad the technology didn’t exist at the time to take x-ray slices so the skull could be recreated. Maybe the bullit entered so low that it bounced off the bottom of the skull and deflected right.
A question about the ‘Mortal Error’ hypothesis: If JFK was accidentally shot by a secret service agent in the car behind him, why was it covered up? I mean, I can see why the agent himself would say something like ‘Hell, I never even drew my gun. No way that happened.’ But why would the Warren Commission, et al, hide the truth?
And so we have to work with the evidence that does exist.
I am now looking at a reproduction of HSCA Exhibit F-53 - the enhanced version of the lateral x-ray of Kennedy’s head. Assuming the top of the head corresponds to the top of the picture (I’m not qualified to judge this), I see what certainly looks like a debris trail ranging downward from back to front by several degrees (sorry, I don’t have a protractor handy). So where do you get the idea that the bullet followed an upward path?
Part of the problem here is the continuing debate over the exact position of the back-of-the-head wound. The pathologists, in their report, put it “slightly above” the external occipital protuberance (the big lump on the back of your head), and for whatever reason decided to stand by this statement come hell or high water, even though the autopsy x-rays and photographs rather clearly place the wound three or four inches higher. If one goes with the lower position, then you probably do get an upward trajectory. But the best evidence favors the higher entry point, and the pathologists simply goofed when they wrote their report.
One passing comment on the Mortal Error debate: Kennedy aide Dave Powers, who was riding in the jump seat of the Secret Service follow-up car, says no one in that car fired a weapon. Given that Powers’ ear would have been maybe two feet from the muzzle of George Hickey’s weapon, you’d think he would have noticed if it had gone off.
I’d like to see a cite on that missing fragment. To the best of my knowledge, both of the ballistically identifiable fragments recovered from the limo are alive and well and living on a shelf at the National Archives.
I dunno, national pride maybe? I would love to know what the Jackie Kennedy letter says that is set to be released some time after Caroline dies. Did she do a three-some with Monroe or is this related to the assassination?
I simply do not see what you claim is there. I see a grainy film of a man - who has already been shot in the neck - with part of his head blowing off. You cannot actually see the bullet, so you do not know what path it took, period. There is no debate about this; unless you can see the bullet itself, you cannot tell me that you know it took an “upward path.”
The reaction of Kennedy’s shattered skull is the result of a chaotic system - a bone-encased globe of tissue being hit by a high velocity projectile. This is not CSI; you cannot line the bullets up and conclude with perfect accuracy exactly where they were fired from based on a grainy film. His head could have blown up in any one of a million ways. Nothing about the Zapruder film suggests to me that the bullet must have come from below and to the right.
What I DO know, absolutely for certain, is that at the moment Kennedy’s head was destroyed by a bullet, there was a man up in the School Book Depository shooting at Kennedy’s head with a rifle. I also know that nobody else in the area has ever been found who was doing the same thing. So you tell me what the likeliest explanation is.
Is thisthe right picture? It looks like it’s going up to me. Kennedy’s head was also down slightly so that helps line it up for a street level shot. . The problem I come across is the conflicting descriptions of the wound as compared to pictures. If you look at pictures of his face you don’t see a huge wound and if you look at pictures of the back of his head you don’t see the exit wound but clearly a huge chunk was blown out in the Zapruder film. It’s really hard to say what the trajectory is but all the different versions show a hole to the side of the trajectory which makes no sense from a physical aspect. I would expect the shockwave to continue in the direction of the shot and not move at a right angle.
That would be the conspiracy part of it. The agent named in the book waited until the statute of limitations ran out to sue. He eventually got a settlement of unknown amount but I found this a bit strange.
If I find it again I’ll post it. Not sure what you mean by a ballistically identifiable fragment is but this was described as a fragment. I’ve looked at so many sites that I’m now convinced Kennedy shot himself in the ass with a spear gun.
Maybe that could explain why they’d initially go along with a cover-up. But it seems that over the years they might decide that it would be better to reveal the truth – however embarrassing – than let large portions of the American public think that the president was knocked off by a conspiracy involving the government itself.
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read about the assasination and “conspiracy”.
What’s always bothered me about the Kennedy conspiracy is that it has nothing to do with the moon landing hoax. Then it hit me: the head of NASA assassinated Kennedy from outer space with a diamond bullet. This was a hit for putting so much pressure on NASA for what was obviously an impossible task. With Kennedy out of the way, NASA could pull off a grand hoax to secure more funding to create the global warming conspiracy. Brilliant!
Wait a second, this has nothing to do with Roswell…
Guessing that this is a reference to the 1976 paper by Luis Alvarez, the Nobel prizewinning physicist, showing that the then-standard arguments amongst conspiracy theorists about the physics were simply wrong. His paper is indeed online (a pdf).
The Disc channel program is on now.
The program was attempting to see if the head damage was consistent with a 6th flr shot. They used simulated skulls since volunteers were hard to get. They shot from all the locations people said they heard shots. The sharpshoooter had no trouble making the shots although the vehicle was stationary. They compared the brain splatter with the Zapruder film.
The Discovery program was worth watching. Seeing what a thin jacketed-bullet would do to a simulated head conflicts with Mortal Error’s assessment. The heavy jacketed bullet Oswald was firing replicated the head damage exactly whereas the light jacketed bullet destroyed the skull. I wish they would have shown the bullet but the results were impressive as shown.
Forgive my tardiness; the house was crawling with in-laws today. :rolleyes:
That’s not even close to being the right photo. If I may cite the caption under the first photo: “Figure 1. X-ray of an Experimental Skull from the Biophysics Division Tests (one of four)”. If I get a chance tomorrow I’ll hunt up an online copy of the x-ray I have in mind.
::sigh:: Photos of the back of the head do not show an exit wound because there was no exit wound in the back of the head. The autopsy photos show a small wound in the back of the head, which is consistent with an entry wound. Actual examination of the wound showed beveling around the wound on the inside of the skull - positive proof that that wound was an entrance wound. There may be another factor proving that this wound was an entrance wound, but I need to look at the autopsy report to see if a particular microscopic examination was done on this wound (I’m sure it was done on the back wound).
Do you realize that you have effectively said that a top Kennedy aide was part a conspiracy? Is there anyone in your universe who can be trusted?
By “ballistically identifiable” I mean that it is possible for an expert to look at such a fragment and declare that the bullet from whence it came was fired from one specific weapon to the exclusion of all others. You know, just like they do with whole bullets.
Actually, it really doesn’t matter where that fragment is now. It was examined several times decades ago, and another examination of it today would tell us nothing new. (And that being the case, why deep-six the thing now? It has already told it’s story.)
bonzer: The thing I actually had in mind is at http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/JFK.html (you’ll have to scroll down the page and hit the link reading “physics monograph”; for some strange reason both pages have the same URL!). I’ve heard of Alvarez’ work, but haven’t read it.
I didn’t explain myself well. In pictures of the front and back of Kennedy you should see an exit wound SOMEWHERE in the picture. They put the skin and hair back that hung out. Maybe I was looking at photos that were taken to show specific areas and the massive wound was “prettied up”. There was never any doubt that the entry wounds are in the back.