Michael Griffith

I am agnostic about Walter's account of the FBI telex. However, his argument that Oswald was a government informant is supported by Orest Pena's HSCA deposition, which the ARRB released in the 1990s. Pena was an anti-Castro Cuban and was also a government informant. He operated a bar in New Orleans while Oswald was in the city. Pena told the HSCA that Oswald was either a government agent or a government informant. 

Indeed. Proud to be an American.

On 7/2/2023 at 4:22 AM, Pat Speer said:

 

I mean, the HSCA report used a still from the Dorman film to prove McLain was in the proper position, but that still was taken 20 or more seconds later.  Don Thomas tried to counter this by moving the first shot to a later time. But his claims are equally problematic, as he has McLain traveling something like 4 mph across the plaza, hiding behind this car than that car etc, so there is no photo of him crawling across the plaza.

No, Thomas does not move the first shot to a later time. You are repeating Dale Myers' erroneous claim on this issue. Thomas's time for the first shot comes from the BBN report, which Myers apparently did not bother to read very carefully, if he read it at all.

Below are portions from Don Thomas's articles that deal with the arguments you have made about his research on McLain's position. Your errant claim that Thomas moves the first shot to a later time is one of many incorrect statements you have made about his arguments. I realize you're getting most of these things from Myers' research, which is why many of these portions deal with Myers' arguments.

First, from "The Bike with the Mike" (LINK) :

          From his reconstruction, Myers concludes that the last frame showing Hughes is only one-half second before the first shot, and thus McLain could not have been at the specified location at the time of the first shot without traveling at implausible speeds, in excess of 400 mph.

          Myers uses the Zapruder film as a chronometer for the assassination, but mis-synchronizes the acoustical evidence by placing the shooting one second earlier than it was. Also, Myers’ reconstruction of the motorcade procession is based on the positions of the vehicles that are seen first in the Hughes film and then later in the Zapruder film. But Myers misplaces the vehicles as seen in the Hughes film because he misplaced the position of Mr. Hughes. Myers then compounded the error in placement by over-estimating the speed of the vehicles. Thus, in his reconstruction the vehicles are further north and traveling faster than they really were. This combination of errors results in a timeline which is about 3-1/2 seconds shorter than it would be without the errors. Removing those errors leaves McLain with approximately 4 seconds to cover the 174 ft (requiring a speed of about 25 mph) to reach the specified location.

          One measure of the reliability of Myers' analysis is his use of the term “Epipolar Geometric” in the title.

          The epipolar line is the baseline necessary for the triangulation process used in epipolar geometry to fix the position of object P. The problem is that the key analysis used by Myers involves images taken by Abraham Zapruder and by Robert Hughes. At no time does Zapruder appear in any of the Hughes frames nor at any time does Hughes appear in Zapruder’s film. Hence, there are no epipoles or epipolar lines or epipolar geometry involved in Myers' key analysis, or any other analysis as far as I can tell. Rather, Myers uses line of sight to estimate the positions of the cars in the motorcade, but without the exactitude implied by the use of “epipolar geometry.”

          Myers specifically contends that the HSCA’s acoustical experts found four suspect sounds on the police tapes to match with their test shots (I report five) and that the first synchronizes to Zapruder frame 160 (as opposed to my synchronization of the first shot with Z-175). But Myers’ contention is wrong on both counts. My numbers come directly from the BBN report.

          The correct numbers are found in the BBN report in their Table II on page 101 of HSCA vol. 8, reproduced herein.

          Importantly, the time-history in Table II is the playback time from a tape recording made by the Dallas police. As mentioned in the footnote in Table II, the recording process was about 5% too slow, requiring a simple correction to adjust to real time. A second correction is also cited in the text of the BBN report necessitated by the subsequent detailed analysis by a second laboratory (Weiss & Aschkenasy) which demonstrated that the pattern identified by BBN at 145.15 sec included impulses that preceded slightly those recognized by BBN, placing the onset of this pattern 270 msec (=0.27 seconds) earlier. When these corrections are applied to the times in Table II the four time intervals among the five putative gunshots are 1.65, 1.1, 4.8 and 0.7 sec. Consequently, the time of the first acoustically identified shot synchronizes to Z-frame 175, not 160 as claimed by Myers.

          The values reported in my essays and lectures come directly from the data in the BBN report and thus are entirely in accord with the HSCA acoustical evidence. The discrepancy is not between my analysis and the acoustical evidence, but between the acoustical evidence and the way it was subsequently manipulated using non-acoustical evidence. The acoustical experts were told falsely that the murder weapon could be cycled in 1.6 sec, an error repeated by Myers. This erroneous, non-acoustical evidence, along with some tortured logic, led the HSCA to discard one of the acoustical matches as a false positive. This changed the number of shots from five to four, but this does not affect the timing of the first shot.

          In spite of some claims to the contrary (i.e., Gregg Jaynes) no films depict the positions where the acoustics places the open microphone at the time of the shots. However, one motorcycle, that ridden by H.B. McLain, was in a position in the motorcade both before and after the shooting, such that he might have been in the acoustically required locations. Those required locations, the test microphone positions where the suspect patterns matched to test shots, were distributed in the vicinity of the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets (Fig. 1).

          By referring to the Zapruder film, specifically to the sequence surrounding Z-175, the time of the first shot, one finds that the acoustically predicted location for the motorcycle is out of the camera’s view, blocked by structures and the crowd at the intersection. The motorcade vehicle in the immediate vicinity of the predicted location was the mayor’s car (sixth in the motorcade). Frustratingly, of the first nine cars in the motorcade the only one which is never visible in the Zapruder film happens to be the mayor’s car. But because of Myers’ faulty analysis this significant fact never surfaces. 

          Between Z-frames 200 and 250, Zapruder panned his camera to the right providing a glimpse of the motorcade on Houston Street including views of the 7th, 8th, and 9th cars. Many researchers have searched these frames for any indication of the motorcycle and none has been found. This negative evidence means that at the time of the shooting, McLain’s motorcycle was either in exactly the right place predicted by the acoustical evidence (next to car-6) or much further back (next to car-10), the latter being Myer’s conclusion. This dichotomy, and its implications, was not made clear by Myers.

          The importance of the mayor’s car to the issue can be seen in the analysis by Greg Jaynes. Jaynes’ flawed analysis appears at the http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/Jaynes/. Jaynes claimed that McLain should have appeared in the uncropped version of the Altgens photo (synchronous with Z-255), and cites the absence as proof that McLain was not in the acoustically required position. But, the mayor’s car is also not visible in the Altgens photo. Jaynes should have provided a map showing, a) Altgens’ cameras scope of view and, b) the acoustically required location of the microphone. Such a map is here provided (Fig. 4) which shows that the required microphone location does not fall within the field of view in the uncropped Altgens photo.      

          Myers has badly misplaced Hughes. Myers places Hughes 15.5 ft west of the center line of Houston Street and 8.8 ft south of the center line of Main Street. The first value is accurate but the second is not. It places Hughes in line with the traffic stripe separating the inner and middle east bound lanes of Main street (and Myers’ illustrations e.g. exhibit 83, show this). Actually Hughes was in line with the traffic stripe separating the middle from the outer lanes, which can be seen in the segment of the Hughes film of the oncoming motorcade on Main Street. This error results in a displacement of approx. 11 ft. from where Myers places him (see Fig. 6 for orientation).

          Through this combination of errors: setting the first shot earlier than it was, displacing the vehicles farther northward than they were, and having them travel faster than they were, Myers lops about 3-1/2 sec off the timeline of events. A precise estimate of the exact amount of time that McLain has between his last filmed position and the time of the first shot may not be attainable because it depends very much on how reliably one can extrapolate the speed of the motorcade. Because at these speeds it can take about two seconds to move one car length, it is clear that over distances of several car lengths any extrapolation is bound to have an ambiguity of at least a second or two. In contrast to Myers’ reconstruction which has the cars moving at a steady 9 mph on Houston Street, I have argued that the motorcade is moving in accordion fashion, slower through the turns than in the straight-aways, and moreover are traveling in a slow and surge mode.

          To put the analysis in proper perspective consider these time estimates. Myers calculates McLain’s speed as he makes the turn from Main on to Houston at 14.7 mph. McLain is last seen at 174 ft from the acoustically required position. At a speed of 10 mph, the equivalent of 15 ft per sec, it would take him about 11 seconds to cover the distance. At 20 mph (=30 ft per sec) he could cover the distance in 5.8 sec. Thus at speeds of 21-29 mph, the distance could be covered in just 3-5 sec. Just from the obvious errors in Myers’ analysis one can see that McLain had the necessary time.

          Although Myers claims that his measurements are consistent among the other films, the other films do not show the same vehicles in the same positions. And his conclusions based on the other films are also questionable. An important example is the Dorman film. The Dorman film shows a police motorcycle approaching the intersection of Elm and Houston at a time approximately 3-6 sec after the fatal shot. The officer could be either H.B. McLain or Jimmy Courson.

          A previous critic has already addressed some of the problems in Myers' identification of the officer as McLain and I would reiterate that Myers does not provide any evidence that would distinguish McLain from Courson. For example, the cop in Dorman has a ticket book visible through the windshield and Myers cited this feature as an identifying character for officer McLain. But Figure 7 shows another motorcade officer (Chaney) with his ticket book in the same position; thus having a ticketbook in this position was certainly not unique to McLain, and there is no information on where Courson kept his ticketbook.

          Myers attempts to refute my argument that the timing of the appearance of the officer in Dorman is consistent with Courson’s account that he saw Mrs. Kennedy and SS Agent Hill on the trunk of the limousine when he rounded the corner of Elm and Houston. Myers claims that this officer does not reach the intersection in time to see that event. But this claim is not supported by his synchronization. 

          Regardless of their memories, if the officer in Dorman is Courson, then McLain has to be in exactly the position required by the acoustical evidence. As mentioned previously, the acoustical evidence requires that the microphone was in the vicinity of the mayor’s car (6th in the motorcade) at the time of the gunfire. Actually, because the acoustical evidence requires the bike with the mike to have an average speed of 11-12 mph during the shooting, the motorcycle is expected to pass the mayor’s car as it rounds the intersection. In the Zapruder film, the only car not seen at any time between the president’s limousine and the tenth car in the motorcade, happens to be the mayor's car.

          Similarly, in the Dorman film, one can see in one sequence, the cars ahead of the SS car (5th in line) and those behind the mayor’s car (6th in line) on Elm Street, but not the space between the mayor’s car and the SS car, which happens to be the position indicated by the acoustical evidence for the location of the open microphone. Hence if the officer in Dorman is Courson, on the motorcycle next behind McLain, the only place McLain could have been is exactly where the acoustical evidence requires (Fig. 9).

From "The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination" (LINK) :

          In the mid-section of the motorcade there were four motorcycle patrolmen: Marion Baker, Clyde Haygood, J.W. Courson and H.B. "Buddy" McLain. Of these, Baker and Haygood stopped to search for the assassins in Dealey Plaza. Because the motorcycle motor noise on the police tape does not stop, only Courson and McLain are viable candidates for the source of the broadcast, if the broadcast originated in Dealey Plaza. In testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, McLain acknowledged that he had a chronic problem with a faulty microphone relay on his unit that caused it to stick open from time to time.

          This photograph (Fig 4) taken by Wilma Bond, shows McLain and Courson on Elm Street in front of the Grassy Knoll where patrolman Bobby Hargis had stopped to search for the assassin. Hargis' motorcycle was parked on the south of the sixth pair of roadstripes from the intersection at Houston Street, just beyond where President Kennedy received the fatal shot. According to Richard Trask [p. 208] the Bond Photo was taken "within 20 sec" of the shooting. However, the scene has to happen later than that. A discontinuous film taken by Mark Bell also shows McLain and Courson passing Hargis. But an earlier sequence shows a witness in the background named Charles Hester rising from the ground. At the sound of gunfire Hester had pushed his wife to the ground and covered her body with his own. Hester is seen standing up in other films, in particular, a newsreel shot by Dave Wiegman.

          Wiegman's film is a clock because it can be connected to the pivotal Zapruder film. A brief instant of the Wiegman film shows the President's limousine approaching the underpass. In the Zapruder film, the President's limousine arrived at the underpass at frame 463, which is 8.2 sec after the head shot. The Wiegman film is 27.3 sec long and the frames showing the limousine approaching the underpass appear 11 sec into the film. Therefore, the Wiegman film begins no later than about 3 sec before the head shot. Towards the end of the film, at sec 26, Hester is seen rising from the ground. Because the frame in the Wiegmann film showing the limousine can occur no later than 8 sec after the head shot, Hester must have stood up no later than 23 sec after the President was shot in the head. Assuming that Bell stopped for about 4-5 sec, allows us to estimate that McLain reached the position shown in the Bond photo at around 27 sec after the head shot.

          The Committee published a frame from the Dorman film showing a motorcycle officer at the corner of Elm and Houston which was supposed to be officer McLain. To the officer's right was an automobile asserted to be Car Number 8 and it was further asserted that this time and location was coincident with the predictions of the acoustical evidence. Both assertions were wrong. In the first place, in order to be in the right place, McLain should have rounded the corner in the proximity of Car-6. It was subsequently realized that the automobile partially visible in the Dorman film was actually the eleventh car in the motorcade and this places the motorcycle well back of where it must be to have the microphone that recorded the assassination gunfire.

          But the officer in the Dorman film is not McLain; it is Clyde Haygood. This can be seen by examination of the newsreel footage taken by Malcolm Couch. This still (Fig 10) is a frame from this newsreel, which from context we can see was taken a few seconds before the Bond photo. Couch's film shows all four of the motorcycle patrolmen at the mid-section of the motorcade. In this single frame we can see three. McLain is way in the distance approaching Hargis's parked motorcycle, Courson is about half way to McLain, and here is Haygood. In the running film one can see Haygood passing Couch on the left. Couch was in the tenth car of the motorcade. To orient the situation I have prepared this plot of the vehicle positions (Fig. 11). Car-10 is at the first road stripe on Elm Street when it was passed by Haygood. This means that Car-11 is at or near the corner and this means that the sequence seen in Couch immediately follows the sequence seen in the Dorman film where Car-11 is approaching the corner. Therefore the motorcycle officer next to Car-11 in the Dorman film has to be Haygood.

Finally, from "Debugging Bugliosi" (LINK) :

          However, one of the salient events in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, one that McLain claims to have seen from his position on Houston Street (in Sneed [No More Silence], p. 163), was Mrs. Kennedy's brief sojourn out onto the trunk of the limousine. Between 3-5 sec after the fatal head shot, a sequence shown in the Zapruder film, Mrs. Kennedy ventured briefly on to the trunk to retrieve a piece of her husband's skull. Given the crowds of people and the structures on the south side of Houston Street, it seems unlikely that McLain could have had a clear view of the event from where he claimed to have been, as opposed to the unobstructed view that he would have had on Elm Street where the acoustical evidence places him.

          More importantly, another motorcycle officer, Jimmy Courson, also saw Mrs. Kennedy on the trunk of the limo, but recalled that he was on Elm street, actually just making the turn on to Elm from Houston at the time. In point of fact, newsreels of the motorcade immediately before and immediately after the shooting show that Courson was several car lengths behind McLain, and thus Courson's account regarding his location directly conflicts with that of McLain. Both officers cannot be correct, and while this doesn't prove that McLain's memory was wrong, it does show how unreliable eyewitness memories of events can be, especially coming scores of years after the event.

          However, in this instance a film taken by Elsie Dorman shows a motorcycle officer turning the corner of Elm and Houston at exactly the same moment that Mrs. Kennedy was on the trunk of the car. Robert Groden originally, and Dale Myers subsequently, assumed that the officer was McLain. But the film lacks any critical detail that would allow one to identify the officer as McLain or Courson though the circumstances of the film (the timing and the other vehicles) are such that it has to be one or the other. So, the truth of the matter is, the filmed evidence is exactly in accord with Courson's account, if it is Courson, and directly contradicts McLain's account no matter who it is. Bugliosi does not discuss this issue, perhaps because of the direct conflict to his star witness.

          For the acoustical evidence to be true, the open microphone had to be on a police motorcycle just ahead of the mayor's car when the Dorman sequence begins. In the Dorman film, there is no motorcycle between the Mayor's car and the cop seen rounding the intersection. If the officer in the Dorman film is Courson, the only place McLain can be at that time, is just ahead of the mayor's car, exactly where the acoustical evidence places the motorcycle with the open microphone.

Whatever one thinks about McLain's location during timeframe in question, at the end of the day the scientific evidence on the police tape itself must be explained by anyone who rejects the HSCA's acoustical analysis.

On 7/2/2023 at 5:08 AM, Michael Griffith said:

In order to explain the hard physical evidence of the rear clothing holes, which place the back wound far too low for the SBT to work, WC apologists must assume that JFK's coat and his tailor-made shirt bunched enough to move the jacket and coat upward by 3-4 inches, and that, even more amazingly, they bunched in such a way as to avoid creating two sets of overlapping holes. Their only evidence for any kind of a sizable bunch is the modest bunch seen in the Croft photo. They ignore the virtually flat coat seen in Betzer 3 and Willis 5, which were taken closer to the start of the shooting than the Croft photo.

Anyway, here are two helpful graphics from our British friends at 22November1963 that I have combined for comparison. One shows the location of the rear hole in the shirt and shows how little JFK's shirt would have bunched even if he had raised his right arm markedly higher than he did, while the other shows how low back the wound was according to the hole in the coat.

I am just going to note that here we have hard physical evidence that the SBT is impossible. We have the rear holes in JFK's shirt and coat. We also have Betzner 3 and Willis 5, which show that JFK's coat had, at the most, only a small bunch just before the shooting started, nothing like the bunch that would have been required to make the clothing holes match the location of a T1 back wound.

If you visit pro-WC websites that discuss the acoustical evidence, you will usually see a link to one of Michael O'Dell's critiques of the acoustical evidence. As I have mentioned, researchers who specialize in the RFK assassination can tell you about the badly flawed research that O'Dell has done on the audio recording of the RFK shooting. 

Mel Ayton, an ardent of opponent of virtually all conspiracy theories, asked O'Dell to analyze the recording of the RFK assassination, which is a tape made by a journalist named Stanislaw Pruszynski. O'Dell wrote that he was only able to identify six shots on the tape. Yet, five audio experts studied the recording and determined that it contains at least 10 shots, which is two more than Sirhan could have fired.

Sirhan's gun could only hold eight bullets, and he had no chance to reload. If more than eight shots were fired, then there must have been a second gunman in the hotel pantry where RFK was killed.

When six audio experts examined the Pruszynski tape, five of them determined that it contains at least 10 shots and at least one group of two shots that were fired within 148 milliseconds of each other, far too quickly to have been fired by the same gun.

The five experts were Philip Van Praag, a former Bell Laboratories engineer and a world-renowned expert on audio recording technology who literally wrote the book on the development of audio recorders; Wes Dooley and Paul Pegas of Audio Engineering Associates in Pasadena, California; Edward Brixen in Copenhagen, Denmark, who is also a ballistics expert; and Phil Spencer Whitehead of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.

The one acoustical expert who did not find more than eight shots on the Pruszynski tape was Dr. Philip Harrison, who was asked by Ayton to analyze the tape. Harrison found "no more than eight shots." Further investigation revealed that, through no fault of his own, Harrison used a mediocre copy of the tape, didn't use any of the specialized equipment that Van Praag used, didn't use any of the test or enhanced recordings that Van Praag made of the tape, somehow did not notice the two 120-150-millisecond double-shot groups, and admitted there were several impulses on the tape whose sources he could not identify. Also, it turned out that Harrison was not even aware of Pruszynski's movements and did not know where the microphone was. It seems that Ayton did not give Harrison all the necessary information when he asked him to analyze the recording. 

One wonders if Peter French was aware of these facts when he endorsed Harrison's analysis. However, contrary to what Ayton claims, French is not an acoustical expert. His field is language and language development, and his firm deals with voice comparison, transcription, and authentication. French spent the first part of his academic career working in child language development, language and education, and conversation analysis. He is a professor in the University of York's Department of Language and Linguistic Science. His published research deals with voice comparison, identifying accents, identifying vowel and phonetic changes, identifying a person's speech rhythms, etc. His bio lists his research interests as "human voice and speech behavior." Ayton makes much of French's endorsement of Harrison's flawed analysis, but French has no expertise or training relevant to the computer analysis of non-voice sounds and the oscillographic characteristics of subaudible non-voice sounds, especially of subaudible gunfire waveform patterns.

The point is: Five experts found at least 10 shots on the recording. Another expert found eight shots. But O'Dell said he could only find six shots. (I might add that O'Dell also claims that the N-wave, muzzle-blast, and muzzle-blast-ehco impulse patterns on the DPD dictabelt recording resulted from human speech.) 

Here is Van Praag's 2011 summary of his analysis of the Pruszynski tape, which he submitted as a sworn statement to the U.S. Central District Court of California at the request of Sirhan's attorneys for their "Reply Brief on the Issue of Actual Innocence":

https://justiceforrfk.com/documents/Sirhan-parole---gunshots-audio-recording-documents.pdf

For those who want more information on the RFK assassination, please excuse this shameless plug of my own website on the subject:

https://sites.google.com/view/the-rfk-assassination/home

Quote

 

Yesterday, Pat Speer said:

It amazes me, moreover, how the same people claiming the HSCA's pathology panel had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's trajectory expert had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's NAA expert had a bias, and blew smoke, refuse to accept the possibility the acoustics experts were also blowing smoke, only in a different direction. 

Oh, wait a minute now. You accept many of the HSCA pathology panel's claims. You say they got it right on the back wound's location and on the authenticity of the autopsy photos, even the nakedly impossible brain photos. You have inhaled quite a bit of the smoke they were blowing.

As usual, you are exaggerating and oversimplifying. Many of the HSCA experts also made valid observations. Even the pathology panel correctly noted that the brain photos categorically rule out the EOP entry site, and that the brain photos show a brain with virtually no tissue missing. They also correctly noted that the WC placed the back wound noticeably too high. Some of the outside experts consulted by the pathology panel provided valuable insights into the skull x-rays that the panel found impossible to accept, not because they were wrong but because they contradicted the panel's conclusions about the head wounds.

The HSCA photographic experts correctly--and historically--noted that the Zapruder film shows that JFK was hit at around Z186-190, when Oswald's view of JFK would have been obscured by the oak tree, and that JFK begins to react to this hit at around Z200. 

On 7/2/2023 at 4:22 AM, Pat Speer said:

You just don't get it, Michael. it's junk science. It's an old tape with some crackles on it that don't even sound like gunshots, The evidence suggests, moreover, that It was not recorded in Dealey Plaza.

The rest is smoke designed to impress people. We know Olivier, Sturdivan, Alvarez, Guinn, Canning, and Baden, et al, blew smoke. So why is it so hard to imagine that another couple of experts blew smoke? 

The best way to see something is to view it from a variety of angles. Let's assume that instead of a dictabelt, it's a blurry film which is purported to show Oswald firing upon Kennedy. Only...

1. It doesn't actually show Oswald in the sniper's nest window, but instead shows a blurry figure crouching down. 

2. The cameraman credited with taking the footage says he didn't take the footage, and that he wasn't even looking at the sniper's nest at the time of the shooting.

And yet some "experts" have concluded the blurry shape is in fact Lee Harvey Oswald, because they have concluded some combination of dots in the blurry image could only have been created if the camera was pointed at someone who looked exactly like Oswald.

In such case, I think you would agree that these "experts" were agenda-driven, and blowing smoke. 

Okay, I can see that you are not going to deal with this subject in an objective and credible manner. You simply ignored my point that the HSCA acoustical experts were initially skeptical that the tape contained gunfire. Weiss and Aschkenasy, in particular, were not just skeptical, they were dismissive when they first heard the tape. But you just swept aside this inconvenient fact because you need to assume that they began their analysis ardently wanting to prove the tape contained gunshots. 

Your comment that the police tape merely contains "some crackles on it that don't even sound like gunshots" shows that you do not even understand the basics of the acoustical evidence, much less the intricate and sophisticated aspects of it. I do not believe you have read the BBN report, the Weiss and Aschkenasy report, and the HSCA hearings on the acoustical evidence. No one who has read those materials would make the silly amateurish argument that the acoustical evidence is invalid because the crackles on the tape do not sound like gunshots to the human ear. Even the NRC panel, with as many blunders as they committed, did not make this embarrassingly unscientific argument. One of the first issues the HSCA acoustical scientists addressed (and easily explained) was why the gunshots are not audible to the human ear when you play the tape.

Your blurry-photo analogy is comical in its lack of resemblance to the case for the acoustical evidence. Clearly, you have no intention of trying to explain how the police tape came to contain the impulse patterns of N-waves, muzzle blasts, muzzle-blast echoes, and windshield distortions, and contains them only when the microphone was in position to record them and never when the mike was not in position to do so, not to mention how echo patterns that mirror those of Dealey Plaza got on the tape. 

Regarding the cameraman in your analogy, you again ignore the fact that McLain changed his story and only later claimed that he could not have been the mike with the open mike. Before he knew what he was supposed to say, McLain's description of his movements in the plaza put him in a location that would have enabled him to be in the position indicated by the acoustical analysis. Let us read what he said, under oath, when he first described his movements: 

Mr. CORNWELL. The first exhibit, JFK F-668, on the left, reflects the motorcade from its left side. There is an officer a short distance ahead of the cameraman, a number of cars, and then further down the motorcade, also on the left side, two motorcycles. Do you recognize the street that that was taken on?
Mr. MCLAIN. That looks like it was taken on Houston.
Mr. CORNWELL. Approaching Houston?
Mr. MCLAIN. No; on Main Street, approaching Houston.
Mr. CORNWELL. So then, Houston Street would be where the buildings break apart and you see a lot of sky toward the end of the street; is that correct?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.

Mr. MCLAIN. The tree that you see there will be on the opposite
side of Houston.
Mr. CORNWELL. In Dealey Plaza?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir. You will turn between the tree and the
building on Houston.
Mr. CORNWELL. Can you tell us whether or not the motorcycle officer in the foreground of that picture--the one closest to the cameraman--was you?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. Then directing your attention to the next exhibit, F-669, would it be fair to state that that is a photograph taken down Houston Street from approximately the location of the intersection of Main and Houston, looking toward the Texas School Book Depository?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.

Mr. CORNWELL. I might state for the record, Mr. Chairman, that in frames just prior to the ones which have been blown up here, it is clear that the cars at the extreme portion of the photograph, away from the photographer, consist of the Presidential limousine, flanked by two motorcycles, and the Secret Service followup car; but you can still see with some clarity in the photograph the Secret Service followup car and the two motorcycles. In other words, the Presidential limousine is right at the corner and turning from Houston onto Elm, and from the School Book Depository.

Mr. CORNWELL. The next two photographs have been placed on the easels out of sequence. May we have those altered just so that they could be viewed with more clarity? The last two-we need to just switch their location. Exhibit F-670 would be several frames after exhibit F-669, also looking down Houston Street, showing essentially the same portion of the motorcade. And then the following exhibit, F-671, would be, again, a few frames later. When viewing the entire film intact, you can then see that within a matter of seconds after the Presidential limousine turns in front of the depository, a police officer riding a motorcycle enters right in front of the photographer--and that is exhibit 671--right onto Houston Street from Main.

Mr. CORNWELL. Can you tell us, Officer McLain, would that have been you?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. Do you have a memory of hearing any shots while you were in Dealey Plaza?
Mr. MCLAIN. I only remember hearing one.
Mr. CORNWELL. And approximately where were you when you heard that shot?
Mr. MCLAIN. I was approximately halfway between Main and Elm Streets on Houston.
Mr. CORNWELL. So you would have heard it sometime after the picture was taken in exhibit F-671, the last one on the right?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. And before you got to the corner and turned the corner from Houston onto Elm; is that correct?
Mr. MCLAIN. That's correct. . . .

Mr. CORNWELL. I would like to ask you next, what happened after you heard the broadcast from Chief Curry about proceeding to Parkland Hospital?
Mr. MCLAIN . Well, everybody broke and headed for the hospital.
Mr. CORNWELL. At the time that this occurred, you said "proceeding." I take it that means that you revved your engine up and started up at high speed to go toward the hospital?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. Do you have a memory of where the Presidential or Vice Presidential limousines were roughly at the time that you caught up with them after hearing Chief Curry's radio signal?
Mr. MCLAIN. They were approximately--well, in front of what is now, where they have the Hyatt House, would be the overpass over Continental.
Mr. CORNWELL. So, in other words, although you speeded up your motorcycle and attempted to catch up to the Presidential and Vice Presidential limousines, it took you until some point up on Stemmons Freeway before you could catch them; is that right?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir. . . .

Mr. CORNWELL. And with respect to F-675, did you identify that as representing you and another officer on Elm Street?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes; that's myself and Sergeant Courson. Well, he is now sergeant; he was J. W. Courson at the time.
Mr. CORNWELL. So that last picture we just described, F-675, you identified as appearing to you to represent yourself and Officer Courson, and Courson was at an earlier point in the motorcade, riding behind you, also on the lefthand side?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, Sir. (5 HSCA 628-630, 635)

And notice that McLain made none of his later claims about what he supposedly did and saw after he heard gunfire.

McLain also admitted that he normally used Channel 1 and that he did not recall using a different channel that day (contrary to one of his many later false claims):

Mr. CORNWELL. Now had you personally had any occasion on that day, to your memory, to use your radio, to talk through it?
Mr. MCLAIN. No, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. Do you have a distinct memory of what channel
your radio was set on?
Mr. MCLAIN. It's normally set on channel 1.
Mr. CORNWELL. And do you remember anything differently on that day?
Mr. MCLAIN. No, sir.
Mr. CORNWELL. The answer is no?
Mr. MCLAIN. Nope. (5 HSCA 630)

McLain further acknowledged that his mike frequently got stuck in the open position:

Mr. CORNWELL. Do you know whether or not it would have been possible for your microphone to have been stuck in the open position without your knowledge?
Mr. MCLAIN. Yes, sir; it has been before.
Mr. CORNWELL. Under how many different circumstances in your particular case?
Mr. MCLAIN. I'm scared to say. (5 HSCA 637)

The HSCA report provides a good summary of McLain's testimony:

          He further stated that he was the officer in the photographs taken of the motorcade on Main and Houston Streets, and that at the time of the assassination he would have been in the approximate position of the open microphone near the corner of Houston and Elm, indicated by the acoustical analysis.  He did not recall using his radio during the motorcade nor what channel it was tuned to on that day. He stated it usually was tuned to channel one. The button on his transmitter receiver, he acknowledged, often got stuck in the "on" position when he was unaware of it, but he did not know if it was stuck during the motorcade. (HSCA report, p. 76)

The bottom line about McLain is that you cannot prove that McLain was not in position to record the tape, and I cannot prove that he was. The photographic record simply does not show his location during the shooting sequence. Therefore, we are left to make subjective judgments about where he could and could not have been, based on interpretation of photos and footage that show him before and after the shooting. 

Speculation and deduction about McLain's position, no matter how adamantly stated, cannot invalidate the hard scientific evidence found on the police tape itself. N-waves, muzzle blasts, muzzle-blast echoes, windshield-distortion patterns, echo patterns that mirror a known location's echo-pattern fingerprint, etc., do not just magically appear on recordings out of thin air. These things must be explained by anyone who says the acoustical evidence is invalid. 

In order to explain the hard physical evidence of the rear clothing holes, which place the back wound far too low for the SBT to work, WC apologists must assume that JFK's coat and his tailor-made shirt bunched enough to move the jacket and coat upward by 3-4 inches, and that, even more amazingly, they bunched in such a way as to avoid creating two sets of overlapping holes. Their only evidence for any kind of a sizable bunch is the modest bunch seen in the Croft photo. They ignore the virtually flat coat seen in Betzer 3 and Willis 5, which were taken closer to the start of the shooting than the Croft photo.

Anyway, here are two helpful graphics from our British friends at 22November1963 that I have combined for comparison. One shows the location of the rear hole in the shirt and shows how little JFK's shirt would have bunched even if he had raised his right arm markedly higher than he did, while the other shows how low back the wound was according to the hole in the coat.

9 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

The acoustics evidence is purported to reflect that he neither accelerated nor slammed on his brakes for more than 30 seconds after the shooting. The original experts said he maintained a constant speed throughout the shooting and then afterwards, like he was oblivious. This would have put him under the triple overpass at the time he was photographed in the Bond photo. So Thomas tried to correct their error, and claimed instead that he stopped accelerating two seconds before the first shot, maintained a speed of 11 mph as he turned onto Elm, and then slowed to a constant crawl--idling speed--for the next 30 seconds. The problem is that 1) McLain said he did not do this, 2) no one saw him do this, 3) he is not visible in the Wiegman film when Wiegman briefly turns his camera to where Thomas says he was, and 4) the "idling" speed suggested by Thomas is far slower than the actual idling speed for a Harley. 

We've seen this before. Someone puts together a theory that's supposed to answer the big questions. It is then pointed out that this theory has major holes. So someone else comes along and tweaks it a bit. Only this "tweak" is no better and only shows how questionable this theory was from day one. I am speaking of course of the single-bullet theory. But there's also NAA, which CTs claimed would answer the big questions, until Vincent Guinn testified before the HSCA that it supported the SBT. People then began to question his conclusions, and realized he was largely blowing smoke. Well, this then led to a number of articles by Rahn and Sturdivan in which they tried to resurrect Guinn's findings (much as Thomas has now tried to resurrect the findings of the HSCA acoustics experts). In any event, the scientific community eventually dismissed NAA for bullet lead as being unreliable, and sent it into the cornfield along with a lot other questionable science, like bite-mark analysis, and. to a lesser extent, handwriting analysis. 

Now, with the acoustics evidence, we have a tape which 1) has impulses, not shots, 2) has these impulses at a time which appears to have been after the event in question, 3) has these impulses in a pattern that has been corrected to make it fit a presumed scenario, 4) has impulses that are purported to match up perfectly with how shots would be recorded on a motorcycle microphone starting at a certain point while traveling at a specific speed, which fails to align with the known location of any motorcycle.  Now, to add insult to injury, it turns out that the rider of the motorcycle presumed to have been where the recording started insisted 1) he wasn't where he was supposed to have been, 2)  his microphone was not on the channel on which the impulses were recording, and 3) he knew of sounds that should have been recorded should the mic in question have been his mic, that were not, in fact, recorded. And, oh yeah, there's also the photographic evidence--ALL of which present the motorcycle far behind the location where it would need to have been to pick up the impulses as ID'ed by the acoustics experts. 

Now, our familiarity with the SBT tells us that the doctors said they found no passage from the back wound into the body, and that Specter "corrected" this by claiming that the trajectory of the bullet creating this wound led between two bruised strap muscles, and this suggested that it did indeed pass. Specter then stood by this bs for the rest of his life. Never mind that the strap muscles are on the front of the neck, etc. Well, I see a close parallel in the acoustics evidence. The acoustics faithful hit a wall, similar to the doctors' stating they found no entrance to the body. Only their wall was that they failed to find a motorcycle where they thought there ought to be one. So, much as Specter pretended there were some bruises on some back muscles, and continued to pretend this for the rest of his life, the acoustics faithful continue to pretend McLain rode the motorcycle whose microphone picked up the impulses. It's total crap. 

It amazes me, moreover, how the same people claiming the HSCA's pathology panel had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's trajectory expert had a bias, and blew smoke, and the HSCA's NAA expert had a bias, and blew smoke, refuse to accept the possibility the acoustics experts were also blowing smoke, only in a different direction. 

Your comment suggests you have not read the HSCA acoustical materials. There is a huge difference between the HSCA acoustical experts and the other HSCA experts whom you cite. The BBN acoustical scientists were initially skeptical that the police tape contained gunfire. Ditto for Weiss and Aschkenasy. In fact, when Weiss and Aschkenasy first heard the tape, they said they thought someone had to be kidding. The BBN scientists only began to change their minds when they digitized the 5.5-minute open-mic sequence, printed the oscillograph (soundwave graph), and began to analyze the graph. When they analyzed the soundwave graph, they recognized patterns that had N-wave characteristics and knew right away that this finding demanded that they do further testing. 

If you would read the BBN report, the Weiss and Aschkenasy report, and Barger, Weiss, and Aschkenasy's testimony, you would learn that they ran screening tests that were designed to disqualify suspect impulse patterns as much as they were designed to do the opposite. 

If anything, the HSCA acoustics experts can be accused of being too cautious and of understating their case. A prime example of this is the ultra-conservative way that Weiss and Aschkenasy arrived at their 5% probability of chance figure. They made the needlessly conservative assumption that impulses could occur only in the two intervals in which echoes were observed in the field-test grassy knoll shot. This assumption needlessly ignored the fact that if the impulses were not gunfire, they would have been able to occur between those two intervals, adding 190 milliseconds to the timespan for impulses to occur and vastly reducing the probability of chance to far below 5%. 

Weiss and Aschkenasy acknowledged this in their report. The NRC panel, and every critic since then, ignored this key qualification of the 5% figure. 

Weiss and Aschkenasy explained that their “5% or less” calculation assumed that impulses could only occur from 0 to 85 milliseconds and from 275 to 370 milliseconds, because these were the intervals in which echoes occurred in the field-test grassy knoll shot.

The grassy knoll test shot produced a distinctive pattern in which the echoes arrived in two clusters. The first cluster arrived in the first 85 milliseconds and consisted of echoes from structures facing Elm Street. The first cluster was followed by a gap of 190 milliseconds, corresponding to the open space at the intersection. The second echo cluster arrived in the last 95 milliseconds (275 to 370) and originated with the structures on Houston Street. This is why Weiss and Aschkenasy assumed in their analysis that impulses could only occur during the timespan of these two timeframes, and these timeframes added up to 180 milliseconds. 

But, if the dictabelt impulses were not caused by gunfire, if they were generated by random noise, then the timespan during which impulses could have occurred more than doubles: it goes from 180 milliseconds to 370 milliseconds. Why? Because there is a 190-millisecond interval between the two intervals of 0-85 and 275-370 milliseconds. Obviously, if you more than double the timespan for impulses to occur, this vastly reduces the probability that random noise caused the dictabelt grassy knoll shot.

Here is how Weiss and Aschkenasy explained this in their report:

          The high degree of correlation between the impulse [the dictabelt grassy knoll shot] and echo sequences [of the grassy knoll test shot] does not preclude the possibility that the impulses were not the sounds of a gunshot. It is conceivable that a sequence of impulse sounds, derived from non-gunshot sources, was generated with time spacings that, by chance, corresponded within one one-thousandth of a second to those of echoes of a gunshot fired from the grassy knoll. However, the probability of such a chance occurrence is about 5 percent. This calculation represents a highly conservative point of view, since it assumes that impulses can occur only in the two intervals in which echoes were observed to occur, these being the echo-delay range from 0 to 85 milliseconds and the range from 275 to 370 milliseconds.

          However, if the impulses in the DPD recording were not the echoes of a gunshot, they could also have occurred in the 190-millisecond timespan that separated these two intervals. Taking this timespan into account, the probability becomes considerably less than 5 percent that the match between the recorded impulses and the predicted echoes occurred by chance. (8 HSCA 32)

Are you ever going to get around to dealing with the correlations between the police tape's impulse patterns and the field-test impulse patterns? AGAIN, okay, if McClain's motorcycle did not record the sounds on the tape, and if the sounds did not occur in Dealey Plaza and even occurred after the assassination, how did those impulse patterns get on the tape? The tape contains N-waves, muzzle blasts, muzzle-blast echoes, windshield-distortion patterns, and only when the microphone was in position to record them. How did these patterns get on the tape? 

If no one could have assembled the bicycle, tell my how the bicycle got assembled. You can repeat over and over and over again that you do not think anyone could have assembled the bicycle. The problem is that we have an assembled bicycle. Just tell me how you think the bicycle got assembled. 

Here are more facts that must be explained by anyone who rejects the HSCA acoustical evidence, and that help us understand and appreciate the nature of that evidence:

-- Acoustical experts Dr. Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy explained why the muzzle-blast echoes were the most effective and reliable criterion for determining if the third impulse pattern on the police tape was caused by a shot from the grassy knoll. As they noted, muzzle blasts and their echoes come in a certain order and interval, and the echoes can be traced back to the structures off which they are reflected and refracted (8 HSCA 6-9, 16-25).

-- Weiss and Aschkenasy also explained that the pattern of sounds a listener—in this case, a microphone--will hear will be complex and unique for any given pair of gun and microphone locations. This pattern of sounds constitutes an acoustical “fingerprint.” Moreover, if the listener, i.e., the microphone, is in motion when the muzzle blast and the resulting echo sounds reach it, the times at which it will hear the muzzle blast and its echoes will be related uniquely to the microphone’s location when it hears each sound, since echo-delay times can be measured precisely by producing a graph of their waveforms, known as an oscillogram or an oscillograph:

          To answer the basic question, "Was the third group of recorded sounds generated by a gunshot from the grassy knoll?" with a high level of certainty, these sounds needed to be examined for some characteristic that they would have had if they had been generated by such a gunshot, and would not be likely to have had if they had not been. Of the several characteristics that can be used, the most effective and most reliable one is the sequence of delay times of the muzzle-blast echoes. 

          The firing of a gun generates a very loud, very brief explosive blast at the muzzle of the gun. This sound, which typically lasts about five one-thousandths of a second (0.005 seconds, or 5 milliseconds), spreads out in all directions from the gun. If the muzzle blast strikes a wall of a structure, it will be reflected from the surface and will move away from it in a new direction. If the muzzle blast strikes the corner of a structure, it will be diffracted, that is, it will spread out from the corner in many directions. These reflected and diffracted sounds are the echoes of the muzzle blast. Like the muzzle blast, which they closely resemble, the individual echoes are very short in duration. The strengths of the echoes tend to diminish with time, the earliest ones being very loud and the later ones growing progressively weaker as they arrive from increasingly distant locations.

          The time taken for the muzzle blast to be heard at some location depends solely on how fast the sound travels and how far the listener is from the gun. For example, at 65°F the speed of sound is 1123 ft/sec. A listener 112.3 feet away from a gun would hear its muzzle blast 0.1 second after the gun was fired. The time taken for the muzzle blast echoes to be heard also depends on the speed of sound and on the total distance each echo must travel, which is the total of the distance from the gun to the echo-producing object and then to the listener. Since the distance traveled by the muzzle blast to a listener must be less than the distance traveled by one of its echoes, the bang of the muzzle blast is always heard first. Then the echoes that are produced by the muzzle blast bouncing off the corners and surfaces of structures are heard. 

          If we now assume that the sound source (the gun) and the listener are located in a typical urban environment, with a number of randomly spaced echo-producing structures, it is possible to see that the pattern of sounds a listener will hear will be complex and unique for any given pair of gun and listener locations. 

          For example, assuming a fixed location of a listener, the echoes that he hears and the times at which he hears them will be related uniquely to the location of the gun, since for each different location of the gun, even though the distances from the listener to the various echo-producing objects are the same, the distances from these objects to each gun location are different. 

          Consequently, the times at which the echoes are heard will be different for each location of the gun. Similarly, assuming a fixed location of the gun, any change in the location of the listener will change the distances between him and the echo-producing structures, and thus the timing of the pattern of sounds he hears. If the listener is in motion as the muzzle blast and the various echo sounds reach him, the times at which he hears the muzzle blast and its echoes will be related uniquely to his location when he hears each sound. 

         The "listener" that we have discussed, of course, could be either a human ear or a microphone. If a microphone receives the sounds and they are subsequently recorded, the recording becomes a picture of the event, not unlike a "fingerprint," that permanently characterizes the original gun and microphone locations. 

          Echo-delay times in such recordings can be measured easily and precisely by producing a graph of their waveforms on an oscillogram, or oscillograph. Such a graph is shown in figure 1. The narrow peaks represent individual sounds of brief duration (that is, impulse-sounds). The heights of the peaks correspond to the loudness of the impulse sounds; the spacing between peaks corresponds to the time that elapses between them. The largest of the impulse peaks is the muzzle blast. The peaks that follow it are its individual echoes. The distance between the peak that is identified as the muzzle blast and each peak that represents an echo is a measure of the delay time of the echo.... 

          It [the oscillograph] provides a picture of the complex, random spacings of the echo-delay times. When the temperature of the air and the locations of the echo-producing objects are known, the graph is uniquely related to a particular pair of gun and microphone locations. This complex picture can be compared to other such graphs. If the random pattern of echo-delay times (the spacings between peaks) matches in any two such graphs, it may be concluded that the sounds and listener locations that produced both graphs were the same. (8 HSCA 6-9) 

-- At 133 seconds after the start of the stuck-microphone transmission, the level of the noise drops by about 6 decibels (about one-fourth of its previous level). The gunshot impulse patterns begin about 5 seconds after the decrease in the level of the continuous noise and last for about 8 seconds (8 HSCA 11) 

Think about the odds that the duration of the gunshot impulse patterns would be correct if they were just randomly generated noises (leaving aside the problems with assuming that random noises can create the precise acoustical patterns of N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes). If their duration were 4 seconds, or 3 seconds, or 12 seconds, or 14 seconds, etc., they would not have passed the second BBN screening test, and we would not be here talking about them. 

-- The match between the grassy knoll impulses on the tape and the grassy knoll impulses from the field test is even more impressive when we consider the reason the field test fired from a point behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll. Not only was this location the spot indicated by eyewitness and earwitness testimony, but this location provided the shooter with a better view of Elm Street and with more cover than any other spot on the knoll. No other location on the knoll would have provided this degree of visibility and cover: 

          During the acoustic reconstruction experiment that was conducted by BBN in Dealey Plaza on August 20, 1978, shots were fired from behind the wooden stockade fence on the grassy knoll. This location was consistent with available eyewitness and earwitness testimony. It was a reasonable one since it afforded good visibility of Elm Street while providing good cover for the shooter of a gun. At any other location on the grassy knoll either the visibility or the cover would have been substantially poorer. (8 HSCA 10) 

And remember that the initial BBN analysis, which was done before the acoustical data from the field test were available, placed the third impulse pattern in the vicinity of the grassy knoll. By reducing the spacing between the microphones from the BBN distance of 18 feet to 1 foot, Weiss and Aschkenasy were able to identify a small area on the knoll as the source of the shot. They were also able to vastly reduce the detection threshold window, lowering it from the BBN threshold of 6 milliseconds down to 1 millisecond. Now, to be sure, 6 milliseconds is a narrow detection window, but 1 millisecond is 500% narrower. 

-- Weiss and Aschkenasy explained that calculating how long it took for each muzzle-blast echo to travel from the gun to the microphone, and thus to calculate the echo-delay times, was based on fundamental principles of acoustics: 

          Using fundamental principles of acoustics, it was possible to compute the time it would take for the sound of a muzzle blast to travel from a gun at any assumed point on the grassy knoll to a microphone at any assumed point on Elm Street. Knowing where the echo-producing objects were in Dealey Plaza, it was also possible to compute the time it would take for echoes of the muzzle blast to travel from the gun to the microphone. Subtracting the muzzle-blast travel time from the echo travel times yielded the required sequence of echo-delay times. (8 HSCA 18-19) 

-- The intermittent wind blowing in Dealey Plaza during the assassination would have had no meaningful effect on the delay times of the echoes: 

          For a gunshot fired from the grassy knoll and heard on Elm Street, the travel of most echoes is in approximately the same direction as the directly received muzzle blast. Consequently, the effect of wind on the delay times of these echoes is comparatively small, becoming significant only for windspeeds greater than 40 miles per hour. The weather bureau recorded winds in Dallas on November 22, 1963, as ranging only between 13 knots and 17 knots, which is roughly equal to 15 to 20 miles per hour. (8 HSCA 21)

3 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Of course, I've read Thomas' articles. Have you read (and understood) my article, where I went through all his musings about McLain's location, and showed that they were nonsense? I mean, I've met Thomas. I like him just fine. And I love Tink. But they are just wrong about this. As far as the specifics of how impulses are recorded etc, I was surprisingly impressed with Mantik's presentation at one of Gary's conferences. I don't remember the specifics but I remember that he found several instances where square pegs were cut to fit into round holes. As I recall, the impulses on the tape did not fit the shot sequence, so they made what they claimed was a reasonable adjustment, etc. In short, David Mantik--someone with whom I frequently disagree--made what was to me a compelling argument that the impulses on the tape were not related to the shooting and that the acoustics evidence was polluted by confirmation bias. Ironic as heck, I know. 

I already addressed the fact that Mantik argues that the tape impulses do not fit the shot sequence. That is a weak argument, and a rather surprising one, since Mantik knows that the Zapruder film has been altered and thus should know that any success or failure to match the shot impulses with the shot sequence proves little or nothing either way. This is not to mention the fact that the police tape cannot be said to contain all the shots that were fired in the plaza, given the limitations of the police radio system and the fact that the HSCA field test only fired from two locations.

Have you read Mantik's critiques of the acoustical evidence? He does not attempt to explain the windshield-distortion correlations. He does not explain the N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes and their occurrence in the right order and interval. He relies on the badly flawed research of the Sonalysts analysts and Michael O'Dell.

Go talk to RFK assassination researchers about O'Dell's bogus acoustical research in that case regarding the audio of the RFK shooting. Do you know what O'Dell's explanation for the grassy-knoll impulse patterns is? Human speech. That is a bogus argument that was debunked by the HSCA scientists. Even the NRC panel knew better than to float such an unscientific argument.

Mantik is simply out of his field on the acoustical evidence, and unfortunately it shows in his critiques of the acoustics. When I asked him about the correlations that I have discussed in this thread, he said they were remarkable coincidences, which is what he says in his critique of the acoustical evidence in his review of Thompson's Last Second in Dallas.

I am not happy to have to point out these things. I respect Dr. Mantik as much as anybody else does in the research community. He and I have discussed the JFK case off and on since the 1990s. His work on the autopsy materials, especially on the skull x-rays, has been historic and game changing. But he is out of his field on and wrong about the acoustical evidence.

17 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

Come on, Michael. Thomas admits it's McLain in Bond. And he recognizes that for McLain to be in Bond, he could not have been traveling at the speed the HSCA acoustics experts assumed he was. So he stands by their conclusions of the motorcycle's speed during the shot sequence and proposes that he slowed down dramatically just after. By doing so, it makes Wiegman's presence on the knoll seem possible. But it's nonsense. Here, see for yourself. Here's his exhibit showing McLain's movements across the plaza. Note that the triangles represent his location at each second. Note that he has him turn the corner without slowing, and then slow down dramatically and putt-putt across the plaza after the shooting. Note also that this should have put him right in front of Wiegman in the early frames of his film, but that he is nowhere to be seen in that film. (Because he wasn't there.)

"Come on"? You need to go back and re-read Thomas's research. Thomas argues that McClain could have been in position to record the sounds. And I notice that you skipped over the fact that before McClain knew what he was supposed to say, he freely admitted, under oath, that his bike would have been in position to record the sounds on the tape. 

But, hey, as I've said, for the sake of argument, let us assume that you are right about McClain's position. Fine. Now, tell me how windshield-distortion patterns, N-wave patterns, muzzle-blast patterns, muzzle-blast echo patterns, and echo patterns that match Dealey Plaza's echo fingerprint got on the tape. How did those impulse patterns get on the tape? 

Yes, I fully comprehend that you are saying that the person we thought could have assembled the bicycle could not have assembled it. Fine. So, tell me why or how we have an assembled bicycle in front of us. Did the bicycle assemble itself? Did a tornado blow apart a bicycle parts warehouse and cause some of the parts to assemble into a functioning bicycle?

6 hours ago, W. Tracy Parnell said:

For those wishing to dive deeper into the subject:

The HSCA Acoustics Issue ~ W. Tracy Parnell (wtracyparnell.blogspot.com)

I'm guessing you did not bother to read the previous posts in this thread before posting your reply. Just a guess.

Anyway, your article does not "diver deeper" into the HSCA acoustical analysis; rather, it recommends articles that ignore most of the evidence that supports the analysis and instead focus on trying to prove that the impulse patterns were not recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. The fact that you claim that John McAdams "effectively explains the issues" suggest you have only read one side of the story, among other things.

If we really want to dive more deeply into the acoustical evidence, let us consider in more depth the intricate nature of the N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes that occur within the identified gunshot impulse patterns on the police tape.

For a sound wave to be an N-wave, it must come before the muzzle blast, and it must do so in the very small and specific timeframe of 10-30 milliseconds, and then the muzzle blast will come after the N-wave, and then the muzzle blast will be followed by its own echo. The Weiss and Aschkenasy report explains how these groups of impulses appear in the graphical representation of one of the test-firing shots:

          The first waveform appearing in the graph, the large peak at the left-hand side, corresponds to the supersonic shockwave [N-wave] of the rifle bullet. The second large peak is the waveform of the muzzle blast. Following it, with generally diminishing heights, are the waveforms of the echoes of the muzzle blast. The delay time of each echo was determined by direct measurement of the distance from the leading edge of the muzzle blast waveform to that of the echo. (8 HSCA 24)

The grassy knoll impulse pattern contains waveforms that conform to these intricate characteristics. 

A loud human yell or a burst of static can cause an impulse pattern that will generally resemble the graphical representation of an N-wave on a spectrogram or oscillogram. However, that yell or static is not going to show the N-wave coming ahead of the muzzle blast and doing so at the correct interval, and it is not going to show the muzzle-blast echo coming after the muzzle blast. Professor Aschkenasy discussed this matter in his HSCA testimony. Weiss and Aschkenasy were displaying an oscillogram, and Congressman Edgar thought that a certain set of "squiggly lines" were caused by supersonic gunfire. Professor Aschkenasy explained the congressman's misunderstanding and explained that identifying an N-wave required a more detailed analysis:

          Mr. EDGAR. How do you know that the squiggly lines you are looking at are really supersonic?

          Mr. ASCHKENASY. They are not supersonic. Those are sound waves. Those are presentations of sound waves. The question, what you might want to ask, is about whether we can tell a bullet was there, namely, was it creating a supersonic shock wave? That is what you are questioning. And those are not supersonic sound waves. Those are sound waves as recorded by a microphone, and put into electrical form by the equipment that was used to transmit it and record it, and there is nothing supersonic in those squiggles that we have up there on that board.

          Mr. EDGAR. Would you answer the question I wanted to ask?

          Mr. ASCHKENASY. Well, because you have a bullet that travels faster than sound, it will get to someplace faster than the sound reaching that same point. We are talking about two components, the bullet and the muzzle blast. 

          The bullet flies, let's just pick a number, at 2,220 feet per second, so that it travels at twice the speed of sound for this particular example, when you fire the gun. And it flies, let's say for 200 feet. It will get at the target 200 feet away in a certain period of time. Just like a boat pushes the water ahead of it creating the V-shape wake behind the boat, that is similar to what you see in a shock wave from a bullet. And that shock wave is what is recorded by the microphone that is right next to the target. 

          Sometime later, finally the sound catches up to it and gets to the target, and the muzzle blast is recorded. That interval of time is fixed, by the fact that you have a certain muzzle velocity and you have a certain distance, they occur in a fixed time relationship. 

          We have also the first, it's covered by the photograph--could somebody remove that photograph, please. If I may point something out there.

          Mr. EDGAR. Yes.

          Mr. ASCHKENASY. I can point out here also these first impulses before the muzzle blast, those are the shock waves, and if you look carefully--I am sure you cannot look that carefully at that distance--but if you look at these graphs, because these microphones are located at different positions on the street, the relationship between the shock wave and the muzzle blast changes, and it changes in a predictable manner because the manner in which you expect them to change is related to where the observer, or the microphone is picking up both the shock waves and the muzzle blast.[/i]

          Now, you measure here about on the average of about 14 milliseconds, 14 thousandths of a second delay between the shock wave and the muzzle blast. We go now here to the police tape and the measurement that we found was around 24 milliseconds here. It is now reasonable to assume because of the measured time interval that the impulse may have attributes of a shock wave.

          If you expand the experiment tape and take an even better look at it, you find there is a little shock wave echo right in between the shock wave and the muzzle blast, and if you expand the police tape properly, you find similar patterns, implying to us that this impulse has the qualities, attributes of a shock wave. (5 HSCA 609-610)

You might ask yourself this question: Why do you suppose the NRC panel declined to offer any explanation for the similarities between the N-wave, muzzle-blast, and muzzle-blast-echo patterns seen in the field-test gunshot impulses and those found in the identified gunshot impulses on the dictabelt? 

Finally, I would note that at least the NRC panel did not make the mistake of making the ludicrous claim that N-waves are "scattered throughout" the police tape or that human speech can cause N-waves, as some WC apologists have suggested.

On 6/28/2023 at 7:41 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

JD--

Surely, JFK made mistakes; every president does (we can say with hindsight).

But there is no way JFK Jr. would have ended up with 500,000 US soldiers in Vietnam, and killing a couple million people. 

JFK knew that US dominance in Vietnam would be seen (justifiably) by large fractions, probably majorities, of the Vietnamese as colonialism, and racism. That is a losing situation. Nobody likes occupying soldiers.

After Tet, Westmoreland wanted 750,000 troops in Vietnam.  And if that didn't work (and it would not have), then a million?

Even LBJ came to rue the day he gave the Deep State its war.  

This does not make the communists nice guys. 

But some wars cannot be won. The CCP is running China and human rights have all but disappeared. 

But US globalist elites cannot do enough business with Beijing. The Bidens are rolling in China money. They love it. 

So, what was the war in Indochina about? Fighting communism? 

It is sad that some of you simply cannot abandon these JFK-and-Vietnam myths. JFK had no intention of allowing South Vietnam to fall under Communist rule. The White House tapes prove this beyond any reasonable or rational doubt. They refute the unconditional-withdrawal claims made by some of his former aides and associates years later (other former aides and associates contradicted those claims, by the way).

The "secret" McNamara debrief proves nothing except that McNamara would occasionally create false paper trails or audio memos for potential later use (as he was caught doing by Admiral Sharpe). In this case, he obviously decided he did not dare use the phony debrief, which is why he failed to say a word about it in his memoir, even though much of his memoir was about JFK's Vietnam policy. Nor did McNamara even mention JFK's alleged revelation to him in any White House meeting when this information would have had a blockbuster effect. Nor is there any mention of JFK's alleged revelation to McNamara on any of the White House tapes recorded between November 1963 and November 1967. It is also revealing that he said nothing about this alleged historic revelation to any of his adoring aides, not even to McNaughton. Yet, sadly, this shoddy evidence was included in JFK Revisited without any mention of the doubts about its veracity.

Westmoreland did not really want that many more troops. That was Wheeler's doing. Wheeler pressured Westmoreland into making the request. And Wheeler wanted those troops because he recognized, as has been confirmed by North Vietnamese sources, that North Vietnam was reeling from the staggering defeat they had suffered during Tet I, and that this was a prime moment to deliver a finishing blow to the Communists. (Westmoreland felt this could be done with a far smaller increase in troop strength.)

The Vietnam War was not only winnable, we won it. We were on the verge of winning it twice before then (1963 and post-Tet 1968) but did not seize the opportunity. Read the now-available North Vietnamese sources. If Congress had not slashed aid to South Vietnam after 1973, South Vietnam would have remained independent. 

Yes, the Vietnam War was about fighting communism. It was about keeping 19 million people from falling under Communist tyranny. The reign of terror that the Communist imposed on South Vietnam should make it clear to every humane person that our effort to keep South Vietnam free was noble and worthwhile.

I hope you will one day read the other side of the story on the Vietnam War, at least three books. I'd recommend Dr. Lewis Sorley's A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999), Dr. George Veith's Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam's Shattered Dream (2021), and The Republic of Vietnam, 1955-1975 (2020), edited by Tuong Vu and Sean Fear.

FYI:

YouTube repeatedly censors RFK Jr. as Democratic leaders demand reinstatement of 2020 censorship | Just The News

35 minutes ago, Allen Lowe said:

thanks for all this, Mike, it is very convincing.   I do ask, re your earlier comment, what you regard as evidence that Zapruder was edited? I don't disagree with you, I am agnostic on this (and it makes more sense than the kind of alteration that others have alleged), but can you explain? Thanks.

Thanks, Allen. Here is a link to my article "Evidence of Alteration in the Zapruder Film": 

Evidence of Alteration in the Zapruder Film (maryferrell.org)

For a more technical and extensive look at the evidence of alteration, I recommend that you read Doug Horne and Dr. David Mantik research on this subject. Here is one of Horne's articles:

The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration – Assassination of JFK

11 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Oh my. It's not subjective. We know within a few feet where Wiegman was when Thomas' first shot was fired. We also know that McLain is captured in the Bond photo, a second or so after passing Wiegman. If McLain was where the acoustics faithful place him at the time of the first shot--well ahead of Wiegman--it necessitates Wiegman's passing McLain within seconds of the shooting. Thomas as much as admits this on his map, in which he shows what he interprets to be the movements of McLain, and has him traveling less than 5 mph after the shots were fired.  

So...do you honestly believe Dave Wiegman, carrying a heavy TV camera, ran past H.B. McLain, who was riding on a motorcycle? And, if not, can you explain how Wiegman is busy filming the end of his film on the knoll as McLain rides by in the Bond photo? 

One, you are misrepresenting Thomas's arguments, and ignoring many others. Much of the debate over McClain's position most certainly is subjective, and it is downright nonsensical to claim otherwise. You know there is no continuous photographic record of McClain's movements from the time he turned onto Houston Street and then onto Elm Street until the time he left the plaza. The fact that McClain lied so brazenly about his actions after he recanted his initial testimony should serve as bright red flag for skeptics of the acoustical evidence.

We should remember that before he knew what he was supposed to say, McClain freely acknowledged, under oath, that he was the officer the HSCA had identified in the photos of the motorcade on Main and Houston Streets and that he would have been in the approximate position of the open microphone indicated by the acoustical analysis. He said that. 

Two, AGAIN, if the police tape was not recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination, how do you explain all the correlations between the tape's gunshot impulse patterns and the field-test gunshot impulse patterns? How did those impulse patterns get on the tape?

You keep trying to prove that no one could have assembled the bicycle, and I keep trying to get you to explain why we have the assembled bicycle if no one could have assembled it. Rather than explain the existence of the assembled bicycle, you keep arguing that no one could have assembled it.

Does it not give you pause that the NRC panel, as determined as they were to refute the acoustical evidence, did not even attempt to explain the windshield-distortion correlations, that their only answer to the presence of the N-waves and muzzle blasts was to claim that Decker's "hold everything" crosstalk proved those sounds were recorded 1 minute after the assassination (wow, so why were there no reports of a shooting involving several rifle shots elsewhere in Dallas that day?), and that they admitted (obliquely and without comment) that their own calculations showed there was only a 7% chance that the timing-movement correlations were a coincidence?

Here are some of the other points of evidence that support the HSCA’s acoustical findings:

-- We know that the gunfire impulse patterns on the tape were caused by supersonic gunfire because in each pattern the shock wave (N-wave) arrives before the bullet’s sound wave arrives (2 HSCA 20-22). If the gunfire had been subsonic, there would be no N-wave (2 HSCA 21).

-- The gunshot impulses appear at the correct point in time on the 234 feet of the printed digitized waveforms from the 5.5-minute open-mike segment on the tape (2 HSCA 27-35). The motorcycle microphone became stuck at about 12:28, about two minutes before the assassination, so the suspect impulses, to even qualify as potential gunshots, should begin about 130 seconds into the segment, and they do.  

The gunshot waveforms constituted about 10 feet of the 234 feet of waveform printouts.

-- Moreover, the BBN scientists recognized that the impulses that were later determined to be gunfire were “very unlike” the other impulses up to that point on the waveform printouts:

          After examining the 234 feet of filtered waveforms we discovered there were no other impulsive events on the tape that had been masked by the motorcycle noise, with one exception. That impulsive series of events . . . was very unlike the series of impulsive events that we see before us here [referring to the printouts], at times around 130 seconds after the stuck button. (2 HSCA 31) 

In fact, those patterns were the only patterns of their kind on the tape (2 HSCA 30-36; 8 HSCA 75). 

-- The BBN scientists knew that if these impulse patterns represented gunfire, they must occur for at least 5-10 seconds, since the shooting sequence was at least 5 seconds long. Needless to say, they found that the gunfire impulse patterns occur in a period of 7.9 seconds (8.3 seconds when the tape recorder’s running speed is factored in) (2 HSCA 36-39; 8 HSCA 75). 

My, my, what a “coincidence.” 

-- The BBN scientists detected a drop in the engine noise, starting at around 132-133 on the tape, and that this was the same time that the timing-movement data from the impulse patterns indicated that the motorcycle would have been slowing down to make the sharp 120-degree turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street (8 HSCA 63, p. 23 in the BBN report). 

If that is a coincidence, it is one humdinger of a coincidence. 

-- The muzzle-blast waveforms of the field-test shots were similar to the muzzle-blast waveforms of the police tape’s gunshot impulses, even when a recording of the field-test shots was fed through a radio system similar to the Dallas police radio system (8 HSCA 77). 

Given the known precise nature of muzzle-blast waveforms, this is a remarkable finding. 

-- When the BBN scientists first identified four matches between impulse patterns on the tape and impulse patterns from the Dallas field test, they did not presume that the motorcycle was moving at the speed of the motorcade: 

         Dr. BARGER. We presumed nothing about the location of the motorcycle or its speed or even direction of motion. The matches were made without any presumption whatsoever about the position of the motorcycle, in fact, of course, without any knowledge that the motorcycle was even there. (2 HSCA 70) 

In other words, there was no hint of confirmation bias. In fact, Barger’s team was not even given the position of the motorcycle until after they had completed their detection experiment (2 HSCA 92). 

-- Amplitude analysis of the sounds on the police tape found that when those sounds were originally picked up by the microphone, they were loud enough to have been caused by gunfire before they were compressed by the radio system’s AGC circuitry (8 HSCA 78). 

-- Critics of the acoustics evidence have exaggerated the problem of false alarms, taking one or two statements by Barger markedly out of context. Barger and the other BBN scientists noted that even with a detection threshold of 0.6, there were fewer than 3.3 false alarms out of 432 echo patterns in a 1-second segment (8 HSCA 95-96, pp. 55-56 in the BBN report). 

Finally, this would be a good place to quote the BBN scientists’ explanation of the nature and significance of the timing-movement correlations between the police tape’s impulses and the test-firing impulses: 

          Even a brief glance at Fig. 22 shows that the microphone locations that correspond to correlations at the three times after the first impulse tend to progress uniformly forward along the motorcade route. This conclusion can be quantified statistically by the chi-square test. If the motorcycle were not moving through Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination, the distance along the motorcade route would be a meaningless coordinate, and the microphone locations for the correlations that exceed the detection threshold would occur at random. When the chart in Fig. 22 is partitioned into a 2 x 2 table by separating time at 5 sec and distance at 250 ft, we find 1, 6, 8, and 0 correlations in the four sections reading from left to right, top to bottom. But the expected number of correlations to be found in these four sections, if the correlations occurred at random, are 4.2, 2.8, 4.8, 3.2. The value of chi-square for the observed and expected values is equal to 11.4. There is only 1 degree of freedom in this 2 x 2 table, and the probability that this large value of chi-square could occur at random is less than 1%. Therefore, there is little doubt that the distance coordinate is meaningful, and we conclude that the motorcycle was moving through Dealey Plaza and did, in fact, detect the sounds of gunfire. (8 HSCA 104, p. 64 in the BBN report) 

No wonder U.S. Naval War College historian Dr. David Kaiser says that these correlations must be explained before the acoustical evidence can be dismissed: 

          And [Don] Thomas was right to raise another point. The odds against Barger and his colleagues having identified a unique set of impulses on the channel 1 tape which just happened, by chance, to match the recordings of actual test shots in Dealey Plaza recorded along an array of microphones seem enormous. That probability in turn has to be multiplied against the chance that the time sequencing of the impulses would match quite closely with the timing of the three or four shots found by the separate panel that analyzed the panning error in the Zapruder film. Until someone can show that there was no basis for Barger’s original conclusions, the issue of whether channel 1 actually recorded a shot from the grassy knoll will, in my opinion, remain open. (The Road to Dallas, pp. 386-387) 

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

As stated, my rejection of the McLain theory had been noted, and I was asked to provide arguments against it to help those working with Tink on his book, Last Second in Dallas. This was years after Thomas' last writings on the subject. I read all of Thomas' articles and found they only provided more reasons to doubt. I wrote an article on the subject to try and dissuade Tink from publishing what was essentially a thumbs up on the McLain theory. But, tellingly, the book focuses on shortcuts and mistakes by the Ramsey panel, etc, and spends very little time as I remember it arguing against anything I'd brought to Tink et al's attention. 

https://www.patspeer.com/debunking-the-dictabelt

Well, this is another case where I just do not see what you say you see in photographic evidence, just as I do not see what you claim to see in the autopsy photos and x-rays and in Baden's demonstration regarding the clothing holes, to name a few examples. And in this case, we are not just talking about seeing this or that but about subjective judgments about how far X could have moved in Y time, about whether Photo A corresponds with Frame B in this or that footage, etc., etc.

More important, I would note that your article does not even mention, much less try to explain, the powerful evidentiary correlations that show that the tape contains gunfire recorded in Dealey Plaza:

The N-waves, the muzzle blasts, the muzzle-last echoes, and the fact that they occur at the right time and in the right order and interval; the windshield-distortion patterns, and the fact that they occur only when they could have occurred; the remarkable timing-movement correlations between the tape's gunshot impulses and the gunshot impulses from the Dallas test firing, which even the skeptical David Kaiser finds impressive and impossible to dismiss; and the fact that the tape's gunshot echo patterns match the echo-pattern fingerprint of Dealey Plaza. (Other evidence could also be cited.)

These correlations cannot be waved aside just because the incomplete photographic record does not enable us to identify the motorcycle with certainty. Simply put, critics of the acoustical evidence must answer this fundamental question: If the N-waves, muzzle blasts, muzzle-blast echoes, windshield distortions, and Dealey Plaza echo patterns on the tape were not recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination, how did they get on the tape?

Dismissing these correlations on the basis of an incomplete photographic record is not terribly far from being as untenable as saying that JFK could not have been shot in Dealey Plaza because no photo shows a gunman firing at JFK in the plaza, because the evidence strongly indicates that Oswald was eating lunch and getting a soda from 12:15-12:30, because no one saw a gunman firing from the grassy knoll or from any other spot in the plaza, and because the witnesses disagreed so markedly about the number and direction of the gunshot sounds that they may have merely been hearing motorcycle backfires.

17 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

And, as argued previously, to insist Hungarian Lajos Marton and Laszlo Varga were behind bars — in what is obviously a country club prison environment — is naive at best, particularly in the political climate of early '60s France with a former Vichy official and QJ/WIN spotter at the helm of INTERPOL ensconced in Paris. 
 

Huh, interesting. If they had been secretly let out of prison and then returned after they had done their dirty work, they would have had a seemingly ironclad alibi.

15 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

Have you read my article on the photo evidence regarding the shooting? I hate to say it but Dale Myers is right. And McLain was telling the truth. He was not where the acoustics experts claimed he would have to have been at the time of the first shot. 

I was asked to provide my analysis to Tink and co. while his book was in preparation. I did so. Evidently they felt the best way to avoid the obvious was to not mention it. The films and photos prove McLain was not where they said he was. I will not dismiss the acoustics altogether because it could be that a different mic at a different location could record a similar impulse. But it certainly looks like the whole thing is junk science. I mean, the HSCA report used a still from the Dorman film to prove McLain was in the proper position, but that still was taken 20 or more seconds later. Don Thomas tried to counter this by moving the first shot to a later time. But his claims are equally problematic, as he has McLain traveling something like 4 mph across the plaza, hiding behind this car than that car etc, so there is no photo of him crawling across the plaza.

What we have instead is this... 

McLain is at far left. Note that Dave Wiegman is filming the Newmans. Well, when one studies the Wiegman film one realizes that this moment occurs towards the end of his film, so this is something like 30 seconds after the first shot. Now, the acoustics experts claimed the motorcycle traveled at a consistent speed across the Plaza--I believe they estimated 11 mph. This speed supposedly put McLain in the proper position to be in place for the sound signature of each sound on the recording. And yet here he is, just passing Wiegman, a cameraman who ran from a car after the first shot, a cameraman who has been on the knoll for a number of seconds. 

Now get this. The acoustics experts claimed they identified the location of Mclain's mic at the time of the first shot. And, golly, this location was roughly two cars ahead of Wingman's location at this time. So, yeah, to subscribe to the HSCA acoustics analysis means you believe Wiegman, carrying a heavy camera not only raced past McLain, who was riding a motorcycle, but passed him so rapidly he had time to film the scene on the knoll for a number of seconds before McLain caught up to him.

Neither Thomas nor Thompson have dealt with this. Because they can't.

I think it has been a while since you read Thomas's articles on this issue, especially his long reply to Dale Myers. Rather than recite all of Thomas's arguments against Myers and Bugliosi regarding McClain's position, I refer interested readers to these two links:

The Bike with the Mike        
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_The_Bike_With_the_Mike.html

Debugging Bugliosi
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Debugging_Bugliosi.html

Thompson did not ignore your analysis. He did not agree with it. You may know that Thompson consulted closely with Don Thomas in writing his book. He concluded that Thomas had the better arguments regarding McClain. 

What do you have to say about the new tests that BBN conducted at Thompson's request? How about the two papers written by two BBN acoustical experts that are included in Thompson's book?

This statement of yours caught my attention:

I will not dismiss the acoustics altogether because it could be that a different mic at a different location could record a similar impulse.

If by "different location" you mean a location other than Dealey Plaza, this will not work because of the intricate echo-pattern matches between the gunshot impulses on the tape and the gunshot impulses from the field test in Dealey Plaza.

But, if you mean that a different motorcycle, i.e., other than McClain's, was in the locations identified by the acoustical analysis and thus recorded the impulses found on the tape, then at least you are not dismissing as mere coincidences all the remarkable acoustical correlations between the police tape, the windshield-distortion test done in New York, and the test firing done in Dealey Plaza.  

And I will beat this drum endlessly: Anyone who says that the identified gunshot impulse patterns on the tape are not gunfire and/or were not recorded during the assassination needs to explain, for starters, why those impulse patterns not only contain N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes but contain them in the right order and interval, and why those impulse patterns contain windshield-distortion characteristics and contain them only when the motorcycle was in position to enable them to occur. 

2 hours ago, Tom Gram said:

Isn’t this aspect screwed up by McClain not being in the right spot? 

This question both misses and avoids the point. Let me ask you a question in response: Why do windshield-distortion patterns occur on the police tape and only occur when the microphone was in position to allow them to be recorded and never when the mike was not in the correct position? How did those intricate sound patterns get on the tape?

The HSCA acoustical experts first conducted a field test for windshield distortion. Once they confirmed the phenomenon and had impulse-pattern data on it, they examined the police tape for patterns of windshield distortion and found them--not only found them but found that they occurred when they should and did not occur when they should not have. The HSCA's final report provides a good summary on this:

          Weiss and Aschkenasy also considered the distortion that a windshield might
cause to the sound impulses received by a motorcycle microphone. They reasoned that the noise from the initial muzzle blast of a shot would be somewhat muted on the tape if it traveled through the windshield to the microphone. Test firings conducted under the auspices of the New York City Police Department confirmed this hypothesis. Further, an examination of the dispatch tape reflected similar distortions on shots one, two, and three, when the indicated positions of the motorcycle would have placed the windshield between the shooter and the microphone. On shot four, Weiss and Aschkenasy found no such distortion. The analysts' ability to predict the effect of the windshield on the impulses found on the dispatch tape, and having their predictions confirmed by the tape, indicated further that the microphone was mounted on a motorcycle in Dealey Plaza and that it had transmitted the sounds of the shots fired during the assassination. (HSCA report, pp. 74-75)

There is a reason that the NRC panel, as determined as they were to debunk the acoustical evidence, did not even mention, much less address, these remarkable correlations.

Some motorcycle in the plaza recorded those sounds.

Have you read Dr. Thomas's rebuttal to Myers on McClain's position during the time in question?

18 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

It's ironic, Michael, that you are pushing this after vilifying me for disagreeing with Mantik. Mantik, to be clear, is one of the few prominent researchers to publicly dispute the acoustics evidence. This has led to some interesting situations for me personally. I was at a conference where David spoke against the acoustics evidence, where people, knowing of our disagreements on the medical evidence, came up to me and said David was--to be nice--totally incorrect about the acoustics evidence. Well, these people were shocked to hear me say I largely agreed with him on this issue. 

 

Dr. Mantik and I have had several discussions about the acoustical evidence. I would be hesitant to challenge his view on an issue regarding optical density measurements of the skull x-rays, since that is his field of expertise. But acoustics is not his field of expertise, and in this case he is simply wrong.

He views all of the evidentiary correlations identified by the HSCA experts--windshield distortions at the correct time, N-waves and muzzle effects only among the gunshot impulses and in the correct order and interval, echo patterns identical to those of Dealey Plaza, etc.--as coincidences. Mantik and I greatly respect each other, but I have frankly told him that I find it impossible and incredible to regard those correlations as mere coincidences. We have cordially agreed to disagree on this.

Mantik relies on Michael O'Dell as an acoustical expert. In fact, he considers O'Dell the "reigning expert on the acoustics evidence." Those who know about O'Dell's shoddy work on the RFK acoustics know that O'Dell is no acoustical scientist, and Don Thomas has refuted O'Dell's research on the HSCA acoustical evidence. 

I do not claim to be an acoustical scientist, but I did spend 21 years working in the field of signals intelligence in the Army, and in that capacity I received technical training on radio theory, radio-wave propagation, the effects of weather on radio transmissions, types of signals, radio-wave modulation, characteristics of wave travel, characteristics of frequency bands, etc. At times I also had to actually use radio systems, some of which were rather old. So, while I am no acoustical scientist and do not pretend to be, I do know a little bit more about the subject than your Average Joe.

Mantik also relies on the badly flawed Sonalysts critique. Some of the Sonalysts analysts' errors are so basic as to be embarrassing. For example, they argue that the HSCA acoustical scientists should have put more emphasis on the amplitude of the sound impulses, not just on their timing. This argument indicates a lack of understanding about how the police dispatch system’s automatic gain control (AGC) circuit worked. The AGC, like other AGCs, did not just suppress loud sounds; it also amplified weak sounds. This argument also ignores the fact that windshield distortion would have reduced the strength of some of the recorded sound impulses.

One of Mantik's issues with the acoustical evidence is Thompson's attempt to align the gunshot impulses with events in the Zapruder film. But the police tape is not a comprehensive audio record of the shots fired during the assassination, for the reasons I've explained earlier in this thread, so any attempt to match the shots with reactions in the Zapruder film is problematic from the outset.

This brings us to another flaw in Mantik's arguments against the acoustical evidence:  he assumes that if the dictabelt was recorded in Dealey Plaza during the shooting, it must contain all the shots that were fired. Thus, for example, in responding to Josiah Thompson, he makes the false-choice argument that "Either accept (per SSID) two head shots in quick succession (Z-312 to Z-313)— or accept the acoustic sequence, which requires a single (frontal) shot at about Z-312 and then a later shot (from the rear) at Z-328" and "JT can no longer tolerate any (not even one inch) actual forward head displacement at Z-313—because it violates his acoustic case." 

Many defenders of the acoustical evidence, including Thompson, wrongly assume that the tape contains all the shots that were fired, but it most certainly does not. Thompson and others should know this, given that the HSCA field test only fired shots from two locations in the plaza, and given that any shots that were not as loud as the engine noise would be undetectable on the dictabelt.

My bottom line is this: Okay, if you are certain that there was no motorcycle in position to record the sounds on the police tape during the shooting and/or that the sounds were recorded after the assassination and not in the plaza, then, for starters, you need to give me a rational, believable explanation for (1) how N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes occur on the tape at the correct time (i.e., only during the putative gunshot impulses) and in the correct order and interval, (2) how windshield-distortion patterns occur on the tape and only when the microphone was in position for them to occur and never when the mike was not in the correct position, and (3) how the echo patterns of the identified gunshot impulses on the tape match the echo fingerprint of Dealey Plaza. Again, this is just for starters. 

10 hours ago, Charles Blackmon said:

Have any researchers or paid specialists tried to correlate the first gunshot impulse on the tape with a frame or frames on the Zapruder film?

Just to follow up on my previous answer, the following segment from the BBN final report to the HSCA helps explain why the dictabelt does not necessarily contain detectable impulses from every shot that was fired in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. After explaining the acoustical characteristics of radio-transmitted gunfire sounds (N-wave, muzzle blast, shock wave, etc.), the report explains that only the "very loudest" sound impulses would be loud enough to be heard (and detected) over the noise of the motorcycle's engine:

          All sound impulses arriving at the microphone that are loud enough to be heard over the environmental noise would be transmitted over the radio connected to the microphone. In this case, the environmental noise consisted primarily of the very loud, repetitive noise made by the engine of a moving motorcycle. This noise was found to be only about 10 dB lower than the loudest gunfire impulse recorded. Thus, only the very loudest gunfire sound impulses would actually be detectable above the engine noise. (8 HSCA 55, p. 15 in the BBN report)

The BBN report also explains that the loudest gunfire sound impulses are much louder than human speech:

          The loudest sound impulses from gunfire are considerably louder than the loudness of speech, for which the radio was designed to operate. (8 HSCA 55, p. 15 in the BBN report)

I point this out because a few WC apologists have floated the claim that the N-waves, muzzle blasts, and muzzle-blast echoes on the police tape were caused by human speech.

2 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

You're entering this conversation a bit late, Michael. When I was a relative newbie, Cliff offered me a few insights. We then became allies in that we both argued here and elsewhere that the clothing holes destroy the single-bullet theory. At a certain point, however, he realized that I didn't think the autopsy photos were fake. And he has been on the attack ever since--a dozen years or more. 

Those claiming the back wound in the photo is inches above the location of the clothing holes simply haven't done the work, IMO. I spent some time on this way back when and it's clear the back wound in the photo is lower than most believe--in line with the shoulder tip, as described in the autopsy report, and as depicted on the face sheet. This destroys the single-bullet theory. It perplexes me that some would rather claim the photo proving a conspiracy is fake than acknowledge their pet impression of the wound in the photo is incorrect. 

Let's refresh. Here's Dr. Baden in his HSCA testimony, pointing out the location of hole on the back of the jacket. Look at where this is in comparison to the shoulder tip. Perhaps an inch below, right? Well, JFK was not a mannequin. He was a swimmer, with strong shoulder muscles, which may very well have lifted the back of the jacket a bit. And he was leaning forward a bit. It is totally disingenuous to pretend that no way no how could the hole in the jacket, when worn by JFK in the motorcade, overlay a wound in line with his shoulder tip. 

This is bizarre. What are you seeing? Baden's finger is clearly below the line of the shoulder tip. Can you not see that? How can you not see that? What are you talking about? There is no way, now how, that the rear clothing holes could overlap a wound at T1. 

I might add, for the sake of accuracy, that T1 is slightly above the shoulder tip, unless JFK had a deformed spine and/or deformed shoulders.

You accept the HSCA FPP placement of the back wound at T1, based the autopsy photo of the back. But this ignores the fact that JFK's head is tilted markedly backward in that photo and that his right shoulder is being manipulated in the photo. I would not be a bit surprised if the wound would appear an inch or so lower if they had not tilted the head backward and manipulated shoulder. 

The rear clothing holes cannot be wished away. They put the back wound in the same place that a number of witnesses placed it. 

Yes, it is very odd that you think that all of the autopsy photos are pristine and accurate, even the brain photos that show a brain that looks nothing like the bran that most witnesses described and that contradicts the skull x-rays. It also odd that you accept as pristine and accurate the photos that show the back of the head intact. I view as ludicrous the idea that the 40-plus witnesses who described a right occipital-parietal wound could not tell the difference between a wound over the right ear and a wound 3-4 inches behind the ear, especially the nurse who packed the wound with gauze and the mortician who reassembled the skull. 

Again, you are in a very tiny minority among researchers who reject the lone-gunman theory. 

Do you at least acknowledge the evidence that a number of autopsy photos and x-rays are missing?

I note that WC apologists have not provided credible answers to the questions posed in the original post. It is an interesting experience when you know that the other person can see the same thing you see but they either won't admit it or they offer weird, unserious theories to try to explain it.

WC apologists have been unable to explain why Conally's right shoulder is suddenly slammed downward starting in Z238 if he was hit in Z224. Posner's silly claim that Connally himself jerked his shoulder downward is too silly to warrant further comment.

One of them actually said that Connally, the man who experienced the wounding and felt the impact of the bullet, could not tell when he was hit, not even after carefully studying high-quality blowups of the Zapruder film. And, of course, we are asked to believe that it means nothing that both of Connally's doctors agreed that he was not hit before Z231.

They have offered only specious denials of the fact that Jackie starts staring at JFK before he goes behind the freeway sign. They cannot admit this because it means that JFK was hit over 20 frames before Z224, and that this shot was fired at around Z186-190. 

They have basically ignored the fact that JFK's waving motion suddenly freezes starting in Z200, as noted by the HSCA PEP, and they refuse to admit the self-evident fact that JFK started reaching for throat many frames before Z224. 

And what of JFK's dramatic reaction in Z226-232, when his upper body is clearly knocked forward and his hands and elbows are flung upward and forward? This is at least 20 frames after Jackie has already been staring at him with her head frozen in position. This is at least 20 frames after JFK freezes his waving motion and starts to bring his hands toward his throat. Obviously, we are seeing him react to a second bullet strike in Z226-232, but WC apologists cannot admit this because it destroys their theory of the shooting.