Hello Everyone,
This is my first post - apologies if this topic has been broached before, I was unable to find it using the search feature.
I have followed and tracked the statements recorded by David Lifton and Doug Horne for many years. I feel I have stitched together the - admittedly complex and at times hard to believe - timeline of events concerning the casket(s) and body from Parkland to Bethesda.
The one piece of the puzzle which I cannot fit is based on an "off the record" conversation between David Lifton and Richard Lipsey where no recording equipment was permitted or used.
Lipsey stated - and Lifton directly quoted him - that JFK's left arm was raised like a "Heil Hitler salute" when he saw the body at Bethesda. Furthermore, Lipsey said that "Humes had to jump on the body and lower it with his knee."
Lifton has discussed this in a few online videos including this series -
Lifton proceeded to hypothesise why the left arm - and only the left arm - was raised. He implied that this was due to storage conditions for the body aboard the luggage compartment of Air Force 1.
Irrespective of how it was raised, if we take Lipsey at his word, we assume the arm was as raised as it was, I have a major problem.
What I know to be true is that the body was delivered inside a "zipped body bag" inside a "shipping casket" by helicopter, then black cadillac hearse to the back door of the Bethesday morgue at rougly 6:35pm.
Looking at both the zipped body bag (as cofirmed by Paul O'Connor at Bethesday) and the grey shipping casket (as confirmed by Jim Jenkins at Bethesda) I can't physically see how JFK's arm could have been raised at all. There just isn't the room inside the body bag NOR the casket.
I would warmly welcome this great community to challenge me on this and I am open to being convinced that this is simply a false statement from Lipsey - he is the only person as far as I know that stated this. Equally, I'm open to being told that the body bags have plenty of room for a raised arm - but logistically, I'm sceptical.
I'm looking forward to your comments.
Thank you.
So Lifton says that Lipsey told him completely off the record that JFK was doing the HH salute. As far as I know, Lipsey hasn't said this at any other time. Nor do I recall Humes, Boswell, Finck, Ebersole, O'Connor, Jenkins, Custer, Reed, Sibert, O'Neil, Stringer, Reibe, Boyers, Canada, Humes, Rudnicki, Wehle, Bird or anyone else present in the autopsy mentioning anything like that happening. I will refrain from advancing an explanation as to why Lifton said what he did, but it's very, very,
very hard to believe that the other attendees would have missed something so obvious occurring. So, any carefully thinking person should find this a dubious claim.
As to the idea of getting the body into the cargo hold of either AF1 or AF2, some important information must be considered. First is that the cargo doors on a 707 are on the left side of the aircraft. On 11/22/1963 the left side of both AF and AF2 faced the terminal, the press, the police escort, and anyone else in the crowd watching the Presidential party boarding. The press pool 707 was directly behind AF2 and the space between AF1 and AF2 was easily visible from this aircraft....there are some extant photos taken from the parked press pool plane showing how open this area was. How would they have been able to get JFK's body directly into the cargo hold without it being blatantly obvious is a mystery that Lifton never could solve. Now, you might think that the body could have been taken aboard AF1 in the bronze casket where it would have been removed and placed in the cargo hold from the cabin, but that's also a bad idea. There is a way to get from the main cabin to the cargo hold directly below it. However....
In a Boeing C-137, the only way to get to the hold from the cabin is through a hatch underneath the navigator's desk in the cockpit, directly behind the pilot's seat. Cabin-to-hold transport of the body would require the body to be removed from the casket at the rear of the plane, then hauled all the way forward to the cockpit, then manhandled through the hatch into the avionics bay, then into the cargo hold behind the av bay. That's quite a feat to pull without being detected by the many people on the plane. And there is the similarly difficult problem of getting the body off the plane without being discovered
in flagrante delicto.
How to get the body on and off the aircraft separately from the casket, while being discreet, is a major weakness of both Horn's and Lifton's theories.
