JFK Blown Away 60 Years Ago Today

On the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy an overview of the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone

Much of the material herewith is from Chapter 10 from my 2022 book Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, which also deals with the assassination of President Lincoln and many other political leaders. So my conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating JFK is based purely on evidence. If there was a conspiracy to assassinate the 35th President of the United States this wasn’t it.

Polaroid photograph taken by Mary Ann Moorman, standing on the opposite side of the road from Abraham Zapruder, who can be seen in the upper right standing on top of a concrete pillar. Kennedy has just been shot through the upper back and neck and Jackie is leaning toward him to determine what happened. Conspiracists think they see in the shadows and trees multiple assassins. Do you see any?

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Before 9/11 Truthers, Obama Birthers, and QAnon Trumpers, the mother of all conspiracy theories involved the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In response to this tragedy, the new President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled a blue-ribbon commission of investigators headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, which produced a comprehensive 889-page report, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.[1] Since then, exhaustive investigations of the assassination have been conducted, including the thorough 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations,[2] the definitive 2002 book on Oswald by Gerald Posner, Case Closed,[3] Vincent Bugliosi’s 2007 encyclopedic 1600-page Reclaiming History that addressed nearly every claim made by JFK conspiracy theorists[4], Michel Gagné’s Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination,[5] and Judge Burt W. Griffin’s book JFK, Oswald, and Ruby, an authoritative analysis by one of the original members of the Warren Commission, all of which corroborated the original finding of the Warren report that Oswald acted alone.

Since Oswald himself was assassinated two days after he killed Kennedy, there was no trial and the case was closed until 1969, when New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison put on trial as a co-conspirator a local businessman named Clay Shaw, alleged to have links to Oswald, who lived for a short time in New Orleans. As Garrison was also a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist he hoped a trial would uncover elements within the U.S. government that had conspired to kill the President. By his reckoning, the most likely candidates were the CIA, in cahoots with the military industrial complex because, he reasoned in contrived hindsight, Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam. (As JFK assassination researcher Michel Gagne told me, “Vietnam did not figure prominently in Garrison’s theories during the sixties. At first, he claimed it was a sadist homosexual plot involving David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, then he began blaming the FBI, then he moved on to say that the CIA killed JFK because he intended to make peace with Cuba, not knowing that JFK had given his consent to the CIA plots to murder Castro.”[6]) “In a very real and terrifying sense,” Garrison proclaimed, “our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.”[7] Unfortunately for Garrison, the jury acquitted Shaw in under an hour.[8]

Conspiracy theories swirling around the President’s assassination arose from day one, but interest was re-ignited after Watergate eroded public trust in the government in the early 1970s. Then the Zapruder film was made public in 1975, so everyone could see the President’s head appear to snap back and to the left, as if the bullet came from the Grassy Knoll to the President’s right, instead of the Book Depository Building where Oswald was located behind JFK. So in 1976 the government reopened the case when the House Select Committee on Assassinations hired 250 investigators and spent $5.5 million dollars and 30 months to get to the bottom of who really killed JFK. After issuing a colossal 12-volume report, the committee concluded that Oswald was guilty and that no agency within the U.S. government was involved.[9]

The only tidbit conspiracy theorists got out of the report was that an audio tape from the Dictabelt recording device with the motorcade in Dealey Plaza suggested that a 4^th bullet was fired. Subsequent analysis, however, determined that whatever sound was recorded on the Dictabelt device happened a full 90 seconds after the assassination, long after the President’s motorcade had accelerated out of Dealey Plaza and on to Parkland Hospital, and it was not even the sound of a gunshot. “My team has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, for the first time,” concluded Larry Sabato, head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia upon the unveiling of a comprehensive study of police radio transmissions that day, “that the main conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations—that a Dallas police Dictabelt recording shows four shots, not three, were fired in Dealey Plaza—is simply wrong.”[10]

A decade later, in 1986, the London Weekend Television show hosted a mock trial in which Vincent Bugliosi—the acclaimed prosecutor who convicted Charles Manson and his cult followers for murder—posthumously tried Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was defended in absentia by the equally illustrious defense attorney Gerry Spence, known for defending Randy Weaver, the gun-loving anti-government isolationist whose family was killed by FBI agents in a botched raid at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. After a 20-hour trial the jury deliberated for six hours in what Time magazine called the closest “to a real trial as the accused killer of John F. Kennedy will probably ever get.”[11] The jury convicted Oswald as the lone assassin. A 2013 PBS Nova special, Cold Case JFK, shows definitively that only Oswald’s Carcano rifle could have caused the wounds suffered by Kennedy and Connally. A 2019 documentary film titled Truth is the Only Client: The Official Investigation of The Murder of John F. Kennedy (the title comes from Earl Warren’s direction to the commission members) is long at nearly two and a half hours, but it is based on the comprehensive Warren Report, and subsequent studies, and it comes to the same conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.[12] Case closed.

In the mind of the public, however, the case is still not closed. Polls taken since the mid 1960s have consistently found that at least half of all Americans believe that there was more than one shooter in Dealey Plaza. A 1997 Fox News poll found that a little over half of Americans consider it either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. officials were directly involved in the President’s death.[13] A 1998 CBS News poll reported that 76 percent said they believe JFK was killed by a cabal of assassins.[14] A 2003 ABC News poll found that only 32 percent of American adults believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.[15] A 2013 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans specifically believe that there was a conspiracy.[16] A 2016 Chapman University survey found that half of all Americans believe that the government is covering up what they know about the JFK assassination.[17] And a 2021 poll that my Skeptic Research Center conducted in conjunction with Dr. Anondah Saide and Dr. Kevin McCaffree of over 3,000 Americans found that 36 percent said they slightly, moderately, or strongly agreed that “Individuals within the United States government have hidden the truth about who was really responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy,” with another 28 percent uncertain.[18]   

Speaking to a conference of top-notch lawyers shortly after Oliver Stone’s film JFK was released in 1992, the aforementioned attorney and JFK assassination expert Vincent Bugliosi asked how many of them did not believe the findings of the Warren Commission that JFK was killed by a lone assassin. Nearly everyone in the room raised their hands. When asked how many had seen Oliver Stone’s film, roughly the same number of hands shot up. Bugliosi then asked how many had read the Warren Report:

It was embarrassing. Only a few people raised their hands. In less than a minute I had proved my point. The overwhelming majority in the audience had formed an opinion rejecting the findings of the Warren Commission without bothering to read the Commission’s report.[19]

And these were professional lawyers passing judgment on a murder case while knowing next to nothing about it.

Once you go down the JFK conspiracy rabbit hole a problem becomes apparent: most of the theories contradict each other, and none have identified a second shooter, much less a conspiring organization, so the lone assassin theory keeps rising to the top as the inference to the best explanation. For example, those who think organized crime was behind the assassination are in conflict with those who think that it was orchestrated by the FBI. If you think the CIA did it, then it can’t have been done by the CIA’s Russian opposite, the KGB. Oliver Stone’s film JFK implicates just about everyone, including the Dallas Police Department, the Secret Service, Vice President Johnson, the FBI, the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the military-industrial complex. If everything is a conspiracy and everyone a conspiracist, then nothing is explained.

My own opinion on the matter has changed over time. When I hadn’t read much on the subject I just assumed that the Warren Commission report that Oswald acted alone was correct. But after I saw Oliver Stone’s film JFK I came to suspect that there might be more to the story, and possibly even a real conspiracy to assassinate the President. That is the power of film, and who can forget Kevin Costner’s character Jim Garrison running the Zapruder film over and over for the jury, showing Kennedy’s head snap “back and to the left…back and to the left.” But after I read Gerald Posner’s and Vincent Bugliosi’s books I updated my priors and readjusted my credence in the lone-assassin theory, which was later re-confirmed for me after I edited a special edition of Skeptic magazine in 2013 on the 50^th anniversary of the assassination.[20]

So let’s start this analysis with Lee Harvey Oswald, whom even most conspiracy theorists agree was involved in the shooting of the President. There are entire books, documentaries, and dramatic films about Oswald—by far the best by PBS Frontline titled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?[21], based on Posner’s book—but here are the core facts that implicate him.[22]

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Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans in 1939 and joined the U.S. Marines in the 1950s, where he received riflery training. Contrary to what Oliver Stone has one of his character’s say in his film—that Oswald “shot Maggie’s Drawers,” meaning he couldn’t even hit the target—in fact Oswald scored the second highest rating possible in riflery, making him a sharpshooter. And if you go to Dealey Plaza and visit the 6^th floor of the Book Depository Building, which is now a museum, you can look out a window next to the sniper’s nest and see just how close a shot it was, marked by two white X’s on the highway below, denoting the neck shot and the head shot.

Politically, Oswald was an avowed Communist who defected to Russia in 1959, worked in a radio factory in Minsk for two years, and married a Russian woman named Marina. After he grew disenchanted with the USSR, in 1962 he moved back to the United States, to Dallas, Texas, shortly after telling friends that he wanted to move to Cuba to join Castro’s communist revolution. This background helps establish a motive for killing Kennedy, as the President was avowedly anti-Communist, and after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, also clearly anti-Cuban and anti-Castro.

Temperamentally, Oswald was emotionally unhinged and suffered from delusions of grandeur, telling people he had ambitions to someday do something to make himself famous. He was very likely a sociopath, and quite possibly expressed the personality traits of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—the “Dark Triad”—dark because the combination often leads to malevolent actions.[23]

While in Dallas, Oswald encountered the anti-Communist crusader Edwin A. Walker, a retired general who was himself something of a conspiracy theorist, once accusing the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren of plotting to destroy the United States by banning prayer in schools and promoting civil rights for minorities. In April of 1963, just eight months before he assassinated Kennedy, Oswald attempted to assassinate General Walker by shooting at him from around 100 feet outside his home. Walker was struck with bullet fragments to his forearm and survived, and after the Kennedy assassination it was determined that Oswald used the same firearm for both: an Italian-made 6.5 mm caliber Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle, which he purchased by mail order in March of 1963, along with a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, leaving a paper-trail investigators later uncovered. That same Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was found among some boxes near the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building, and in the sniper’s nest were three spent Carcano cartridges scattered on the floor.

In September 1963, after his wife talked him out of hijacking a plane to Cuba, Oswald traveled to Mexico City in order to procure a visa to Cuba, but the Cuban embassy said they would give him a visitor’s visa only if he was returning to the Soviet Union with his family, which he declined. So he went to the Soviet embassy where he encountered three undercover KGB agents, who later reported that Oswald seemed unhinged, so they put him off.

Oswald then returned to Dallas, where on October 16 he started work at the Texas School Book Depository Building. Conspiracy theorists have made much of the fact that the building was on Kennedy’s parade route, but that route wasn’t determined until the week before the president’s visit to Dallas, well after Oswald got the job there.

Co-workers saw Oswald on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building shortly before JFK’s motorcade arrived and saw him exit shortly after the assassination.

The sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building was constructed out of boxes, which had Oswald’s fingerprints on them.

Three bullet casings were found in the sniper’s nest indicating that he took three shots. This matches what 81 percent of eyewitnesses in Dealey Plaza reported hearing—three shots.

Subsequent tests with the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, particularly that for the 1977 House Select Committee report, found that three shots can easily be taken in the eight seconds that Oswald had to shoot. In fact, with the first bullet already chambered, it would have taken only 3.3 seconds to squeeze off three shots.

The three shell casings found in the sniper’s nest carry distinct ballistic markings on them showing that they were fired from Oswald’s rifle, and the one recovered bullet at the Parkland Memorial Hospital where Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally were taken, showed matching ballistic markings indicating that it had been fired from that rifle.

After killing Kennedy, Oswald went home and picked up his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and left again, shortly after which he was stopped by Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippet. Oswald shot him dead with four bullets, an act witnessed by ten observers, and the bullet casings at the scene matched his .38 Smith & Wesson.

Oswald then fled the scene and ducked into a nearby theater without paying. The police were summoned to the theater where they confronted Oswald. Oswald pulled out his revolver and attempted to shoot the first officer, but the gun was wrestled away from him and he was arrested, saying, “Well, it is all over now.”

Actually, it was all over for Oswald two days later, when at 11:21am CST on Sunday November 24, a Dallas nightclub operator named Jack Ruby walked into the Dallas Police Headquarters when Oswald was being transferred to the city jail and shot him dead at point-blank range. In yet another eerie coincidence, Oswald was rushed to Parkland Hospital and pronounced dead, two days to the hour after President Kennedy died in that same hospital.

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So, there is no doubt whatsoever that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and anyone who would join a Fair Play for Oswald Committee needs a reality check. What conspiracists contend is that someone else, or several others, also shot Kennedy, or conspired to order the hit, or bankrolled the job, or orchestrated the shooters in Dealey Plaza…or something. (For those who think Oswald was a patsy set up by the CIA, the KGB, or the mob, one need only recall the above facts about the man and ask yourself, “who in their right mind would select someone this unstable and deranged to carry out an assassination of this magnitude?”) Since there is no solid evidence fingering anyone else besides Oswald, conspiracists have to go anomaly hunting to find something that does not quite seem to fit the lone assassin theory. What should we do with such anomalies? Nothing. No theory explains everything, and here the Conspiracism Principle applies: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or incompetence.

A perfect example of this is the man who shot Oswald, Jack Ruby, who has also been a prime suspect for conspiracists, particularly because of his affiliation with the mob. In fact, Ruby told investigators exactly why he shot Oswald: in order to save “Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial.” He said his decision was a spur of the moment decision. Indeed, just minutes before he shot Oswald, Ruby wired one of his employees money he owe her, and he even left his beloved dog in the car when he entered the police station. Those who knew Ruby described him as temperamental and periodically violent. Here’s how Vincent Bugliosi summarizes what many people said about Oswald’s assassin:

FBI agents may have interviewed close to one hundred people who knew Ruby well, and in their published reports in the Warren Commission volumes the reader would be hard-pressed to find one interviewee who did not mention Ruby’s temper, or at least how “very emotional” he was.[24]

So much of conspiracy theorizing depends on eyewitness accounts, but we know from decades of research in cognitive psychology that memories are not an accurate high-fidelity recording of events. Emotionally charged events distort memory even more—and being present during the assassination of a President whose head is blown open by a bullet surely counts as an affecting event. This is probably why spectators in Dealey Plaza gave such differing accounts of what happened. Some heard shots from behind Kennedy’s limousine while others thought they heard shots from in front or to the right on the grassy knoll. Three witnesses said the shots came from inside the president’s car. Another witness said that she “saw some men in plain clothes shooting back,” which never happened. An early press bulletin reported that one of Kennedy’s Secret Service agents had been killed, also untrue. According to the Dallas Morning News reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who was at Dealey Plaza and saw the assassination:

I remember interviewing people that said they saw certain things; some did, some didn’t. Even then there were people making up things. I remember interviewing a young couple where the guy was telling me that he had seen this and he had seen that, and his wife said, “You didn’t see that! We were back in the parking lot when it happened!” Even then![25]

Then there’s the Parkland medical observations made by the attending physicians and nurses who could not seem to agree on the directionality of the bullets from the nature of the wounds. Some said that the throat looked like an entrance wound, thereby placing the shooter in front, not behind, Kennedy. Someone else reported that it was the back of the head blown off, not the side above the ears as the Warren Report says. And so on. But a more formal autopsy of Kennedy’s body after it was returned to Washington D.C. determined that both shots entered his back and head from behind, the first exiting his throat and hitting Governor Connally and the second indicating bullet and skull fragments from back to front.

Then there’s the Zapruder film, the most analyzed recording of a murder in history. It was taken by the Dallas clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder, who was perched atop a four-and-a-half-foot tall concrete pillar with his 8mm movie camera to capture his President rolling past. “This is the key shot,” says Kevin Costner’s character Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. “Watch it again. The President going back to his left. Shot from the front and right. Totally inconsistent with the shot from the Depository.”

Was it? Our intuitions about how bullets and bodies interact would make it seem so, and that’s what happens in the movies, which is where most of us get our knowledge about firearms. But numerous studies since have shown that what is seen in the Zapruder film is exactly what happens to a person when shot from behind, namely the body’s involuntary reaction to the sudden pain and shock of being hit by a bullet, causing Kennedy’s head to lurch back after first being propelled forward (plus, Kennedy was wearing a back brace that prevented his body from lurching forward). In the clinical language of a study on the “transfer of momentum and kinetic energy” of the bullet impact, “the observed motions of President Kennedy in the film are physically consistent with a high-speed projectile impact from the rear of the motorcade, these resulting from an instantaneous forward impulse force, followed by delayed rearward recoil and neuromuscular forces.”[27]

Let’s consider the three shots that Oswald took. According to Dale Myers, a computer animator who has produced an exact simulation of the Zapruder film, at frame 160 the first shot is fired and Governor Connally starts to turn to his right—later he said he thought that shot came from behind. At frame 224 you can see Connally’s jacket pop out as Oswald’s 2^nd shot entered Kennedy’s back, emerged from his throat, and then struck Connally. In frame 247 you can see Kennedy’s hands go up toward his throat in response to that 2^nd shot, along with Connally’s reaction to being hit, as he winces in pain. In frame 275 you can see Connally turn around to see what has happened to Kennedy. Both men were hit by the same bullet, which conspiracists call the “magic bullet theory” but forensic analysts call the “single bullet fact.”[28]

Top: The inaccurate magic bullet theory has Governor Connally facing straight forward and seated directly in line with President Kennedy. The shot line is also inaccurate, as it shows an extreme angle for the shot, which would have missed Connally were it not for the “magic” twists and turns it would have had to take.

Middle: Instead, Dale Myers’s analysis shows that Governor Connally was seated on a small jump seat placed a few inches to Kennedy’s left. At the time of the “single bullet” shot, Connally had shifted his upper body sharply to the right when he heard the first shot.

Bottom: The path of the second bullet, with notations about speeds and rotational action after it passed through Kennedy’s upper back and neck and then struck Connally in his right shoulder, before going through his wrist and into his leg.

Source: Top and middle images redrawn by Pat Linse from Robert Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone’s book, High Treason (New York: Basic Books, 1998); bottom diagram (redrawn by Pat Linse) and captions labeling events of the bullet’s passage through both bodies from Gerald Posner’s book, Case Closed (New York: Random House, 1993), pages 478–479.

Another argument conspiracists make is that the bullet recovered at the Parkland Hospital was “pristine,” evidence they say that it was planted by operatives there, who were apparently so dumb that they didn’t bother to bang up the bullet a little. In fact, the bullet is not pristine, and it bears rifling marks, proving that it was shot out of a rifle, as the photographs below show—it is flattened as if it had gone through a body, which it had, two bodies in fact.

Finally, the third and fatal shot that hit Kennedy’s head in frame 313, when viewed in slow motion in the digitally enhanced high-definition slo-mo versions readily available online, clearly shows that the shot came from behind. If you pause it at frame 313 (below) you can see skull, brain, and blood matter ejected in an upward and forward direction as if shot from the 6^th story of the Book Depository building.[29]

The evidence overwhelmingly points to the conclusion that JFK was blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. After 60 years the burden of proof is on conspiracy theorists to provide positive evidence for a second shooter rather than just anomaly hunting in the “just asking questions” vein. That a great many people doubt the JFK lone assassin theory doesn’t change the mountain of facts supporting it.

A final point: in my 2011 book, The Believing Brain, I introduced the concept of patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise, and agenticity, or the tendency to infuse those patterns with intentional agents. There is, perhaps, no better illustration of this phenomena than the Polaroid photograph taken by Mary Ann Moorman. JFK conspiracists think they patterns of intentional agents lurking in the shadows of Dealey Plaza, particularly above the grassy knoll. Look for yourself.

The only thing I see is patternicity and agenticity. The image also stands in for what so many conspiracy theories depend on: degraded data that can be interpreted in many different ways; once the mind has determined what it is, it cannot see it as something else, including randomness.

References

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[1] The Warren Commission Report: The Official Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. PDF: https://bit.ly/3gocb8w

[2] Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations. https://bit.ly/3mZFi3r

[3] Posner, Gerald. 1993. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: Random House.

[4] Bugliosi, Vincent. 2007. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. New York: W.W. Norton.

[5] Gagné, Michel Jacques. 2022. Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories. Routledge.

[6] Personal correspondence, September 23, 2021.

[7] Quoted in a Playboy interview with Garrison: https://bit.ly/3v5qeUW

[8] Papers of Jim Garrison. National Archives. JFK Assassination Records: https://bit.ly/2P1e6Vo

[9] Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations. https://bit.ly/3mZFi3r

[10] Schmidt, Markus. 2013. “Sabato: Audio analysis debunks theory of fourth shot at JFK.” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Oct. 16. https://bit.ly/3dx7R5m

[11] In Bugliosi, 2007, xxiv.

[12] Kwait, Todd and Rob Stegman. 2019. Truth is the Only Client: The Official Investigation of the Murder of John F. Kennedy. BlueStar Media, Ezzie Films.

[13] Blanton, Dana. 2004/2015 update. “Poll: Most Believe ‘Cover-Up’ of JFK Assassination Facts.” Fox News: https://fxn.ws/3sxEmEo

[14] CBS News Staff. “CBS Poll: JFK Conspiracy Lives.” CBS News. https://cbsn.ws/3dx9Kis

[15] Langer, Gary. 2003. “Poll: Lingering Suspicion Over JFK Assasination.” ABC News: https://abcn.ws/3goWtds

[16] Swift, Art. 2013. “Majority in U.S. Still Believe JFK Killed in a Conspiracy.” Gallup News. https://bit.ly/3eiSnki

[17] Bader, Christopher. 2016. “What Aren’t They Telling Us? Chapman University Survey of American Fears.” https://bit.ly/3amYnY9

[18] Full results of the Skeptic Research Center study on conspiracy theory beliefs, along with beliefs in the paranormal and supernatural, will be published in the coming years in professional journals, with preliminary reports to be published in Skeptic magazine sooner. For more information see: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/

[19] In Bugliosi, 2007, op cit., xxv.

[20] Reitzes, David. 2013. “JFK Conspiracy Theories at 50: How the Skeptics Got it Wrong and Why it Matters.” Skeptic, Vol. 18, No. 3. https://bit.ly/3apHqfL

[21] Cran, William and Ben Loeterman. 2003. Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? PBS Frontline. https://to.pbs.org/32seYWb

[22] All facts here come from Posner’s Case Closed and the Frontline documentary Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?, op cit.

[23] Paulhus, Delroy L. and Kevin M. Williams. 2002. “The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality. 36 (6): 556-563.

[24] In Bugliosi, 2007, op cit., 1116.

[25] In Bugliosi, 2007, op cit., 90.

[26] In: Reitzes, 2013, https://bit.ly/3apHqfL

[27] Nailli, Nicholas R. 2018. “Gunshot-wound dynamics model for John F. Kennedy Assassination.” Heliyon, April. https://bit.ly/3gaA3vM

[28] Myers, Dale K. 2008. Secrets of a Homicide: JFK Assassination. https://bit.ly/3tsVj4i See Myers’s animation in this clip from the ABC documentary on the JFK assassination: https://bit.ly/3dzIYpD

[29] There are a number of enhanced versions of the Zapruder film online that are slowed down so you can clearly see the head shot, e.g.: https://bit.ly/3xiaCPR

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.