JFK Conspiracy Theories IV: The One With The Whales

[No Other]

It isn't; suspicious for the sake of suspicion is the mark of one. This is why it's difficult for CTists to gain any ground here- you bring up suspicions that go nowhere and are disconnected from anything but the need for suspicion. Suspect the Paines all you want, but until you tie them into a sensical narrative of conspiracy, it's useless "whoa, dude, this is weird, huh?" pipe-talk.

You are not in a position to lecture me. I never used the word conspiracy yet you invoke "narrative of conspiracy" during your admonition. Apparently, unless I am a CTer, there is not a path for discussion.

 

[LSSBB]

You are not in a position to lecture me. I never used the word conspiracy yet you invoke "narrative of conspiracy" during your admonition. Apparently, unless I am a CTer, there is not a path for discussion.

Maybe if you couched your quibble in terms of pointing it out as a curious anamoly. Consider your audience: skeptics in a Conspiracy sub-forum, pining for any alternative to LHO dunnit by his lonesome, posed in a comprehensive format addressing consilience.

 

[turingtest]

You are not in a position to lecture me. I never used the word conspiracy yet you invoke "narrative of conspiracy" during your admonition. Apparently, unless I am a CTer, there is not a path for discussion.

I'm talking about discipline, NO- you're flailing around just like a CTist with suspicions of this and that, with no coherent point except suspicion, quacking just like a duck and denying you are one. You guys like to deny any need for an alternative theory by equating the issue with a trial, where only reasonable doubt is necessary, no requirement for anything else. But the time for trial has passed- this is history now, and the requirements of history are different. There is a body of consilient evidence that adds up to the conclusion that LHO, acting alone, shot JFK. Whether you like it or not, it's not enough to just cast shadows, you need a solid equivalent narrative that also accounts for all the evidence. History is "this is what happened"; you've reduced history to "I don't know what happened."

Don't like being lectured? Don't come to a skeptic's forum and flail.

 

[cmikes]

You are not in a position to lecture me. I never used the word conspiracy yet you invoke "narrative of conspiracy" during your admonition. Apparently, unless I am a CTer, there is not a path for discussion.

What connection do you believe that Michael Paine had to the assassination of JFK? Do you have any evidence other than "Hey, isn't it suspicious that Michael Paine worked for Bell Helicopter?"? So did thousands of other people in Texas at the time. So what?

 

[BStrong]

What connection do you believe that Michael Paine had to the assassination of JFK? Do you have any evidence other than "Hey, isn't it suspicious that Michael Paine worked for Bell Helicopter?"? So did thousands of other people in Texas at the time. So what?

The CT narrative is that the Paine's were CIA.

Un-named sources (read as: unicorns) have stated R. Paine was collecting intelligence in Nicaragua while doing volunteer work and her family had eastern roots, etc. so she must be up to no good, and the guy that was taken into custody w/ piece in hand that he murdered a LEO with didn't do nothing wrong ad infinitum.

 

[MicahJava]

This assertion comes up so often that it's become a article of faith amongst the CT community that individuals that reject common JFK assassination nonsense (impossible shots by LHO, et al) have somehow only agreed with the governments version of events and haven't any foundation for their pov's based on their own knowledge, training or experience.

I grew up on a shooting range. The minute I read accounts of events with details and heard various folks describe the shooting as somehow being beyond the range of mortals I knew I was reading absolute ******** - The WC report didn't bring anything to light wrt the facts that changed my opinion, and when I got myself to the scene of the crime my pov was set - the shooting performed by LHO was no one in a million shot by any means.

CTists might want to consider that certain folks in the world have first hand experience in various subject matters that refute common CT fantasy constructs and they need no go-ahead from usgov.org to state those opinions.

Lol. Some of the best snipers in the world have said that they could not replicate those shots, and they were alledgedly made with a dollar store with the most defective scope ever. I'm not aware anybody replicating the shots. I know of one experiment in which an olympic sniper accomplished something similar... from a height of the third floor of the school book depository.

 

[Tomtomkent]

And I know of an experiment where Penn Jillette made the shots.

There is nothing about the shots that are improbable. But as they are also the best explanation for the totality of evidence, Oswald could have been lucky.

Though it os worth busting a certain myth.

Trying to replicate any EXACT series of hits is tricky, and nigh on impossible.

Asking, however, if a person can be hit three times in a frame of reference, from a location, to wound or kill, is more practicable.

Ask the worlds top snipers to replicate Oswalds timing or patterns, and they will always fail.

Ask them if they can JFK with three hits from a location, and you will get a useful answer.

Many of the experiments I have seen to prove "Oswald fired an impossible shot" just proved "this guy aims a little differently and pulls the trigger at a different time" or "three body shots is more intuitive than a head shot".

 

[Tolls]

And let's never forget that he missed one of them...

 

[pgwenthold]

And let's never forget that he missed one of them...

I contend he missed TWO of them.

I don't know what he was aiming at, but there is no reason to think that he was aiming at the back of the neck on one and at the head for the other.

I argue that he was aiming for the head on all three, and that's why he stopped when he hit it. If that is the case, then the second shot is a miss, because it hit well below the target.

Alternatively, you could argue that he was aiming for the torso, and stopped because he was dead. But then the third shot is a miss.

So Super Snipers contend that they could not hit an 8 inch target at 180 ft in one out of three attempts?

 

[pgwenthold]

And I know of an experiment where Penn Jillette made the shots.

There is nothing about the shots that are improbable. But as they are also the best explanation for the totality of evidence, Oswald could have been lucky.

Though it os worth busting a certain myth.

Trying to replicate any EXACT series of hits is tricky, and nigh on impossible.

Asking, however, if a person can be hit three times in a frame of reference, from a location, to wound or kill, is more practicable.

Ask the worlds top snipers to replicate Oswalds timing or patterns, and they will always fail.

Ask them if they can JFK with three hits from a location, and you will get a useful answer.

Many of the experiments I have seen to prove "Oswald fired an impossible shot" just proved "this guy aims a little differently and pulls the trigger at a different time" or "three body shots is more intuitive than a head shot".

I saw a recreation a while back where a guy exactly replicated the positioning of Connolly, JFK and Oswald at the time of the second shot (the single bullet), using model bodies made of the appropriate body-like materials. Using a rifle similar to Oswalds, he aimed at the spot where the second shot hit JFK in the back of the neck. In this exercise, he completely reproduced ALL of the wounds of the magic bullet - the exact entrance spot in JFK, the correct exit spot, the entrance into Connolly, the exit from Connolly and the hit into the thigh.

The ONLY thing that was not reproduced was that the bullet didn't lodge into Connolly's thigh, it only made a mark. All it had to do was come through on a different orientation and it would have lodged.

This is what happens when you actually do it right.

 

[Tolls]

I contend he missed TWO of them.

I did think about putting in an "at least" in there.

 

[HSienzant]

Lol. Some of the best snipers in the world have said that they could not replicate those shots, and they were alledgedly made with a dollar store with the most defective scope ever. I'm not aware anybody replicating the shots. I know of one experiment in which an olympic sniper accomplished something similar... from a height of the third floor of the school book depository.

And I could accomplish something relatively easily that it would take thousands of trials to replicate.

I can flip a coin 20 times and whatever sequence I get would take roughly a million trials (2 to the 20th power or precisely one in 1,048,576 trials) to replicate precisely.

You're asking the wrong question.

Nobody needs to replicate the shooting exactly. All they need to do is put one shot in the head or through the heart. Any shooter who accomplished that accomplished what Oswald did.

Oswald didn't set out to perform the shooting a specific way, with one miss, one bullet going through two men, and another hitting the President in the head. That was the happenstance results of what he set out to do.

Oswald set out to kill the President. How many of those trials you're familiar with made at least one kill shot? More than 50%? That's really all those trials should be attempting to accomplish.

And most adequate shooters could accomplish that feat.

I used a 1917 Mannlicher Carcano (Oswald's was only 18 years old) in 2015 to shoot at targets from a bench rest (essentially what Oswald had from that window) and scored four hits on the target in six shots - three in the body and one in the neck. My weapon was more than five times older than Oswald's and still accurate enough for the task. Oh, and one more point. As a city kid, I had never shot a weapon before in my life. That was the first - and to date, only - time I ever fired a weapon at a target. Yeah, my target wasn't moving, but each of my six shots was at 100 yards, each longer than Oswald's longest shot.

And as to Oswald's weapon, it was tested and found to be as accurate as any modern military rifle at the time. The scope could not be sighted properly when found, but Oswald dropped it on the floor between some boxes and that could have caused the scope issue after the shooting. In addition, the iron sights were perfectly adequate for the shooting; Oswald trained at 200 and 500 yards in the Marines. And this shooting was - at its longest point - just 87 yards - about 1/6th the longer distance Oswald trained at only a few years before.

Your arguments are failures.

Hank

EDIT: I see TomTomKent made the same point I made about the replication aspect of the feat. Killing JFK is relatively easy from that location with that weapon. Replicating Oswald's feat is a different question - and the wrong one - altogether.

 

[HSienzant]

I saw a recreation a while back where a guy exactly replicated the positioning of Connolly, JFK and Oswald at the time of the second shot (the single bullet), using model bodies made of the appropriate body-like materials. Using a rifle similar to Oswalds, he aimed at the spot where the second shot hit JFK in the back of the neck. In this exercise, he completely reproduced ALL of the wounds of the magic bullet - the exact entrance spot in JFK, the correct exit spot, the entrance into Connolly, the exit from Connolly and the hit into the thigh.

The ONLY thing that was not reproduced was that the bullet didn't lodge into Connolly's thigh, it only made a mark. All it had to do was come through on a different orientation and it would have lodged.

This is what happens when you actually do it right.

That's this episode from the DISCOVERY Channel, called Beyond the Magic Bullet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-5xfTKqf1A

If you go to the 1:16 mark, you'll see all you need to see.

And of course, the bullet didn't lodge in Connally, most likely it did almost exactly what the replicated shooting did... hit the thigh, make a small wound, and bounce off (and got trapped in his pants leg as it rebounded). The replication didn't use pants on the thigh, or a 'bunched' jacket and shirt for that matter.

EDIT: At 1:16:30 you can see the bullet missed the target mark on JFK by passing about an inch to the left of the actual wound. That, and the fact that it struck and damaged two ribs on the "Connally" target body (instead of only one Connally rib in the actual shooting), accounts for the additional damage to the bullet in the attempted replication. But that bullet remained in one piece and had an undamaged nose as well as CE399, although it is slightly more bent.

Conspiracy theorists like to pick apart the differences between this shooting and the actual, but ignore all the similarities.

Hank

 

[MicahJava]

And I know of an experiment where Penn Jillette made the shots.

There is nothing about the shots that are improbable. But as they are also the best explanation for the totality of evidence, Oswald could have been lucky.

Though it os worth busting a certain myth.

Trying to replicate any EXACT series of hits is tricky, and nigh on impossible.

Asking, however, if a person can be hit three times in a frame of reference, from a location, to wound or kill, is more practicable.

Ask the worlds top snipers to replicate Oswalds timing or patterns, and they will always fail.

Ask them if they can JFK with three hits from a location, and you will get a useful answer.

Many of the experiments I have seen to prove "Oswald fired an impossible shot" just proved "this guy aims a little differently and pulls the trigger at a different time" or "three body shots is more intuitive than a head shot".

Penn Jillette rapidly cycling a Carcano rifle under his arm without aiming at anything is not an accurate experiment.

 

[MicahJava]

That's this episode from the DISCOVERY Channel, called Beyond the Magic Bullet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-5xfTKqf1A

If you go to the 1:16 mark, you'll see all you need to see.

And of course, the bullet didn't lodge in Connally, most likely it did almost exactly what the replicated shooting did... hit the thigh, make a small wound, and bounce off (and got trapped in his pants leg as it rebounded). The replication didn't use pants on the thigh, or a 'bunched' jacket and shirt for that matter.

EDIT: At 1:16:30 you can see the bullet missed the target mark on JFK by passing about an inch to the left of the actual wound. That, and the fact that it struck and damaged two ribs on the "Connally" target body (instead of only one Connally rib in the actual shooting), accounts for the additional damage to the bullet in the attempted replication. But that bullet remained in one piece and had an undamaged nose as well as CE399, although it is slightly more bent.

Conspiracy theorists like to pick apart the differences between this shooting and the actual, but ignore all the similarities.

Hank

The deformation of the bullet is one thing, but it doesn't bother you at all that the trajectory in that video enters very close to where the T1 back wound was, only to exit out of the chest and continue on a much lower trajectory?

You also showed Dale Myer's cartoon. He never released his raw data so for all we know it is a cartoon. Anybody looking at that clearly see that he slightly raised the back wound and slightly lowered the throat wound (to the chest). He also apparently distorted Kennedy's anatomy in his back and neck area. There is actually no guarantee that his animation is consistent from each perspective. A fuller examination of the Myers animation is found here: http://www.patspeer.com/chapter12c:animania

Experiments like the discovery channel and computer models like from Dale Myers would be a great place to start any new investigation, however the ones shown in your link does not live up to the standards of people who rightfully pay attention to details.

 

[MicahJava]

I contend he missed TWO of them.

I don't know what he was aiming at, but there is no reason to think that he was aiming at the back of the neck on one and at the head for the other.

I argue that he was aiming for the head on all three, and that's why he stopped when he hit it. If that is the case, then the second shot is a miss, because it hit well below the target.

Alternatively, you could argue that he was aiming for the torso, and stopped because he was dead. But then the third shot is a miss.

So Super Snipers contend that they could not hit an 8 inch target at 180 ft in one out of three attempts?

It would probably be wise for the popular official story to move their one missed shot to after the 313 head shot. It has a decent chance of explaining why the last two shots were close together.

 

[pgwenthold]

And I could accomplish something relatively easily that it would take thousands of trials to replicate.

I can flip a coin 20 times and whatever sequence I get would take roughly a million trials (2 to the 20th power or precisely one in 1,048,576 trials) to replicate precisely.

You're asking the wrong question.

Nobody needs to replicate the shooting exactly. All they need to do is put one shot in the head or through the heart. Any shooter who accomplished that accomplished what Oswald did. .

"Why did Oswald take three shots?"
"Because that is how many he needed to kill the President."

If he would have blown JFK's head away on the first shot, he would have stopped there. If he wouldn't have hit the third, he still had a 4th bullet to try again.

 

[MicahJava]

"Why did Oswald take three shots?"
"Because that is how many he needed to kill the President."

If he would have blown JFK's head away on the first shot, he would have stopped there. If he wouldn't have hit the third, he still had a 4th bullet to try again.

Are you insisting that the (at least) one missed shot could not have been the last shot? There couldn't have been a shot between the 190-222 shot and the 313 shot (if you really stretch the realm of plausibility, Robert Harris's shot at 285 is the closest thing you could agree with). There is also very little evidence for any shot before 190. When was the missed shot?

 

[Axxman300]

Lol. Some of the best snipers in the world have said that they could not replicate those shots, and they were alledgedly made with a dollar store with the most defective scope ever. I'm not aware anybody replicating the shots. I know of one experiment in which an olympic sniper accomplished something similar... from a height of the third floor of the school book depository.

No.

Lol. Some of the best snipers in the world have said that they could not replicate those shots

Name them.

The issue with recreating the assassination is that those events are mostly done on firing ranges that have been modified to match the elevation of the shooter, and the declination of Elm Street. Range shooting is ALWAYS different than real world shooting. There's just your weapon and a paper target mounted to plywood. There's no emotional component.

This is from 1967:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoTmczjJcHk

Elite forces conduct exercises where their operators are physically and mentally stressed. My mom could - and did - put all of her rounds from her M-1 in center mass at 100 yards when she went through basic (she was on the WACS pistol team), but when under stress she folds up like a wet paper bag.

I can't image looking through that scope and seeing the back of Kennedy's head, the adrenaline must have pegged.

Say what you will about Oswald, he made it through USMC boot camp (back when it was hard), and defected to the Soviet Union. That took a special kind of nerve.

and they were alledgedly made with a dollar store with the most defective scope ever.

Again, not true. It wasn't a great scope but it was enough, and the way it's set up on the rifle you can switch to iron sites instantly. The rifle is still in use in Africa, the myth of the Carcano being a crap rifle was generated by JFK Ctists and not by people who know firearms.

I'm not aware anybody replicating the shots.

Google is your friend.

Magic Bullet, complete with deformity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRUNYZY71g

Head shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RX2phbWmgA

Bonus: Head shot from Grassy Knoll:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RCX3RdVHqo

Here's what you have to understand about guns: They never lie.

Starting at the point of impact, you determine the trajectory, and work backwards. The 6.5×52mm Carcano Model 91/38 is the first and last word in the JFK Assassination because it was the only weapon capable of doing the DOCUMENTED damage recorded that day.

Had it been a .306/.762 you could argue endlessly about other gunmen. Had it been a .306/.762 Oswald lands all three rounds, maybe more. In Texas in 1963, the list of men owning a .306/.762 would have stretched for miles, but the guys with a 6.5x52mm was pretty short.

This was Oswald's rifle. He bought it, posed for TWO photographs with it. Took it to the range a couple of times where people saw him fire it viciously. He might as well have carved his initials and SSI# on the buttstock.

 

[MicahJava]

Okay, Axxman300 brought up way too many points way too quickly. I'll make one rhetorical question: Is it intentional comedy that so many propaganda hitpieces make such lame "recreations" that don't recreate anything? I swear this has to be a tradition at this point. Take National Geographic's 2013 program JFK: The Lost Bullet for example. They used a laser beam to demonstrate a straight single-bullet trajectory from the snipers nest, but deceptively edited the scene to hide that the demonstration actually took place further down the road.