US Crimes that Refute Luis Alvarez on the JFK Assassination
A serious plot hole in the offical JFK story remains unclosed
The fact that JFK’s head snapped backward after absorbing the fatal shot that killed him in 1963 was such an obvious plot hole in the Warren Commission's story that Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez stepped in decades ago to try to explain it. Amazingly, in the 888 page Warren Commision Report, this difficulty with its story was ignored. [1]
If JFK was hit only from behind as the Warren Commission claimed, then why did JFK’s head snap backwards rather than forwards as intuition leads us to expect. As Alvarez put it
When I studied the graph showing the changing position of tire President's head relative to the moving car's coordinate system, I was finally convinced that the assassination buffs were right: there had to be a real explanation of the fact that the President's head did not fall back, but was driven back by some real force
Attempted clean up of Warren Commission's mess
Alvarez’s explanation was published in 1976 in the American Journal of Physics. [2] Alvarez used the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum to explain why an object that’s punctured by a bullet might explode creating an exiting jet that drives the object moving in the opposite direction of the bullet. The physics of a bullet puncturing a human head is different in important ways from a boxer getting punched in the head, or a moving billiard ball striking a stationary one. Alvarez showed that it’s wrong to claim that the laws of physics can’t possibly reconcile the movement of JFK’s head with the shots all coming from behind him. But the jet effect doesn’t stand up as a significant factor in JFK’s case. I rely on very disturbing footage of two crimes in which the victims were shot in the head to make my argument.
Alvarez demonstrated his explanation by shooting bullets into melons wrapped with scotch “filament tape” to simulate a human skull. Alvarez's explanation (backed by experiments) makes intuitive sense when you think about it. Provided a bullet penetrates an object with a sufficiently soft outer shell and a fluid-like inner core, the energy transferred from the bullet to the object might produce a jet of fluid out of the exit point that drives the entire object in the opposite direction of the bullet: See the figures below. I annotated screenshots from a video that illustrates the jet effect.
There were at least two key questions raised by the experiments Alvarez did:
Is a melon wrapped with scotch tape a good enough simulation of a human head?
Is the jet effect Alvarez explained large enough to account for how fast JFK’s head recoiled backwards? [3]
The answer to the first questions is “no” as Josiah Thompson’s book Last Second in Dallas revealed. In 1964, the Warren Commission had actually commissioned experiments in which bullets were fired at skulls filled with gel to simulate tissue and covered with goatskin to simulate JFK’s hair and scalp. All showed the skulls moving in the direction of the bullet. [3] Again, this finding didn't bother the Warren Commission because it simply ignored the backward snap of JFK’s head.
Both questions are answered by footage of other crimes.
Alvarez’s exploding melons moved about three times faster than JFK’s head. Alvarez said this was partly explained by the fact that the melons were hit with bullets that moved much faster (at 3000 ft/sec) than the bullets that hit JFK.(1800 ft/sec because they traveled a long distance before striking JFK). In other words, the jet effect should be larger the closer the gun is fired to the victim’s head because the closer to the gun, the faster the bullet moves.
Sadly, there are two readily available videos that show a person being shot in the head at point blank range, and in neither case does the victim’s head recoil towards the shooter. Incidentally, both those crimes were perpetrated by US -backed forces.
The assassinations of Bill Stewart and Nguyễn Văn Lém
In 1979, journalist Bill Stewart was murdered by the US-backed Nicaraguan National Guard (shortly before the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinistas). Stewart was made to lie on his stomach and was then shot in the back of the head. His head did not recoil upwards towards the shooter. On the contrary, the video of his murder shows that his head was simply driven into the ground. [4] There may have been debris that recoiled upward, but his head did not.
It may be objected that Stewart was lying on the ground during the murder so that the weight of his head prevented it from recoiling towards the shooter. As we all know, JFK was sitting upright. But if the jet effect (or any neuromuscular spasm) was not strong enough at point blank range to overcome the weight of a human head (which is only about 5.4 kg, or 12 lbs) then how big a factor could it have been in the motion of JFK’s head? JFK’s head moved as if it had been hit by a punch between frames 313 and 321 of Abraham Zapurder’s film, about 0.44 seconds [5].
In fact, JFK’s head accelerated backward by up to 70 ft/s/s (21.34 m/s/s). [6] Therefore the force (mass times acceleration) reached up to 26 pounds (115 Newtons), about double what is required to overcome the weight of a head even though JFK must have been struck by a much slower moving bullet than the one that hit Stewart. So we should expect to have seen Stewart’s head snap upwards if the jet effect (or neuromuscular spasms) were big factors in JFK’s case. That didn’t happen.
Then there is the murder of Nguyễn Văn Lém on February 1, 1968 by a US-backed police national police chief. In this case the victim is upright when he is shot. The murder weapon was a pistol which does not impart as much velocity to a bullet as a rifle. However, as with Stewart, the weapon was fired at point blank range which maximized the speed at which it struck the victim.
The gruesome video footage of the murder is very clear. The victim’s head does not move towards the shooter. In fact, if you watch at quarter speed it is easy to see the head jerk up and back slightly after the shot is fired which is in line with the general direction the bullet would have traveled. As it was fired, the gun was inclined significantly upward and to the front of the victim’s head. Nguyễn Văn Lém then collapsed straight down to the ground. He then slumped over away from the shooter. A stream of blood can be seen squirting upwards out of the entry wound when he was lying on the ground. I am not certain if the bullet exited Nguyễn Văn Lém’s head at all. The only jet visible is from the entry wound, not an exit wound. Again, according to Alvarez it was a jet of debris from an exit wound that pushed JFK’s head backwards.
It would be an extremely morbid research project to find more footage of such crimes to settle questions about the JFK assassination. I’m sure not up for it, but ultimately the whole point of theory is to explain real world events. Alvarez effectively rebutted exaggerated claims that have been made by some Warren Commission critics about “the laws of physics”, but he did not close a serious the plot hole in the offical story about the assassination.
NOTES:
[1] From Josiah Thompson’s Last Second in Dallas, p 212: “Nowhere in its entire 888-page report is there a single mention of this fact [impact debris moving back and towards the left], just as there is no mention of the dramatic left and backward snap of Kennedy’s head and body after frame 313.”
[2] The Alvarez paper does not simply deal the with movement of JFK’s head but also delves (not that conclusively) into the question of how many shots were fired. Regarding “pulses” (abrupt movements in the camera that Abraham Zapruder held as he filmed the assassination) Alvarez concludes from them that they support three bullets having been fired but he acknowledged other pulses that he isn’t sure about:
I was bothered for some time by the weaker set of pulses lasting ;t shorter lime, That show in Fig. 3, from fr;unc, 290 through 298. They don't look like the ones that seemed clearly associated with bullets . But obviously they required an explanation. I'll give my best explanation for them in the final section of this report but I don't feel as certain about that explanation as I do about the other three cases
[3] Physicist Paul Hoch, assistant to Alvarez, in addition to expressing strong doubts about the melons properly simulating a human head, also doubted the bullets used in the experiments were appropriate. See Last Second in Dallas, p 125,
[4] Better resolution footage of Stewart’s murder can be seen at the 3:05 point of this video
[5] Last Second in Dallas, p 222: “The Zapruder frames show the president’s body thrown backward and to the left until it strikes the upright back of the seat at frame 321 and bounces forward.”
Each frame of Zapruder film covers 1/18 of a second as explained on page 94 of Thompson’s book
[6] See graph on page 93 of Thompson’s first book on the JFK assassination Six Seconds in Dallas . It coud be argued that the appropriate mass to use for calcuclating force is not the mass of the head alone but also of the upper torso to which the head is attached. But in that case the estimates of forces driving JKF backwards go way up.