Poor Scholarship on Display: Larry Sturdivan's Book "The JFK Myths"

[Gerry Down]

As I understand it, Dr. Thomas, and the 1978 HSCA acoustic experts, accept that the 4 “gunshots” were recorded out of order, about a minute after they really occurred.r.

This does not help the acoustics evidence. You can't just change evidence and say it was recorded out of order.

[Joe Elliott]

As I understand it, Dr. Thomas, and the 1978 HSCA acoustic experts, accept that the 4 “gunshots” were recorded out of order, about a minute after they really occurred.

This does not help the acoustics evidence. You can't just change evidence and say it was recorded out of order.

I agree. It is my belief that the alleged gunshots occurring on the tape at about the same time as the phrase “Hold everything secure” means the “gunshots” occur too late, about a minute too late, to have been real gunshots. I was just pointing out that Dr. Thomas believed that somehow, the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place. I disagree with Dr. Thomas’s claim which is, at best, unproven.

[Michael T. Griffith]

I agree. It is my belief that the alleged gunshots occurring on the tape at about the same time as the phrase “Hold everything secure” means the “gunshots” occur too late, about a minute too late, to have been real gunshots. I was just pointing out that Dr. Thomas believed that somehow, the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place. I disagree with Dr. Thomas’s claim which is, at best, unproven.

Actually, Dr. Thomas's claim fits the evidence far better than the claim that the gunshot patterns appear between 30 and 90 seconds after the shooting. Read and learn, just this once:

The NRC’s conclusion that the acoustical evidence was invalid, is based on the assertion that the sounds identified as gunfire were not synchronous with the time of the shooting. On the day that Kennedy was assassinated, the Dallas police were using two radio channels. Ch-1 was used for routine police communications. An auxiliary frequency, Ch-2 was used for special events, in this case, for the police escort of the president’s motorcade. Events on the separate channels can be synchronized because there are simulcasts, that is, broadcasts that are common to both channels. One is a deliberate simulcast by the dispatcher which begins with the phrase, “Attention all emergency vehicles…”. The dispatcher had a switch on his console that allowed him to make simulcasts. But most of the simulcasts were accidental due to a phenomenon called crosstalk. Basically, if two police units are close together, but tuned to opposite channels, and one opens a microphone, it can capture broadcasts from one channel and instantly simulcast them over the other. This happened four times just during the 5-1/2 min sequence when the motorcycle microphone was open.

The NRC panel’s synchronization was based on the juxtaposition of the suspect gunfire to one of the simulcasts, a crosstalk of a broadcast on Ch-2 by Sheriff Decker about a minute after the assassination, ordering his men to go to the grassy knoll area and, “Hold everything secure.” The same broadcast occurs on Ch-1 at the end of the sequence of sounds identified as the gunshots. The NRC panel concluded that the juxtaposition of the sounds to a broadcast a full minute after the shooting was proof that the sounds, whatever they are, cannot be the assassination gunfire. The NRC redux (Linsker et al., 2006) repeats this assertion. The problem, as I pointed out in my 2001 paper, is that it depends on which instance of crosstalk one chooses as the tie point between the channels. A deliberate error of omission on the part of the NRC and the NRC redux was the failure to consider the fact that there are five instances of crosstalk and that in every single instance, the time between them is different on the two channels (Table 3).

Very simply, the data in this table proves that playback time on these recordings is not real time. One of the problems is the sound actuation function which stopped the recorders during dead air. In theory, this should not have been a problem on Ch-1 because the constant motorcycle noise would have kept the recorder running. But this was clearly not the only problem. Consider the 3 sec displacement between the two consecutive simulcasts from Sergeant Bellah who was searching for the motorcycle with the stuck microphone. If this discrepancy had been caused by recorder stoppage, then there should be four sec of dead air between the two broadcasts, but there isn’t. But inasmuch as the rotation time of the audograph disc is around 3 sec, the simplest explanation is that the stylus skipped a groove at this point. Because both recorders were stylus in groove arrangements, they were prone to displacements, a problem which is very obvious on Ch-2 which is studded with repeats. Moreover, if it is true that the recordings are not the originals, but only copies, then the possibilities of artifacts causing offsets in time multiplies. Regardless of what has caused the time offsets documented in Table 3, the fact is that the juxtaposition of events to the crosstalks is not a reliable indicator of synchronization, or lack thereof, because even the crosstalks themselves do not synchronize with one another. Neither NRC report reveals, let alone deals, with the data in Table 3, because it directly contravenes the basis for their position.

It should be obvious however, that whatever phenomena is imposing the time offsets on the recordings, that the amount and likelihood of an imposition of a time offset between any particular recorded event and a corresponding crosstalk will be the amount of time between them. The farther apart they are, the greater the possibility that an offset has been imposed. Hence, if one is going to use the crosstalks to synchronize events, one should use the crosstalk closest to the incident in question. The NRC panel knew this (because I pointed it out to them) which led to their next major error of omission. In spite of their argument that the suspect sounds are not synchronous with the assassination, at no point in their report do they ever identify the actual time of the assassination. The actual time of the assassination can be fixed by the context of the broadcasts from the motorcade on Ch-2. These broadcasts emanated from Police Chief Jesse Curry who was with the first car in the motorcade. The Weaver photo shows the motorcade in Dealey Plaza with the lead car, in accordance with Secret Service rules, about 120 to 150 ft ahead of the President’s limousine. The transcript of the Ch-2 broadcasts (Table 1) shows that the last broadcast by Curry just 20 sec before the crucial “Go to the Hospital” broadcast, was an announcement that he was at or approaching “… the triple underpass.” The triple underpass is the railroad bridge at the western edge of Dealey Plaza. When the lead car was at or near the underpass the presidential limousine must have been in the mid-section of Elm Street, the position where the shooting occurred. In his September 2003 account for the oral history project at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dealey Plaza, Winston Lawson, the Secret Service Agent who was in the lead car, recalled that he heard the shots and recognized them as gunfire, just as the lead car was arriving at the Triple Underpass. Hence, Curry’s broadcast that he was at the triple underpass is a marker for the time of the assassination.

The crosstalk closest to this event is the broadcast just two sec earlier by Deputy Chief Fisher saying the words, “Naw, that’s all right, I’ll check it.” The last three words, “I’ll check it” occur on Ch-1 just two sec before the first acoustically identified gunshot. Thus, the Fisher crosstalk establishes exact synchrony between the assassination and the acoustically identified gunfire. Neither the NRC report or the NRC redux acknowledges this fact. (https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Acoustics_Overview_and_History_-_part_3.html)

To believe that the "hold everything" crosstalk is the determinative timing factor would require us to label as mere coincidence all the evidence that the dictabelt contains assassination gunfire. Some of this evidence is as follows:

* When the HSCA acoustical experts performed an oscilloscope screening on the 5.5 minutes of graphed sounds from the dictabelt recording, they located a sequence of sounds that met the acoustical criteria for gunfire. The sequence was 10 seconds long, occurred almost exactly two minutes into the motorcycle segment (i.e., 12:30, when the assassination occurred), and contained five candidate impulse patterns.

* The five candidate, or suspect, impulse patterns were grouped into a sequence that would be expected from the circumstances of the shooting, which the HSCA experts realized was either one heck of a coincidence or a strong indication that the impulse patterns were gunfire recorded during the assassination.

* In August 1978, a test firing was conducted in Dealey Plaza. Gunshots were fired and recorded on microphones placed along the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza. When these test patterns were compared to the suspect sound patterns on the dictabelt, all five of the suspect sound patterns were found to match the echo patterns of shots fired in the Dealey Plaza test firing.

The odds are remote that all five suspect impulse patterns would match the echo patterns of test-firing shots. If the suspect impulses had been merely random noise patterns, perhaps one of them would have matched one of the sounds from the test firing, but the odds that five random noise patterns would match sounds from the test firing, and in the correct order, are fantastically remote, zero for all intents and purposes.

* The fact that the five suspect impulse patterns on the dictabelt matched the echo patterns of shots from the test firing in the correct topographic order is powerful evidence that the suspect patterns are assassination gunfire. The odds of this happening by chance are 125 to 1. Dr. Thomas explains:

The first suspect sound on the DPD recording matched to a test shot that was recorded on a test microphone on Houston Street near the intersection with Elm Street. The very next suspect sound on the dictabelt matched to a test shot recorded at the very next microphone, 18 ft to the north on Houston Street. The third suspect sound matched to a test shot recorded on a microphone in the intersection of Houston and Elm Street. The fourth sound matched to a test shot recorded on a microphone on Elm Street, and the fifth suspect sound matched to a test shot recorded on the next microphone to the west. Thus, rather than in a random pattern, the chronological order of the suspect sounds had matched to the topological order of the microphones that produced matches to the test shots. To a scientist this sort of orderliness is very significant because there are 125 ways to sequence five events, only one of which is 1-2-3-4-5.

If the sounds on the dictabelt are anything but Dealey Plaza echo patterns, then the matches are purely by chance, having nothing to do with the geometry of Dealey Plaza. And that being the case, any spurious match was as likely to occur at any one microphone as at any other. And if the five matches achieved were truly spurious then the sequence of matches relative to the test microphone locations would have nothing to do with the location of the motorcycle with the open microphone. They would be in nonsense, random sequence. But the results are not scattered at random. The matches are precisely in the order that would be expected of a motorcycle traveling with the motorcade. (https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Acoustics_Overview_and_History_-_part_2.html)

* Not only did the suspect echo patterns from the dictabelt match the sequence of the corresponding test-firing shots, but they also matched the spacing and distance of the test microphones. Dr. Thomas:

But it is not just the sequence that was ordered. The spacing on the sounds on the dictabelt matched the spacing of the test microphones in Dealey Plaza. The first three suspect sounds are each separated by a little more than a second. The first and second are 1.6 sec apart, while the second and third are 1.1 second apart. Then there is a 4.8 second gap before the fourth putative shot which is only a fraction of a second (7/10ths of a second) before the final suspect sound. The test microphones that recorded the matching echo patterns were three in a row at the intersection of Houston and Elm. The test microphones that matched the last two sounds were at two consecutive positions about 80 ft west of the intersection, skipping four microphones between.

But it wasn’t just the sequence and the spacing that matched. The distance from the first test microphone that achieved a match on Houston Street was 130 ft away from the microphone on Elm street where the last match occurred. The time lapse between the first suspect sound and the fifth suspect sound was 8.3 seconds. In order to travel 130 ft in 8.3 sec an object would require an average speed of around 12 mph. In 1964 the FBI using the Zapruder film, calculated that the President’s limousine was traveling at an average speed of 11.3 mph on Elm Street. (https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Essay_-_Acoustics_Overview_and_History_-_part_2.html)

* Each of the three suspect impulse patterns on the dictabelt that were recorded when the microphone was in a position to record the shockwaves of gunfire contain a shockwave followed by a muzzle blast, and the shockwaves and the muzzle blasts occur in the right order and in the right interval. An N-wave (shockwave) comes 10-30 milliseconds before the muzzle blast, and the muzzle blast is followed by muzzle-blast echoes. This is the same pattern we see in the dictabelt gunfire impulses that were recorded when the microphone was in a position to recorded N-waves.

Incredibly, the NAS-NRC-Ramsey panel did not even attempt to explain the presence of the N-waves, much less the fact that they come at the correct time. The NRC's entire case was that a crosstalk episode proved that the suspect impulse patterns came after the assassination and that therefore they could not be gunfire but had to be random noise.

A few HSCA critics even claim that human speech can cause an N-wave-like noise on a recording, and that the N-wave of the dictabelt's grassy knoll shot was caused by Decker's crosstalk. Leaving aside the ludicrous nature of the claim that human speech can mimic supersonic shockwaves, what about the other N-waves and their succeeding muzzle blasts? There is no crosstalk that can explain those other N-waves.

* The HSCA experts discovered that windshield distortions were present in each of the suspect impulse patterns and absent in all the other sound impulses on the dictabelt. The HSCA experts realized that a motorcycle windshield would somewhat distort a soundwave and its echo pattern, so they determined just how much distortion would occur. And, lo and behold, they found that no other sound impulses on the dictabelt included this kind of distortion; they found that only the suspect impulse patterns contained such distortion. I keep asking the question, but so far no HSCA critic has ventured to answer it, Can you fathom the odds that this is just a coincidence? This is another piece of evidence that the NAS-NRC-Ramsey panel simply ignored.

Just to clarify something, I have been referring to five gunshot/suspect sound impulse patterns on the dictabelt. There are five such impulse patterns on the dictabelt, but the HSCA's chief counsel, Robert Blakey, would not accept all four of the rear-shot impulses because four rear-shot impulses so close together would have required two gunmen; so, Blakey pressured the acoustical scientists to label one of them as a false alarm, even though there is no acoustical basis for doing so, as Dr. Thomas has documented.

[Michael T. Griffith]

RE above post by Griffith, our copy-paste jockey at work again, hilarious.

The majority of what you just posted is irrelevant to the synchronization issue.

Huh?! Uh, actually, it has everything to do with the synchronization issue. What an amazingly erroneous statement. What on earth are you talking about? Were there just too many big words for you? I mean, every point I made and every fact I cited had to do with the synchronization issue, either directly or by implication.

And, umm, I notice that you once again punted on dealing with the intricate correlations between the gunshot impulse patterns on the dictabelt and the corresponding gunshot impulse patterns from the Dealey Plaza test firing. They won't go away just because you can't explain them.

Or, maybe you're still searching the NAS-NRC-Ramsey report and McAdams' website for explanations for those correlations. Again, just to save you some time: no attack on the acoustical evidence has ever gotten around to dealing with those correlations. The NRC took over a year to comb through the acoustical evidence and still did not offer a single, solitary explanation for any of the gunfire-confirming correlations.

[Gerry Down]

The odds are remote that all five suspect impulse patterns would match the echo patterns of test-firing shots. If the suspect impulses had been merely random noise patterns, perhaps one of them would have matched one of the sounds from the test firing, but the odds that five random noise patterns would match sounds from the test firing, and in the correct order, are fantastically remote, zero for all intents and purposes.

Maybe the impulse sounds they heard were echoes and not the actual gunshots themselves. In which case, they would be comparing echoes to echoes. And echoes tend to all sound alike whether the echo is from a rifle shot or a motorcycle backfire.

This might explain why the impulses all sound alike. Simply comparing echoes to echoes.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Let me try to explain in plain terms why the Decker crosstalk is a bogus, lame excuse for rejecting the acoustical evidence.

There are five gunshot impulse patterns on the Dallas police (DPD) dictabelt. The HSCA acoustical experts determined that the gunshots were recorded during the time of the assassination. Scholars have found additional evidence that the gunshot patterns were recorded during the assassination. Consider:

* According to the DPD dispatcher’s “12:30” time notation, the gunshots were recorded during the assassination. Yes, the dispatcher on each channel periodically gave time notations, and on the dictabelt the Channel 2 dispatcher voices the time notation “12:30” at virtually the same time the gunshots occur on the dictabelt (Channel 1).

* The first gunshot on the dictabelt occurs just 2 seconds after the Fisher “I’ll check it” crosstalk, and the Fisher transmission occurs just before the dispatcher notes “12:30” on Channel 2.

* The first gunshot on the dictabelt occurs just after Curry’s “triple underpass” transmission. This transmission comes right after Fisher’s “I’ll check it” transmission and just before the dispatcher’s “12:30” time notation. Curry’s “triple underpass” transmission was made to note that the motorcade was on Elm Street and that his car was approaching the triple underpass (his car was ahead of the presidential limo).

* The final gunshot on the dictabelt, which comes 8.3 seconds after the first one, occurs about 10 seconds before Curry’s “to the hospital” transmission, and we know Curry’s “to the hospital” transmission was made 18 seconds after his “triple underpass” transmission.

* Thus, it is very clear that the gunshots on the dictabelt were recorded during the 18 seconds between Fisher’s “I’ll check it” transmission and Curry’s “to the hospital” transmission. Curry yelled “go to the hospital” after he saw that JFK had been wounded, after Curry’s car slowed down to let the limo catch up with it and pass it, and we know when this happened because the event is captured on the Zapruder film.

You might be wondering, “Well, then how in the devil can anyone claim that the gunshots on the dictabelt were recorded 60-80 seconds after the assassination?” That is a very good question indeed.

Those who make this claim discard all of the above evidence. They claim that the dispatcher’s time notation, the Fisher transmission, Curry’s “triple underpass transmission,” and Curry’s “to the hospital” transmission are all somehow overruled by Decker’s “hold everything” crosstalk. Decker’s crosstalk occurs on Channel 2 sixty seconds after Curry’s “to the hospital” transmission, and it occurs on Channel 1 just after the last gunshot on the dictabelt. Therefore, they claim that the gunfire sound patterns on the dictabelt were recorded about 80 seconds after the assassination, and that therefore they cannot be gunshots but must be random noise.

You might be saying to yourself, “Well, wait a minute. Isn’t it much more logical to believe that Decker’s crosstalk on Channel 1 is simply an anomaly and is not a reliable time indicator, given that three other transmissions and the dispatcher’s time notation establish that the dictabelt gunshots were recorded during the assassination? How can this one Decker transmission overrule the dispatcher’s time notation and the Fisher and Curry transmissions?”

Lone-gunman theorists claim that Decker’s “hold everything” transmission is the overruling/determinative time indicator because that is the only way they can avoid dealing with the powerful, intricate evidence that the dictabelt contains at least four gunshots that were recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination.

If lone-gunman theorists admitted that the suspect sound impulse patterns on the dictabelt were recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination, they would have to address the HSCA evidence that those impulse patterns are assassination gunfire; they desperately want to avoid this because they cannot explain that evidence.

This is why the NRC panel, after spending over a year studying the HSCA acoustical evidence, never got around to dealing with the compelling correlations between the impulse patterns of the suspected gunshots on the dictabelt and the impulse patterns of gunshots from the Dealey Plaza test firing.

This is also why the HSCA acoustical experts have been so dismissive of the NRC panel’s report. They noticed that the NRC did not lay a finger on any of the evidence they presented. They also noted, and several scholars have since noted, that the Decker crosstalk on Channel 1 could have been placed there, out of chronological order, by phenomena known to have been possible with the kind of dictabelt machine used by the Dallas police in 1963, namely, recorder stoppage, stylus displacement, over-recording, and speed warps.

The NRC panel did not even try to explain the presence of supersonic N-waves on the dictabelt. N-waves are characteristic of supersonic gunfire from rifles. Each of the three suspect impulse patterns on the dictabelt that were recorded when the microphone was in a position to record the shockwaves of gunfire contain a shockwave followed by a muzzle blast, and the shockwaves and the muzzle blasts occur in the right order and in the right interval. An N-wave (shockwave) comes 10-30 milliseconds before the muzzle blast, and the muzzle blast is followed by muzzle-blast echoes. This is the same pattern we see in the dictabelt gunfire impulses that were recorded when the microphone was in a position to recorded N-waves.

The NRC panel also ignored the amazing windshield distortion correlations. Windshield distortions consistent with the sound of gunfire bouncing off a motorcycle windshield occur with each shot when the indicated positions of the motorcycle would have placed the windshield between the shooter and the microphone. Impressively, there are no windshield distortions with the shot when the motorcycle's windshield was not in position to cause them.

The N-waves and the windshield distortion correlations are just two of the lines of evidence that the dictabelt contains assassination gunshots.

But critics of the acoustical evidence wave aside this and all other evidence with the argument that the Decker crosstalk proves that the suspect sound impulse patterns on the dictabelt were recorded after the assassination, and that therefore the N-waves and all the gunfire correlations between the dictabelt and the test firing must be coincidences and sound impulse patterns on the dictabelt must have been caused by random noise.

[John Iacoletti]

I agree. It is my belief that the alleged gunshots occurring on the tape at about the same time as the phrase “Hold everything secure” means the “gunshots” occur too late, about a minute too late, to have been real gunshots. I was just pointing out that Dr. Thomas believed that somehow, the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place. I disagree with Dr. Thomas’s claim which is, at best, unproven.

Can you quote Thomas claiming that the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place?

[Michael T. Griffith]

Quote from: Joe Elliott on September 15, 2020, 09:08:27 AM
I agree. It is my belief that the alleged gunshots occurring on the tape at about the same time as the phrase “Hold everything secure” means the “gunshots” occur too late, about a minute too late, to have been real gunshots. I was just pointing out that Dr. Thomas believed that somehow, the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place. I disagree with Dr. Thomas’s claim which is, at best, unproven.

Can you quote Thomas claiming that the phrase “Hold everything secure” was recorded on the wrong place?

Decker's "hold everything" transmission was recorded on the wrong place on Channel 1. It is crosstalk on Channel 1, and it occurs at a different time on Channel 1 than it occurs on the channel on which it was broadcast, i.e., Channel 2.

Decker's crosstalk is the most out-of-sync of all the crosstalk episodes on the dictabelt, yet critics ignore this fact and choose it as their time indicator.

The Fisher crosstalk is crucial because we know from several facts when it occurred on Channel 2 and because it occurs on Channel 1 just two seconds before the first gunshot impulse on the dictabelt. and just before Curry's "triple underpass" transmission and before the dispatcher's "12:30" time notation on Channel 2. 

Two seconds after the Fisher phrase on Channel 1, the gunfire sequence begins. Two seconds after the Fisher phrase on Channel 2, Curry broadcasts that he is "at the triple underpass." So the first gunshot sound was recorded at the same time Curry's car was near the underpass.

Furthermore, if we use the Bellah crosstalk to synchronize events on the two channels, the gunshot impulse patterns occur shortly before Curry's "to the hospital" transmission, and obviously Curry's transmission was broadcast very soon, a matter of seconds, after the assassination.