Posted on 11/22/2003 9:36:29 AM PST by keving
Did anyone see the show on the History Channel about the archiving of the Zapruder film?
"Image of an Assassination"
Saturday, November 22 @ 8am ET/PT
On November 22, 1963, Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder brought his movie camera to film President John F. Kennedy's motorcade for his grandchildren. As it turned out, Zapruder captured one of the 20th century's most important documents. In 1997, two media companies created a digital replica of the original, which is presented here, along with Zapruder's business associates, photography experts, and National Archives employees, who piece together the history of the crucial 26-second film. TV PG-V
It was very interesting. The most revealing part was that the frames that claim to be the Zapruder film are cropped copies of the original (1/3 to 1/2 screen).
The best part of the film is that the "fatal" blow when Kennedy's head explodes is cleary shown traveling from the side of the limo - grassy knoll area.
The "expanded" version or original version of the film included the trajectory of the bullet which could not be indicated on the cropped photo version.
Please view programs - it is very clear.
(Excerpt) Read more at historychannel.com ...
Her name is Jean Hill, and a favorite "witness" of conspiracy theorists. The problem is that she is clearly a "confabulator", one of those people who is either a pathological liar, or more likely unable to separate her own imaginings from reality.
There have been dozens of irreconcilable differences between her version of events and everyone else's (including photographic evidence), and her story keeps changing over time.
One of the most damning is the one you mention, whereby she tells a tale of rushing across the street to chase the "grassy gnoll gunman", and yet photographic evidence (the Zapruder film gets all the attention, but there were *hundreds* of still photos taken by spectators that day) show her doing nothing more than standing and then sitting next to her companion Mary Moorman.
More minor items in her story don't bear so heavily on the actual events, but cast great doubt on her reliability. She claimed that "Just as Mary Moorman started to take a picture we were looking at the president and Jackie in the back seat and they were looking at a little dog between them", and described it as a "white fluffy dog". Needless to say, there was no dog in the car, and when this was pointed out to her she said she was confused by the white roses. The roses were red.
She claimed that as the car passed she leapt to the edge of the street and yelled, "hey, we wnat to take your picture", and JFK turned and was looking at her just as he was shot. The Zapruder film shows Hill never moved or said a word as the President passed, and she was not even looking at him when he was first shot.
Hill claims she heard Jackie shout, "My God, he has been shot!". No one else that day, not even the other occupants of the car, heard Jackie say anything at the time of the shootings.
On the day of the shootings she told the sheriff's department that she saw "someone in plain clothes shooting back..."
Finally, Hill was interviewed within half an hour of the assassination by a local Dallas TV crew. Asked if she saw anybody or anything that drew her attention, she answered simply, "no". And yet over the years her story has changed so much that in 1986 she told Jim Marrs, "I saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence. I saw a puff of smoke and some sort of movement on the grassy knoll where he was." In 1989 she added a "flash of light".
Even her husband made fun of her testimony, and he's probably got a better idea of her reliability than anyone.
And yet, sadly, a great deal of the conspiracy literature (and Oliver Stone's "JFK") is based on her fantasies.
To this day, I believe Oswald was the only shooter. If there is any cover-up, I would say that it is that the Powers That Be prefer the public to think of Kennedy as a martyr rather than some poor schmuck who was killed by mistake. The irony boggles the mind.
Yep,......If there was a conspiracy, LHO was the world's greatest shooter.
And,.....since LHO was the world's greatest shooter,....his being a bad shot,...is part of the conspiracy!
It gets confusing,....'cause,....everyone can have a 'bad' day on the job.
/sarcasm
Besides, cow-knuckle, mostly cartilage, is not the same as rib, scapula, ulna, and radius. Decreased velocity or not - there would be much more significant deformation and fragmentation even with modern jacketed 'cop killers.' Furthermore, Fackler himself has said of using one or two simulated shots that, "A series of shots through a 14 or 15 cm block of tissue simulant or the leg of a 25 kg animal can give enough variation so that, by selective choice of exit wound photographs, one can "prove" any point one wishes." He focused on military jacket rounds and even so, has written much about how bullets "commonly break up after 7 inches" of travel through a body - without hitting bone. Once bone, especially a long bone or high density bone, is struck, with a force to break that bone, the bullet deforms and fragments .
Do not depend too much on Dr. Fackler. He has made a name for himself as a government and defense witness expert. He also has stated under interview, to Chistopher Ruddy, (NewsMax, I believe)that "he is not a pathologist." He is however a prolific publisher for Army ballistic.
Impressive as his credentials are - he has his critics. His Ruby Ridge testimony has been described as "inaccurate, sometimes wild, conclusions, and [he] failed to adequately research the issues involved in the case before he testified. He proposed one scenario that was patently absurd." (Jess Walter in covering Ruby Ridge)In the ABA mock trial of Oswald in 1992, he stated that the bullet that supposedly caused the multiple injuries of Kennedy and Connely with lands and grooves intact, little nose damage, nose, little body buldge, and base deformation visible only at certain angles was "typical" for that type of bullet, trajectory, and damage. Yet, the other experts refuted him with the simple fact that no other bullet of similar path and damage result ever emerged with so little deformity.
I'll go with the bullets I've seen.
Sorry, but that is incorrect. In the kinematic mechanism of trauma, it is the square of the velocity that is significant not the mass of the projectile.
The direction of JFK's motion after the head shot is almost surely determined primarily by reflexive spasmodic jerking of the body due to the destruction of much of the brain, and as such nothing can be drawn about the angle of the shot from the subsequent motion of the body.
This explanation was refuted during the Warren inquiry itself. There can be some seizing after the shot, rarely tgat great - but never such that it would interfere with drawing conclusions about where the shots came form when analyzing body motion afterwards. Forensic pathology does exactly that - looks at bullet wounds, body motion if available, and position of the body after the shot to determine where the shot originated.
The idea that this 'neuromuscular event' would overcome the momentum of a bullet shot has long been held as one of the silliest things to come from the Warren commission.
That's energy, (a measure of the potential for damage) not momentum, (which causes the movement).
I made a calculation 10 years ago (last time this subject was flavour of the day). IIRC if only 10% of the bullet energy had gone into moving brain tissue foward (as shown on the Zapruder film) that would have given a rearward momentum (from large mass at low velocity) to the skull of FOUR times the previous momentum from the bullet (tiny mass at high velocity).
This agrees with what Zapruder shows - a small forward movement in framw 314, followed by a larger rearward momentum in th3e following frames.
Moving brain tissue forward within the head would never produce a backward motion unless the source of the movement originated in the head - like some sort of weird bomb. The bullet impacting the head imparts motion to the entire head. Hit the head and brain and skull move together in the diretion of the hit.
Agreed. A glancing hit by a billard ball would cause the egg to move away at an angle but with a resultant vector in the same direction of the orignal ball - a pool shot that hit on the left side a second ball would make it appear to the right and away from the view of the cue stick. But even with wicked English, you can't hit that ball (or egg in your example) a glancing blow and make it come back to against the cue. Unless you use a bank shot....
The next mess comes with what would a glancing through and through head shot look like if fired from high above and to the rear. Then we get bogged down in the vast discrepancies between the ER doctors and nurses, the official autopsy reports, and the conflicting testimony of the Warren and the later House investigations.
Basically, his head would have been shoved partly forward and to the left with a "downward" angle of rotation. Which could result in some of the Warren testimony to the damage.
I would love to see that! But imagine the spectacle...corpse in a new suit and in a Presidential limo...pot shots from everywhere....and just one test isn't enough, need lots of fresh corpses...
Igor! More bodies, please.
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