Pat Speer - Debunking the Dictabelt

[Micah Mileto]

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

[Richard Price]

I haven't studied the audio/dictabelt information before.  Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the information presented, but to me it would seem the speeds and location of the "open mike" would indicate that it was one of the outrider motorcycles or a vehicle near them as opposed to the one being proposed.  The speed decrease certainly (to me at least) seem to indicate those associated with the turn onto Elm and the continuing slower speed down Elm.  There are at least seven possibilities for the "open mike" in my mind.  There are four motorcycles, the Presidential limo, the SS backup car and the VP limo (as it has been stated by some, that LBJ was listening to some sort of radio).  This actually could be construed as eight since there may have been a radio in the front of the VP vehicle as well.

[Mark Stevens]

I don't "believe" in the dictabelt audio, largely due to some of the issues with the audio which Pat has highlighted in his article.

I had a few comments, mainly on memory. There seems to be this belief that memory is infallible and if a person says they did something then that means it is true. Pat for instance takes umbrage at the dismissal of McLains statements regarding his siren. Basically, he said he turned it on so anyone saying different is ignoring what he did/said...etc... 

Memory isn't infallible though and people often say they did things in which they did not do. Not in a lying way, but in a generally believing it happened kind of way. As an aside, my girlfriend could not find her wallet Monday morning. My first thought was she left it at the store on Saturday. She though was adamant that she brought it home. She specifically remembered not being able to grab groceries because her wallet was in her hand and she had to come in the house, set the wallet down, then go get groceries. She very much remembered this chain of events and even where she placed her wallet. In the end, her wallet was at the store. Her memory of the wallet being in her hand and her sitting it in the house just never happened. She didn't just lie, even now she truly believes the wallet was with her when she got home and "it doesn't make any sense." It obviously wasn't in her hand though, since we went to the store and picked it up on Monday.

In reply to Richard, I don't think there really are 7-8 possibilities for the audio, at least not including the examples you gave. As far as I can recall the audio is pretty clearly from a motorcycle. This would rule out a potential/suspected LBJ radio, as well as any other radio in a car or on a person who wasn't riding a motorcycle. The only possibilities are from the motorcycles. I'd say it could be a car with an exhaust problem we weren't aware of, but I do believe studies on the RPM's have been done which concluded it came from a specific make of Harley Davidson, which if I remember correctly was not the style McLain was riding.

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks for this Micah.  Nice job Pat.

[David Josephs]

Excellent presentation Pat... thanks....   a few thoughts if you'll indulge me

MATH RULES shows conclusively that the limo stopped at the corner of Elm/Houston....  that upwards of 100 frames were removed between 132 and 133 as I've shown with the wide turn of one of the motorcycle cops....

 

Finally, all animations of the motorcade removes this Elm/Houston "pause" as well as the 157 splice, the 168 to 161 switch in CE884, 207-211 and on and on...
Tying a linear sound track to a spliced visual track - to me - is a futile exercise...  so at the very least the audio HAD to be adjusted at some point.

 

Mr. CORNWELL. And at the point in time that you heard Chief Curry state that he was going to Parkland Hospital, would it have then been possible that what you heard was the transmission from the speaker of Officer Courson and not in fact your own?
Mr. McLAIN. It could be possible.

It seems to me that the response at the end of this post from McLain places him at the top of Elm/Houston... and he stays there until told to move which is just after the shooting ends...  
The "plotted trajectory" and the reality of where he was appears to be 2 different things.

Pat writes:  Nope, still no McLain. Well, then what about frame 194, a full second after frame 175? Don Thomas admits "The plotted trajectory of McLain's motorcycle has him arriving at this corner just ahead of Mayor Cabell's car" Mayor Cabell's car is the car right behind LBJ's back-up car. So McLain should appear any, uhh, split second, right?

 

My understanding of the following is that McLain was interviewed and was very candid about where he was and what he saw.  We must remember that the HSCA was rubber stamping the WCR by the time Blakey gets to it....  No film breaks, 11mph steady, CE884 are the actual props in the charade aided by a vocal timeline that, like all the other items of evidence in this case, must be made to fit the solution, not the facts....

FWIW...  Pat always does an amazing job and is the source and impetus for many of the analysis I've done over the years....  We have a much greater understanding in a great many areas thanks to Pat's work....   I just think sometimes we get stuck in the old paradigms when in the past couple of years, those paradigms have been shifted.

===
https://www.jfk-online.com/bowles.html 

A Rebuttal to the Acoustical Evidence Theory by James C. Bowles

OFFICER McLAIN

Just after I had turned north onto Houston from Main Street, I was moving very slow along the west side of the street. Officer "E" was across the street and a little ahead of me. The motorcade seemed to stop at Elm and Houston as the crowd pressed in on the President. As the President got around onto Elm Street, I was approaching the middle of the block between Main and Elm. It was along there that I heard a shot. I suppose it was the first shot because I looked up and saw the pigeons flushed from their roost on top of the building on the northwest corner of Elm and Houston. I was either stopped or stopping at the time. I looked around in an effort to determine what had happened. I don't recall ever hearing the other shots -- just one which I guess was the first.

While looking about, I looked through an opening in the decorative wall behind the fountain and pond in Dealey Plaza running parallel to Houston Street. I saw the President's limousine going west on Elm Street fairly slow, and a man was running along behind it, holding on to the handrail, and jumping onto the rear of the car. I was sure by that, that something serious had happened. Then Chief Curry radioed for us to go to the hospital -- Parkland Hospital, and the lead jockeys started off code 3 (using sirens with their red lights). So I did the same. I pulled up to Houston and Elm and turned left to go west on Elm. As I turned I saw Bobby (a presidential escort officer) on his hands and knees, and his motorcycle was on its side. For an instant I thought he had been hurt, but then I noticed that he was crawling and attempting to stand up. By the time I reached him, he was on his feet and heading up the hill to my right, the one they now refer to as the grassy knoll.

{snip}

Now, the Committee staff Report says that I was from 80 to 90 feet west of Houston, west bound on Elm Street when the President was hit with the last shot. That's completely wrong! I never left Houston Street until after the chief said for us to go to the hospital and for someone to check the overpass. The agent didn't get onto the back of the limousine until some seconds after the last shot. I saw that happen while I was still on Houston Street, so while I only heard one shot, I could not have been on Elm Street until after the shots had been fired. Had the Committee staff told me what they had in mind, it would have made a difference in my testimony. They were at least deceitful if not outright dishonest with me.

Edited October 21, 2020 by David Josephs

[David Josephs]

But this is nonsense. As the frame in the Hughes film depicting McLain at the corner of Houston and Elm matches up with Zapruder frame 160 or so, and 138 at the earliest, McLain would have at most two seconds to to race up to his purported position by the Cabell car at frame 175. That's around two hundred feet. In two seconds or less. That's like 68 miles an hour, on average, for two seconds, which begin and end with him traveling 11 mph. Well that means he would have to have accelerated up to 125 miles per hour for one second, and then braked back to 11 miles per hour within 1 second. When the motorcade in this stretch was traveling less than 11 miles an hour, and heading towards a sharp turn. 

I wanted to add further to the notion that where McLain was in relation to frames 138-160 - the infamous frames which were both excised from the Zfilm and artificially made to sync to Towner - is not as easy as simply matching frames....  As I posted above, McLain claims to have stopped at the top of Elm on Houston...

As Pat eludes to here...  these speeds are not possible or realistic, but to match the altered films.  As the motorcade came to a halt around the ELM corner, McClain simply keeps moving forward...  Officially he was by the 12th/13th cars in line with HARGIS.     

As I continue to reread the work, Pat seems to just not say what we've worked to prove...  How much of HUGHES is removed between the turn and the cut to other cars on Elm when we finally see McLain?  If the limo passes thru Position A as claimed it has to make the wide turn and slow everybody down...

Doesn't take long to move up a 4 cars while they stand still... yet he stops and doesn't turn... at least that's what he says.

At the best, McLain was in that first circle at Elm/Houston and remained there...  
As to evidence from the DPD thru the FBI and presented at the HSCA being indicative of the truth in the events...   

I don't think so.

 

 

[Dr. Gregg Wager]

If you've ever driven a taxi cab or ambulance (or used a CB radio, for that matter), you know that there can be up to 10 open mikes at one time in a group of 50 or more drivers on the same frequency. It would not typically happen on a motorcycle, because it usually occurs when the driver drops the microphone in their lap and sits on it. 

Certainly, the HSCA made an embarrassing mess of many things (especially neutron activation, which has also now been thoroughly debunked). That doesn't stop me from wondering exactly what is on the Dictabelt. If it was actually made during the event, it should be treated like other evidence (e.g. films) and be thoroughly analyzed.

My recollection is that the acoustic team used mathematical probability to conclude that the sonic impulses they found (which could not be heard, only indicated on their equipment) matched generally the sounds of gunshots fired within the time frame. I especially find it unbelievable that there was a carillon on the recording, but after more than fifty years, no one has ever stepped forward who knew where that carillon was in the city of Dallas. 

Bugliosi laughably uses several pages to ineptly examine the Doppler effect that occurs on the recording, obviously having no idea whatsoever what the Doppler effect is (not even a proofreader bothers to explain it to him--I learned about the Doppler effect in high school--it's not rocket science). 

Can't anything at all be done competently to analyze this Dictabelt recording?     

[James DiEugenio]

As I recall, one of the problems with the DIctabelt is they thought it was the original, but its not.

 

[Larry Hancock]

In regard to the carillon, in one of Penn Jones newsletters there was mention that at one of the early JFK knoll observances on Nov. 22 (third possibly) those in attendance were surprised to hear a carillon and they traced it to a Church some blocks away.  He gave the Church and location but my copies of his full newsletter collection have been gone for some years now and I don't recall any specifics.  Apparently it was an older instrument and did not play all the time; he described how surprised they were to hear it,

[Andrej Stancak]

So, whose microphone if not Officer McLain's was left open and caused the recording of sounds in the Police channel 2?

[Eddy Bainbridge]

Pat Speer's article doesn't get us very far, and doesn't debunk the Dictabelt evidence. He doesn't really even try to debunk it. Lets say from the beginning the mystery of who recorded the shots has not been definitviely determined. If you're looking for film backup then you have two problems ; Firstly the community is not agreeing on potential crops to films and secondly the Dictabelt recording likely has 'skips' in it (See D B Thomas's later work on this, he postulates where they may be.)

 

So if you want to say 'voila! McClain wasn't in the right place' then I can't counter that argument. What the statistical analysis shows, to a high degree of accuracy is that; the dictabelt recorded multiple shots, in Dealey Plaza, at the time of the assassination, some shots came from the TBSD, and one shot can be demonstrated to have come from the Knoll. Until someone can refute the stats then the Dictabelt evidence stays in play.

David Josephs is suggesting the Dictabelt recording may have been altered and Jim DiEugenio states the recroding in the record is not original. Is the suggestion all the wave form analysis, and simulation were done on tampered evidence? Doesn't seem plausible.

[Cliff Varnell]

Why does anyone care?

The physical evidence recovered with the body proves shots from two directions.  All this dictabelt nonsense is moot.

[Paul Jolliffe]

On 10/24/2020 at 6:14 PM, Eddy Bainbridge said:

Pat Speer's article doesn't get us very far, and doesn't debunk the Dictabelt evidence. He doesn't really even try to debunk it. Lets say from the beginning the mystery of who recorded the shots has not been definitviely determined. If you're looking for film backup then you have two problems ; Firstly the community is not agreeing on potential crops to films and secondly the Dictabelt recording likely has 'skips' in it (See D B Thomas's later work on this, he postulates where they may be.)

 

So if you want to say 'voila! McClain wasn't in the right place' then I can't counter that argument. What the statistical analysis shows, to a high degree of accuracy is that; the dictabelt recorded multiple shots, in Dealey Plaza, at the time of the assassination, some shots came from the TBSD, and one shot can be demonstrated to have come from the Knoll. Until someone can refute the stats then the Dictabelt evidence stays in play.

David Josephs is suggesting the Dictabelt recording may have been altered and Jim DiEugenio states the recroding in the record is not original. Is the suggestion all the wave form analysis, and simulation were done on tampered evidence? Doesn't seem plausible.

Well, my understanding is that in 1978 the HSCA fired test shots from only the TSBD and the Grassy Knoll. The dictabelt contained "impulses" that acoustically matched (to a high degree of "scientific certainty") with the recordings of the 1978 shots. 

Whether the dictabelt contained additional possible impulses, and whether other suspected firing locations were tested acoustically by the HSCA, frankly I don't remember. 

I think Pat Speer has proved beyond any doubt that the HSCA's finding (Officer McClain's mic was the source of the impulses on the dictabelt) was completely wrong. 

Whatever the source of the impulses, they were NOT from McClain's microphone. Good work, Pat!

Ultimately, I am skeptical that our understanding of the assassination will be furthered by an examination of the dictabelt.

Even if, by some miracle, we could somehow get a modern retest of all sniper's lairs and compare the results with the impulses on the dictabelt, all we'd really get would be some additional evidence (but not proof) of shooting locations.

We already have a pretty good idea of several spots.