Here's a 2013 analysis of the Dictabelt 'open mike' recording commissioned by the Politics Center at UVA. The finding is that the transmitting motorcycle could not have been part of the motorcade and the recording could not have captured the gunshots. In addition, Sheriff Decker's words, apparently overheard from a nearby police radio tuned to Channel 2, time the 'impulses' at least a minute after the actual time of the shooting.

https://www.thekennedyhalfcentury.co...o-Research.pdf

This tends to agree with Officer McLain's own account: that he was not in the position where the analysts' model required him to be, that the sounds on the recording do not match his movements (and the sirens of the motorcade are only heard a couple of minutes after they actually started) and that, as he turned left on to Elm just after the shooting, he picked up Chief Curry's message ordering all officers to Parkland, which he could not have done if his transmit button was stuck open.

James Bowles, who was supervising police dispatcher that day (and later Dallas country sheriff), has said that the transmitting motorcycle was about two miles from Dealey Plaza. He has also said that the blips or impulses occur throughout the recording and that there is nothing special about the group that the analysts picked out. He thinks he may have caused the blips himself when he lifted and dropped the stylus while transcribing the recordings.

Some things you may not have known....

Please be kidding....

Well, that's a shame. People have talked, and many of the ones who did/planned to, were simply killed or scared into silence. Of course, the people at the very top who orchestrated this and had the most to gain would never say a thing. There's plenty of info out there if you care to look. Will post this quote again:

"To the stock objection that it would be virtually impossible to assemble a murder conspiracy without leakage, the response is that an existing conspiratorial network or system of networks, already in place and capable of murder, would have much less difficulty in maintaining the discipline of secrecy." - Author Peter Dale Scott in 'DEEP POLITICS AND THE DEATH OF JFK'

Analysis of the tape indicates it records gunfire in Dealey Plaza, the timing matching the Zapruder film.

No one ever claimed that Kennedy was shot from any enormous distance.

What makes the shot difficult is the state of the weapon, the misaligned scope, the tree obscuring the target, the moving target, etc.

That is why when professional sharpshooters try it, they find it's not an easy shot at all.

Retired Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock is likewise skeptical of Oswald's alleged shooting feat. Hathcock is a former senior instructor at the U. S. Marine Corps Sniper Instruction School at Quantico, Virginia. He has been described as the most famous American military sniper in history. In Vietnam he was credited with 93 confirmed kills. He now conducts police SWAT team sniper schools across the country. Craig Roberts asked Hathcock about the marksmanship feat attributed to Oswald by the Warren Commission. Hathcock answered that he did not believe Oswald could have done what the Commission said he did. Added Hathcock:

"Let me tell you what we did at Quantico. We reconstructed the whole thing: the angle, the range, the moving target, the time limit, the obstacles, everything. I don't know how many times we tried it, but we couldn't duplicate what the Warren Commission said Oswald did".

I'm sure there are lots of amateurs who think they can out shoot the top people in their respective fields.

Clumsy cop thinks needle drop produces shock waves like rifle fire and 'coincidentally' creates echo pattern that matches Dealey Plaza and 'coincidentally' matches film of the murder.

These guys are scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren't they?

It turns out there are some problems with this attempted 'debunking' of the acoustic science findings.

The report [by Sonalysts] is long on technology but short on science, unless one includes political science. Actually the appropriate analogy is to Creation Science. As an evolutionary biologist I recognize the M.O. The problem is not in the data, it is with the interpretation. There is no discussion, let alone refutation, of the core acoustical evidence. By core acoustical evidence I mean the specific data cited by the HSCA acoustical experts as the evidence which compelled them to conclude that the assassination gunfire was captured by the police recording system. Rather the weight of their argument rests on what is at best ambiguous evidence concerning extraneous noises.

In contrast the acoustical evidence of gunfire on the Dictabelt is rock solid science. Like all good science it is falsifiable. If it can be shown that the sounds on the dictabelt identified as gunshots don’t match to test gunshots fired in Dealey Plaza then the gunfire hypothesis will have been falsified. The match was demonstrated by the HSCA’s experts (BBN), confirmed by a second lab (Computer Science Dept. at Queens College) and then reconfirmed in a study by a firm (Sensimetrics) commissioned by Court TV, in spite of the latter’s attempt to show the opposite. If it can be shown that the matching patterns are not ordered with respect to sequence, spacing and trajectory, just as would be expected of a microphone traveling with the motorcade, the gunfire hypothesis will have been falsified. It was this order in the matching data that compelled BBN to conclude that the assassination gunfire is on the dictabelt.

In the years following the HSCA report there has been ample corroboration of the acoustical evidence. The audio sequence of gunfire exactly fits the video sequence of wounding. Filmed evidence shows that a motorcycle with a sticky microphone was at the acoustically predicted locations. A broadcast common to both police channels synchronizes the acoustically identified gunshots with the moment of the assassination. The fact that the Sonalyst report fails to discuss or acknowledge this evidence strongly suggests that its objective was not to assess the evidence, but to discredit the evidence. In fact, Sonalysts data actually supports rather than conflicts with the HSCA acoustical analysis.

https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Es...Sophistry.html

This is a comedy website, right?

Whatever helps you sleep at night.

I now remember why I am hostile to Gaeton Fonzi. He is one of the ones that believes my father told Sylvia Odio that there was a cover-up. That's complete crap.

Not according to Professor Ramsey's NAS panel (the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics), no. Not only does the timing not match, but there are no gunshots audible on the Dictabelt recording.

Dr Barger, who led the BBN team, specifically declined in oral evidence to state that the 'impulses' were gunshots, or that there were four of them. He only testified that, if there were four gunshots and the inaudible 'impulses' represented them (overlooking the obvious issue that gunshots picked up by a microphone would be audible to the human ear on the recording, as Barger's comparison gunshots in the test-firing session were), then the intervals between the four impulses were 0, 1.6sec, 5.9sec, 0.5sec.

Dr Weiss, one of the review consultants called in by the HSCA, actually stated in oral evidence that the supposed position of HB McLain's motorcycle on Elm Street was only assumed because that was the strongest receiving position for reverb in a shot from the 'grassy knoll' during Barger's tests. It was nothing to do with whether McLain was actually in that position or not.

And that, of course, is no good. It's a reversal of the scientific method. (In effect, 'First adopt your conclusion, then rig the evidence to fit it.')

The HSCA and their counsel did not allow McLain to hear the recording before he gave evidence in Washington. When he returned to Dallas and JC Bowles played him the recording, he was quite annoyed, because the recording could not possibly have come from McLain's motorcycle, for various and obvious reasons given above. In his view, the open-mike bike was a Harley Servi-Car three-wheeler ridden by Officer Leslie Beilharz, an habitual whistler who was at the Trade Mart at the time (close enough to other vehicles to pick up Sheriff Decker's 'Hold everything secure' transmission on Channel 2) and who later admitted that he had failed to receive any messages for about five minutes around the time of the assassination, suggesting that his transmit button had stuck open. In 1982 Beilharz telephoned Professor Ramsey to say that he might well have been the rider of the open-mike bike. And a recording made more than two miles from Dealey Plaza cannot have captured the gunshots.

Mac McLain suggested that Barger's and Weiss's phantom 'impulses' were just 'the radio popping... I don't guess they ever took a radio and listened to it, they just assumed it.' Much as they 'assumed' his position to be on Elm when he was still halfway back down Houston, stationary, with a foot on the ground.

It's quite doable for a trained rifleman like Oswald. And most of the test shooters in the 1964 and 1967 tests, who (unlike Oswald) had never handled a Carcano before, could duplicate his feat of two hits in three shots in the required time.

I'm reading my father's testimony to the HSCA. Parts of it are amusing. He suggested changes to a chapter in the report written by Norman Redlich. He and Redlich had a conversation about the changes. My dad: "my general impression was that my performance against Mr. Redlich was like UCLA's football team usually is against USC's. But it was really not quite that bad. I won some and some of the changes were made. And some were not."

No, I'm afraid the thing you're quoting is just a weird quasi-religious rant.

Yes, I've heard that science will appear to be magic and people who can harness it seem god-like to those who haven't got it yet.

The fact stands that the analysis by the experts stands despite attempts by would-be 'debunkers' to deny them.

Certainly it is doable, just that I don't buy the opinion of some that it is an 'easy' shot. But you are right, there were many thousands of people who were trained as rifleman during the Cold War.

I suppose had Oswald been a professional shooter like those who were conducting these tests (highly unlikely since he doesn't seem to have had a knack for hitting even stationary targets), and was shooting at stationary targets, under no particular pressure, with a weapon that had been properly set up instead of supposedly hastily reassembled and in such bad repair it's entirely possible he could have replicated these results.

As I have already posted, there's no special reason to suppose that if there was a shooter in the Book Depository they might have gotten lucky.

We can agree on that.

Proud, please rebut Michael O'Dell's analysis and criticism of the BBN, NRC, and 2001 British Forensic Science Society analyses of the acoustic evidence. It is at http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/Odell/

In it, Odell finds deficiencies both in the BBN analysis and in the NRC analysis. It is too complex to summarize here, but his conclusion is that both BBN and the NRC made significant mistakes related to playback timing from one of the two recording devices in question. Analyzed correctly, the supposed shot impulses on the recording actually occurred over a minute after the shooting and could not therefore have been shot impulses.

There is persuasive evidence that Oswald was able to make the shots in question. Specifically: he did so. Interestingly, my father testified on this exact point before the HSCA. In the original draft of the warren report, my father argued that it was a mistake to overreach on the record at all, and doing so would ultimately undermine the credibility of the report. I think three of the fifteen marine shooters were able to duplicate Oswald's shots. Was Oswald skilled, or just lucky? We don't know and never will. But the fact that several shooters were able to duplicate the shots proves that it was possible for Oswald to have done it, and that is all that need be proved.

Yes, when we synchronize the shot determined to come from the so-called 'Grassy Knoll' (where all the cops and onlookers were rushing to try and catch the shooter), the gunshots are a match for the Zapruder film.

The reason these shots are not recognized by the human ear on the tape is because the Automatic Gain Control used to enhance voice communications by automatically dampening very loud sounds, such as gunshots.

Amusing that the author of this parenthetical remark hasn't read the articles already provided which discuss the Automatic Gain Control used on the Dictabelt.

The separation in time between the two visible wounding events is therefore: 313-224 = 89 frames. Because Zapruder’s camera had a film speed of 18.3 frames per second, the separation between the impacts was 89/18.3 = 4.8 sec.

This exactly matches the separation on the police tape between the acoustically identified Grassy knoll shot and the immediately previous acoustically identified shot from the Book Depository: 4.8 sec.

This agreement provides one with even greater confidence in the acoustical evidence.



Since McClain was in the motorcade and his position is the best fit for where the open microphone was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting and simultaneous recording of the gunfire that is a very reasonable conclusion. Occam's Razor FTW!

No evidence was rigged - even in your version of the story.

While all this is very interesting anecdotal evidence, the hard science indicates the gunfire recorded on the Dictabelt occurred in Dealey Plaza at the same time that Kennedy was assassinated there.

Yes, always good to have a cop with no background in the science of acoustics to make accusations against not one but two of the top scientific research departments in the nation.

Next up, we'll have the homeless guy in the alley interpret your EKG.

I agree that much of this stuff is too complex to summarize here!

I agree it is conceivable someone could have made those shots from the Book Depository. Maybe even Oswald could have gotten lucky had he been there and been motivated to try it.

Yes, I agree that it could be that in their zeal to close the case some of the people working on the WC may have overstated things.

I was kidding about the back and to the left part but look at frames 312-315. He clearly leans forward when he gets shot.

Another lie you've been told about the assassination which you've taken to heart.

In fact the limousine was not moving in a straight line away from the alleged 'sniper nest' in the TSBD.



Another 'Oswald-did-it' Theorist turns out to be misinformed.

The shots would become progressively easier as the car moved away, because its apparent rate of traverse across the gunman's field of vision diminished. At the point where the final, successful shot arrived, Elm Street is fairly straight and, given the distance and trajectory and the slight downward incline, the car would be relatively static in the gunman's sights.

The target, of course, was specifically the president's head. It's likely that the first shot was the miss, when the car's apparent rate of traverse was greatest. So in three attempts, Oswald seems to have scored a miss, a near miss (considering the specific target) and then a hit. With an army rifle at that range, it's not an unbelievable feat.