Urban legends and opinions don't really matter a whole lot around here on FR. Here's a picture of the cases that were found at the Tippet's Shooting.
Posted on 11/19/2003 10:51:44 PM PST by mlo
It is a tantalizing tape recording, full of static hiss, popping sounds, and eerie faraway voices. And for years, there has been debate over whether it proves there was a plot to kill President Kennedy.
Now, a new analysis of the tape recorded by a Dallas police officer on the day Kennedy was assassinated casts further doubt on the lingering conspiracy theories.
Although some previous studies have suggested that one of the sounds on the tape is a gunshot from the infamous "grassy knoll," forensic acoustics expert Bob Berkovitz said it was extremely unlikely that the sound was gunfire.
"The theory that the noise represents a 'grassy knoll' gunshot is not supported by the computer-based analysis," said Berkovitz, chairman of Sensimetrics Corp., which specializes in research on speech and hearing.
Berkovitz studied the tape for Court TV for its special — "The JFK Assassination: Investigation Reopened" — which was to air Wednesday.
For those who believe a conspiracy was at work on the day JFK was shot — Nov. 22, 1963 — the tape is considered a key piece of evidence.
It is believed to have been made by a Dallas motorcycle police officer who accidentally left his microphone on during the chaotic minutes surrounding the assassination. The transmissions from the microphone were then recorded at police headquarters.
Although Lee Harvey Oswald is thought to have fired three shots from the window of the Texas Book Depository, the question of whether a fourth shot was fired by somebody else from the grassy knoll has been the subject of heated debate.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after hearing reports from acoustics experts who said there was a high probability that the tape contained four gunshot sounds, found in 1979 that the assassination was probably the result of a conspiracy. The Warren Commission, appointed by President Johnson to investigate the JFK shooting, found in 1964 that Oswald acted alone.
But a special panel of the National Academy of Sciences, led by a physicist from Harvard who would later win the Nobel Prize, disputed the evidence of a fourth shot in 1982.
Other studies have taken one side or the other and Berkovitz's study doesn't seem likely to be the last word in the long-running debate.
G. Robert Blakey, former chief counsel of the House committee and now a law professor at Notre Dame, said he was curious about Berkovitz's analysis, but he stood by the House investigation.
"Did Oswald have help? I think there's a high probability that there was a shot from the grassy knoll," he said.
Berkovitz, who has testified in court cases as a forensic acoustics expert, analyzed the key segment of the tape using software developed by his company to help researchers analyze speech and other sounds.
Berkovitz seized on a snippet of conversation that can be overheard on the recording right at the point where the supposed grassy knoll "shot" is heard. The words "hold everything secure" appear to come from a second radio channel being operated by police that day.
The problem for conspiracy theorists is that the time of the transmission of the words "hold everything secure" on the second radio channel was about a minute after the assassination, meaning that the sound identified as the shot actually came a minute after the shots, according to Berkovitz.
It's not clear how the sounds from one police radio channel could have leaked into another channel, said Berkovitz, but one possibility is that the microphone simply picked up sound from the loudspeaker on another officer's motorcycle.
Some have argued that the later conversation could have somehow been recorded on top of the earlier gunshot sound, but Berkovitz said he had found evidence within the recording that the supposed gunshot and the radio transmission were recorded at the same time.
He said he went back one minute in the tape to see if he could find the assassination shots there, but had no luck. It was "an unholy mess. ... There was lots of noise and not much else," he said.
Berkovitz, who worked on the project for nine months, also said he used a computer program to calculate whether sounds on the tape represented echoes of the grassy knoll shot bouncing around Dealey Plaza. He said his analysis found a very high probability that the sounds were not echoes, a finding diametrically opposed to the findings that had swayed the House committee.
Noting that previous studies were carried out more than two decades ago, Berkovitz said, "I think it may well be that having some better tools at my disposal caused me to have different results."
Still, Berkovitz doesn't see his research as the last word.
"Those are the results I got," Berkovitz said. "People are going to come along and say, 'You're full of it.' That's fine. That's how science progresses."
A top secret clearance is not all that impressive. Every officer in the military has to be cleared for one, and many enlisted men & women get them. It just pertains to the duties of their jobs. It doesn't mean that one now knows the island where Marilyn Monroe and Elvis are shacked up.
Not to belittle your brother, but that hardly makes him an expert on how the intelligence apparatus of the American government works, much less on whether or not there could be an effective cover-up of a murder of a chief executive. The only ones who would have to be in on the cover-up are those who "had to know", certainly not bureacratic "government workers."
That's an interesting theory considering the majority of Americans have believed in a government conspiracy/cover-up of the JFK assassination for the thirty years prior to the Stone film. I don't think I've ever met anyone in person who believes the Warren Report, although they seem to hang out in droves on FR.
I disagree. I've stood behind the fence and it's an easier shot than the Sixth Floor of the TBSD. And there was nobody even close to being in the line of fire from that direction if you see the knoll from the Willis photo. There are three men near the bottom of the steps and few other onlookers between the limo and the fence at the moment of the head shot. Whether there *was* somebody shooting from there is another debate. But saying that the shooter's angle from there would have been blocked in any way is simply incorrect.
At the time of the motorcade there were a good many people standing on the grassy knoll itself (Abraham Zapruder was one of them), directly across from the grassy knoll, and, among railroad workers, behind the stockade fence and even from railroad structures behind the grassy knoll. (Josiah Thompson's book, Six Seconds in Dallas, meticulously charts all of this, even though Thompson supports a conspiracy theory). NONE of those people saw a gunman on the grassy knoll, or saw anyone with a rifle there, nor heard a shot from that close.
And, of course, there is the question of what the gunman would do and where he would go immediately after the fatal shot.
At the moment of the fatal shot, JFK was right beside the grassy knoll, moving (from the viewpoint of someone there) from left to right, and a shot would have hit JFK almost exactly sideways (from his right shoulder to his left). Although there's a lot of quibbling about the impact of the fatal bullet, that sort of impact is not seen.
One of the oddments of the JFK assassination is that some people claim to have seen smoke, here or there, but in the mid-20th century rifle bullets were virtually smokeless.
Urban legends and opinions don't really matter a whole lot around here on FR. Here's a picture of the cases that were found at the Tippet's Shooting.
I also heard a live interview with the cop who was handcuffed to Oswald the day he was killed. It was about 5 years ago on KPRC AM 950 in Houston and was conducted by Dan Patrick. He replayed it on KSEV AM 700 this year. The cop was also in charge of the interrogation of witnesses the day of the assassination. He claims that NO ONE came forward at the time saying there was smoke on the hill and that as years go on more and more make the claim including some who said otherwise at the time.
I do not intend to defend this statement but the police officer did say it, and I am repeating his words.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.