On the 50th Anniversary of His Assassination, My JFK Story

If what I saw was accurate, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was not killed by rifle fire from the Texas Book Repository.

Law school in the mid-70's.  I had all the right, i.e. "hard" courses.  A full plate. Then I came across an intro-course into forensic science.  3-credit hours. Neat.  One evening a week, 7 to 10 p.m.  Even neater.

The upside was it was an evening class, once a week.    The downside was it was an evening class just long enough to ensure you would have dinner before.

Most lectures featured an acclaimed expert in some field of forensics and, naturally, these individuals, being experts, brought slide shows of the sort that often made you wish you hadn't succumbed to hunger before class.

The federal Department of Justice was said to have generously endowed the course which furnished enough money to bring in really top notch talent from vast distances away.

We were at "blood spatter" in the curriculum when they brought in this pioneer forensic scientist from Alaska.   After a cursory survey of his field, he took about two hours to take us through the Kennedy assassination.  He was in Dallas within a day or two of the killing but I won't digress to get into that.

He took we eager law students through the Zapruder film, frame by frame.  In particular he focused on the frames that showed Kennedy being shot in which a pink mist emerges from his forehead, immediately after which a large chunk of Kennedy's skull and hair from the back of his skull blast outward and fall onto the trunk of the presidential limo.  Who hasn't seen the frames of Jackie Kennedy crawling out onto the trunk lid to retrieve her husband's skull and brain matter?

And here's the thing.   As part of his federal commission, this scientist decided to run experiments at an abbatoir with the same rifle supposedly used by Oswald fired from the same angle only into the skulls of cattle awaiting slaughter.  It was necessary that the cattle be alive to test the ballistic affects on a living creature's skull.

Our lecturer's experiments utilized those ultra-high speed cameras that can literally freeze a bullet in mid-air.  He recorded round after round impacting the body of a living animal.

Each and every round recorded, whether fired into skull or torso, produced the same phenomenon - a pink blood vapour mist at the entry point.  I watched slides showing pink mist after pink mist as a succession of creatures were killed by high velocity bullets.

Back to Zapruder.   You see in one frame the pink mist spraying out from Kennedy's forehead an instant before the back of his skull flies out onto the trunk lid of the Lincoln.

Our lecturer said, until somebody could replicate those conditions with a demonstrated shot from behind (the supposed Lee Harvey Oswald shot from behind) with the pink mist from the front of Kennedy's head (away from Oswald) afterward and the skull fragment blasting back out onto the trunk of the limo first, there was simply no way the government's story was believable.

Make up your own mind about how and why and by whom Kennedy was assassinated.   But, before you accept the government's story, find just one example of the "pink mist" resulting from an exit wound.