It was not until 2014 that he realized that the official account of the bullet differed from his memory, he said, but he did not come forward then out of a feeling that he had made a mistake in putting it on the stretcher without telling anyone in that pre-C.S.I., secure-the-crime-scene era.
“I didn’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Landis said. “I was afraid. I started to think, did I do something wrong? There was a fear that I might have done something wrong and I shouldn’t talk about it.”
Indeed, his partner, Clint Hill, the legendary Secret Service agent who clambered onto the back of the speeding limousine in a futile effort to save Kennedy, discouraged Mr. Landis from speaking out. “Many ramifications,” Mr. Hill warned in a 2014 email that Mr. Landis saved and shared last month.
Mr. Hill, who has set out his own account of what happened in multiple books and interviews, cast doubt on Mr. Landis’s version on Friday. “I believe it raises concerns when the story he is telling now, 60 years after the fact, is different than the statements he wrote in the days following the tragedy” and told in subsequent years, Mr. Hill said in an email. “In my mind, there are serious inconsistencies in his various statements/stories.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/us/politics/jfk-assassination-witness-paul-landis.html
“I believe it raises concerns when the story he is telling now, 60 years after the fact, is different than the statements he wrote in the days following the tragedy” and told in subsequent years, Mr. Hill said in an email. “In my mind, there are serious inconsistencies in his various statements/stories.”I would like to add that Paul Landis’ outlandish story most certainly fits my definition of a morphing memory. And therefore could be added to the ones already specified in the thread by that title.
Additionally, there is this from the Vanity Fair article:
But there seem to be only two real possibilities, both of which can be inferred from the Zapruder film. One way is that an undercharged bullet, having already been lodged in the president’s back from an initial gunshot, was jolted out of his body after a subsequent shot to the head caused his upper body to be thrown violently back against the seat, bouncing off of it with great force. A second possibility is that at some point in those hectic moments, the bullet fell out of the president’s back and onto the first lady’s clothing (her white-gloved hand did brush hard against his back, around where the bullet could have been embedded at the moment of the final shot). As one can see in the Zapruder film, Jackie, at this stage, climbed onto the trunk of the speeding car, possibly to look for or retrieve a portion of her husband’s skull—or out of sheer panic to take cover from further gunshots. In fact, the section of the back seat over which she stretched corresponds to the spot where Landis says he found the bullet.So this “theory” that you suggest might be able to “kill” the single bullet theory apparently depends upon a theory of a reduced velocity bullet that was going slow enough to only penetrate a short distance into JFK’s neck and then fall out. The Vanity Fair article suggests an “undercharged bullet,” something that, despite all the various tests done with the same type of ammunition (by the same manufacturer) after the assassination, no one else has reported (that I am aware of).
I was hit by a BB when I was a much younger and more foolish person. It lodged just beneath the skin but still had to be surgically removed. A typical BB gun from that era fired in the range of approximately a 300 to 400 feet per second velocity. The slowest velocity that I can get the Hornady Ballistic Calculator to calculate a Carcano bullet’s trajectory is 600 feet per second. At that velocity (due to gravity and the resistance of the air) the barrel would need to be aimed 48.92” above the target to hit it at a distance of 58-yards (the approximate distance from the sixth floor window to JFK at Z224). Does anyone really believe that this is what actually happened? If so, please explain your position.
I do plan to read Landis’ book when it becomes available. Mostly because I have in the past enjoyed reading the accounts of the people who were there. Landis’ outlandish story regarding finding a bullet on the top of the back seat of the limo and placing it on the hospital stretcher is just not believable. But maybe his story includes some other information that might be interesting.
