The sources I cite in my reply refute every single criticism presented in the article you cite, Dale Myers' article. You'd know this if you'd bothered to read the links I provided. If you had just read my article on the acoustical evidence, you'd know that Myers' article is woefully inadequate and misleading. . . .
It says much that you would rely on someone like Myers to get your information on the acoustical evidence. Have you even read the studies that the BBN and Queen's College acoustical scientists submitted to the HSCA on the acoustical evidence?
Myers obviously hasn't read them, because he doesn't say a word about any of the evidences they present, such as the windshield-distortion correlations, the timing-movement correlations, and the presence of N-waves and their echoes in the correct order and timing. Nor does Myers say a word about the NRC/NAS panel's admissions about the timing-movement correlations and their own finding of a high probability (77.7%) that the 144.9 impulse pattern is gunfire from the grassy knoll.
To give you some idea of how misleading Myers' article is, let's consider his attack on Dr. Don Thomas's research on the acoustical evidence:
In March, 2001, Science & Justice, a quarterly publication of Britain’s Forensic Science Society, published a paper by Donald B. Thomas, an entomologist and part-time assassination researcher working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Subtropical Agricultural Research Laboratory in Weslaco, Texas. Thomas became convinced of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination after viewing Oliver Stone’s 1991 motion picture, JFK. In his Science & Justice published paper, Thomas claimed that the CBA [Committee on Ballistic Acoustics, i.e., the NRC/NAS panel] report was flawed and that a statistical review of the HSCA acoustic work confirmed their findings and elevated the probability of a grassy knoll shot from 95 to 96%. Thomas also suggested that five shots, not four as the HSCA had concluded, had been fired in Dealey Plaza. [92]
Former HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey, eager to embrace any study critical of the CBA’s devastating critique of his committee’s findings, called Thomas’ study “an honest, careful, scientific examination of everything we did, with all the appropriate statistical checks.” [93]
However, eight months after his findings made worldwide news, Thomas acknowledged to a small group of assassination researchers at a conspiracy conference that his objection to part of the CBA’s hypothesis were “largely blown away” after he examined a statistical analysis of a more complete version of the Dallas police recording which he had recently gained access to – the same recording used by the CBA 19 years earlier. Thomas emphasized, however, that his acknowledgment shouldn’t be construed to mean that he believed that the CBA hypothesis was correct, merely that the CBA hypothesis was “now plausible.” [94] Thomas went on to offer a number of arguments which buttressed his original Science & Justice paper which concluded that five shots were fired in Dealey Plaza and that the fourth shot, fired from the grassy knoll, was the fatal head shot.You'd never know to read the last paragraph that the polemic about Dr. Thomas's objection that was "largely blown away" refers to the fact that Dr. Thomas used the Bellah crosstalk to establish the time of the gunshot impulses
because he relied on the NRC/NAS panel's timing figures, but those timing figures were later proven to be off by nearly 100%. To put it another way, Dr. Thomas assumed that the Ramsey Panel could at least be trusted to have made the correct timing calculations, but the panel's calculations were off by nearly 100% because they miscalculated the needle-skip adjustment as 60 seconds when in fact it was 35 seconds.
But of course Myers mentions none of this because he's trying to make Dr. Thomas look bad and to make the CBA/NRC/NAS/Ramsey Panel look like the unassailable final authority that produced a "devastating critique" of the HSCA's acoustical evidence, when in fact the Ramsey Panel blundered badly on the duration of the alleged recording pause (their needle-skip adjustment) because they didn't understand how the dictabelt machine worked. Dr. Josiah Thompson explains:
It all started with a mistake by the Ramsey Panel itself.
In any case like this, the first thing any investigator or committee of investigation should do is to obtain recorders of the same make and model used by the Dallas police on November 22, 1963. This permits multiple experiments on how the equipment actually operated. The Ramsey Panel failed to do this and consequently produced mistaken timing figures for the Audograph [dictabelt] recorder that the DPD used for channel 2. . . .
. . . the needle on this old machine often skipped forward (thus leaving out part of the transmission) or backward (repeating part of the transmission). . . . The repeats were obvious, so the Ramsey Panel simply removed them in making its timing calculations. Unaware of how the recorder actually worked, it never realized that the linkage to the worm drive meant that any backward needle jump would be compensated for by a forward needle jump after one (or several) disk revolutions. There was nothing to subtract. Hence, the panel’s timing figures were all incorrect. . . .
Instead of using “Hold everything,” Thomas had used another instance of crosstalk accepted by the Ramsey Panel -- the words “You want me to hold this traffic on Stemmons” spoken by motorcycle Sergeant S. Q. Bellah -- to show that the gunshot impulses occurred right at the moment of the shooting. But Thomas had used the mistaken timing figures of the Ramsey Panel to reach that result. (Last Second in Dallas, pp. 484-485)Dr. David Kaiser:
The National Academy panel did not address the issue of how the dispatcher could have been off by a full minute in announcing the time, as their analysis implies.
Four members of the original National Academy panel and Richard Garwin of IBM published a rebuttal to Thomas in the same British journal in 2005. . . . They found an interval of approximately 144 seconds (plus or minus a few seconds) between those two events on channel 2, and an interval of about 35 seconds longer (correcting for the speed of the tape) between the two events on channel 1.
In other words, in contrast to the original NRC report (which four of them had helped to write), their new paper postulated about 35 seconds of stopped recording on channel 2 instead of a full minute. The original panel, Linsker and his colleagues said, had miscalculated by making an improper adjustment for forward skips on channel 2 that were actually automatically corrected for. Such a gap of 35 seconds or so, they argued, was consistent with Barger’s original graph. They also cited other sounds on the tapes and other technical evidence suggesting that the “Hold” on channel 1 did not result from a skip . . . but they cannot prove that channel 2 was stopped for 35 seconds.
And Thomas was right to raise another point. The odds against Barger and his colleagues having identified a unique set of impulses on the channel 1 tape which just happened, by chance, to match the recordings of actual test shots in Dealey Plaza recorded along an array of microphones at a speed of 11.8 mph seem enormous. That probability in turn has to be multiplied against the chance that the time sequencing of the impulses would match quite closely with the timing of the three or four shots found by the separate panel that analyzed the panning error in the Zapruder film. (The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 385-286)It cannot be repeated often enough that the all-important and now-debunked claim that the Decker "hold everything" transmission was crosstalk relied on the bogus assumption that channel 2 stopped recording for 35 seconds. Originally, the NRC/NAS/CBA/Ramsey Panel argued that channel 2 stopped recording for 60 seconds, but Linsker and four of the panel members admitted in 2005 that the alleged recording pause was not 60 seconds but 35 seconds.
In his 2010 book
Hear No Evil, Dr. Thomas explained why the recording-pause theory was implausible, and why the Decker "hold everything" transmission is not crosstalk:
To explain the one minute offset between the Bellah and Decker broadcasts the NRC Panel concluded that the Audograph recorder must have stopped for that much time. . . .
For the express purpose of marking the passage of time the radio protocol required the dispatchers to note the time whenever they made a broadcast. The BBN team had used the time notations in their analysis three years previously, long before the Double-Decker was discovered. Just as they had done for the Ch-I recording, they plotted the elapsed time on the tapes against the dispatcher's time notations. Prior to 12:30 the slope of the regression line was a tilted 0.4. The linear regression analysis of the dispatcher's time notations proves that the Audograph machine must have shut off for extended times prior to the assassination.
But after 12:30, the approximate time of the shooting, the dispatcher's announced times and the actual elapsed time fall into very close agreement for the six minutes after the shooting.71 There did not seem to be any appreciable amount of time missing, and none between 12:30 and 12:32 when the relevant broadcasts were made and where a full minute of time is supposed to be missing according to the NRC Panel. That is, there is exactly 120 seconds of playback time between the dispatcher's time notations at 12:30 and 12:32. . . .
The dispatcher's time notations provide a convenient data set for testing the hypotheses explaining the offsets because they are strongly dependent on the passage of real time, yet completely independent of any events such as the assassination or the position of the putative gunshots. . . .
The disc was mounted on a pivot driven by a screw drive. The stylus would reach the end of the recorded disc in the same amount of time whether it occasionally skipped or not. This means that the 17 seconds worth of audible repeats that occurred in the 137 second interval between the Decker and Bellah cross-talks must have been compensated for by about an equal amount of skips.
A linear regression analysis of the time notations provides an objective mathematical measurement of the agreement, or lack thereof, between the playback time and real time, because the time notations must fall within successive 60 second bins, and because any long time periods between successive time notations must be offset by an equal number of short periods, which when summed will give an average of 60 seconds if playback time and real time are the same. The linear regression analysis measures the deviation between the dispatcher time intervals and the playback intervals, if any. . . .
The bottom line is that, NRC's assumption that the cross-talk could be used to reliably synchronize (or show asynchrony) between events is proven false by the existence of the time offsets. That original assumption was salvaged by imposing a corollary assumption that says that the offsets can be explained by recorder stoppage. But that key assumption is not supported by any evidence, and actually is contradicted by the dispatcher's time notations. This reasoning implies that the offsets were caused by some phenomena imposed on the Ch-1 recording. . . .
In response to my highly critical article published in 2001, several of the still living members of the NRC panel, Richard Garwin, Herman Chernoff, Paul Horowitz and Norman Ramsey, with an IBM scientist Ralph Linsker as first author, published a rebuttal in the same journal [Science & Justice] in 2005. Although they asserted that my article contained significant errors, the only error they could actually cite was my mistake in relying on their adjusted timeline of Ch-2. . . .
But the most significant evidence analyzed by Linsker et al. was an instance of cross-talk overlooked by the original panel, and by their most ardent critic, when the 2001 critique was written. It is actually louder and clearer than the others. In fact, it is the exemplar cited by Jim Bowles in his explanation of the crosstalk phenomenon. Most importantly, it is the instance of cross-talk closest to the time of the assassination. The original NRC panel was aware of this putative instance of cross-talk but chose not to address the problem in their article. It is an utterance of the words "I'll check it" present on both channels. . . .
When the lead car was at or near the underpass, the President was in the kill zone in the mid-section of Elm Street, and therefore, the broadcast by Curry "... the triple underpass" must have been made within moments of the assassination. The distance from the Elm-Houston intersection to the triple underpass is about 400 ft. The Warren Commission calculated that the first shot was fired when the limousine was approx. 150 ft west of the intersection (based on the Willis photo). The Warren Commission also calculated that the entire shooting occurred within 7. 9 sec; 108 the acoustically identified gunshots occurring within an interval of 8.3 sec. Thus, Curry's critical broadcast over Ch-2 serves as a real-time marker for the moment of the assassination.
The broadcast which immediately precedes the triple underpass announcement, by just two seconds, is a transmission from Deputy Chief Fisher saying, "Naw that's all right, I'll check it." The latter words, "I'll check it" crossed over to Ch-1. Most significantly, the broadcast of "I'll check it" on Ch-1 occurs just two seconds before the first acoustically identified gunshot sound. Thus, the Fisher crosstalk establishes exact synchrony between the acoustically identified gunshot sounds and the actual shooting. This inconvenient fact is never mentioned in the rebuttal by Linsker et al., depriving the reader of the information that contradicted their conclusion and relieving themselves of having to explain this diabolical coincidence.
Instead, and without reference to its significance, Linsker et al. contend that the cross-talk is not really cross-talk at all and cite the contention as another of my errors, conveniently forgetting that it was the supervisor of the Dallas Police communications department, Jim Bowles, and not I (would that I had), who had discovered and published this instance of cross-talk. I pointed out this instance to them, and its significance, and suggested that they apply the same computerized voice print analysis to it as had been applied to the Decker and Bellah cross-talks. And so they did, with the predictable outcome that it was positive, and perhaps also predictable that they tried to hide this fact. The report by Linsker et al. never acknowledges the outcome of this critical test. (Hear No Evil: Social Constructivism and the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination, 2010, pp. 638-641, 654-656)One of the historic findings of the new research done by BBN scientists in 2015-2018 is that PCC testing proves that the Fisher transmission is genuine crosstalk and that the Decker transmission is not, thus refuting the myth of a 35-second recording pause and debunking the foundation of the attacks on the HSCA's acoustical evidence. Dr. Thompson discusses these crucial findings in
Last Second in Dallas. And, as mentioned in a previous reply, two of the BBN scientists wrote appendices for Thompson's book.
The new BBN research also proves that the PCC test that Linsker and his colleagues conducted was badly flawed, if not rigged. The Linsker et al. test used a ridiculous sample-width window of 512, which was guaranteed to produce inaccurate results loaded with extraneous data, and used that window for all three potential crosstalk transmissions. Dr. Barger explained to Thompson that this is not how an actual PCC test is done, and that a 512 window is "a much coarser measurement tool." The most charitable assumption we can make is that Linsker et al. botched their PCC test because not one of them was an acoustical scientist.
The PCC test done by BBN acoustical scientist Dr. Richard Mullen used the far more accurate sample-width window of 64 and
. . . showed conclusively that “I’ll check it” [the Fisher transmission] not only is crosstalk but has a higher net PCC peak than “Hold everything” [the Decker transmission]. With this finding, the Linsker et al. argument from 2005 imploded -- and with it the whole house of cards constructed by the 1982 Ramsey Panel. (Last Second in Dallas, pp. 524-525). BTW, Myers paints the 2005 Linsker-Garwin-Chernoff-Horowitz-Ramsey article as a demolition of Dr. Thomas's research, but he says nothing about Dr. Thomas's thorough 53-page rebuttal to the article in chapter 17 in
Hear No Evil (pp. 613-666), nor does Myers say a word about the evidence that Dr. Thomas presents in his two other chapters on the acoustical evidence (chapters 16 and 18).
Myers can't even get his facts straight about when the Linsker-Garwin-Chernoff-Horowitz-Ramsey article was published and how many of the authors were members of the NRC/NAS panel. He says the article was published in 2006 in
Science & Justice, but it was actually published in the October 2005 issue of the journal. He says three of the authors were members of the Ramsey Panel, when in fact four of them were members of the panel (Garwin, Chernoff, Horowitz, and Ramsey).
