Subject: Acoustical Evidence: Proof of 2nd Gunman? Part 2 (New Edition) Date: 25 Nov 1998 23:42:16 GMT From: mtgriffith@aol.com (MTGriffith) Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk PART 2 of 2 THE HSCA'S ACOUSTICAL EVIDENCE: PROOF OF A SECOND GUNMAN? Michael T. Griffith The HSCA identified the microphone of police officer H. B. McClain as the mike that recorded the sounds on the tape, but McClain later insisted that his cycle was in the wrong location to have done this, and according to some researchers, including some conspiracy theorists, the photographic evidence proves that McClain was correct (e.g., Livingstone 358). Posner sees McClain's denial as evidence against the dictabelt recording. The NAS panel likewise appealed to McClain's denial. McClain said he couldn't have recorded the sounds on the tape because he accompanied the President's limousine to Parkland Hospital and had his siren on en route to the hospital. "Yet," says Posner, "on the dictabelt recording there are no sirens" (Posner 240). However, some researchers have countered by claiming that a UPI photograph shows McClain was still in Dealey Plaza after the limousine had departed for the hospital (Marrs 533; Scheim 35). But critics of the tape reply that the Hughes film shows that McClain "was barely past the intersection of Houston and Main streets when the shooting began" and that therefore he was not in a position to record the shots anyway (Livingstone 358; Scally 38). In addition, former Committee chief counsel Blakey has indicated that McClain left for the hospital at right about the same time the limousine departed (Blakey and Billings 117). One of the HSCA's acoustical experts stated that the sound of sirens would not have been audible over the noise of the motorcycle's engine anyway (Scheim 35). It seems that a strong case can be made that McClain's mike was not the one that recorded the sounds on the tape. I should add, though, that according to defenders of the HSCA's findings, the acoustical evidence is not dependent on the assumption that the open microphone was Officer McClain's. Christopher Scally argues that Officer Bobby Hargis's mike could have recorded the sounds on the dictabelt tape (Scally 37-43). Says Scally, In his testimony before the HSCA on December 29, 1978, Dr. Barger said that, having slowed down, the level of engine noise remained constant for 30 to 40 seconds. It then rose to an even higher pitch than it had earlier reached, and then remained at this high level for at least two minutes. In a letter to Bob Cutler dated February 2, 1979, Dr. Barger disclosed that the motorcycle engine was, in fact, IDLING after the shots were fired, before apparently moving off at high speed. A detailed study of the photographic evidence showed that the actions of police motorcyclist Bobby W. Hargis were entirely consistent with these facts. Hargis, who was riding approximately 10 feet behind and immediately to the left of the President, can be seen in many photographs taken in Dealey Plaza. His testimony before the Warren Commission can be verified by reference to these photographs. . . . Film of the motorcade on Elm Street shows that Hargis stopped his motorcycle immediately after the final shot. Bond 4 and Bothun 4, two still photographs taken 20 and 26 seconds later respectively, show Hargis returning to his motorcycle and remounting it, exactly as he testified. . . . Unlike those of McClain, the actions of Officer Hargis correspond exactly with those which must have occurred in order to generate the motorcycle engine noises found on the radio recording. . . . Researcher Stephen Barber has recently analyzed these sounds in great detail. His study confirms the sound of the idling engine, and also the sound of another motor- cycle passing the one which is stationary. This second motorcycle is, in fact, the one ridden by Officer McClain, who can be seen riding past Hargis' stationary motor- cycle in the Bond photograph taken 20 seconds after the final shot. Just after McClain goes by, Barber detects the sound of Hargis snapping his kick-stand into place as he prepares to leave the scene. During the next 15 seconds Barber notes the echo of Hargis' engine as he passes through the Triple Underpass. For the next 20 seconds, according to Barber, the engine noise reverts to an "idling" sound. It may well be, however, that this simply the drop in engine noise level which would follow as Hargis emerges from the tunnel and scans the area, exactly as he testified. [Hargis indicated that he slowed down after going through the triple underpass in order to scan the area to see if anyone was running away from the plaza.] The noise level rises again, however, as Hargis circles round and returns to the TSBD, from where he transmitted on Channel 2 of the police radio between 12:34 and 12:35 pm. It was during the latter part of the return journey that Hargis recorded the sound of sirens approaching and receding, and it is quite possible that these sirens were on vehicles which passed Hargis, going in the opposite direction towards Parkland Hospital. This reconstruction of Hargis' movements is consistent with Dr. Barger's finding that, following the period of idling immediately after the shots were fired, the motorcycle accelerated and remained in motion for 2 to 3 minutes. It also answers most, if not all, of the outstanding questions about the identity of the motor- cycle policeman with the jammed transmitter. (Scally 39-42, original emphasis) Scally concedes that his scenario does raise one new question: If Hargis was the source of the interference on channel 1 between 12:28 and 12:33, how could the following exchange have taken place on channel 2 less than two minutes later: HARGIS. A passer-by states the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository Building. DISPATCHER. Get all the information. Scally says there are three possible explanations, "any one of which, if true, would be satisfactory" (Scally 42). He continues by presenting these explanations: - Hargis realized his transmitter was switched to Channel 1, and he simply turned it back to Channel 2. This possibility was not discussed during his testimony before the Warren Commission, nor is it mentioned in the HSCA's published evidence. - The fault in his radio caused it to alternate between Channels 1 and 2, and it had reverted to Channel 2 automatically by the time he returned to the Book Depository and spoke to the dispatcher. - His Channel 2 transmission was made over a different radio. This is at least POSSIBLE, since Hargis undoubtedly parked his motorcycle near the TSBD and then moved around the area on foot. He could therefore easily have used another radio to make his transmission on Channel 2. Once again, however, neither Warren Commission testimony nor the HSCA's final report address this possibility. (Scally 43-44, original emphasis) But critics of the acoustical evidence argue that the sirens on the tape prove that the motorcycle was not with the motorcade. "There is no possible way," says Todd Wayne Vaughan, "in which this cycle was with the President's motorcade. It's a physical impossibility" (Livingstone 351). Vaughan explains, Beginning at 262 seconds and lasting until 299 seconds [on the tape] are the sounds of several sirens. These sirens are very important as to determining the location of the cycle with the open mike. The sirens are the sirens mounted on the motorcade vehicles. They were all turned on following the assassination. . . . The sirens on the tape sound as if they are passing a stationary microphone not in the motorcade but on Stemmons Freeway. The sirens rise in intensity, fade, rise again, and fade again. This continues and suggests that several vehicles are passing the open mike. It is clear that the open mike is not in the motorcade but somewhere on Stemmons Freeway. (Livingstone 351) Harrison Livingstone raises the issue of why no shots are audible on the tape and cites this as another reason that the motorcycle could not have been in Dealey Plaza: Why, now, are there no shots audible on the tape? Rifle shots in such an enclosed urban space, echoing off buildings, would be very loud and certainly were heard by everyone in Dealey Plaza. Was there some technical reason that they might not record through an open mike located somewhere in Dealey Plaza? The answer is that there was no microphone open anywhere near Dealey Plaza, and so the gunshots could not have been recorded. (Livingstone 357) It must be remembered that the HSCA's acoustical scientists identified certain sound impulses on the tape as gunshots. One cannot play the dictabelt and hear gunfire. It is not audible. WC supporter Jim Moore gives some of his reasons for rejecting the dictabelt recording as evidence of multiple gunmen: Not once in its final report did the HSCA address how a gunman firing from the knoll might have missed, nor did it speculate on where the bullet hit. Having rushed to judgment on the issue of the dictabelt and the recording showed, the Committee dissolved itself with the admonition that it was unable to identify the other gunman and that the Department of Justice should examine the audio evidence to see if it concurred with the Committee's findings. Of course, the Justice Department did not concur, nor did the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS review, in particular, discovered the existence of "bleedover" on the Dictabelt at the time of the assassination [actually, the bleedover was brought to the NAS panel's attention by a private researcher]. This bleedover [i.e., the Decker transmission] contained dialogue between law enforcement officers that indicated the portion of the recording where shots were found had actually been recorded a minute or so after the assassination. (Moore 142-143) Defenders of the dictabelt contend that the problems noted in the tape are outweighed by the presence of the N-wave, by the correlations between the tape and the motorcade's movement, and by the fact that the sound for the posited grassy knoll shot was determined to come from the same area from which several witnesses said shots were fired. Defenders of the tape also note that the acoustical fingerprint for the grassy knoll shot matched point for point all of the 26 impulses of the test shot fired from the knoll during the Committee's site simulation. Additionally, some conspiracists maintain that the tape in evidence is a copy. This, they claim, could explain the technical discrepancies which have been found in the recording. What about the gaps in the recording? And what effect could they have on the timing of the transmissions? Defenders of the tape note that faulty time-keeping by the dispatchers, and the fact that there's no way to know how long the machine was turned off during the two recordings, might explain Sheriff Decker's seemingly problematic transmission. During the broadcasts, the Dallas dispatcher notes the time every so often, but is subject to some error by the angle at which he had to look at his clock, and the FBI and Dallas Police found in a test with stopwatches in 1964 that the time was often out by as much as one minute. There were three different dispatchers working at the time of the assassination, and they used three different clocks. The clocks got out of synchronization by as much as one minute over the course of a month before they were reset. During the assassination, there was a great deal of confusion and pressure, and the time checks could not be expected to be perfectly accurate. And the Channel 2 recording had stopped twice at Curry's two transmissions: his "at the underpass" report and his "Parkland Hospital" transmission. The BBN report states clearly that there is no way of knowing how long the machine was off during the two recordings. Vaughn and Barber equated the two tape times to each other nevertheless, using the simultaneous transmissions by Decker on Channel 2 and both faint and incomplete on Channel 1, a few seconds after the last shot. The "gap" is not on Channel 1. (Groden and Livingstone 254-255; Note: Livingstone no longer accepts the validity of the HSCA's conclusions about the recording.) If all of the Committee's conclusions about the dictabelt are accepted as accurate, then one must believe that the grassy knoll shooter somehow missed the entire limousine, even though he was only 111 feet away from it, and that the three other shots all came from the alleged sniper's nest. Few researchers believe the shooting occurred in this manner. Some defenders of the acoustical evidence assert that the HSCA simply mismatched the impulses on the tape with the Zapruder film. The Committee said the fourth impulse (or "shot") on the tape was the fatal head shot. But some researchers maintain that if the THIRD impulse is aligned with the head shot, then every other impulse matches an action in the Zapruder film. In fact, Robert Groden, a photographic expert who served as a consultant to the Select Committee on certain issues, claims that he met with Weiss and Aschkenasy and that the three of them found that the third impulse was the best match for the head shot. But, according to Groden, the Committee's chief counsel, Blakey, would not allow him to express this position in his testimony. Matthew Smith: Said Groden, "In all likelihood, the fatal shot did not come from the Book Depository, but rather from the grassy knoll; whether or not Lee Oswald was firing, someone else had actually killed the President." He went on to describe how when the fourth shot was matched up to the pictures of the President's head "exploding," none of the other shots were in alignment with the [Zapruder] film. But when the THIRD shot was advanced to match up with those pictures "EVERY OTHER IMPULSE MATCHED AN ACTION ON THE FILM EXACTLY." In HIGH TREASON, Groden recounted how Professor Blakey took him aside and ordered him not to express to the Committee any conclusions that he had drawn from his study of the film and tapes. The Congressmen (and the world) were to be told that the fatal shot came from the rear, and the fourth shot was the only one to be considered the head shot. (Smith 147, original emphasis) Leaving aside the issue of which impulses best match the head shot in the Zapruder film, other researchers doubt Groden's claim that he was denied the opportunity to share his alleged finding with the Select Committee. They wonder why Groden didn't say something about it during his testimony anyway, since he was under no legal obligation to remain silent about it. How could Blakey have prevented Groden from mentioning this important finding once he had begun his public testimony? Would Blakey have dared to interrupt Groden, in front of the Committee and the press, with TV cameras rolling, to tell him not to say another word on the subject? Since Blakey could have taken no legal action against Groden for revealing this finding during his testimony, what would Groden have had to fear anyway? And wouldn't Weiss and/or Aschkenasy have later said something about the supposed correlation between the third impulse and the head shot? Could it be that the dictabelt tape itself was recorded in Dealey Plaza during the shooting, and that there are indeed four (or more) gunshot impulses on it, but that the Committee's conclusions about the geographical origin of the shots are in error? It must be remembered that the Committee limited the test firings to the sixth-floor window and to one spot on the grassy knoll. No test shots were fired from any of the other locations that had long been suggested by researchers as possible firing positions, such as the Dal-Tex Building, the roof of the TSBD, and the area of the triple underpass. This was a serious mistake. Scally explains: The HSCA's decision to conduct test firings from the Book Depository and the knoll alone had serious repercussions, because in ignoring other possible firing points, they ruled out the likelihood that any of the unmatched sounds on the police radio tape could be impulses caused by shots from other locations such as, for example, the Dal-Tex building. (Scally 35) Moreover, Scally maintains that the Committee's acoustical experts were unable to match the second alleged shot on the tape with any of the test shots from the Depository Building: . . . examination of the correlations between the test shots and the sounds on the Dallas police tape shows that all of the matches with shots at this target were ultimately rejected as "false alarms." It seems there is NO acoustical or other evidence to prove that the second shot was fired from the Book Depository! (Scally 35, original emphasis) In summary, there is some evidence supporting the Committee's acoustical findings, but there is also evidence against them. Further study of the dictabelt tape must be done in order to determine for an absolute certainty that it contains the sounds of four or more gunshots. Among other things, a new, more thorough site test should be conducted. Then, an acoustical fingerprint should be done for every sound on the tape that could be a gunshot. (An acoustical fingerprint was done for the grassy knoll shot, but not for any of the other alleged shots on the tape.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- MICHAEL T. GRIFFITH is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, Texas, and the author of three books on Mormonism and ancient texts. In addition, he has attended Brigham Young University, Ricks College, Austin Peay State University, Mount Wachusett Community College, and Haifa University, where his studies centered around history and foreign languages, and where he has earned 123 semester hours thus far. His articles on the JFK assassination have appeared in DATELINE: DALLAS, in DALLAS '63, in THE ASSASSINATION CHRONICLES, and in the JFK-DEEP POLITICS QUARTERLY. He is also the author of the book COMPELLING EVIDENCE: A NEW LOOK AT THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY (Grand Prarie, TX: JFK-Lancer Productions and Publications, 1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY ------------ Blakey, G. Robert and Richard Billings, FATAL HOUR: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY BY ORGANIZED CRIME, Berkley Books Edition, New York: Berkley Books, 1992. Cornwell, Gary, REAL ANSWERS: THE JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION, Spicewood, Texas: Paleface Press, 1998. Groden, Robert and Harrison Edward Livingstone, HIGH TREASON: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND THE NEW EVIDENCE OF CONSPIRACY, Berkley Edition, New York: Berkley Books, 1990. Livingstone, Harrison Edward, KILLING THE TRUTH: DECEIT AND DECEPTION IN THE JFK CASE, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993. Marrs, Jim, CROSSFIRE: THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989. Marsh, W. Anthony, "The Ramsey Report," DATELINE: DALLAS, volume 1, numbers 2 and 3, Summer/Fall 1992, pp. 14-16. Moore, Jim, CONSPIRACY OF ONE, Ft. Worth: The Summit Group, 1991. Posner, Gerald, CASE CLOSED: LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK, New York: Random House, 1993. Scally, Christopher, "SO NEAR . . . AND YET SO FAR": THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON ASSASSINATIONS' INVESTIGATION INTO THE MURDER OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, Dallas, Texas: JFK Assassination Information Center, April, 1980. Scheim, David S., THE MAFIA KILLED PRESIDENT KENNEDY, London, England: Virgin Publishing Ltd, 1992. First published under the title CONTRACT ON AMERICA: THE MAFIA MURDER OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988. The retitled 1992 edition is a revised and updated version of the 1988 original. Smith, Matthew, JFK: THE SECOND PLOT, London: Mainstream Publishing, 1992. Trask, Richard, PICTURES OF THE PAIN: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY, Danvers, Massachusetts: Yeoman Press, 1994. MICHAEL T. GRIFFITH. 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