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.