JFK Assassination Forum

Jack Nessan really should pay me a royalty on every copy of Phantom Shot he sells, but I cannot help but be struck by the fact that Oswald manages to put two pretty precisely-placed bullets into JFK after supposedly having gone through all sorts of hypothetical gyrations and managing to miss the entire limousine - and no one can agree on exactly when he did that. Two shots seems to me to be favored by Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor, and Mrs. Occam agrees. I don't quite understand the near-desperation to preserve the three-shot scenario. There doesn't seem to be any reason the evidence demands this.

It seems to me that the best evidence, including the Gloria Calvery group, places the first shot just about where the three-shot narrative places the second shot. If the three-shot scenario were correct, it seems to me the second and third shots would be the bang-bang sequence that Bowers and others described. Is this perhaps the real motivation for insisting on an early missed shot?

My threshold question is always, "Does that make any real-world sense?"

Hearkening back to the UFO video I watched yesterday, which was full of "crash retrievals," I have to ask about Roswell and all the rest: Does it make any real-world sense that exotic craft travel here from Zeta Reticuli or another dimension or the future and then crash like Piper Cubs in New Mexico thunderstorms and Norwegian fjords and whatnot?"

No, it does not.

With Ruby:

1. First, we have to believe the Mafia would have wanted Oswald dead. They would not, unless he had some inkling of what he was involved in. If he thought he was involved in a pro-Castro operation, anything he said could only be helpful in pointing away from the Mafia.

2. Next, we would have to believe that the Mafia - the Mafia - completely dropped the ball. They failed to whack him right there in the TSBD. Big Louie, who was supposed to give him the proverbial ride to nowhere, had car trouble and failed in his mission. They completely lost track of him between the TSBD and the Texas Theater. Or, alternatively, they wanted him dead but had no plan whatsoever - the Mafia?

3. Or their plan was Ruby from the get-go, which would be supported by the calls Ruby supposedly made before the JFKA. Everyone who knew Ruby said he was an erratic, impulsive little character. His only conceivable positive would be that he was known to the police. If being known to the police was his big positive, that would suggest he wasn't recruited until Oswald was in custody. I simply can't think of any plausible reason the Mafia - the Mafia - would recruit a loose cannon like Ruby unless they were in a state of absolute desperation because Oswald was in custody and knew something he might reveal.

4. But wait, Ruby didn't get the job done until Oswald had been in custody and under intense interrogation for hours and hours. If Ruby had shot Oswald on Friday night, when he had an opportunity, we might at least have something to talk about. But he didn't.

5. No, he didn't, and now we have to bring the DPD into the conspiracy to account for the fantastically unlikely split-second timing of the supposed hit on Oswald. If the Mafia had someone on the inside of the DPD, they didn't need Ruby to whack Oswald. Just the DPD guy to say, "He tried to grab my gun and I shot him. Sorry." Anyway, Ruby does absolutely nothing until minutes before the shooting that looks anything like a guy planning to shoot Oswald. Nevertheless, with split-second timing he is allowed into the garage, which is crawling with police and reporters, and semi-miraculously manages to get off one shot. At least while he remains in his right mind, he never says anything suggesting he was on a mission.The entire scenario is just fantastically unlikely and un-Mafia like - indeed un-any-conspiracy-like.

Even if there was a conspiracy, I think Ruby was an outlier who did what he said he did and what the LN narrative said he did.

Because he was kind of a Mafia wannabe, and because he actually did manage to whack Oswald, everyone is entranced by those two bookends and determined to fit him into their conspiracy. But it just doesn't work out here in the real world. It ... just ... makes ... no ... sense. IMO, Ruby is a red herring and just a distraction. He's the "crash retrieval" of the JFKA! 

I noticed that this morning. I have it on good authority that Wm. NiederNut, in his capacity as moderator, suspended Wm. NiederNut, in his capacity as member, for eight months for referring to a longtime member, who is Irish, as a “cognitive-infiltrating semitic turdball.” Mr. NiederNut, in his capacity as member, appealed to John Simkin over the strong objections of Mr. NiederNut in his capacity as moderator. Mr. Simkin reduced the suspension to 90 minutes, infuriating Mr. NiederNut in his capacity as moderator. When the 90 minutes was up, Mr. NiederNut, in his capacity as member, referred to Mr. NiederNut, in his capacity as moderator, as an “ineffectual weenie of a moderator.” This slur led to the intervention of Wm. NiederNut in his capacity as a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. After extensive negotiations, it was decided by a vote of 2-1 (Mr. NiederNut, in his capacity as moderator, dissenting) to pull the plug on the entire thread.

We used to refer to alt.conspiracy.jfk as "the nuthouse". Sounds like that term could apply to the Ed Forum as well.

I agree with what you said above. What I disagree with is your contention that LHO would have intentionally taken a shot under those very poor conditions. He had apparently set up the sniper’s nest for some very comfortable and stable shots while the limo was in the kill zone just past the tree. Why do you believe LHO would take an intentional early shot that was so very difficult so that missing by greater than 3’ at a distance of only ~105’ was likely?

We will never know these things with any certainty, but when I consider the difficulty of an early shot and that the window box and the vertical pipe near the window were both potential interference factors for a shot at that point in time, it seems to me that the shot was most likely an accidental discharge. Accidental discharges can happen to anyone and can happen at the most in opportune times. We once obtained a hole in our dining room table and chair and floor from an accidental discharge by a federally licensed gunsmith that was also a gun safety instructor. He had been told it was loaded but unintentionally had his finger on the trigger while examining the pistol. He knew better than to have his finger on the trigger, but it happened anyway.

I believe that LHO would have, at that point in time, been in the process of raising the rifle out of his lap and into a shooting position and beginning to track the moving target while anticipating shooting just after the limo cleared the tree and entered the kill zone. If LHO had his finger on the trigger and an unexpected bump into the window box or his left elbow into the pipe, then an accidental discharge could very well have been the result. My opinion is that this is the more likely scenario.

In hindsight, it's easy for us to second guess Oswald taking that first shot under such difficult circumstances, but I've consistently said over the years, we can't know what was going through Oswald's mind at any point during the event. Oswald had four rounds in his rifle and a limited amount time to fire them. It's understandable why he might try to get in a shot before JFK went under the tree, even if it was a low percentage shot. He had zero chance of scoring a hit if he didn't take that shot. As Wayne Gretzky once famously said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.". Hockey players try to put as many shots on goal as they can, even though they are low percentage shots. For every hockey game the shots on goal vastly outnumber the goals scored. A low percentage shot has a better chance than no shot at all. 

DM--

Yes, the thread has been buried somewhere.