JFK Assassination Forum

      You have No Idea what I am looking at.

 And then you assume that JFK was struck with a routine bullet.  "No soup for you"!

      I am extremely familiar with "Shane". "Torrey" and "Wilson" too. Howard Hughes knew what he was doing when he tried to buy that flick.

     Very telling that you would tie a Hollywood Movie into a discussion of the Current Z Film.

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.

With my chest and hips facing forward I can extend the right arm to the rear reaching back as far as possible and the left extending to the front as far as possible. This puts the right shoulder behind me and the left in front. So with my hips facing in a 12 o'clock position my shoulders turn to about a 1:30 position or 45 degrees.  I suspect I am not anatomically unique in that respect.  My upper chest does turn a bit but not as much as the shoulders.

The twist occurs because each rib is connected by a flexible joint to its own vertebra in the spine and the vertebra are connected to each other by flexible material that allow each vertebra to turn a different amount than its immediate neighbours. If a person has had back surgery resulting in fused vertebrae, the ability to twist is lost for those vertebrae.  But Connally appears to have had a normal spine.
 

The wound was lateral to the lateral edge of the right scapula. It missed the scapula. The posterior border of the axilla or armpit is the lateral edge of the scapula. See:
https://teachmeanatomy.info/upper-limb/areas/axilla/

The author shows a diagram of the (left) axilla or armpit region from above which shows that the anterior surface of the scapula forms the posterior boundary of the axilla:



and from the front it shows the right axilla:



The armpit region actually changes depending on the positions of the shoulders and ribs.  But you can easily see that any bullet that misses the scapula enters the armpit.

With Connally turned sharply right as he was in z254 in Altgens 6, the path from the SN looks like this:

So by entering laterally missing the scapula it hits the fifth rib with a significant impact, deflects right, passes along the fifth rib to about mid-axilla and then passes through the fifth rib and exits an inch or so below the right nipple, (which has moved to the right). 

I don't see the bullet path through JBC at z271 to be a problem if the bullet deflected to the right on impacting the fifth rib (and bending it so much that it fractured at the spine).  I don't see how it could not have deflected given the evidence of impact. By deflecting, instead of going through the lung it went around the pulmonary cavity exiting below the right nipple before then hitting the right forearm.


All I can say is that the evidence says he was hit there (the first shot hitting JFK, the second hitting JBC which was closer to the third shot that hit JFK in the head).  Not my interpretation of the evidence: just the evidence at face value. If you think it is impossible you need to show why.  Just spewing a bunch of pejoratives at it doesn't do anything, other than lower the quality of the discussion.

Did you happen to notice where JFK hit the seat? It was on the far right side. That shoots down the claim he went "back and to the left". He was already leaning to his left when the bullet struck his head. From that left leaning position, he went straight back.

While impossible to prove, the most likely explanation for JFK's rearward movement is a neuro-muscular reaction to the massive brain trauma. Also a contributing to the rearward movement could be the so called jet effect caused by the force full ejection of matter from the front of the head propelling him backward. I don't think that force would be enough to cause the backward movement by itself, but it probably was a contributing factor.

What we can rule out is the force of the bullet driving JFK backward. Bullets are two small and don't have that much throw weight. They only transfer a small amount of momentum to the body being struck. I have shot empty aluminum cans with a .44 Magnum and it usually doesn't even knock the cans down. That's because the cans offer almost no resistance to the bullet. There's almost no momentum transfer. Bullets throwing human bodies around like rag dolls is a Hollywood invention done for visual impact. The first time that was done was in the movie Shane. The gunfighter Wilson (Jack Palance)* gunned down a sodbuster whom he had goaded into drawing on him. To create the effect, a rope was tied around the sodbusters waist and as Wilson fired the gun, the sodbuster was yanked backward in an unrealistic manner. Since then, that kind of reaction has become a Hollywood staple in gunfights.

*In the movie Shane, Jack Palance was billed as Walter Jack Palance, a name he kept for several years until dropping the Walter. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Shane. He didn't win for Shane but four decades later he was nominated for the same award for City Slickers and won the Oscar for that performance.