JFK Assassination Forum

I can certainly agree that there is way too much evidence against a missed first shot to make it even a remote possibility. A missed first shot is a fantasy.  There is also abundant, consistent evidence that the head shot was the last shot.  If the bullet through JFK’s neck went on to strike JBC it had to have happened on the first shot. The second shot SBT is a fantasy. 

But there is also abundant, consistent evidence that there were three distinct loud noises. And given the number of witnesses who reported hearing three shots (132 according to the HSCA study), many of whom reported hearing a shot a pause and then two more distinct shots, it is difficult to understand how they could have imagined a shot that did not occur. It is much easier to understand how a few witnesses might not have been counting the number of shots and  thought there were only two (17) or weren’t sure whether it was 2 or 3 (7).

It happens.

But it wasn’t just Mary Woodward. There are at least 23 witnesses who recalled JFK reacting to the first shot. There are another 20+ witnesses who put the first shot occurring:

• after z180 (occupants of VP car, VP security car);
• as the car was approaching the Thornton sign (TE Moore);
• when JFK was passing the Stemmons sign in her line of sight (Linda Willis);
  
• an instant before z202 (Phil Willis);
  
• just as the President’s car was almost directly in front of where is was standing (Karan Hicks, Gloria Calvery, Karen Westbrook)
  
• the President had just passed me (Jean Newman);
• just as he got just about in front of me (John Chism)
  

Direction of the source of a sound is not easy for humans to observe. Perception is also skewed by the proximity of reflective surfaces. You are comparing apples and watermelons (oranges are not an apt comparison to fit this metaphor).

Humans are not clocks. The evidence does not require the last two shots being closer than 2.3 seconds apart.

I don't see any dirt piles. Certainly nothing that would raise a person's waist 6 feet above the ground.

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?