Thompson's New Book Powerfully Confirms the HSCA Acoustical Evidence

[Walt Cakebread]

Just out of curiosity Walt, what makes you sure there were inaudible shots?

The major reason is the number of recorded bullet strikes .....

A) 2 bullets struck JFK ( possibly three )
B) 1 bullet struck Connally
C) 1  bullet stuck James Teague
D) 1 bullet struck the tuft on the south side of Elm
E) 1 bullet struck the cement curb along Elm street
f)  1 bullet struck the chrome molding

Some folks accept that some strikes were created by the same bullet.....Teague for example. Some folks believe that he was struck by a bullet that  ricocheted ..... That's Possible, but not established.

The damage to the chrome molding was not caused by a light weight particle from a 6.5mm bullet..... It was struck by a heavy slow moving projectile with poor penetrating power.

[Pat Speer]

My challenge remains...

IF, as claimed, McLain was near the corner of Houston and Elm at the time of the first shot and rode his motorcycle 10-11 mph across the plaza, how is it that he's at the left of Bond 4, a photo showing cameraman Dave Wiegman (who was two cars behind McLain's supposed position at the time of the first shot, and who climbed from his car and ran towards the grassy knoll) filming the Newman family--an event that is not captured in Wiegman's film till roughly 30 seconds after the shooting?

I mean, McLain is just past Wiegman in Bond 4. And this means Wiegman was on the knoll and filming for 8-10 seconds before McLain rode past...

So how is it that the pedestrian Wiegman, who started out two cars behind McLain (should McLain have been where the acoustics requires him to have been) not only raced past McLain (who was presumed to have been on a motorcycle traveling 10 mph), but blew by him at such a velocity it required McLain seconds to catch up?

[Dan O'meara]

It is astonishing to see anyone still arguing that there were only three shots because most of the witnesses reportedly only heard three shots, given that we know that the FBI and the DPD distorted what witnesses told them, given that some of the shots were fired nearly simultaneously and thus could have sounded like a single shot, given the accounts of extra shots hitting grass and pavement in Dealey Plaza (and some of those accounts are supported by photographic evidence), and given that the Zapruder film clearly shows reactions to six shots.

You've already made the above points and have yet to answer:

"...given that we know that the FBI and the DPD distorted what witnesses told them..."

Provide one scrap of evidence that any of the 160+ witnesses who testified to hearing three shots have had their testimony altered. To even suggest anything close to this amount of people had their testimonies altered, and not one instance has come to life is, is Tinfoil Town at it's best. I believe it's unacceptable to simply allow someone to spout such nonsense and go unchallenged.
If you cannot provide any evidence you are clearly wrong/deluded/tinfoil.

"...given that some of the shots were fired nearly simultaneously..."

Evidence for this assertion please.
It sounds like more made-up  to me.
How do you think you're just going to say these things and go unchallenged.

"...given that the Zapruder film clearly shows reactions to six shots."

It's astonishing you are still pushing this utter garbage considering the lesson you were taught on your own thread - "Reactions to 6 Shots in the Zapruder Film" - a thread you were forced to abandon after being schooled regarding your childish arguments.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Many of us here know that there are some people who will never admit there is hard evidence of conspiracy, no matter how powerful and clear the evidence is. They simply will not admit it because they are, for whatever reason, absolutely determined to accept the lone-gunman theory. Even after the irrefutable proof that has emerged that the autopsy skull x-rays were altered, there are still researchers, including some multiple-gunmen theorists, who refuse to acknowledge it.

To any open-minded, reasonable person, the HSCA acoustical evidence is clear, compelling evidence that more than one gunman was involved and that more than three shots were fired. In some ways, the acoustical evidence is the most intricate, sophisticated, and impressive evidence of conspiracy in existence. The locational correlations between the dictabelt gunshot impulse patterns and the test-firing shots are stunning. Even the NRC panel admitted that their own calculations showed that the probability that those correlations resulted from chance was only 7%.

There's an old saying: If someone is determined not to believe something, no amount of contrary evidence will change his mind.

[Alan Ford]

Whatever the implications, if any, for the acoustics evidence, I am not satisfied that these two motorcycle officers are one and the same man..............

[Dan O'meara]

There's an old saying: If someone is determined not to believe something, no amount of contrary evidence will change his mind.

You don't think the testimonies of 160+ witnesses is "contrary evidence"??
You are the one in denial.
You are the one making wild assertions about the testimonies of these witnesses being altered because it's 'contrary' to your belief.
And when asked to qualify these assertions you've got nothing.
It's almost as if you're determined not to believe this hard evidence that completely undermines your position.
Provide examples that any of these witness statements were altered. If you can't, then accept there is a serious weakness with what you are proposing.

[Pat Speer]

Many of us here know that there are some people who will never admit there is hard evidence of conspiracy, no matter how powerful and clear the evidence is. They simply will not admit it because they are, for whatever reason, absolutely determined to accept the lone-gunman theory. Even after the irrefutable proof that has emerged that the autopsy skull x-rays were altered, there are still researchers, including some multiple-gunmen theorists, who refuse to acknowledge it.

To any open-minded, reasonable person, the HSCA acoustical evidence is clear, compelling evidence that more than one gunman was involved and that more than three shots were fired. In some ways, the acoustical evidence is the most intricate, sophisticated, and impressive evidence of conspiracy in existence. The locational correlations between the dictabelt gunshot impulse patterns and the test-firing shots are stunning. Even the NRC panel admitted that their own calculations showed that the probability that those correlations resulted from chance was only 7%.

There's an old saying: If someone is determined not to believe something, no amount of contrary evidence will change his mind.

If I'm reading this correctly, Michael is claiming that there are two conspiracy facts which any open-minded reasonable person should accept--and that these two are the alteration of the x-rays and the existence of too many shots on the dictabelt.

This would appear to be a dig at me personally. Although I accept many conspiracy facts (e.g. that the single-bullet theory is garbage) and have come to embrace a number of previously overlooked conspiracy facts (e.g. that the NAA of the paraffin casts suggests Oswald did not fire a rifle on 11-22-63) the two facts cited are two that I have publicly disputed.

The irony, of course, is that the proponent of one of his preferred facts (that the x-rays were altered), has long been a disputer of his other preferred fact (that the dictabelt proves four shots were fired).

One can only wonder then if he's written Dr. Mantik and informed him that he too is close-minded and unreasonable.

[Mitch Todd]

Josiah Thompson's long-awaited new book Last Second in Dallas (University Press of Kansas, 2021), published last week, presents powerful evidence in support of the HSCA acoustical evidence, which proved there were at least two gunmen and at least four shots. Thompson's chapters on the acoustical evidence account for 98 pages of the book and include separate contributions by BBN scientists James Barger and Richard Mullen. Some highlights:

* Thompson utterly, totally, and completely destroys the NRC panel's report. Among other things, Thompson presents evidence that the panel rigged their PCC test to avoid confirming the acoustical evidence.

* Thompson demolishes the claim that the Fisher "I'll check it" transmission is not crosstalk. He proves, partly via a PCC test done by Mullen, that it most certainly is crosstalk, and that it proves that the dictabelt's gunfire impulses occurred during the assassination. Interestingly, Thompson notes that years ago Jim Bowles himself recognized the Fisher "I'll check it" transmission as a crosstalk transmission, and that the NRC panel attempted to conceal this fact in its report.

* Thompson once and for all resolves the problem of the Decker "hold everything" transmission, proving that it is irrelevant, that it is not time synchronous, and that it must be the result of an overdub that was produced during the copying process. Thompson, summarizing Barger's new research on the subject, presents evidence that Decker's "hold everything" transmission and the two Bellah transmissions were recorded during a separate recording session and not during the session that recorded the three scientifically established crosstalk transmissions, and that, crucially, they were recorded at a different recording speed.

* Thompson establishes that neither the HSCA nor the NRC panel used the original dictabelt recording, and that the extant recording is a second- or third-generation copy.

* Interestingly, Thompson reveals that when the NRC panel sent Dr. Barger a draft of their report, Barger replied with an 8-page critique, and that the panel declined to publish Barger's critique and did not address his objections in their report.

This is a very simplified, general summary of Thompson's chapters on the acoustics evidence. Dozens of the pages in those chapters get rather technical, but Thompson does a good job of putting the information in layman's terms. I have not mentioned some of Thompson's best evidence because doing so would require technical explanations that would take several paragraphs. Barger's and Mullen's chapters are a bit tougher reading, but even a newcomer will be able to grasp their significance.

You wish.

Barger's analysis self-destructs on figure 23-6 on page 344 (it's also reproduced as Figure A-4 in Barger's appendix on page 373). To explain why, remember that the DPD recording system was designed to record only if there was a transmission to record. Normally, the system only recorded intermittently. However, at about 12:28 on November 22, 1963, a microphone on a police motorcycle stuck in the transmit position, broadcasting a steady stream of background noise back to the city hall until about 12:35. This event kept the Dictabelt machine on Channel 1 continuously recording during that interval.  At the same time, Channel 2 was operating intermittently, as designed. Because of this, the channel 2 recording consistently loses time against its channel 1 counterpart during this period. If you plot the crosstalk events for channel one along one line, do the same for channel 2, and compare the resulting plots, you'll notice that Channel 2 does indeed lose time to channel one:

    from the HOLD crosstalk to the  BELLAH1 crosstalk
    from the BELLAH1 crosstalk to the BELLAH2 crosstalk
    from the BELLAH2 crosstalk to the ATTENTION simulcast
    from the ATTENTION simulcast to the I'VE GOT  crosstalk

The lone exception is the interval between the putative "I'll check it" crosstalk and the HOLD crosstalk. Between these two points, channel 2 gains about 80 seconds on channel 1. Channel 1 is running continuously at this point, so there is no way that channel two could gain time on channel 1 here. That makes "I'll check it" the outlier. If any external signal was somehow dubbed into the recordings, it's the channel one "I'll check it."

Mullen's critique of the NAS panel's use of PCC is more complex, but it revolves around the use of time scaling various bits of the recordings. Barger and Mullen say that there are multiple overlapping bits of power supply hum in the recording, so choosing which one (or which combination) to use for proper scaling and where to apply it looks to be a significant issue, and probably will be argued about quite a bit in higher circles.

However, PCC is not the only issue that  the NAS panel raised with the alleged Fisher crosstalk. They also noted that the supposed "I'll check it" transmission is accompanied by heterodyning, indicating that this particular transmission was native to channel one. The heterodyning occurs when two transmitters attempt to transmit at the same time and interfere with each other. In this case, someone tried to transmit a message while the radio on the open mike bike was transmitting the sweet rumble of Harley Davidson. Crosstalk wouldn't generate a heterodyne like that. No heterodyning accompanies Fisher's channel 2 transmission, nor is there good reason to expect it to, so there is no reason to expect that the heterodyne was carried over from channel 2 to channel one. So far as I've read, I see no mention of this problem by Thompson, Barger, or Mullen.  I'm still reading through it, but heterodyning only gets one mention in the index, and it's a trivial reference that doesn't address the NAS panel's point.

BTW, the appearance of the Decker crosstalk on channel 1 has a greater significance than one might expect. Weiss and Aschkenazy's analysis of the "GK shot" is predicated on the assumption that the impulse pattern in question is either a (synthetically-derived) gunshot or a series of random impulses (basically, noise). However, the Decker crosstalk overlies the area where the BRSA/WA "shots" are found. That changes the situation. Proper probabilistic analysis would require the Decker crosstalk be accounted for as a partial or whole source of the "shots" as well as the string-of-random-impulse hypothesis. This is true no matter the origin of  "hold everything secure" on channel one.