The Truly Magical Bullet

[John Iacoletti]

Another bad hair day, Johnny ?

You asked me to speculate about what might have happened to the missed shot.

My response was that it hit concrete and probably fragmented making it very difficult to find.

I also pointed out that finding a bullet that missed the limo and could have wound up anywhere in or around the plaza would naturally be far more difficult than locating where a frontal entry bullet to JFK's throat went.

I think those are logical, reasonable, rational responses and observations.

Of course you do.

So your "logical", "common sense", speculative answer (guess) is "duh....I dunno....it musta disappeared".

So, unless you're a raging hypocrite, then you should also accept the same answer for where the throat shot bullet went.

The fact that you find that kind of answer "plausible" only when you are the one giving it not only shows your hypocrisy, but also your megalomaniacal arrogance.  Not to mention your continued cowardly and juvenile namecalling when your fallacious and vacuous arguments are shot down again and again.  Keep it up though.  You're making your side cringe with each and every post.

[John Iacoletti]

It seems that you are not only a believer in Large Secret Enduring Conspiracies, but in mind reading as well. How else could you tell that the police didn?t do something they never did, shutdown a vital street for hours to search the streets for possible bullet fragments, because right from the get go, they had a predetermined conclusion.

How ironic.  You seem to be the self-appointed mindreader here as I have never said that I believe in "Large Secret Enduring Conspiracies" nor did I ever say anything about the police shutting down a street.  Those are your strawmen.

How does them bringing in the three tramps for questioning and summoning many policemen to check out a man who ignored their call to stop and entered a library fit in to the police following ?a predetermined conclusion?.

I think you are very confused.  It was the Warren Commission "investigation" that had the predetermined conclusion.

That is why I said ?probable?, not ?absolutely?. It is possible Oswald left a shell there to create a mystery for the police, so they would falsely assume that there was an extra shot that was never fired there. It is even less likely that Oswald left the shell in the rifle after his last practice shot many months earlier, and never operated the bolt that would have ejected it.

You never give any actual justifications when you label things "probable" or "likely".  That just seems to correlate with whether you just want to believe it or not.

For one thing, you don't know that Oswald did anything with that rifle, but what's so unlikely about leaving an empty shell in a rifle to protect the firing pin?

Most likely, the three shells mean there were three shots fired from that rifle from that floor. And there is evidence for all three shots.

Really?  What is the sum total of evidence for the alleged "first missed shot"?

And the Zapruder film shows her looking at neither man until well after both were obviously wounded.

Way overstated.  Nellie's head is visible in very few Z frames before the head shot.

[John Iacoletti]

What "tests" are you referring to?  Camera jiggle theory has never been used to consistently and accurately pinpoint shots. Never. It is just an untested theory.

Not only that, but Joe continues to completely ignore the "jiggle" near Z290, which is as big as the one near Z158, and the jiggle near Z190 for no other reason than that they don't fit his "probable" predetermined narrative.

[Jack Trojan]

What "tests" are you referring to?  Camera jiggle theory has never been used to consistently and accurately pinpoint shots. Never. It is just an untested theory.

Jiggle analysis is not just an untested theory. A film camera operator will involuntarily "jiggle" the camera in response to a loud sound. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt. Whether we can identify the jiggles and pinpoint shots is another matter. But what a Camera Shake Analysis CAN tell you is when shots were NOT fired, which can be as informative as finding their jiggles amongst the background noise on film.

How is it that Zapruder jiggled the camera in response to a shot at z222 before he would have heard any sound from the shot? The bullet travels at about twice the speed of sound.  A shot at z222, which was about 185 feet from the SN would have been fired about 90 ms earlier.  So the sound, traveling at 1130 fps, would have reached Zapruder, who was about 275 feet from the SN, about  240 ms. after firing, or about 150 ms after z222 i.e. z225.

A film records camera shake very accurately. While stabilizing the Z film I filtered out the noise and graphed the camera shake to look for gunshot jiggles. I used the confirmed jiggle at frame 313 as my control and looked for similar jiggle patterns such as at z225. There appears to be approx. a 5 frame delay between hearing the shot and reflexively jiggling the camera.



Note that there's a telltale jiggle that peaks at z230, which suggests that Zapruder was responding to a sound at z225. If your math is correct, then the sound reached Zapruder 1/6th of a second after the bullet struck JFK at z222, behind the Stemmons sign.

Note the splices at z158 & z213.

Note the massive edit at z333 just when we would expect to see a hole in the back of JFK's head.

[Jerry Freeman]

What "tests" are you referring to?  Camera jiggle theory has never been used to consistently and accurately pinpoint shots. Never. It is just an untested theory.
 

So is the Magic Bullet!!... a theory that was never proven.

[Andrew Mason]

Jiggle analysis is not just an untested theory. A film camera operator will involuntarily "jiggle" the camera in response to a loud sound. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt. Whether we can identify the jiggles and pinpoint shots is another matter. But what a Camera Shake Analysis CAN tell you is when shots were NOT fired, which can be as informative as finding their jiggles amongst the background noise on film.

The problem is that camera shake and panning errors occur for a variety of reasons.  Zapruder was not panning at a constant rate. He stops panning in several places (from z165 to about z186 and z214 to z222 there no panning at all).  He resumes panning at z223 but then stops panning from z227 to z232 (keep your eye on the position of the tree in the background).  So there is bound to be some jerkiness to the image because he is starting and stopping all the time.  Is that because of a shot? I don't think it has been shown that people reflexively start and stop panning when they hear a shot - or just before they hear a shot as in the case of the panning that starts at z223.

And you cannot say that people will consistently jiggle the camera when they hear a loud noise without data from actual experiments using a large sample of people that bears this out.  That is the difference between science and a plausible theory.

A film records camera shake very accurately. While stabilizing the Z film I filtered out the noise and graphed the camera shake to look for gunshot jiggles. I used the confirmed jiggle at frame 313 as my control and looked for similar jiggle patterns such as at z225. There appears to be approx. a 5 frame delay between hearing the shot and reflexively jiggling the camera.

Let's assume that you are right, that Zapruder would have jiggled the camera in response to hearing  a shot.  According to this Wikipedia page, a reflexive startle response should begin within 60-121 ms. for the head, neck and shoulders to move, or within about 1-2 frames of the loud sound. Let's suppose that the jiggle at z200 was in response to the first shot (Willis, Betzner, motorcade and Elm St. witnesses, etc).  If that was a startle reflex within 60-121 ms of the sound, it would put the shot sound reaching Zapruder at z198 from a bullet that struck 3 frames earlier at z195 and fired at z193-194.  This also fits with Jack Ready's release of his right-hand from the handhold and the beginning of his rearward turn which occurs between z198 and z199. Because Ready was behind the limo, he would have heard the muzzle blast about 2 frames before Zapruder (path difference = 275-150 ft = 125 ft; time diff. = 125/1130 = .110 s or 110 ms.).  All of that fits a shot at z193-194.  There is a lot of witness evidence that puts the first shot about that time. That is corroborated by other evidence such as the Secret Service film showing JFK at that point to be clear of the oak tree as viewed from the SN.   Why do jiggle analysis "experts" reject that jiggle as a response to a shot?

[Joe Elliott]

The missed shot probably hit concrete and might have fragmented making it even more difficult to find or recover.

Actually, it wouldn?t have to hit concrete to fragment. Asphalt will cause the bullet to fragment as well. The following video shows what would happen:

If the police had shut down the street for several hours, trying up traffic in downtown Dallas for the rest of the day, to conduct a careful search of over ten thousand square feet of street pavement, all they would have found was some metal fragments in a small hole in the street. None of these fragments could have been linked to the rifle they were fired from.

CTers insist a careful search should have been made of the street. The whole case against Oswald goes up in smoke because this was not done.

I don?t see why they think this would make such a big difference.

** A rifle found on the sixth floor.

** A bullet found at the hospital that was fired from that rifle.

** Two bullet fragments found that were fired from the rifle were found in the limousine.

** Fingerprints of the suspect found on the rifle and on the boxes by the window.

** A suspect who leaves the scene immediately who pulled a gun on the first police officer who approaches him (actually, likely the first two officers) within 75 minutes later.

All of this is not enough to convince them that Oswald is guilty. I doubt a small hole, like the small holes one typically finds on a road, with a bunch of metal fragments that can?t be tied to any rifle, can convince them.



By the way, this test pretty well lays to rest the theory that the bullet ricocheted off the street and went on to wound Mr. Tague about one hundred yards down the street. Instead the bullet would fragment into many little pieces that would fly up about a couple of feet and fall straight back down onto the road. I don?t think one can find a ballistic expert, who conducted a real-world experiment on this would ever say anything different.

But, why go with real-world experiments when armchair guesses of what might have happened to a bullet hitting the road can give on a much happier result.





In the following video, Luke and Michael Haag talk about the Single Bullet Theory:

While there is much that CTers, backed up with extensive armchair research, have found to question the Single Bullet Theory, Ballistic Experts, who conduct real-world research, have found this theory to be very good.

Where is the ballistic expert, who conduct real-world research, who think differently? In the United States? In Europe> In Japan? In India? Even in Russia? No where to be found. The explanation? The Large Secret Enduring Conspiracy controls all of them. None dare speak.

[Joe Elliott]

Jiggle analysis is not just an untested theory. A film camera operator will involuntarily "jiggle" the camera in response to a loud sound. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt. Whether we can identify the jiggles and pinpoint shots is another matter. But what a Camera Shake Analysis CAN tell you is when shots were NOT fired, which can be as informative as finding their jiggles amongst the background noise on film.

A film records camera shake very accurately. While stabilizing the Z film I filtered out the noise and graphed the camera shake to look for gunshot jiggles. I used the confirmed jiggle at frame 313 as my control and looked for similar jiggle patterns such as at z225. There appears to be approx. a 5 frame delay between hearing the shot and reflexively jiggling the camera.




Note that there's a telltale jiggle that peaks at z230, which suggests that Zapruder was responding to a sound at z225. If your math is correct, then the sound reached Zapruder 1/6th of a second after the bullet struck JFK at z222, behind the Stemmons sign.

Note the splices at z158 & z213.

Note the massive edit at z333 just when we would expect to see a hole in the back of JFK's head.

The data you show is off.

The study by Dr. William Hartmann conducted in 1978 for the HSCA found strong jiggles in the Zapruder film, consistent with a startle reaction. The 6 strongest jiggles are shown in the chart below:


jiggle    corres.   strength
frame     frame
158/159     153       2.4
191         185       2.5     sign
197         192       3.4     sign
210         205       2.5     sign
227         222       2.6
318         313       3.7



The first column shows where the frame the jiggle was found. The second column shows which frame this jiggle would be associated with, assuming a 5-frame delay in the startle reaction., The third number shows the strength of the startle reaction. The fourth word ?sign? indicates a jiggle that was likely caused by the limousine passing behind the sign.

Source of information, Larry Sturdivan?s book ?The JFK Myths?.



Tests show that loud noises cause involuntary camera jiggles. But so, does the subject passing behind an object in the foreground. The camera jiggles at z191, z197 and z210 happen while the limousine is starting to pass behind the sign or is almost totally hidden. We would expect jiggles here, whether there are shots or not.

The other three camera jiggles are associated with frames z153, z222 and z313.

A shot at z313 (actually, probably more like z312) is certain.

A shot at z222 is very, very likely, due to the Connally coat movement at z224 and the reactions of JFK and Connally during the z220?s.

A shot at z153 has the least support but does have the testimony of Governor Connally and the apparent reaction by Rosemary Willis.


While the original film had some minor damaged and needed a couple of splices, intact copies were available and used by Dr. Hartmann where needed.



In any case, the jiggle you note at z230 was not at z230 but at z227. This is too bad because a jiggle at z230 would imply a shot at z225, which is just too late to be associated with the coat movement at z224. But the jiggle which was actually at z227, implies a shot at z222, which matches perfectly with the coat movement at z224, which the tests by Dr. Lattimer would cause the coat to move a tenth of a second after the shot strikes Connally.

Of course, I understand, that the camera jiggle at z227, and the coat movement at z224, should be looked at as an amazing coincidence. Nothing more.