March 26 — The House Assassinations Committee may have been right after all: There was a shot from the grassy knoll.
THAT WAS THE KEY finding of the congressional investigation that concluded 22 years ago that President John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas in 1963 was “probably ... the result of a conspiracy.” A shot from the grassy knoll meant that two gunmen must have fired at the president within a split-second sequence. Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of firing three shots at Kennedy from a perch at the Texas School Book Depository, could not have been in two places at once.
A special panel of the National Academy of Sciences subsequently disputed the evidence of a fourth shot, contained on a police dictabelt of the sounds in Dealey Plaza that day. The panel insisted it was simply random noise, perhaps static, recorded about a minute after the shooting while Kennedy’s motorcade was en route to Parkland Hospital.
A new, peer-reviewed article in Science and Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society, says the NAS panel’s study was seriously flawed. It says the panel failed to take into account the words of a Dallas patrolman that show the gunshot-like noises occurred “at the exact instant that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”
In fact, the author of the article, D.B. Thomas, a government scientist and JFK assassination researcher, said it was more than 96 percent certain that there was a shot from the grassy knoll to the right of the president’s limousine, in addition to the three shots from a book depository window above and behind the president’s limousine.
HOUSE INVESTIGATOR SEES VINDICATION
G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the House Assassinations Committee, said the NAS panel’s study always bothered him because it dismissed all four putative shots as random noise - even though the three soundbursts from the book depository matched up precisely with film of the assassination and other evidence such as the echo patterns in Dealey Plaza and the speed of Kennedy’s motorcade.
"This is an honest, careful scientific examination of everything we did, with all the appropriate statistical checks,” Blakey said of Thomas’s work.
“It shows that we made mistakes, too, but minor mistakes. The main thing is when push comes to shove, he increased the degree of confidence that the shot from the grassy knoll was real, not static. We thought there was a 95 percent chance it was a shot. He puts it at 96.3 percent. Either way, that’s ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ”
The sounds of assassination were recorded at Dallas police headquarters when a motorcycle patrolman inadvertently left his microphone switch in the “on” position, deluging his transmitting channel with what seemed to be motorcycle noise. Using sophisticated techniques, a team of scientists enlisted by the House committee filtered out the noise and came up with “audible events” within a 10-second time frame that it believed might be gunfire.
The Warren Commission had concluded in 1964 that only three shots, all from behind, all from Oswald’s rifle, were fired in Dealey Plaza as the motorcade passed through. But the House experts, after extensive tests, found 10 echo patterns that matched sounds emanating from the grassy knoll, traveling carefully measured distances to nearby buildings and then bouncing off them to hit the open motorcycle transmitter.
They also placed the unknown gunman behind a picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll, in front of and to the right of the presidential limousine. The House committee concluded that this shot missed, and that Kennedy was killed by a final bullet from Oswald’s rifle. Thomas, by contrast, believes it was the shot from the knoll, seven-tenths of a second earlier, that killed the president.
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http://www.msnbc.com/news/549788.asp
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"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask, is not an alien force ALREADY among us?" - Ronald Reagan
THAT WAS THE KEY finding of the congressional investigation that concluded 22 years ago that President John F. Kennedy’s murder in Dallas in 1963 was “probably ... the result of a conspiracy.” A shot from the grassy knoll meant that two gunmen must have fired at the president within a split-second sequence. Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of firing three shots at Kennedy from a perch at the Texas School Book Depository, could not have been in two places at once.
A special panel of the National Academy of Sciences subsequently disputed the evidence of a fourth shot, contained on a police dictabelt of the sounds in Dealey Plaza that day. The panel insisted it was simply random noise, perhaps static, recorded about a minute after the shooting while Kennedy’s motorcade was en route to Parkland Hospital.
A new, peer-reviewed article in Science and Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society, says the NAS panel’s study was seriously flawed. It says the panel failed to take into account the words of a Dallas patrolman that show the gunshot-like noises occurred “at the exact instant that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”
In fact, the author of the article, D.B. Thomas, a government scientist and JFK assassination researcher, said it was more than 96 percent certain that there was a shot from the grassy knoll to the right of the president’s limousine, in addition to the three shots from a book depository window above and behind the president’s limousine.
HOUSE INVESTIGATOR SEES VINDICATION
G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel to the House Assassinations Committee, said the NAS panel’s study always bothered him because it dismissed all four putative shots as random noise - even though the three soundbursts from the book depository matched up precisely with film of the assassination and other evidence such as the echo patterns in Dealey Plaza and the speed of Kennedy’s motorcade.
"This is an honest, careful scientific examination of everything we did, with all the appropriate statistical checks,” Blakey said of Thomas’s work.
“It shows that we made mistakes, too, but minor mistakes. The main thing is when push comes to shove, he increased the degree of confidence that the shot from the grassy knoll was real, not static. We thought there was a 95 percent chance it was a shot. He puts it at 96.3 percent. Either way, that’s ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ”
The sounds of assassination were recorded at Dallas police headquarters when a motorcycle patrolman inadvertently left his microphone switch in the “on” position, deluging his transmitting channel with what seemed to be motorcycle noise. Using sophisticated techniques, a team of scientists enlisted by the House committee filtered out the noise and came up with “audible events” within a 10-second time frame that it believed might be gunfire.
The Warren Commission had concluded in 1964 that only three shots, all from behind, all from Oswald’s rifle, were fired in Dealey Plaza as the motorcade passed through. But the House experts, after extensive tests, found 10 echo patterns that matched sounds emanating from the grassy knoll, traveling carefully measured distances to nearby buildings and then bouncing off them to hit the open motorcycle transmitter.
They also placed the unknown gunman behind a picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll, in front of and to the right of the presidential limousine. The House committee concluded that this shot missed, and that Kennedy was killed by a final bullet from Oswald’s rifle. Thomas, by contrast, believes it was the shot from the knoll, seven-tenths of a second earlier, that killed the president.
Want to learn more?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/549788.asp
------------------
"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask, is not an alien force ALREADY among us?" - Ronald Reagan