With the Trump administration releasing tens of thousands of pages on the Kennedy assassination, it looks like a good excuse to do an update on my 60th anniversary magnum opus on the Single Bullet Theory. After all, there’s no way my 18 bullet points were going to cover all the evidence for this settled science. So I’d like to add some pieces of evidence I missed, add some related thoughts and propose a scientific experiment.

What really inspired me was running across the featured image. Here it is uncropped:

In the upper right corner you see the base of exhibit CE399, the so called magic bullet. You’ll notice that it’s been flattened and mostly on the top. This is consistent with the fully jacketed bullet going through Kennedy’s back and neck, being slowed, being destabilized, tumbling and hitting Governor Connally’s rib sideways making the oblong shaped wound. I’ve seen no other succinct explanation for this deformation. There’ve been experiments done to show that if the bullet is slowed enough, it will not shatter. I’m always amused when I hear hunters say they’ve seen bullets do all kinds of crazy things, but they’ve never seen one end up looking like this. Isn’t this just another crazy thing for a bullet to do? The military used copper jackets to prevent bullets from expanding and causing serious debilitating injuries. This goes back to the 1989 Hague Declaration.

In the lower right of the image, are the fragments removed from John Connally. In my post, I mentioned that the House Select Committee did neutron activation analysis on these fragments and found that they came from CE399. This technique will not work on all bullets, especially modern ones, but the mixes of metals at that time and the bullets for Oswald’s rifle in particular were inconsistent enough to make positive identifications. I mentioned that parts of only two bullets were found in the limo. No fragments of the first shot were ever found.

My interest in this subject comes from Gerald Posner’s definitive book, Case Closed, especially the computer graphics analysis. My post mentioned people who accepted that Oswald alone shot JFK, but couldn’t accept the Single Bullet Theory, most notably, John Ziegler. I’ve been a loyal follower and Twitter/x advocate of his work on the Jerry Sandusky case. I’ve explained this at length in a couple posts on the Mann v Steyn case. He has a half baked theory where the first shot misfires, goes slightly into Kennedy’s back and falls out. I ridiculed him for it and he got so mad that he blocked me on Twitter/X. This is irritating since I can’t quote or retweet his tweets. So to retaliate, I’m going to do some arm chair psychoanalysis on him. I don’t think this is as bad as Stephan Lewandowsky’s weaponized professional kind.

John Ziegler’s grandfather was Hans Ziegler. He was a German rocket scientist who was brought to the US under Operation Paperclip. He’s probably best known for his advocacy of using solar cells on satellites and also gets us a little closer to the subjects of climate and energy. In one of his many podcast episodes he mentioned being attacked because of his Nazi ancestors. His response was that his grandfather was an asshole but not a Nazi. My guess is that he probably had some argument with him over a science topic where he got squashed and was left with a deep resentment of scientific expertise. This might explain his stubborn recalcitrance in holding on to his hypothesis and not listening to or addressing counter arguments and facts.

Going back to the picture, the fragments on the bottom look to me like they would fit in the base of CE399. What I propose is that high resolution computer models be made of CE399 and the fragments. Then Finite Element Analysis could be used to see if they could be made to fit together or compute how plausibly they could be configured. Perhaps a convincing diagram could be made or even an animation of the bullet deforming and ejecting the fragments. I asked Grok who would be good candidates to do such an analysis and put the exchange in a pdf. It recommended a bunch of prominent experts to do the work at Sandia National Laboratories and gave some procedures. It also included Cyril Wecht as one of the candidates. I had to inform Grok that Wecht had died.