The points of contention are:
Actually, I’m am certain we have only seen a portion of the tip of the iceberg so far.
1) There was no microphone stuck on the 'transmit' position in the motorcade, and if there was, it was nowhere near Dealey Plaza at 12:30 p.m.;
1. We know this is wrong because the Channel 2 dispatcher told all the patrolmen that a patrolman "up on Stemmons" had his mike stuck on, and he asked them to try to find him and get him to shut off his mike. The "up on Stemmons" comment is evidence that McClain was the one with the stuck mike.
Joffrey. There was a motorcycle with a stuck ‘transmit’ button, but it was not with the motorcade. It was at the Trade Mart.
I see you watched the 40-minute video by Dr. Thomas. In it, he seems to make an overwhelming case that the motorcycle with the stuck microphone was with the motorcade, because he played an 8-second clip of the sounds of loud sirens, exactly the sort of thing that would be recorded by a motorcycle going with the President to the hospital.
However, if one does not “cherry pick”, as Dr. Thomas did, which section of the tape to play, but played the whole thing for the 5 minute trip to the hospital, you would have heard:
Very little
Sirens approaching from the distance, then getting louder, then quite loud for a few seconds, then get less loud and receding the distance.
And again, the same patter with the sirens, getting loud and receding.
And again, the same patter with the sirens for the third time, getting loud and receding.
This is not consistent with a motorcycle travelling with its sirens on to the hospital for the full 5 minutes. This is consistent with a motorcycle waiting at the Trade Mart Center for the President, and hearing the sirens as they passed right by on the freeway. The Trade Mart center was very close to where the limousine was as it rushed to the hospital.
I claim, it was dishonest for Dr. Thomas to play just a short clip. I am very confident that Mr. Griffith will not make available to you a recording of this entire 5-minute span, no more than Dr. Thomas did.
2) The open microphone did not record any gunshots;
Since the motorcycle appears not to have been with the motorcade, it could not have recorded the gunshots.
But one thing that is beyond dispute, is that many of these “sound impulses” were not gunshots.
Below is a quote from Dr. Barger with the BBN, who gave testimony to the HSCA in 1978 in support of the acoustic data.
Dr. BARGER - Yes. We examined the full 234 linear feet of the waveform representing the output of the channel 1 recording when the button was stuck to see if there were any other impulsive patterns that occurred that were similar to these that we are looking at on channel 1. We found that there was one other sequence of impulsive events. It was dissimilar from the one we have looked at principally in that its timespan was less than 5 seconds. It occurred about a minute later than the period of impulses in question. We found no other impulsive patterns on the tape.
So, about a minute after the alleged gunshots, there was another of multiple sound impulses. No one is saying there was several seconds of gunshots, followed by a minute of quiet, followed by another flurry of gunshots.
Also, of the 7 sound impulses that were recorded at the time of the alleged gunshots, 4 sound impulses were accepted as gunshots, 3 were rejected by the BBN. Years later, Dr. Thomas said one of these was a real gunshot. And it just happens to corresponds to z224 so I suspect Dr. Thomas wanted at least two of the gunshots at z224 and z313, to match the Zapruder film better.
Now, who knows, I don’t know the absolute truth. But one thing I can say for certain. Most of the sound impulses on that tape were not caused by gunshots. And likely none of them were.
3) The impulses shown on the audiograph are not gunshots but random impulses created by ambient noise;
I don’t know the technical reason. I heard the vibration of the engine could caused these sound impulses, these “N-waves”. I don’t think anyone knows for certain. But there are too many of them and too much spread over time for them to all have been gunshots.
4) The dictabelt recording can not be matched to the Zapruder film because it has been altered;
Actually, if one accepts that Dr. Thomas shot at ‘140.32 seconds”, that matches up well with the BBN shot at ‘145.15 seconds” A gap of 4.83 seconds which is within a tenth of a second of the gap between z224 and z312, when many people, including me, say two shots did occur. Well, that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it. I mean the odds of that are something like one in a hundred of that happening, correct?
No. Remember there were 7 sound impulses within a few seconds of each other. Mathematics says that there are 7*6/2 or 21 possible unique pairs. “Shots 1 and 2”, “Shots 1 and 3”, etc. So, the real odds are not 1 in 100 but more like 1 in 5.
And maybe somewhat less, because there was another cluster of “shots” a minute afterwards that the BBN could have focused on. They made have focused on the one they chose because they knew about this 4.83 second gap between two of the sound impulses in the first cluster.
This is similar to the problem where a teacher, year after year, finds that often, two of his students in his class have the same birthday. With 22 students, there are 22*21/2 or 231 unique pairs. More than half of 365. So, it is not a vast coincidence for him to discover such pairing in many years.
5) The four to six shots recorded by the dictabelt contradict the Warren Commission's findings therefore it can not possibly be true;
Yes, it would.
5. Yes, believe it or not, some people make that argument.
Speaking of the WC, we now know that the commission had an analysis done on a KBOX radio station recording that was made in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. The analysis was done by acoustical expert Larry Kersta at the Bell Telephone Lab in New Jersey. Kersta only had the equipment to do a spectrographic analysis of the tape, but he found that it contained six "non-voiced" noises! Moreover, the KBOX "non-voiced" noises follow the same sequence and pattern as do the six dictabelt impulses that passed the first BBN screening for gunfire: the first one is different from the others, followed by three impulses close together, followed by a slight pause, followed by two more impulses similar to the previous three. My, my, my, what an amazing coincidence.
Joffrey, the KBOX recording was a recreation. They did
NOT record the assassination as it happened.
It was similar to the 1938 Orson Wells broadcast of the “War of the Worlds”, where they didn’t record a real invasion of the Earth from Mars, but a fake one.
At the end of the day, I admit, it is conceivable that the Dictabelt did have a recording of the assassination, despite all the evidence against it. But there is no way this KBOX recreation from a latter day recorded the gunshots at Dealey Plaza.
6) Some gunshot impulses on the recording can not be matched to any test shots, therefore the acoustic evidence is invalid.
No. If most did not match at all, but a few matched very very well, that would be of much interest. Now before we go on, I should say that I am very good at mathematics. At algebra, calculus, trigonometry, at least when I have been practicing. But not so good at statistics. So, take what I say with a grain of salt.
Correlations between two data sets can be measured, like between the data from 1963 and the data from a 1978 test, to get something called a “Correlation Coefficient”. This coefficient must always be between -1 and +1. If outside that range, an error in calculation has occurred. A correlation of +1 is very good. A perfect match of data. A correlation of -1 is very bad, because you always get the opposite results. Actually, this might be good because if a bad model predicted one result, you would know the opposite would always actually happen. And a correlation of 0, means the comparisons are random. Occasionally a match is found, but this is just by luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation_coefficientA correlation of 0.8 may be very low if one is verifying a physical law using high-quality instruments, but may be regarded as very high in the social sciences, where there may be a greater contribution from complicating factors.
The BBN tested, believe it or not, over 2,600 hundred tests. 78 gunshots, recorded at 36 microphones. I make it out to be 2,808 tests. Of these 15 had a correlation coefficient of 0.6 or greater. And 4 were found with a correlation coefficient of 0.8, which caused the BBN to conclude that these were shots. I should think one should find some correlations with 2,808 possibilities.
Now, to a layman like me, this seems questionable, since 0.8 provides a low degree of confidence. Although it could be asked “Is the Dictabelt recording a “high-quality” instrument?” I would guess not.
Still checking 2,808 results and finding 4 somewhat weak correlations, of only 0.8, does not sound impressive to me. But when it comes to statistics, I am well out of my depth.
