JFK's Head Snap and the Implausible Jet-Effect and Neurospasm Theories

[Michael Carney]

Jerrol Custer, x-ray technician, had been instructed by Dr Ebersol (sp) to tape metal fragments to the skull bone of JFK. What the skull had originally was very small fragments, nothing like those that would have come from a metal jacked bullet, if you would have gotten any frags at all from a jacketed bullet.

[Michael T. Griffith]

No one ever claimed the ‘object’ was 6.5 mm across?

The truth is, the size is probably between 6.0 mm and 7.0 mm. And possibly a bit smaller than 6.0 mm. Or a bit larger than 7.0 mm. It should be called a 6 to 7 mm object, not a 6.5 mm fragment. To say it is a 6.5 mm fragment, or a 6.500 fragment, implies its size is known to great precision, and it would be a massive coincidence, that it should match the diameter of a WCC/MC with such precision, by sheer chance. But I suppose CTers will continue to call it a 6.5 mm fragment just like they call the Single Bullet Theory the Magic Bullet Theory. Because the label they put on things is very important to propaganda.

Lots of people, both LNers and CTers have called it a 6.5 mm fragment, but only because early CTers were successful in getting this label established early on. But I will not call it such in the future. Not until it is proven to be somewhere between 6.45 and 6.55 mm in size. Which will never happen. To me it is a 6 to 7 mm object (no, not even a 6 to 7 mm fragment).

Look, if you just cannot bring yourself to read the research, there's no point in discussing this issue further with you.

Now, CTers were not the ones who first described the object as being 6.5 mm in diameter. The Clark Panel were the ones who measured the "fragment" to be 6.5 mm in diameter, as they stated in their 1968 report:

This fragment as seen in the latter film is round and measures 6.5 mm in diameter. . . . (p. 11)

No conspiracy theorist knew anything about this fragment until the Clark Panel's report became available.

P.S. Larry Sturdivan argued that this was an object that was accidentally placed in or on the head. But most LNers say it is a defect in the X-Ray, which I understand does happen. That is one reason multiple X-Rays are taken. So, such defects can be more easily identified when they appear in only one X-Ray but not the others. I don’t take a strong stand on either theory, except to note that an accidental object is possible, when the “object” in question does not look like any kind of fragment but like something that is commonly carried in a pocket.

And I have already explained why the accidental-object theory is ridiculous. The object is spatially consistent with the small genuine fragment in the back of the head, so the odds that it is some kind of pill that was dropped on the table and x-rayed with JFK's head over it are astronomically remote. This is not to mention the implausibility that no one would have noticed a pill that size lying on the table.

Furthermore, if the object were a pill, this would mean that it was present on the AP x-ray at the autopsy, which in turn would mean that nobody noticed it, even though it would have been the most obvious "fragment" on the x-rays, far more obvious than the two smaller fragments that the autopsy doctors discerned on the x-rays and removed from the skull.

Most important, and most telling, is that the "pill," to be that bright on the x-ray, would have had to contain more metal than any of JFK's fillings.

The theory that the object is a defect in the x-ray is a howler. For one thing, I would like to see a single solitary example of an x-ray defect being nearly perfectly circular except for the bottom-right portion of the object. Moreover, if the object were an x-ray defect, this would mean it was present on the AP x-ray at the autopsy, which in turn would mean that nobody at the autopsy noticed it. Even more unbelievably, this would also mean that by sheer, cosmic coincidence, the defect occurred in just the exact right place to be spatially consistent with its partner image on the lateral x-rays.

Your labored efforts to avoid the obvious, logical, and scientific conclusion that the 6.5 mm object was planted on the AP x-ray are as sad and silly as if a construction worker who was alone on a tall scaffold threw a small screw at a coworker on the ground and hit his helmet with it, and if the guilty worker then denied throwing the screw and claimed that a piece of space debris had hit his coworker's helmet. Yes, technically speaking, this explanation would not be categorically impossible, since each year some space debris does fall to Earth, but sensible people would dismiss the explanation as ridiculous and too far fetched to warrant a moment's consideration.

[Michael Carney]

I invite everyone to watch the documentary "JFK - The Smoking Gun" by Colin McLaren. The video can be found on line and it is an hour and a half long. It explains the fragments, JFK's head movement, the cover-up and more. People spend hours writing on this site, you all can certainly spend 90 min to watch the documentary and learn something very interesting.

[Tim Nickerson]

I invite everyone to watch the documentary "JFK - The Smoking Gun" by Colin McLaren. The video can be found on line and it is an hour and a half long. It explains the fragments, JFK's head movement, the cover-up and more. People spend hours writing on this site, you all can certainly spend 90 min to watch the documentary and learn something very interesting.

It does not explain the two large bullet fragments found in the limo. It also doesn't explain how Hickey could have fired the fatal shot when he was still seated at the time.

[Michael Carney]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood which frags you were talking about. I was thinking the frags in the skull x-ray.
Hickey was seated on the back of the backseat with the AR 15, then he stood on the back seat. Two secret service agents saw Hickey with the gun and one the thought he had fired it. Over ten people in the motorcade smelled gunsmoke. It explains the jerking backward of JFK's head also.

[Michael T. Griffith]

I invite everyone to watch the documentary "JFK - The Smoking Gun" by Colin McLaren. The video can be found on line and it is an hour and a half long. It explains the fragments, JFK's head movement, the cover-up and more. People spend hours writing on this site, you all can certainly spend 90 min to watch the documentary and learn something very interesting.

The video does explain a few things, and it does a decent job of exposing part of the cover-up, but it gets many things very wrong. McLaren bases his case almost entirely on Howard Donahue's research. But Donahue, although he made some important discoveries, was very poorly read on the medical evidence and failed to consider all the disclosures that came from the ARRB releases and the research developments that occurred in the mid- and late 1990s.

When I corresponded with Donahue several years after his book came out, he was very good on the dented shell and on the impossibility of any sizable fragment shearing off an FMJ bullet and ending up below the shearing point after striking it at a downward angle, but he appeared to be unaware of the ARRB releases and the new research developments.

For example, Donahue assumed the 6.5 mm object was a genuine fragment that came from the bullet that struck the curb early in the shooting, but we now know that the object is a ghosted image that was placed over the small genuine fragment in the back of the skull.

Donahue uncritically accepted the Clark Panel and the HSCA's relocation of the rear head entry wound by a whopping 4 inches, but we now know that the skull x-rays show no entry wound at the proposed higher location, and that when the HSCA showed the back-of-the-head photo to Finck, he went so far as to question how the photo had been authenticated as having been taken during the autopsy.

Donahue was aware of some of the problems with the relocation of the rear head entry wound, but he preferred the higher location because it fit with his theory that Hickey fired the officially acknowledged fatal head shot. He acknowledged in his book that the EOP entry wound could not have come from the sixth-floor window and could not have come from Hickey. When the Clark Panel, and then the HSCA, said the entry wound was 4 inches higher than where the autopsy doctors adamantly said it was, he was willing to take their word because he thought it provided a plausible trajectory from the entry point back to Hickey's rifle.

[Michael Carney]

For example, Donahue assumed the 6.5 mm object was a genuine fragment that came from the bullet that struck the curb early in the shooting, but we now know that the object is a ghosted image that was placed over the small genuine fragment in the back of the skull.

Please excuse my ignorance but please explain what you mean by “ghosted image” in this situation. One thing I would like to mention is that JFK said “I’ve been hit”, this was before the magic bullet so I assumed that he was hit with a frag from the bullet that hit the pavement. He would not have been able to say anything after being hit with the magic bullet.

Donahue uncritically accepted the Clark Panel and the HSCA's relocation of the rear head entry wound by a whopping 4 inches, but we now know that the skull x-rays show no entry wound at the proposed higher location, and that when the HSCA showed the back-of-the-head photo to Finck, he went so far as to question how the photo had been authenticated as having been taken during the autopsy.

I don’t know that it matters if the bullet hit JFK high in the back of the head or 4 inches lower. He was leaning forward and downward. A bullet coming almost perfectly horizontal would do what it did to JFK. A frangible round of course, not a fmj bullet. The fact that the entry wound measurement was noted in the autopsy as 6 mm tells me it couldn’t have been a 6.5 mm round but a 5.65 diameter would explain an AR 15 round.

Lets sum it up: with the diameter of the hole in the back of JFK’s head, the explosive destruction of JFK’s head and direction (the physics of it, an explosion in his head), Hickey’s behavior after, the cover up by the SS, the smoke smelled in the motorcade, the witness’s that saw Hickey with the gun, the one SS Agent that thought Hickey fired off a round, what was going on in the autopsy room with Dr Ebersol and Jerrome tells you a cover up was in progress. And who is pushing the cover up and getting the body out of Dallas, the Secret Service, why?

[Tim Nickerson]

I'm sorry, I misunderstood which frags you were talking about. I was thinking the frags in the skull x-ray.
Hickey was seated on the back of the backseat with the AR 15, then he stood on the back seat. Two secret service agents saw Hickey with the gun and one the thought he had fired it. Over ten people in the motorcade smelled gunsmoke. It explains the jerking backward of JFK's head also.

I'm talking about CE 567 and CE 569, which were matched to Oswald's Carcano.