I can think of few things more utterly subjective than interpreting "reactions" in a blurry, silent film.
John, there was a little more involved in the technique than casually looking at reactions in a blurry, silent film.
If this is how you have interpreted how the analysis works then I have done a terrible job in conveying to readers how and why it works. That is my fault and your comment makes me wonder how many other folks may also have questions about it. I need to remedy that.
Perhaps some additional context should be added to help other readers, and I’ll add it in three areas:
1) A little more on how it works, its use and possible misuse.
2) Some background on how it evolved, actually spurred on by this forum, and how it was reviewed.
3) Reasons why the results are credible and the method reliable.
1) The technique was developed as a new forensic technique useful for misc occasions, not just the JFK case. It uses the observations on film of the start of surprise voluntary reactions in order to estimate when a surprising, sound occurred (specifically when the sound reached them). To use the technique in a shooting case using silent film you definitely should have some prior reason to believe that gunfire (or loud surprising sound like gunfire to elicit reactions) occurred in the particular event being evaluated. If you didn’t have any expectation of a surprising sound happening in the film being reviewed, this might not be the technique to use.
Since it relies some on statistics and on historic reaction time science modeling, it can, like any forensic method, have some variations and misreads when misusing a technique. Although you could do it, using only one data point is a misuse in my mind. That’s part of the reason the technique recommends averaging, using multiple observations, if at all possible, to reduce error, and I would recommend not using any sample point if someone was unsure about a particular observation. But if you review enough film slowly frame by frame, and at actual rate, you can get a pretty good sense of when you see a surprise reaction.
Another misuse can occur if looking at a situation with a sequential grouping of sounds, the technique would only be applicable analyzing for the first surprising sound in a grouping of sounds, as recent earlier sounds in a group can forewarn of subsequent sounds occurring and that would alter the analysis since “surprising” is no longer applicable after a first sound.
One clue that supports the reactions are surprise and have a common source is how close together these (surprise) reactions are, i.e. how they begin relative to each other. For surprise reactions you would expect to see them start at nearly the same time (within a second or so of each other). This is based on what has been determined what the population as a whole would do.
2) Now about the technique background as applied to JFK. In fact, I think I first connected up with Ken Scearce on the subject in this forum a long time ago when first starting to investigate reaction observations. Ken said my comments were very interesting and he had similar observations. I asked him to send me what he was talking about. When I got his notes, my jaw dropped as I was surprised to see that he had observed the same exact 7 people around the Presidential limo that I was commenting on, and the start of reactions he observed were basically identical to mine and ours were all within a couple of frames of each other. This is when I thought there is something here for the JFK case. To note, it was more than just seeing the same reactions, there was the proximity of seeing all the reactions start happening at about the same time, between Z140 and z150, which is within the 1 second timing I mentioned earlier for what the population would be expected to do on voluntary surprise reactions.
3) Reasons the results are credible and the method reliable.
A reliable theory has a few properties that are key. A basis that is accepted by technical experts, the ability to Predict results in the context, and Testability. I don’t know about other theories put forward, but this one has all three.
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A basis that is accepted by technical experts. This method has been reviewed and approved by two journals peer review groups, and published by one of them. Both journals told me it was good but I needed to trim out a lot of fat, I was too wordy (imagine that). The first journal that published it was the crime scene reconstruction journal. The second journal, a psychology journal, said that it was good, suggested some minor additions, but encouraged going to another journal since they debated about it and decided not to publish is because it was "not the subject matter they wanted at the time". I think once you include the Kennedy assassination topic that makes people nervous. An independent review by some professionals I know were aligned as well. Net, it has been accepted by a number of technical experts.
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The ability to Predict results in context. You have seen this method predicts a very narrow point in time (z124) as opposed to a large range over much later frames.
1) This result is newer but it predicted that there should be a subset of lower variability testimonies that aligns right with it.
It predicted what the anchored testimony results would be almost to the frame.
2)
It also predicted that Elsie Dorman should have a camera reaction (a startle reaction this time) at the predicted first shot frame. Analysis at the link below showed that this is indeed what appeared to happen, again at basically the exact predicted frame time. The link also appeared to show when the second shot was fired.
https://sites.google.com/view/dorman-zapruder-sync-on-elm-st/home 3) As follow up to its prediction of first shot trigger time, it indirectly suggested the idea of a minimum limo miss into pavement, which in turn would imply that the Tague mark was not the result of the first shot but another bullet fragment. Subsequent analysis of the Tague incident supports
a prediction of a third shot head fragment as causing the Tague incident. 4) Another piece of work is not yet complete but the perception time results here would also
predict there was no first shot at z160 as proposed from the acoustic analysis (the film blur was voluntary panning effects and comes from some extended jiggle analysis which supports that conclusion).
The technique does all sorts of predictions that appear to agree with observations.
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The method is Testable. Testability in a scenario separate from the JFK assassination would be a sign of a credible and reliable method. Unfortunately, this was also done. This one is kind of a Twilight Zone moment for me. One Sunday morning in August 2019 I got an email from the Editor of the Journal that published the method saying it was accepted but had a few suggestions to add and he wanted to remove some fat. He previously said it would be nice if it could be used for future cases given the proliferation of security cameras, many without audio. Later that day the news came out that there was a mass shooting in Dayton overnight with 27 injured and 9 dead. A few days later the police had a news conference and said they were looking for any information and showed a silent surveillance video from the balcony of the bar near where the shooting happened. They said their estimate was 30 seconds from the beginning of the shooting to the end where you could see the last shot from a policeman’s gun into the dead offender. With 7 people visible on the silent patio video showing reactions, I used this technique of reactions of the people on the patio to estimate the offenders first shot and using the policeman’s last shot, estimated the shooting at 32.67 seconds. I sent this to Dayton law enforcement and said it was a shooting duration based on a developmental method. A few days later police found a surveillance video further down and across the street that had sound. The shots you could audibly hear on that video yielded an actual shooting event duration of 32.616 seconds. Our method was testably very close and better than the initial police estimate. It was also spookily off by 0.054 seconds.
Net, the method was testable, and succeeded, in another unfortunate set of circumstances.
