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."
At one point in the Clay Shaw trial D.A. Jim Garrison tried to show, from a film of the assassination, that there was a gunman on the grassy knoll: It turned out that his "evidence" consisted of a grainy shadowy blob, apparently hiding behind a tree, on only one frame of the film (about the duration of one heartbeat) -- but it wasn't on and of the frames before or after, and the tree it was "hiding" behind was no thicker than a man's wrist, and the blob itself looked so much unlike a normal person that anyone looking like that would have been remembered by eyewitnesses.
My son recently pointed out to me, in a state of amusement, that the word "knoll" is never heard in any other context.
Y'all following where I'm going here?
Me neither.
Hardly a "statement", maybe a rumor or a myth. The entire car, including its windshield, were examined for bullet fragments and there is a small blemish in the windshield - definitely not a hole - where it was chipped by something, perhaps a bullet fragment, which did not go through. There is a photo of this blemish in the multivolume published records of the Warren Commission. If I remember correctly, the chip was on the inside of the windshield.
There are pictures of the car, and its windshield, before it gets to Parkland Hospital. A bullet fragment struck the windshield on the inside, but did not penetrate. The hole does not go through.
That's what happens when people rely solely on someone's statements.
Wrong. Your mistake is assuming that his motion HAD to be imparted by a bullet. It didn't.
They aren't in conflict.
That is a question that has been bugging me over the last several days. Are there any records of witnesses giving a description? If he was in the lunch room a minute and a half later, cool as a cucumber, why would anyone suspect him? If the description came from people who saw him in the window, how do they get details such as height and weight from this? If people saw him shooting wouldn't some hero types have gone it after him? Anyway...just one of things that bugs me. Any info on this is greatly appreciated.
Several witnesses pointed police to the schoolbook depository bldg, whose employees had mostly stopped work to watch the motorcade. The supervisors immediately began to take roll of who was there, and the only person missing was Oswald.
I am not absolutely clear on how soon and how detailed the bulletin for Oswald was. About 90 minutes after killing JFK, he encountered policeman J.D. Tippett on the street and killed him -- why has never been explained, my theory is that Tippett (who was posted in a quiet part of Dallas, far from the scene of the assassination) merely asked this stranger if there had been any additional news on the radio or TV and Oswald panicked. There were eyewitnesses to the Tippett shooting, who immediately directed police to the movie theatre where Oswald had run.
Okay what else would move Kennedy's head back in violent fashion at the EXACT same time his head exploded. Did you see the Zapruder film?
More times than I could count, and it's always been clear to me that the motion is not from the impact of a bullet. I guess it depends on one's expectations.
Bullets throwing people around is a Hollywood effect. In real life, super-sonic bullets move too fast and have such a small cross-section that they penetrate and pass through, imparting relativley little momentum to the body.
A rifle bullet also creates a "pressure cavity" inside the body. In Kennedy's case the bullet penetrated the rear skull and exited the front. The pressure cavity caused by its passage built up the internal pressure of the skull until it literally exploded. Like any explosion, there is an equal and opposite reaction from the direction of the expelled material. The ejected material went toward the front.
Also, Kennedy was not an inanimate object. He was a living human being. He was leaning forward at the time he was shot in the head. Why would you think he couldn't have simply jerked backwards?
It moved back violently at the exact time of impact.
Not really. The head moves slightly *forward* at the moment of impact, then the head and his upper body move backward after the head explodes and the bullet is long gone.
secondly the shot which penetrated his NECK from behind caused his body to move FOWARD
There is no such visible reaction at the time of the neck shot. That was just as he came out from behind the sign.
There's a pretty good theory out there, published by an ex-Secret Service agent I believe, that the "magic bullet" was neither magic nor from the Grassy Knoll. It was fired by mistake into JFK by one of the agents behind him when he drew his gun, or so the theory goes.
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