Dr. Gary Aguilar's AARC presentation Part I

Dr. Gary Aguilar – Okay, excellent, I’m going to be running through quite a few slides here this morning, and I want to thank everyone, and I want to thank and congratulate Cyril for his devotion and attention to this subject for a long time.  He’s one of the people who stimulated my interest and brought me, sort of on board a little bit, after a debate on the medical evidence at the Journal of American Medical Association, a debate in Chicago, in 1983, I think it was and it was at that point that we became acquainted, and I met Wayne Smith who is walking in to sit down.

So, I want to start out with a discussion here about, it was originally reported in the New York Times in an introduction to the Warren Commission report in 1964 that no material question remains unresolved so far as the death of president Kennedy is concerned. This was the conclusion that was reached and promulgated by The New York Times at the outset of the release of the Warren Report, before anyone really had the time to read the report and read the 26 volumes of supporting evidence.  The New York Times, right from the get go was very supportive of this, and this has become “official” policy.

One of the things that has always been the strongest support for Oswald’s lone guilt is the fact that the scientific, medical, autopsy and scientific evidence supported it, and you can find this in a quote from Vince Bugliosi. 

So, when you look at the people that we should trust on this,

one of the things that you will know from people who have followed this case for a long time is that there are people who are considered really the authorities, the people whose opinion that we should trust on this these are people who are detached, objective, very knowledgeable, experienced, thoroughly professional, and scientifically trained, and so on and so forth.

And who are they? Well, you know, initially, up at the top left there, this is an old photograph, I couldn’t find a better one, these are the autopsy pathologists, Dr. Boswell on the left, Humes in the middle, Fink on the right, their conclusion, their autopsy report showed two shots from the right. [I don’t know what he means, but that’s what he said. He meant to say “from the rear.”]

To the right of that I don’t have a younger photograph of him but Alfred Olivier, or Olivi-era, some people pronounce it differently, he was a doctor of vetinary medicine, he worked for the Aberdeen Proving Ground, he did duplication tests, he testified before the Rockefeller Commission and did work for the Warren Commission, and testified to the Warren Commission.

You have Dr Russell Fisher, a colleague of Dr. Wechts, who was the medical examiner of Baltimore, another medial examiner. He was the chairman of the Clark panel. He agreed two shots from the rear.

You have Louis Alvarez, a Nobel Laureate in Physics, out where I live in Berkley, his test proved that a “jet effect” explained JFK’s recoil and he also debunked the acoustics, which I think Don, Don Thomas will be talking about. 

And finally on the right, the one person who whenever the anniversary comes around and they want to get into the medical, legal autopsy they automatically defer to Dr. Michael Baden, a former coroner of New York City.  He was the chairman of the House forensics committee and he said everything fits with Oswald being the lone killer.

In addition we have the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, George Lundberg.  He came up with a series of articles that came in the aftermath of the film “JFK” in 1991 and 1992. A series of articles were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and this is right from that journal

(Gary reads) “I am extremely pleased that, finally, we are able to have published in the peer-reviewed literature the actual findings of what took place at the autopsy table on November 22 (Gary incorrectly says the 23^rd) 1963. I completely believe that this information, as personally given by Jim Humes, and J. Boswell;” and that is a picture of them standing there with Dr. Lundberg, not a very good one; “is scientifically sound and, in my judgment, provides irrefutable evidence that President Kennedy was killed by only two bullets that struck him from above and behind and that caused fatal high-velocity wounds.”   The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association who is also the editor of all of the AMA journals, [it’s] quite a powerful endorsement.

And, of course The New York Times immediately chimed in,

that by organizing and publishing this restatement of the key finding of the Warren Commission these JAMA articles performed a service for reasonable people and for reason.  The basic facts of the evidence survives and to all who are willing to listen offers proof against paranoia.

Again, the most respectable sources and authorities in the country, leading medical editors, leading forensic pathologists, leading government authorities. So, the science of Oswald’s guilt basically comes down to, I mean there’s lots and lots of things we could go into, but fundamentally with respect to the medical and autopsy evidence and the scientific evidence, 

it’s the autopsy evidence; the test shots on skulls, which duplicated JFK’s injuries, and so prove that shots could have been fired by Oswald; the bullet evidence, neutron activation analysis that was said to have proved that the “Magic Bullet” and all the recovered fragments [were] traced to only two bullets that had been fire arms matched to Oswald’s rifle; and finally, the scientific duplication of test shots that prove that shots from behind drove JFK backward through a so called “jet effect” that was proved by the Noble Laureate in Physics.

So, let’s go through these, here’s the autopsy evidence:

And Arlen Specter announced that, “There is every reason to believe that we did get a comprehensive, thorough, professional autopsy report from trained, skilled experts.”

And here they are:

Commander Humes who you know already he’s in the middle, he was a senior pathologist and director of laboratories at Bethesda Naval hospital.  His assistant at Bethesda Naval Hospital was J. Thorton Boswell, Chief of pathology.  And they brought in as a consultant after they had already started the autopsy a half hour later, Lt. Col. Pierre Finck.

I will make only one comment about this, as Dr. Wecht pointed out, neither Humes nor Boswell had ever done a gunshot autopsy.

Dr.Pierre Finck, as Dr. Morton Halperin who was the Dean of Forensic Pathology once reported and you will find it in Tink Thompson’s book, that Pierre Fink had been in the position of basically reviewing the autopsies of other people and had not done a hand’s on autopsy himself in about four years prior to the time he stepped into the autopsy room at Bethesda.

So, these were NOT practicing forensic pathologists.

Nevertheless, this is in the autopsy report, Commission Exhibit #387 

(Gary reads) “According to available information…three shots were heard and the President fell forward bleeding from the head…A Dallas Times Herald photographer said he looked around as he heard the shots and saw a rifle barrel disappearing into a window on an upper floor of the nearby Texas School Book Depository.”

Part of the autopsy report, not uncommon for autopsy reports to include information that is relevant to the circumstances of the event, in this case an assassination, and so, there it is. Three shots were heard, the president fell forward.

The autopsy report then was supplemented with these diagrams which were produced as we heard earlier for testimony by the autopsy pathologists

But, (reading) “the autopsy report said there is a large irregular defect in the scalp and skull on the right involving chiefly the parietal bone but extending somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions with an actual absence of scalp and bone producing a defect which measures 13cm in greatest diameter.”

And there you can see that this is the diagram as was prepared by the autopsy doctors who worked with an artist named [ Harold A.] Rydberg and they drew these diagrams showing what Kennedy looked like at the time he was assassinated.

Now, no one pointed tihs out at the time and it has not become of any great interest until recent years but this was prepared for the Warren report on the far left, the Rydberg diagram, producing a defect of 13cm, as I will try to show, yeah, here we go, in it’s greatest diameter.  But, on the night of the autopsy there was an autopsy diagram, this is from the face sheet that Dr Boswell drew, and you will see right in here it says “17 and missing.”  I will be showing this several times, you will see it in a larger view, but you can make that out.

And under oath, and repeatedly, and, by the way, in recorded conversation I had with Dr. Boswell that I only recorded because I knew that Warren Commission defenders would say that I was lying, as they always do (laughs) he told me exactly the same thing. And he said he would be fair to say that when you first examined the body prior to the arrival of the fragments that the skull that was missing from approximately those dimensions, 10 by 17cm? And you can see there is a 10cm across here and a 17cm across here, that is when they first got the skull, when they first examined him the defect wasn’t 13cm, it was 17cm.  That is what they wrote on the night of the autopsy, in ink, on a blood stained autopsy report.  I mean, it’s not something that was invented later on.  The wound was actually much, much larger than what was reported in the autopsy report.  He said yes.  And I’ll get into exactly what that means.  And I know I’m speaking to some people who know this material better than I do, and so I’m trying to bring everybody up to speed on some of this a somewhat complicated issue.  So, if I’m speaking down to people I apologize, if I’m speaking above people I apologize for that too because some of this is quite complicated. 

So, here’s the diagram prepared on the night of the autopsy.

The autopsy doctors are then criticized for missing the real, correct site of the inshoot.  They said the inshoot went in low at the bottom of the head near the external occipital protuberance. The Clark panel and other people who reviewed the data later on say, no, no, no, they missed the inshoot by ten centimeters.

The top of the skull to the bottom of the skull is about 12 centimeters.  So, they basically are said to have missed where the entrance wound was by 10 out of 12 centimeters. Quite an error.  Nevertheless, they marked the skull, right here, for the House Select Committee, that’s where their marking is. That’s where the correct entrance wound, later determined by the Clark Panel, the Rockefeller Commission experts, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations experts said it was, it actually went in there.

But, here is what the diagram shows on the night of the autopsy, 10 by 17 centimeters missing.  And when Boswell was interviewed before the Assassination Records Review Board, and Dr. David Mantik actually has better slides on this than I do, I found one finally but too late to put into the talk, here is a diagram of a skull that he prepared showing the defect that he found when he firt examined the body.  This is the outline the skull defect went from here to here. If you take a centimeter ruler and you measure it from the higher inshoot location and 17 centimaters forward (demonstrating) it puts you out (Gary seems to be pointing to a space several inches outside and in front of his own head, as if the high inshoot combined with the 10 x 17cm missing measurements are larger than JFK’s head )  We can assume perhaps that with the training they have they know how to use a centimeter ruler, and so with a 17 centimeter defect there, then the defect had to have gone way to the back of the head. (which seems to vindicate the idea of a low inshoot, if the 10 x 17cm dimensions are correct. Yes?) I mean, there’s no way around that. Unless perhaps they were so incompetent that not only did they not know how to do a forensic autopsy they did not know how to use a ruler.  But, I don’t think that’s the case.

In any case, here’s the autopsy report.  Again, the other evidence for an inshoot at that point was that there was beveling.

Now beveling occurs when you hit an object, say shooting a BB at a plane of glass, you will find a little hole at the entrance and a bevel on the inside, that proves the direction of the bullet.  This (above) is a diagram from the House Select Committee on Assassinations and it says that situated in the posterior scalp there was this wound and that there was corresponding exhibits beveling on the margins of the bone when viewed from the inner sides of the skull. So, as they’re talking about, and this is from the autopsy report, they looked at the inside and they said there is beveling in here so that shows the bullet came forward.

And the other evidence that the shot entered low in the rear of the head and went forward was X-rays of the skull reveal multiple metal fragments along a line corresponding with a line joining the above small described occipital wound and the right supra-orbital ridge.  In other words from here, here is the supra, the orbit is the eye, so there should have been a track of fragments along here and the beveling cinches the case from a forensics standpoint.  And their conclusions was that Kennedy died as a result of two perforating gunshot wounds fired from a point behind and somewhat above the level of the deceased. The fatal missile entered the skull above and to the right of the external occipital proturberance, and so on and so forth.

So, here we are internal beveling proved the site of the inshoot was in the occipital bone and a trail of bullet fragments seen from the occipital inshoot to the upper ridge of the eye socket. So, that’s where the trail of fragments was.  And this is to show it on a human skull, not Kennedy’s, but just one.  And I’m putting this is in the same orientation as the Rydberg diagram in the Warren Report for, well, purposes of confusing everyone I think.

In any case, in 1968 Ramsey Clark apparently was concerned about this, some criticism was being raised about this, and the fact that only government officials had looked at the autopsy work and so he commissioned a panel, the so called Ramsey [ Clark ] Panel, or the Clark panel, rather, and they looked at this and they determined that the autopsy surgeons were wrong about where the fatal bullet had struck JFK in the head. And they said the correct location was 10cm higher.

And Dr. Fisher, who again, well respected authority and forensic pathologist, for decades was the chief coroner for the state of Maryland, in his report on the lateral bullet film, the fragments, in other words there were a lot of bullet fragments in there, if you extend their long axis, if you extend it posteriorly it passes through the above mentioned 10cm higher entrance hole.

This is where the original entrance wound was supposed to have been and there was supposed to have been a trail of fragments going from here to the upper edge of the eye, of the eye socket.  And they said, no, no, no, you know, that’s wrong because the trail of fragments actually goes from this 10cm higher location forward. And, of course, that helps prove that they had made this 10 cm error.

And, of course, John Lattimer, who was a very strong defender of the Warren Commission’s conclusions that Oswald had done it alone also looked at the X-rays, got privileged access to them as I have had, and Cyril, and a handful of people outside the government and he said that he also reported in ‘Kennedy & Lincoln,” that if you looked at the fragment trail that they were arranged roughly in a line that would pass, if extended posteriorly, through the wound of entry,” which again, he agreed was where the Clark Panel and later on the House Select Committee [ on Assassinations ] would agree it was, up here.  And so he was basically saying that the trail fragment goes from here and extends forward.  

And here again, here is where the forensic pathologists labeled the skull, where they said the entrance wound went. [ The red line] This is where the Clark Panel, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Rockefeller Commission and John Latimer said it was, higher.

So, again, there has been lots of criticisms about this as Cyril mentioned about the original autopsy report that the original autopsy team missed the inshoot by 10cm, they failed to dissect the back wound, they took poor autopsy photographs, a whole list of failings, not worth detailing in any detail here.

But, again, the internal beveling showed the inshoot there.

Well, we’ve been through this already. And the trail of fragments.

So, let’s look through the real evidence itself and I want this audience to realize that you are more expert despite the fact that very few of you are trained [as] physicians, radiologists, forensic pathologists, you are more expert than everyone I have talked about in describing this.  So, here is where the original autopsy doctors said the trail of fragments was.

Here is where the forensic pathologists said the trail of fragments was.  And the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and this is the original autopsy X-ray up there, a poor quality duplication of it.  I have seen the originals. That’s where the Clark Panel, the House Select Committee on Assassination said it was.

Can anybody here see where that is? Where the real trail is?

[The yellow line] That’s where it is. It’s real clear.  It doesn’t show up so well here but to those of us who have seen them, David Mantik has seen them, Cyril has seen them, I’ve seen them, and ultimately the House Select Committee on Assassinations had a couple, and had one radiologist who talked about the trail being at least 5cm higher than the higher inshoot that they had selected as the entrance site. 

All of them had missed it, [and] by a whopping margin. And these were trained authorities.

And, of course, we can prove that the shot came from behind because there is beveling on the inside of the skull, meaning that the bullet had hit going in from the outside and creating a beveling wound. 

And there was also, the New York Times chimed in on this besides that, besides the beveling issue there was a bruise at the rear of the neck that had proved a bullet had gone in from behind. Okay, so those are two things that The New York Times is pointing out.

But, let’s get back to the business of beveling.  So, beveling as we have pointed out here occurs when the bullet goes through, like a BB through a plane of glass. But when Boswell; and this is also in my recording which is available at the national archives now, I turned it over to the ARRB; Boswell told me the same thing he told, I think it was Harrison Livingstone the same thing, and he testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations the same thing, and I think maybe also the Assassination Records Review Board testimony, he said that they had to dissect JFK’s scalp to see the entrance wound in to JFK’s skull, “But not too much because the bone was all gone and actually the smaller fragment fit this piece down here –there was a hole here, only half of which was present in the bone that was intact and this small piece then fit on there and the beveling on those was on the interior surface.

What he is saying essentially is that this suggests that there was a intact plate of bone, and you took out the brain and you looked at the inside of it and inside that intact plate of bone there was a beveled wound, smaller on the outside, beveled out on the inside.

But, that wasn’t what it was at all. What he is saying is, what there was was a fragment, an edge of a bone and then another fragment was brought in later and [it] fit in down there and when you put the two together then you could make out that there was perhaps beveling, that’s his testimony.  And it’s supported by his own autopsy face sheet diagram that shows 17cm missing, that had to go back down to the level of the external occipital protuberance or otherwise you do not have enough skull. So, then if you look at the bottom of this skull, there is this small little diagram of something, and again, because this bone was all gone, and actually this smaller fragment fit this piece down here only half of which was present in the bone that was intact, and this small piece then fit right on there and the beveling on those was on the interior surface. 

Now this is the autopsy face sheet.  I’ve blown this small thing up here to show this. And this is essentially what Boswell was saying that there was a complete absence of bone which is what his face sheet diagram suggests and there’s an implication that this, but nobody had ever asked him, and when I was working with Jeremy Gunn to prepare him for some of the questioning he did of these people it did not occur to me to ask him, was this meant to be the diagram of that fragment that fit in down there and completed the entrance wound that supposedly showed the beveling?

So, far from being an absolute certainty this evidence is very sketchy now. I mean, you have to assume that he oriented that fragment correctly, that the blasted skull was right, and that they were able to see that. So, it’s far from [being] totally convincing.

So, again, we go back to the autopsy report, according to the available information, the president fell forward bleeding from the head, and so on and so forth. But, that’s not what happened at all. A few shots were heard, the president didn’t fall forward at all.  A few shots were heard and the president fell backwards. But, the autopsy pathologists were told that he had fallen forward. 

And in fact, in the handwritten autopsy report, a copy of which is available at Harold Weisberg’s “Post Mortem,” it says the president fell forward, face forward to the floor of the car.

And they were told, that. okay, we got the assassin, he was shooting from the sixth floor above and behind the president, he was hit in the head and he fell forward, they were given a body and they say figure out how all of this fits.  And they were not particularly competent pathologists to do this kind of work. So, hearsay evidence got elevated into immutable forensic fact.

So, let’s talk about the test shots on human skulls that duplicated JFK’s injuries.  Again, these are not, you know, this is again, The New York Times reporting on this, they say that one of the bullets hitting the skull, I’m reading from the bottom there, one of the bullets hitting the skull on a point close to the estimated entry point into the president’s head blew out the right side of the skull in a manner very similar to the head wounds of the President.  

Of course, The New York Times has always been extremely subservient to the official version here, and, of course, they put that down, but they weren’t wrong about saying that that is what had been testified to by Dr. Olivier.  And here is, this is a copy taken directly, it says that this particular skull blew out the right side in a manner very similar to the wounds of the President.

Specter asked him, did you formulate any other conclusions or opinions based on the tests on firing at the skull?

( Olivier answers, ) Well, let’s see. We found that this bullet could do exactly, could make wounds very much like the President.

(Gary)  I’m sorry I cut that off.

And again, this is right from the Warren Report, “The (test) bullet blew out the right side of the reconstructed skull in a manner very similar to the head wounds of the President.” Now the irony of this is that they already had this diagram, the Warren Commissioners had this diagram, these are the photographs that he showed to the Warren Commission.  And here is the test skull that he shot. (WCE 861 and 862 in Warren Commission Volume 17.) So, he shoots a test skull, he brings in these images, these are published in the Warren Report, and this is supposed to duplicate that, no one raises a finger, no one raises any objection to it.  There is no New York Times reporter pointing out the fact that there is a huge disparity between what the known injuries were, the absence of any facial injuries on the President either in the autopsy report or the Rydberg diagram and what happened to the test skull.  And, of course, there’s an autopsy photograph proving, that’s a real autopsy photograph, by the way, as many of you or all of you know.

So, the Warren Report also reported that based on the information provided by the doctors who conducted the autopsy an artist’s drawing depicted the path of the bullet through the President’s head, with his head being in the same approximate position [ as Zapruder frame 312 ].         

But, you’ll notice they did this to show you the path of the bullet.  And you’ll notice one huge difference between Zapruder frame 312 and this, okay? And that is that they had the head bent far further down in the Rydberg diagram but the point is that had you shot Kennedy, had Kennedy been shot in the way that they say he had, entering near the bottom of the skull from Oswald’s position you can see that that bullet would have blown out (right) through his face just as it did in the test skulls. But, in order to avoid that by canting the head downward they can depict this and yet still report that they had the head in about the same position.

So, now we have neutron activation analysis with the bullet evidence.  Now, this has long been held, and this has been a very powerful thing.

Here’s Paul Hoch writing many years ago, right after the House Select Committee on Assassinations.  And I think that critics like Paul Hoch, and including even people like Bob Blakey, and other people, were absolutely smitten by the neutron activation analysis evidence when it was first presented

And Paul Hoch then reports, somewhat forlornly, it almost sounds like that, but the fact remains that the House Committee took a stab at the tests that we the critics wanted, not completely, not perfectly, but we expected that any one of the tests would demolish the WC reconstruction, neutron activation analysis, trajectory analysis, and they didn’t. 

And so here we have the House Select Committee on Assassinations, this by the way his testimony occurred fairly early in the HSCA’s examination of this, of the Kennedy case, and it took the wind out of the sails of a lot of people who were critics when Vincent Quinn reported that the neutron activation analysis proved that all bullets came from, all the bullets and fragments came from but two bullets, firearms matched to Oswald’s rifle.

But, here he is testifying, Dr. Quinn says, “Yes, sir, there is no evidence for three bullets, four bullets, or anything more than two, but there is clear evidence that there are two.” And they had been firearms matched to Oswald’s rifle

And here’s Blakey on a Firing Line episode with David Belin in 1981.  Blakey says, abd there is a transcript of this available online

“the scientific approach we took, we reestablished in fact ,  established better in some cases than they, The Warren Commission, did because we had more science and technology available to us – that their basic scenario was correct, and, again, that the critics were wrong on it.  For example, the single bullet theory is absolutely correct. We established it with the photographs and with the ballistics testimony and the neutron activation analysis testimony.” 

John Lattimer again, quotes and uses the neutron activation analysis in his book on page 217.

And here you have in 2004 the neutron activation analysis, again, an article published in the peer reviewed, scientific literature, (emphasizing) peer reviewed scientific literature, this means that experts have reviewed this and have approved it for publication, that by Ken Rahn and Larry Sturdivan, “Neutron Activation and the JFK Assassination: Part 1 Data Interpretation,” and this is taken right from that, I didn’t type it myself, I just copied and pasted it.  This substantiates Guinn’s original conclusion that two and only two bullets from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle struck the two men.

So, then Science Daily picks this up, a very respected, scientific publication, “neutron Activation Analyses prove Oswald acted alone.” Again, published just after Ken Rahn’s article appeared.

And then if anyone bothered to take a look Ken Rahn’s paper with any care would notice a very interesting thing.

It was published in 2004, if you look at the footnotes, of which there are only 15, a paper like that probably should have had 30 or 40, mine do, as those who publish in the scientific literature know how we do such things everything that makes any sense is thrown in here.  The most recent citation in Ken Rahn’s 2004 paper was published in 1979 and it was by Vincent Guinn, who had lots of stuff published in the intervening years.  So, I had always been very skeptical about this and I heard about a guy named Rick Randich, Erik Randich, that he had testified in a court case against Vincent Guinn when somebody had been charged in a murder case and it was published in the Los Angeles Times. And this guy had been confronted with Vincent Guinn testifying for the prosecution in a murder case using neutron activation analysis evidence. Rick Randich testified against him and the guy ultimately was acquitted. 

I thought, well, this is interesting.  So, I looked up Rick Randich who was over at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Berkley, right across the bay from me, and I tried to peak his interest in this.  And so it turns out that he and his associate, Pat Grant, and Pat Grant had been Vincent Guinn’s graduate student.  So, he knew him personally and had no axe to grind.  And they don’t care at all about whether Kennedy was killed by Oswald or a conspiracy, they have no opinion on that, they care nothing at all. But, they did take a look at it, and they did take an interest and I brought them out to give a little paper on it in San Francisco to a small group, I think two or three people here who were at that, and then they finally went and published in the press and I wanted to get them here 10 years ago, originally, to talk about this, but ultimately they concluded the bullet evidence in the JFK assassination was [ or should be?] reexamined from a metallurgical and statistical standpoints.  And their conclusion was that “a conclusion for material evidence for only two bullets in the questioned JFK assassination specimens has no forensic basis…Moreover, the fragments need not necessarily have originated from MC ammunition. Indeed, the antimony compositions of the evidentiary specimens are consistent with any number of jacketed ammunitions containing unhardened lead.”

Very shortly after that, the next year Spiegleman, Tobin, Wexlar, et al published another article again absolutely took apart the statistical analysis as well as some of the metallurgical conclusions that had supported neutron activation analysis.  Neutron activation analysis has been completely debunked.  There is virtually no one who still clings to neutron activation analysis. And I’m not going to read this for you, but again, those that have an interest in this I can get you the citation, it’s readily available (online.)

Now even Dr. Blakey says its junk science.  

So, Paul Hoch again, he said the fact remains the HSCA took a stab at some of these tests and we thought they would demolish the Warren Commission reconstruction, and it didn’t, particularly neutron activation analysis and trajectory analysis.

So, the House Select Committee on Assassinations got NASA scientist Thomas Caning who performed the HSCA’s trajectory analysis. And he proved the wounds of the two victims were aligned to receive a single bullet originating from the sniper’s nest at Z-190. 

And he was able to prove this with incredibly elegant work.  For those who really want to read in depth about trajectory and the problems with trajectory analysis that Thomas Canning did I would refer you to Don Thomas’ book “Hear No Evil.” He’s sitting right here in the front row. And I will only touch on some of these just to show that this, once again, is another example of junk science.

Canning has the origin of the head shot 29 degrees to the right of true north.  That’s from his report. But, none of the measurements reported anywhere in the analysis were ever given reference to true north, or even what it means. There is no objective way of testing Canning’s work. And that was also true of the back wound.  

Canning calculated the head shot trajectory, and this is a diagram from Canning’s own report, and where is the president sitting? In the middle of the limousine, and not to the right where he actually was. 

And I’m not going to go through this, the trajectory analyses are, again, an example of trying to prove, trying to confirm a bias.  And I’ll continue on with that in just a minute.  None of the wound locations in Canning’s trajectory analysis are the same as those reported in the Forensic pathology panel. Canning chose his own wound locations.

He just chose them himself, it’s incredible. Canning then assumed that the bullet deflection in passing through JFK’s body was negligible.  But, the forensics panel, and this is right from the Forensics panel.  They said that the forensics panel was concerned as to the degree of accuracy obtainable in determining the missile trajectory based on a backward extension of a bullet track from within the body particularly of precisions within the range of a few degrees as required.  And why is that? Because there is such a thing as a cavitation cavity. And a cavitation cavity occurs when a bullet strikes it causes a cavitation cavity within the tissues, soft tissues, of course, if it hits bone it will be deflected by the bone, very often. But even in some of the studies, I’m not going to belabor this but a cavitation cavity even within soft tissues can deflect the bullet. Canning allowed for none of this.

Dale Meyers came up with a trajectory analysis that was reported on ABC.  And these are diagrams from his work. And Dale Myers again proved that the trajectory came right from the 6^th floor of the school book depository, southeast corner, but his analysis is based on a bullet hitting at Z224 . So, it seems it doesn’t matter if a bullet hits you at Z190 or at Z224 when the president is at a decidedly different positions the trajectory analysis will still get you right to that southeast corner window. 

I don’t know if Pat Speer is in here, or not, oh there he is, okay, I took this from Pat Speer’s work. It is worth reading his work on this, and I think he’s done a very nice job of it. And David Mantik has done some good work on Dale Myers’ analysis but I couldn’t find it at the last minute, but, again, what Dale Myers has done, of course, is he moved the back wound up a little bit and in order to make it work because it appears as if the neck wound is at a higher location  than the back entrance wound, he has Kennedy slumped forward slightly.

And so the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that there was this upward track through Kennedy on the non-fatal back wound.  And Michael Baden had always wanted to try explain how that occurred. And so, this is the diagram from the House Select Committee on Assassinations showing that at the time of the fatal shot Kennedy was leaning forward.  And so if you’re leaning forward and you’re being shot from above then the bullet can track upward because you’re leaning further forward than the downward slope of the shot.

And here is Michael Baden demonstrating that in a TV show. 

[ Continues in Part II ]