Clint Hill: I jumped onto the left rear step of the Presidential automobile. Mrs. Kennedy shouted, ?They?ve shot his head off;? then turned and raised out of her seat as if she were reaching to her right rear toward the back of the car for something that had blown out.
But the Zapruder film shows nothing on the trunk of the limousine. We can see the individual fingers of Jackie?s white gloved fingers, but no visible piece of skull, no visible piece of brain, on the trunk. Nor does it show Jackie even pantomiming the picking up of something.
The Zapruder film trumps an eyewitness?s memory. Jackie did not pick something up off the trunk.
Hill specified that he witnesses Mrs. Kennedy retrieve some material which he thought to have come from president?s head wounds.
I?ll grant you that the film trumps witness recollection, but when making claims with respect to the
contents of the film one should employ objective analyses and be parsimonious with the data. The reason films are better than witnesses is not simply because they are here, but rather because they can be analysed by independent experts for verification as to what the images appear to depict etc. Without such scrutiny, one is only
slightly better than a witness. Indeed, the fact that the debris (whatever it was) does not appear on basic scrutiny is evidence of Nothing.
If one fails to detect such a thing as wound debris then one
may not conclude that it is absent and therefore the witness wrong, but rather that there?s no evidence visible to confirm the veracity of the story and it remains unproven.
It is worth pointing out also that the proportions of the material and quality of film are essential to this analysis. What if the debris consisted entirely of neural tissue? Such might not evn be visable on the film. Minute or thin scalp fragments might also fit this category. Etc., etc.
A better point for all to consider however is that the truth about what happened on the trunk may not even be relevant. High velocity missiles shot debris everywhere. If it were as simple as follow the debris trail we wouldn?t need experts to do it.
