Dale Myers and His tale of 2 1/2 Inches

[Pat Speer]

From patspeer.com, chapter 12c:

On his website, Dale Myers asks: "Isn't it true that you incorrectly modeled the presidential limousine, positioning Connally's jump seat six inches from the inside of the door rather than the actual distance of 2.5 inches?

Myers answers: "No. One critic claimed that I "used the incorrect limo measurement of a 6 inches clearance between JBC jump seat and door. The actual measurement was 2.5 inches. So whatever trajectory [Myers] thought he proved was not what 'a single bullet' could have taken."

"This particular criticism stems from a comment made during the ABC News broadcast. At one point in the program, a computer animated sequence compares a diagram of how conspiracy theorists believe Kennedy and Connally were seated in the limousine with how they actually were seated as seen in the Zapruder film. Peter Jennings notes in voiceover narration that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, as some conspiracy theorists believe, but was "six inches" to Kennedy's left. However, the six inch figure mentioned in narration did not refer to the distance between the jump seat and the inside of the limousine door, as presumed by this critic, but instead referred to the distance between the center of Kennedy and Connally's body. Kennedy was seated to the extreme right side of the limousine. Connally was turned to his right and had shifted left on the jump seat in front of Kennedy. Projecting an imaginary line forward from the center of the both men shows that the difference between their two center points is six inches. Connally's jump seat, which was about 20.5 inches wide, was correctly located 2.5 inches from the inside of the right-hand door."

Godzilla! I'd accepted the possibility that Myers felt his animation was "close enough" and had, step by step, made it more and more convincing, without his fully realizing that it was now yards if not miles away from an accurate depiction of the shooting. But I hadn't fully expected him to LIE in such a manner. I figured he would say that he'd mistakenly trusted the Warren Commission testimony of Secret Service Inspector Thomas Kelley, but that this mistake was of no importance.

After all, on June 4, 1964, during the sworn testimony of Thomas Kelley (5H129-134, the same Arlen Specter-orchestrated testimony in which Kelley falsely stated that CE 386 was used to mark the back wound during the re-enactment), the following exchange took place:

Mr. SPECTER. On the President's car itself, what is the distance on the right edge of the right jump seat, that is to say from the right edge of the right jump seat to the door on the right side?

Mr. KELLEY: There is 6 inches of clearance between the jump seat and the door.

When blaming his mistake on Kelley, moreover, Myers could also have pointed to the 1979 HSCA trajectory report, in which Thomas Canning claimed : "Connally, on the other hand, was seated well within the car on the jump seat ahead of Kennedy; a gap of slightly less than 15 centimeters separated this seat from the car door." (As Canning was a NASA scientist, and meticulous in the presentation of his findings, his representation of a gap of 2.5 inches (roughly 5 cm) as only "slightly less" than 15 cm (roughly 6 inches) is thoroughly out-of-character and suggestive that he, or the committee itself, was trying to hide that Kelley had testified incorrectly to the Warren Commission.)

But no, Myers never even mentions these deceptive assertions in his response. Apparently, we're to believe it's just a coincidence that Kelley falsely testified that the seat was six inches in from the door, Canning helped cover up that Kelley falsely testified, and that Myers' animation just so happened to shift Connally's seat inboard 6 inches to its "actual" location.

Even more troublesome is Myers' own deceptive assertion that he bears no responsibility for the inaccurate perception that he placed the seat six inches from the door. No, he claims, it stems not from anything he'd said or done but from a misinterpreted voice-over by the now-deceased Peter Jennings on 2003's Beyond Conspiracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When discussing Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Jennings says: "In the Stone film diagrams have Governor Connally sitting directly in front of the President, facing forward at the time of the second shot. Not true. Governor Connally was sitting 6 inches inboard of the President, and turned sharply to his right." (During this pronouncement we see an animated Governor Connally siting in front of an animated President, then slid inboard, and turned to his right.) Now compare this to Myers' exact words from Beyond the Magic Bullet, a year later. (Note: he's looking at the overhead view on the slide above): "Here's the position that most critics believed they were occupied at the time of the single bullet, with Connally directly in front of Kennedy. But that's not true. Actually, Connally's seated about six inches inboards (Here, he slides Connally over, as depicted on the second image in the slide up above). And turned to his right."

It is therefore Myers who is responsible for the mis-perception that his animated jump seat was six inches inboard of the door, and not Jennings!

Even worse, and as already discussed, it is not actually a mis-perception! When one compares the edge of the jump seat in in Myers' overhead views of the seat before and after he slides it inwards, it's absolutely and devastatingly clear that he slides the SEAT inwards six inches in both Beyond Conspiracy and Beyond the Magic Bullet. He does not slide the middle of Connally's body over six inches on the seat. He slides the seat. Unless one is to believe that Connally's seat, in Myers' first image, is actually 3 1/2 inches outside the interior of the limousine, it is strikingly clear that Myers moves the seat 6 inches in from the door, and not 2 1/2. This fabrication by Myers--blaming his own deception on a dead man--in my opinion, marks a new low and reveals the depths that he will travel before he will admit the obvious--that his animation deceptively depicts an under-sized Connally model on a seat 3.5 inches further from the door than the seat occupied by the flesh and bone Connally, and that, when these mistakes are corrected, the bullet exiting Kennedy's neck strikes Connally in the middle of his back.

In Myers' defense ( I can't believe I'm doing this) it's clear he's in a trap. He can't admit his "mistake" without risking all he's worked for. He sold his animation to large entertainment corporations under the assurance it was accurate. He then snowballed this success to become a semi-visible ghost writer for Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History. In the acknowledgments section, in fact, Bugliosi writes "no one helped me as much as Dale Myers, the Emmy Award-winning computer animation specialist...Dale helped me in the writing of several sections of Book One." Included in Book One is Bugliosi's section on the single-bullet theory. Not surprisingly, he (or Myers) condemns conspiracy theorists for assuming that Connally was sitting directly in front of Kennedy by writing "In fact,Connally's jump seat not only was situated a half foot inside and to the left of the right door, but also was three inches lower than the backseat." This assertion has a footnote. As one might guess, it refers back to the inaccurate testimony of Thomas Kelley on June 4, 1964.

An 8-20-07 interview with Bugliosi by George Mason University's History News Network demonstrates Bugliosi's continuing reliance on Kelley's testimony. In this interview, Bugliosi rants:

"If you start with an erroneous premise, everything that follows makes a heck of a lot of sense. The only problem is that it is wrong. There’s no question that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy in the presidential limousine. He was seated to his left front. I have a photograph in Reclaiming History showing exactly where they were seated, and right along side of it I show sketches that they put in conspiracy books, [with Connally] right in front and the bullet is making a right turn and a left turn. But he was seated to [JFK’s] left front in a jump seat a half-foot in so the orientation of Connally’s body vis a vis Kennedy’s was such that a bullet passing on a straight line, through Kennedy, would have no where else to go, except to hit Governor Connally."

Should we tell Bugliosi that his defense of the single-bullet theory was in large part based on the "erroneous premise" that the jump seat was 6 inches inboard of the door? Or should we assume that Myers, who, after all, was on Bugliosi's payroll, has already set him straight?

[David G. Healy]

From patspeer.com, chapter 12c:

On his website, Dale Myers asks: "Isn't it true that you incorrectly modeled the presidential limousine, positioning Connally's jump seat six inches from the inside of the door rather than the actual distance of 2.5 inches?

Myers answers: "No. One critic claimed that I "used the incorrect limo measurement of a 6 inches clearance between JBC jump seat and door. The actual measurement was 2.5 inches. So whatever trajectory [Myers] thought he proved was not what 'a single bullet' could have taken."

"This particular criticism stems from a comment made during the ABC News broadcast. At one point in the program, a computer animated sequence compares a diagram of how conspiracy theorists believe Kennedy and Connally were seated in the limousine with how they actually were seated as seen in the Zapruder film. Peter Jennings notes in voiceover narration that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, as some conspiracy theorists believe, but was "six inches" to Kennedy's left. However, the six inch figure mentioned in narration did not refer to the distance between the jump seat and the inside of the limousine door, as presumed by this critic, but instead referred to the distance between the center of Kennedy and Connally's body. Kennedy was seated to the extreme right side of the limousine. Connally was turned to his right and had shifted left on the jump seat in front of Kennedy. Projecting an imaginary line forward from the center of the both men shows that the difference between their two center points is six inches. Connally's jump seat, which was about 20.5 inches wide, was correctly located 2.5 inches from the inside of the right-hand door."

Godzilla! I'd accepted the possibility that Myers felt his animation was "close enough" and had, step by step, made it more and more convincing, without his fully realizing that it was now yards if not miles away from an accurate depiction of the shooting. But I hadn't fully expected him to LIE in such a manner. I figured he would say that he'd mistakenly trusted the Warren Commission testimony of Secret Service Inspector Thomas Kelley, but that this mistake was of no importance.

After all, on June 4, 1964, during the sworn testimony of Thomas Kelley (5H129-134, the same Arlen Specter-orchestrated testimony in which Kelley falsely stated that CE 386 was used to mark the back wound during the re-enactment), the following exchange took place:

Mr. SPECTER. On the President's car itself, what is the distance on the right edge of the right jump seat, that is to say from the right edge of the right jump seat to the door on the right side?

Mr. KELLEY: There is 6 inches of clearance between the jump seat and the door.

When blaming his mistake on Kelley, moreover, Myers could also have pointed to the 1979 HSCA trajectory report, in which Thomas Canning claimed : "Connally, on the other hand, was seated well within the car on the jump seat ahead of Kennedy; a gap of slightly less than 15 centimeters separated this seat from the car door." (As Canning was a NASA scientist, and meticulous in the presentation of his findings, his representation of a gap of 2.5 inches (roughly 5 cm) as only "slightly less" than 15 cm (roughly 6 inches) is thoroughly out-of-character and suggestive that he, or the committee itself, was trying to hide that Kelley had testified incorrectly to the Warren Commission.)

But no, Myers never even mentions these deceptive assertions in his response. Apparently, we're to believe it's just a coincidence that Kelley falsely testified that the seat was six inches in from the door, Canning helped cover up that Kelley falsely testified, and that Myers' animation just so happened to shift Connally's seat inboard 6 inches to its "actual" location.

Even more troublesome is Myers' own deceptive assertion that he bears no responsibility for the inaccurate perception that he placed the seat six inches from the door. No, he claims, it stems not from anything he'd said or done but from a misinterpreted voice-over by the now-deceased Peter Jennings on 2003's Beyond Conspiracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When discussing Oliver Stone's movie JFK, Jennings says: "In the Stone film diagrams have Governor Connally sitting directly in front of the President, facing forward at the time of the second shot. Not true. Governor Connally was sitting 6 inches inboard of the President, and turned sharply to his right." (During this pronouncement we see an animated Governor Connally siting in front of an animated President, then slid inboard, and turned to his right.) Now compare this to Myers' exact words from Beyond the Magic Bullet, a year later. (Note: he's looking at the overhead view on the slide above): "Here's the position that most critics believed they were occupied at the time of the single bullet, with Connally directly in front of Kennedy. But that's not true. Actually, Connally's seated about six inches inboards (Here, he slides Connally over, as depicted on the second image in the slide up above). And turned to his right."

It is therefore Myers who is responsible for the mis-perception that his animated jump seat was six inches inboard of the door, and not Jennings!

Even worse, and as already discussed, it is not actually a mis-perception! When one compares the edge of the jump seat in in Myers' overhead views of the seat before and after he slides it inwards, it's absolutely and devastatingly clear that he slides the SEAT inwards six inches in both Beyond Conspiracy and Beyond the Magic Bullet. He does not slide the middle of Connally's body over six inches on the seat. He slides the seat. Unless one is to believe that Connally's seat, in Myers' first image, is actually 3 1/2 inches outside the interior of the limousine, it is strikingly clear that Myers moves the seat 6 inches in from the door, and not 2 1/2. This fabrication by Myers--blaming his own deception on a dead man--in my opinion, marks a new low and reveals the depths that he will travel before he will admit the obvious--that his animation deceptively depicts an under-sized Connally model on a seat 3.5 inches further from the door than the seat occupied by the flesh and bone Connally, and that, when these mistakes are corrected, the bullet exiting Kennedy's neck strikes Connally in the middle of his back.

In Myers' defense ( I can't believe I'm doing this) it's clear he's in a trap. He can't admit his "mistake" without risking all he's worked for. He sold his animation to large entertainment corporations under the assurance it was accurate. He then snowballed this success to become a semi-visible ghost writer for Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History. In the acknowledgments section, in fact, Bugliosi writes "no one helped me as much as Dale Myers, the Emmy Award-winning computer animation specialist...Dale helped me in the writing of several sections of Book One." Included in Book One is Bugliosi's section on the single-bullet theory. Not surprisingly, he (or Myers) condemns conspiracy theorists for assuming that Connally was sitting directly in front of Kennedy by writing "In fact,Connally's jump seat not only was situated a half foot inside and to the left of the right door, but also was three inches lower than the backseat." This assertion has a footnote. As one might guess, it refers back to the inaccurate testimony of Thomas Kelley on June 4, 1964.

An 8-20-07 interview with Bugliosi by George Mason University's History News Network demonstrates Bugliosi's continuing reliance on Kelley's testimony. In this interview, Bugliosi rants:

"If you start with an erroneous premise, everything that follows makes a heck of a lot of sense. The only problem is that it is wrong. There’s no question that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy in the presidential limousine. He was seated to his left front. I have a photograph in Reclaiming History showing exactly where they were seated, and right along side of it I show sketches that they put in conspiracy books, [with Connally] right in front and the bullet is making a right turn and a left turn. But he was seated to [JFK’s] left front in a jump seat a half-foot in so the orientation of Connally’s body vis a vis Kennedy’s was such that a bullet passing on a straight line, through Kennedy, would have no where else to go, except to hit Governor Connally."

Should we tell Bugliosi that his defense of the single-bullet theory was in large part based on the "erroneous premise" that the jump seat was 6 inches inboard of the door? Or should we assume that Myers, who, after all, was on Bugliosi's payroll, has already set him straight?

email the to the appropriate HBO properties folks those involved with Bugliosis' script development. I can guarantee you we've not seen the last of Myers cartoon, nor has HBO and Tom Hanks....

[Tony Austin]

Pat,

I think you make a good point. The computer model by Dale Myer's has always been suspect.

I remember when the first version appeared on the internet the model of kennedy looked rather crude and the trajectory for the bullet striking him appeared to be a little too high and on a downward path. Also it was striking so close to the midline of his body that there would be no way it could go on through the neck and not smash into the the cervical spine. However, later a more 'refined' version appeared in which Kennedy looked more detailed. He now had his jacket on, complete with a bunched up part below the collar. This time it looked like the entry wound on Kennedy would be a little further away from the spine and just slightly lower. It made me wonder how you can tell what is refining of a model to make it more precise and what is tinkering about with your model just to make sure it gives you the answer you want it to.

The one thing that Myers has never done is show how the trajectory for the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back matches up with the trajectory for the bullet that went through Connally's wrist as determined by the official enquiries. In theory, only one bullet is involved and the trajectories should be the same. It is not surprising that Myer's does not do this with his model because if this is done you find that the two trajectories are at right angles to each other!

Tony

[Pat Speer]

Pat,

I think you make a good point. The computer model by Dale Myer's has always been suspect.

I remember when the first version appeared on the internet the model of kennedy looked rather crude and the trajectory for the bullet striking him appeared to be a little too high and on a downward path. Also it was striking so close to the midline of his body that there would be no way it could go on through the neck and not smash into the the cervical spine. However, later a more 'refined' version appeared in which Kennedy looked more detailed. He now had his jacket on, complete with a bunched up part below the collar. This time it looked like the entry wound on Kennedy would be a little further away from the spine and just slightly lower. It made me wonder how you can tell what is refining of a model to make it more precise and what is tinkering about with your model just to make sure it gives you the answer you want it to.

The one thing that Myers has never done is show how the trajectory for the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back matches up with the trajectory for the bullet that went through Connally's wrist as determined by the official enquiries. In theory, only one bullet is involved and the trajectories should be the same. It is not surprising that Myer's does not do this with his model because if this is done you find that the two trajectories are at right angles to each other!

Tony

You're right, Tony. It's never been clear how the bullet went through Connally's wrist. And without even hitting his hat! While my creating a whole chapter on Myers' animation is quite possibly a waste of time. I am constantly running into newbies or people with only a passing interest, who are totally snowed after watching his animation on TV. I wanted there to be somewhere I could point them, so they could see his deceptions for themselves.

It is my perception that as much as 10% of the population has changed from CT to LN over the last few years, and I suspect Myers' animation is the single-biggest reason for this switch.