JFK Conspiracy Theories IV: The One With The Whales

[Dave Rogers]

Is this a blanket statement? The acoustic signature i unique and if it fits the experimental data (test firing in D Plaza) with a P = 1/100 000 you pretty much know where it came from.

Except that there wasn't a bike where it's supposed to have come from at the time it was recorded. And there have been other analyses that have not agreed with those findings; probabilities in particular could be 1/100000, or 95%, or 96.3%, or any other random number someone wanted to pick. Assigning a probability to an analysis like that sounds like bad science right off the bat. Ultimately it's the opinion of a few experts against a mountain of evidence.

And also, what do you particularly want to happen? Another analysis of the same piece of evidence that's been debated back and forth for decades with multiple conclusions being formed by different people at different times, never leading anywhere? Who cares? Believe what you want to believe, and someone will cite a different study to contradict it. It all cancels out, leaving the preponderance of evidence right where it's always been.

Dave

 

[manifesto]

Except that there wasn't a bike where it's supposed to have come from at the time it was recorded.

Says who?

And there have been other analyses that have not agreed with those findings; probabilities in particular could be 1/100000, or 95%, or 96.3%, or any other random number someone wanted to pick. Assigning a probability to an analysis like that sounds like bad science right off the bat.

Are you saying that acoustics analysis isn't real science?

Ultimately it's the opinion of a few experts against a mountain of evidence.

What evidence. Be specific.

And also, what do you particularly want to happen?

I want to discuss the HSCA acoustic evidence with people who like to do the same. If you don't want to, well, I certainly will not try to force you.

Another analysis of the same piece of evidence that's been debated back and forth for decades with multiple conclusions being formed by different people at different times, never leading anywhere? Who cares? Believe what you want to believe, and someone will cite a different study to contradict it. It all cancels out, leaving the preponderance of evidence right where it's always been.

Dave

Isn't this a bit nihilistic (lol) outlook for a sceptic? I thought we were in it for the science?

 

[turingtest]

If the acoustic analysis says there is five rifle shots on the dictabelt and a conspiracy, well, a critic has three choices:

1. Show thats something is wrong with the investigation.

2. Show other secondary data that contradicts the finding and with a stronger confidence.

3. Don't give a ****.


Wich is it?

"Stronger confidence" is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it? IMO, it's at least strongly enough contradicted that you need something more to back up the conclusion of "conspiracy because a shooter on the grassy knoll." What you're doing is pure anomaly-hunting with no regard for overall context. "LHO acted alone" is a conclusion backed by a convergence of independent evidence; if you want to counter that with your conclusion, then you need a convergence of your own, not just the single data point. And your conclusion is one; this means that a standard for proof for it equal to the one you impose on the other is proper.

Unless, of course, your conspiracy is the analog of the creationist deity, such a completely self-evident and over-arching whole that it needs no consilience, only faith in its indivisible perfection- an illusion of precision.

 

[turingtest]

I would tax all big corporations who profit from war, and the investigation would be open-ended until every lead was followed up. A new peoples referendum every third year that should give mandate for a new three year period, and which overrides everything else. JFK, Malcom X, MLK, RFK, that is, all State Crimes Against Democracy in US should be investigated until the american people have been satisfied.

Like in a real democracy.


NARA.

There are always tag-ends in investigations; your investigations would never conclude because there would always be someone who wasn't satisfied.

 

[Dave Rogers]

What evidence. Be specific.

The totality of evidence that indicates that the only viable hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone. This is just one minor outlier, easily explained.

Dave

 

[manifesto]

"Stronger confidence" is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

No, it is pure statistics.

IMO, it's at least strongly enough contradicted that you need something more to back up the conclusion of "conspiracy because a shooter on the grassy knoll." What you're doing is pure anomaly-hunting with no regard for overall context.

What do you mean? A scientifically proven shot from the grassy knoll is just an anomaly, nothing else?

"LHO acted alone" is a conclusion backed by a convergence of independent evidence;

Says who?

if you want to counter that with your conclusion, then you need a convergence of your own, not just the single data point.

If there is a second shooter this should be followed up with a new investigation. I can't do that, I do not have access.

And your conclusion is one; this means that a standard for proof for it equal to the one you impose on the other is proper.

What?

Unless, of course, your conspiracy is the analog of the creationist deity, such a completely self-evident and over-arching whole that it needs no consilience, only faith in its indivisible perfection- an illusion of precision.

It's not self evident, I put forward HSCA's research with conclusions. if you have any problem with that, attack the research.

 

[manifesto]

The totality of evidence that indicates that the only viable hypothesis is that Oswald acted alone.

Says who?

This is just one minor outlier, easily explained.

Dave

So, explain it.

 

[Loss Leader]

A separate thread on acoustic evidence has been merged back into this thread. All discussion of the assassination of President Kennedy must be confined to this thread. It is a violation of the MA to start a thread on a subject that is under moderation. Your cooperation in keeping to these rules is appreciated.

Posted By: Loss Leader

 

[calebprime]

Specific criticisms of the content of this paper by Michael O'Dell?

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/odell/

Conclusions

1. The timeline relied on by the NRC report and by Thomas is inaccurate.

2. Both the "hold everything" and the "you want me" crosstalk alignments demonstrate that the suspect impulses happen too late to be the assassination gunshots.

3. There is no evidence that the Audograph machine that recorded channel II ran continuously in the first few minutes after the shooting, and evidence indicates that it did stop. Because the Audograph stopped, later instances of crosstalk cannot be used to align the suspect impulses on channel I.

4. There is no statistical significance of 95% or higher for a shot from the grassy knoll. There is persuasive evidence that BRSW/WA simply found a match to the speech pattern that exists at the same location on the recording.

 

[Dave Rogers]

What do you mean? A scientifically proven shot from the grassy knoll is just an anomaly, nothing else?

It's not self evident, I put forward HSCA's research with conclusions. if you have any problem with that, attack the research.

Let's look at how "scientifically proven" it is. In sequence we have:

The original presentation to the HSCA, accepted by two-thirds of the committee and rejected by the remaining third.
The FBI's December 1980 report rejecting the conclusion of a second shooter.
The National Academy of Science's 1982 report also rejecting the conclusion.
A 1988 Justice Department review rejecting the conclusion.
A March 2001 analysis in Science & Justice claiming the conclusion was correct.
Three studies by different TV channels in 2003 rejecting the conclusion.
A 2005 study in the same magazine rejecting the conclusion.

To suggest that this evidence was presented as scientific proof to the HCSA and has remained uncontested since is to say the least somewhat disingenuous. It might better be described as highly contested.

Also, note that one of the above studies was by the Justice Department, which seems to have been exactly the re-examination manifesto is asking for. It's already been done, and it didn't give the conclusion he wants.

Dave

 

[Axxman300]

What do you mean? A scientifically proven shot from the grassy knoll is just an anomaly, nothing else?

There is no scientifically proven shot from the Grassy Knoll.

Anybody who has been to Dallas can testify that there is no way a gunman could not have been seen by everyone in the street and in the motorcade. There's nowhere to hide.

 

[BazBear]

Manifesto, there is no proof that those sound impulses were gun shots, and there is no proof that whatever was recorded came from McLain's radio. If these basic assumptions are shaky (which they are, putting it mildly), any conclusions by anyone - even the greatest acoustic experts in the world - are not credible evidence of a conspiracy. And as others have pointed out, there is a ship load of evidence that points directly to Oswald acting alone.

 

[Sandy McCroskey]

This fellow thinks the four students infamously shot down by the National Guard were in Kentucky. Has he never heard the song about the sad event? "Four Dead in O-HI-O." Kent State University is located in Kent, Ohio.

Needless to say, he is also off by more than a country mile on everything else.

First, it is not just witness testimony that says McClain's bike wasn't in the position required for BB&N's analysis to be valid. It is also the film record that tells us that.

I do not know what these two sentences mean:
"1. The tapes was not in sync, depending on different possible factors.
"2. The cross over-talk appears I believe five times över the ca five minutes of the recording and the closest cross over is spot on."
They wasn't (ha ha) "in sync" with what? "Spot on" with what?
Garbled transmission.

But the NAS committee on ballistics did "[f]ind flaws in the HSCA acoustics findings." The esteemed physicists on the committee were indeed capable of analyzing BB&N's work, including the aspect specific to acoustics analysis. And contrary to conspiracist allegations, some at least did have background in directly relevant subfields (and certainly more than the noted entomologist Thomas). For example, here is a patent...
https://www.google.com/patents/US4748639
...by John C.Feggeler of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Gee, I wonder what they do at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

It is not an uncommon occurrence for the work of even highly qualified researchers to be influenced by unconscious bias; this is why such a thing as peer review exists. It isn't difficult to see how BB&N went wrong, nor how W&A ran with and elaborated on BB&N's results.

Gary Mack thought he heard seven shots in the recording... none of which turned out to match any of the spots where BB&N later located impulse patterns supposed to be shots. There are actually no audible gunshots on the recording, a fact that was explained away by the existence of a noise limiter on the police microphone. But please see the footnote on pages 160-161 of the CD part of Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History (which, by the way, contains everything you need to know in order to stop wondering about the damned Dictabelt recording). It seems the noise-limiter explanation is nonsense.

Can anyone tell me if BB&N, when they fired their test shots (in only two locations, the TSDB and the knoll; i.e., with no controls for this experiment), verified that no audible gunshots were heard on their recording either? Didn't they, in attempting to reproduce the same sort of patterns as on the Dictabelt, use the same, or same sort, of equipment as produced the original recording? Ask yourself this: If they had proven that, because of the noise limiter on Dictabelt microphones, no shots emerge audibly from their own recording either… wouldn't they have shouted this from the rooftops? Instead... well, I have not been able to find any reference to this hypothesis's having been tested—let alone confirmed!

There were many more than four, or five (as some conspiracists have it), impulse patterns virtually identical to the four that BB&N determined to be the real McCoy; several, in fact, were discarded as "false positives." So what you have is basically a random distribution of noise over a period of just several seconds; it shouldn't be surprising that BB&N were able to find three that matched a plausible timing, based on what we can see in the Zapruder film, for the three shots that were already known, from the incontrovertible physical evidence, to have been fired from the TSDB.

That they threw in a fourth shot, which they have as third in the sequence of shots that day, coming from the highly unlikely exposed position of the grassy knoll, and hitting no one and nothing... is indeed a curiosity. But it is evident that people were primed to find what they were looking for in the random noises of the recording, like ancients poring over bird entrails. The HSCA's eleventh-hour turnaround to a finding of conspiracy, based solely on this phantom shot from the knoll, contradicted everything else the committee had concluded up that point. No other evidence of conspiracy had been found, zilch, nada, rien. So even before the National Academy of Sciences panel weighed in, this conclusion wasn't very convincing to anyone but conspiracy believers.

 

[Sandy McCroskey]

McClain's bike

McLain's, oops.

Can anyone tell me if BB&N, when they fired their test shots (in only two locations, the TSDB and the knoll; i.e., with no controls for this experiment), verified that no audible gunshots were heard on their recording either? Didn't they, in attempting to reproduce the same sort of patterns as on the Dictabelt, use the same, or same sort, of equipment as produced the original recording?

I'll answer my own question: No, they recorded the shots on audiotape (according to the previously cited Bugliosi CD).

 

[manifesto]

There is no scientifically proven shot from the Grassy Knoll.

Yes, there is, in the HSCA report. Ca 96% for the grassy knoll shot, P = 1/100 000 for the five-shot-series being a chance occurrence.

Pretty much a slam dunk.

Anybody who has been to Dallas can testify that there is no way a gunman could not have been seen by everyone in the street and in the motorcade. There's nowhere to hide.

Behind the fence and everybody is intensely focused on the presidential limo. Ca 50 polismen and bystanders herd shots from the fence area. Ca 10 saw smoke puffs.

 

[manifesto]

And as others have pointed out, there is a ship load of evidence that points directly to Oswald acting alone.

Good. Name one.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Yes, there is, in the HSCA report. Ca 96% for the grassy knoll shot, P = 1/100 000 for the five-shot-series being a chance occurrence.

Pretty much a slam dunk.

You misunderstand the nature of scientific proof. To be considered reasonably proven, a scientific result has to be peer reviewed, ideally repeated and / or confirmed by other workers, and generally accepted as sound by the scientific community. What you are offering as "scientific proof" is the opinion of two experts. Whatever their status or level of expertise, this does not constitute proof; there is no Nobel Laureate Exception.

So any new investigation of this specific piece of evidence would have to start by considering the validity of the evidence. There are at least two officially sanctioned re-investigations that have done exactly this, and stalled at this point because they found the evidence not to be credible. Other than the fact that you personally consider the original evidence to be irreproachable and incontrovertible, a view not shared by the scientific or law enforcement communities and in fact completely alien to their most basic principles, what justification can you offer for ignoring those conclusions and requiring an inquiry to begin from an already rejected position?

Dave

 

[turingtest]

Let's look at how "scientifically proven" it is. In sequence we have:

The original presentation to the HSCA, accepted by two-thirds of the committee and rejected by the remaining third.
The FBI's December 1980 report rejecting the conclusion of a second shooter.
The National Academy of Science's 1982 report also rejecting the conclusion.
A 1988 Justice Department review rejecting the conclusion.
A March 2001 analysis in Science & Justice claiming the conclusion was correct.
Three studies by different TV channels in 2003 rejecting the conclusion.
A 2005 study in the same magazine rejecting the conclusion.

To suggest that this evidence was presented as scientific proof to the HCSA and has remained uncontested since is to say the least somewhat disingenuous. It might better be described as highly contested.

Also, note that one of the above studies was by the Justice Department, which seems to have been exactly the re-examination manifesto is asking for. It's already been done, and it didn't give the conclusion he wants. Dave

Which is the whole problem with manifesto's proposed solution- it's no solution at all, literally speaking, because there would never be any resolution. He has his impulse patterns; someone else has the backyard photos, "proven" to be impossible; someone else has "scientific proof" of "reflex reactions" at a point in the Z-film showing shots too close to the others to have been fired by LHO; and so it goes, each CTist flogging an isolated data point that demands an investigation which is only valid when it reaches their (non-specific) conclusion of "aconspiracydidit!" Any event like this one is going to have its leftovers; life is messy like that, it can't always be just wrapped up in a neat little package labeled "conspiracy!" so the CTist can take satisfaction in the illusion of control. And I don't mean the control of the conspiracy- I think that for the CTist, like the theist, the simple act of naming the conspiracy (or the deity) is the satisfying act of asserting their control over life. When they name it, they own it.

 

[Tomtomkent]

Good. Name one.

Please see parts 1 to 4 of this thread for repeated naming of the evidence.

However, we need only one ok at the Autopsy to disprove a gunman on the grassy knoll. It doesn't matter what anybody thought they saw, if the bullets didn't hit JFK, and there is no other evidence of their impact.


As Oswalds rifle is the only one in the vicinity from which bullets were fired, as we have evidence of his bullets, from his rifle, with his prints, we can infer he alone was the shooter.

 

[Border Reiver]

Behind the fence and everybody is intensely focused on the presidential limo. Ca 50 polismen and bystanders herd shots from the fence area. Ca 10 saw smoke puffs.

Modern propellants (those in use since the beginnings of the 20th century) don't produce smoke puffs, hence the name "smokeless powder."