Dr. Gary Aguilar's AARC presentation Part II

Most people are convinced that the shot, the non-fatal shot hit him at Z224. His is at Z225.  And he certainly hasn’t moved much in 1/18^th of a second.  And he is not leaning forward.

So, now we have the scientific tests by Nobel Laurete, Luis Alvarez, that show that it is most probable that the shot in Zapruder 313 came from behind the car driving JFK backward with fatal shot – via “jet effect.”

And, of course, these are the frames that show it, Z313 to Z321.

Kennedy is rocked backward with the fatal shot, Luis Alvarez said that the “jet effect’ explained that.

“Shown the rearward snap of JFK’s head with the fatal shot, Alvarez reported he’d solved the problem ‘to my own satisfaction and in a one dimensional fashion on the back of an envelope.’”

(someone in the audience laughs.)

(jokingly) I don’t want any cynical laughter in this room. “Jet effect” recoil explains this. When I showed my simple calculations to  PhD graduate student, Paul Hoch; again, the man who was sympathetic for conspiracy and then turned against with the work, the scientific work of the House Select Committee on Assassinations; he said that no one would believe it unless we could demonstrate the retrograde recoil on a rifle range using a reasonable facsimile of a human head.

And so, here is his experiment, showing a bullet coming from the left, and you see the bullet come from the left, it blows out here and then the skull moves back off the table, and; well I have a better slide of this. Sorry, it doesn’t show up so well there.

Here we are, here’s bullet coming from the left, going across here, and you see a big spray of debris, and that melon that he shoots falls back off this.  

Proof positive of “jet effect!” And, again, this is supposed to duplicate what we see in the Zapruder film.

And you have Alfred Olivier also testifying before the Rockefeller Commission that as a result of this jet effect to push the head in the other direction. This was demonstrated by Louis Alvarez in California several years ago by shooting melons.  When you could get a jet of a honeydew melon going out the front, the melon would roll toward the gun showing that there is some movement from the “jet effect.” But, he thought the larger part of it was a neuro-muscular reaction. But, he did allow for the fact testifying in 1975 before Alvarez published his paper, incidentally, that’s interesting.    

So, how did Alvarez do it? Well, one of the things he did was he super-charged his ammunition, and rather than using a Mannlicer-Carcano shell which travels at about 2,000 feet per second he used a 30.06 soft-nosed, hunting round, which again, strikes, it’s not a jacketed bullet, a jacketed bullet will have very little effect as other people in this room who have done these shooting experiments have shown so he used a different kind of bullet entirely and he did get some small recoil back, and you can see the recoil that he got back. And he shot at wrapped soft skin melons not at an object with a firm exterior like a human skull. And then he reported, and this is in the American Journal of Physics article in 1976, and by the way, 1976 is when he published that article, and in 1975 is when Olivier testified that Alvarez had proven “jet effect.” So, they had been in contact, obviously. 

“It is important to state,” Alvarez writes in peer reviewed, scientific literature, “It is important to stress that the tape melon was our a prioir best mock-up of a head, and it showed retrograde recoil in the first test. If we had used the Edison test and shot at a large collection of objects and finally found one which gave retrograde recoil, then out firing experiments could reasonably be criticized. But as the tests were actually conducted, I believe they show it is most probable that the shot in 313 came from behind the car.”

You know, suitably understated.

Within the last two years Josiah Thompson, a good friend of Paul Hoch’s, by the way, asked Paul Hoch because he is researching for a book he’s writing if he had copies of the photographs. And so, Paul Hoch pulled out of his own files all of the photographs they had taken during the Alvarez shooting experiments. 

They showed that Alvarez had shot at coconuts, pineapples; now coconuts are much more similar to a human head.  It has a hard exterior right? (Continuing) pineapples, plastic jugs filled with water, rubber balls filled with gelatin, etc.

All targets were driven downrange except the melons.

Except, he says, if we had used the Edison test at a large collection of objects and finally found one which gave retrograde recoil, then we could reasonably be criticized.

Well, in fact, he did do that.  But, he never reported it.

And Doug DeSalles, who is sitting in the room here, a physician who has done some shooting experiments of his own, and I, know Paul Hoch personally, and we had repeatedly said, Paul, this just sounds like bullshit to me, and Paul would look at us and go, what, are you calling a Noble laureate a liar?

DeSalles – (laughs) Right.

Aguilar – Well, we didn’t know then that he was a liar. (he laughs)

But Paul did! That’s what happens when your mind changes as I’m going to get to in a minute.

Alan Dale – Would you allow me to interrupt for just a moment, please? I’ve been asked to announce that Dr. Grover Proctor is giving a presentation upstairs on the Raleigh call and the fingerprints of intelligence.  And that we are reshuffling things a tiny little bit during the course of the afternoon in consideration of new presentations. But, please proceed, and I’m sorry for the interruption.

Aguilar – Thank you very much, and I think that’s important work that he’s done.    

So, all the targets were driven downrange except the melons.  This is a photograph from his shooting test, the bullet came from the right, it came through here, and as you can see it moves it away.

This was, I forget, a pineapple or something like that, or that might have been a rubber ball. 

And as Tink wrote, “Whether taped or not, a bullet will cut through the outside of a melon like butter.  A human skull is completely different.  The thick skull bone requires considerable force to be penetrated and that force is deposited in the skull as momentum. A much closer “reasonable facsimile of a human head” is the coconut. When it was fired upon it did not show recoil motion but was instead blasted down range.

And now we finally get to the neuromuscular reaction issue.

And as Alfred O Olivier said most of the movement you see of the President moving backwards and his body moving sideward I believe is due to a neuromuscular reaction.  And so in his book, “JFK Myths,” Larry Sturdivan explained the neuromuscular reaction. And for the neuromuscular reaction he shows this picture.    

This picture is called Fallen Soldier said to have been taken during the Spanish-Ameri- (Gary corrects himself) the um..

Audience member – The Spanish Civil War.

Aguilar – Sorry. Thank you, thank you. Great to have a knowledgeable historian in the room. (laughs) Thank you. But, as you know David this was not taken then, this photograph was not taken then, Oh? You did not know that? Oh, alright, I’ll give you the citations on that

Alan Dale – I knew it! (laughing)

Aguilar – This was taken then, they think it was taken at least 50 or a 100 miles from where this is supposed to have been taken and he was not shot in the head. In any case a long story about this having been debunked. But, Larry Sturdivan uses to this to prove that when you shoot someone in the head that they go backwards.

And he also, and this is testimony that he gave to, for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and he showed these images of a goat being shot in the head and you see that the goat, and his testimony and I should quote it but I’m not going to for time reasons, he talks about what you actually see here and that is that both the fore arms, or, the forelegs in this case, and the back legs all splay outward. Okay? They splay outward when you hit a goat in the head with a bullet.  But, that’s not what you see in the Kennedy case. What you see in the Kennedy case is the head leans backwards and the body follows. You can do this as many times as you want. But, it is decidedly different than the neuromuscular reaction to see that.

So, there’s much more to be said about neuromuscular reaction but suffice it to say there is very little reason to suppose that neuromuscular reaction explains Kennedy’s head recoiling backwards.

So, you have the autopsy evidence, the findings, the X-rays, it was very clear that they don’t really give you the kind of convincing evidence. You had test shots on skulls which were entirely misrepresented and certainly proved the opposite of what was intended.

You have the neutron activation analysis which has been debunked.

And the scientific duplication tests proving a shot from behind via the “jet effect,” which again were done dishonestly, and reported dishonestly.

So, the other thing that is worth talking about is this abrasion collar because this was supposed to have proved that the bullets came from behind because there is an abrasion collar showing a bullet had entered there. Autopsy photographs show a zone, a well defined zone of discoloration at the edge of the back wound most pronounced in the upper and outer margin which identifies it as having the characteristic of an entrance wound of a bullet.  And that was from the Clark Panel report in 1968. 

This is Dr. Lindenberg saying, again, for the Rockefeller Commission, again, confirming the findings of the Clark Panel that there was a zone of dark discoloration at the margin of the skin, most prominent at the upper and lateral margin of the wound.

And what this shows is if you hit skin with a bullet purely perpendicularly you get a circular wound like this with a zone of discoloration that is circular.  If it comes from above it will give you an abrasion collar up above. Fairly simple stuff, right?

I want to assure you that you are all better authorities than the Clark Panel experts and the Rockefeller Commission experts here is a diagram from the House Select Committee on Assassinations that shows what we see in the autopsy photographs and what we have seen.  And where is the abrasion collar? It’s here.  It’s down below.

This isn’t me inventing this, this isn’t just my own view of this, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded the same thing, that the zone of discoloration was down below.

And here is another authority we should all listen to, and by the way, those of you who have seen him on specials, literally eleven years ago in a debate with Michael Baden I proved, I laid this out for him, and told him that he was completely wrong on this, and yet two or three years ago he was on TV saying the same stuff,…

saying the same thing.  So, when the autopsy photographer who were there, the corpsman, he’s [Baden] trying to explain why the autopsy photographs are so bad, and essentially what he is saying is that the corpsman who normally takes the photographs was confronted by an FBI agent in the morgue who said [to the corpsman] you don’t have clearance and so he took him off the job and got an FBI agent to take the photographs and that is why they are so lousy.

“We got our own man taking pictures, the FBI agent said, this is right from his book “Unnatural Death,” this is what he wrote and what I didn’t realize this but Pat Spear pointed out to me I thought that he had just written this because the book came out in 1990 but he had apparently he had been saying this two or three years after the House Select Committee on Assassinations report came out, that an FBI agent had taken the autopsy photographs after they had removed the guy who regularly takes autopsy photographs out and that is why the photographs are so lousy.

Here’s the House Select Committee’s Forensic Panel report, now he’s the head of the Forensic Panel, right? (laughs) This is the forensic panel’s report. 

Stringer and Reibe took the autopsy photographs under the direction of Dr. Humes…Stringer also stated that a federal agent took a camera from Reibe and exposed the film.

But, not Stringer, who took the autopsy photographs. Stringer was widely recognized as a superb autopsy photographer such that the government would send people to Stringer to learn how to do autopsy photography. So, in the House Select Committee’s own report they proved that Michael Baden is [full of] nonsense, which he continues to repeat to this day. It’s not true. Even after I sent it to him at a small confab at Cyril Wecht’s house after the talk he was circulating the rumor that I had misquoted him. So, I sent him a copy, a page of my slide, a copy of a page from his book, and I said I’d be happy to buy you dinner for two anywhere you want to go if you see any misrepresentation here.  He never wrote back.

So, for those of you who don’t know the case, and many of you in this room do, know that there was a huge disconnect between where the Parkland doctor’s said where JFK’s wounds were and where they appear on the autopsy photographs.  And here is a diagram prepared under the direction of Dr. McCelland, and here’s Dr. Paul Peters basically writing to Harry Livingstone, I think, saying that yeah, that’s about where I saw the wound too.

And when you stack them all up, Warren defenders will try to say that I misquote these people and quote them out of context but they can never really prove it because I just take their own statements, and they are really rather clear. You stack them all up and you see that all of these people at Parkland hospital said there was a wound to the right rear of JFK’s head.

Well, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was quite concerned about this and I pointed this out again in a sort of a conference about 15 or 16 years ago when I first discovered this.

That critics of the Warren Commission’s medical evidence findings have found on the observations recorded by the Parkland Hospital doctors…in disagreement with the observations of the Parkland doctors are the 26 people present at the autopsy.  All of those interviewed who attended the autopsy corroborated the general location of the wounds as depicted in the autopsy photographs; none had differing accounts…it appears more probable that the observations of the Parkland doctors are incorrect.

But, what wasn’t then known, because it was suppressed, until the Assassination Records Review Board came along is what those witnesses at the autopsy had actually told the HSCA.  Here are a number of the diagrams from people who were interviewed by the HSCA and routinely the Bethesda witnesses interviewed by the HSCA not only described a wound in the back of the head they depicted it in diagrams that were suppressed. 

“All of those interviewed corroborated general locations ie that the wound was in front of the ear. Not true.

All of those interviewed…the Parkland doctors are wrong.

Well, here’s Dr. Boswell’s lab assistant, now I’m only going to give you a couple.  I could give you 15, or 8 or 10 of them who say very much the same thing, the back right quadrant of JFK [‘s head is ] missing.  Again, suppressed from the record until the Assassination Records Review Board came along.  Mortician Tom Robinson said JFK’s skull wound was directly behind the back of his head.  The commanding officer of the Military District of Washington said the skull wound was in the back of the head.

And here are the diagrams he wrote and depicted. And here we are, here. This is the mortician who prepared the head for burial. This is Sibert, I think, I can’t see, but you can basically see that most of these people place the wound at the back of the head.

So, we need to understand how does this happen? I’m sure there are several people in this room who have done peer reviews in their specialty.  I have done peer review in ophthalmology a couple times in my specialty, subspecialty, and you have probably seen as I have seen junk that comes through and you have to make all sorts of suggestions and corrections to get it right.  But, what you basically find is that there are incredible tendency for confirmation bias that goes on.  And I’ll tell you how I think this kind of thing starts. I think, much to my amazement I ran across this article many years ago and you can find the citation for this, or I can send you a copy of it, in a Maryland State medical journal interview Dr. Russell Fisher reported that Ramsey Clark called him.  Now, the Attorney General of the United States calls you, okay? And he became concerned about some statements he had seen in the proofs of Josiah Thompson’s, then not yet published book, “Six Seconds in Dallas.” He decided to get a panel of people together to look at the autopsy evidence…and the real goal was the Clark Panel report was released partly to refute some of the junk that was in Thompson’s book.  

But, there’s an article which I would recommend to any of you by Ioannides, John Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” And that is because of the reason of “confirmation bias.”

Confirmation bias occurs when people actively search for and favor information or evidence that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses while ignoring or slighting adverse or mitigating evidence.  It’s a type of cognitive bias (pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations – leading to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, or illogical interpretation) and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study.

This happens all the time in my specialty. I see it all the time in papers I’ve reviewed.

And again, we have, again “According to available information…Three shots were heard and the President fell forward bleeding from the head.” 

A body is given to these guys they are told that he was shot from above and behind, here’s the body, figure it out, give us the evidence that will prove the conclusion that he was shot from above and behind.  They weren’t dishonest men, they weren’t lying they are trying to put together something that they knew had to fit.

Here’s Jack Kennedy, and that’s what he looked like, if anybody wants to see those photographs, I’ll…

But, again, here we have a number of experts, these people are not liars, they are not corrupt, they are not part of, you know, some anti-American, or a conspiracy, they are not here to deceive people, but they perceive things in ways that they think going in to confirm the biases that they carry into this, everything fits with Oswald to be a lone killer and so you see that whenever he [Baden] talks on the subject he always shapes that evidence, even when it is pointed out to him that it’s wrong he continues to shape it in the same way. And that is why I think that there has been so much junk science in the Kennedy case. And I wish that was the only case.  But, junk science is everywhere, pervasive.  

Thank you very much for your attention.