Quote:

Investigation of the "Jet Effect" reveals a further anomaly. If a grid is superimposed on the relevant frames, what actually happens at the time the President's head explodes is that the plume of blood and tissue spreads out from the side of his head into a halo thus negating the "Jet Effect" hypothesis.

Unquote.

A 1921 New York Times editorial on Robert Goddard said his rockets won't work in space because there is nothing for the exhaust gases to push against. After Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon the NYT printed a retraction.

Matt

Bill MacDowall replies:

Mathew! Mathew! Mathew! You miss the point contained in the passage quoted from my article and do so spectacularly. Just as the author of the New York Times editorial misunderstood the principles behind the topic he was discussing, so too do you.

I will try to address the point you are making in language everyone can understand. Essentially, the maximum amount of thrust a jet can develop depends upon the amount of energy produced by the fuel and the size of the nozzle through which that energy is released. A fireman's hose is a good analogy and demonstrates that by increasing or decreasing the nozzle size the relative thrust of the escaping water can be increased or decreased. Continuing with the fireman analogy, a hose with a wide nozzle setting produces less thrust and can be controlled easily by a single person, at narrow settings, two or even three firemen may be needed to control the hose against the recoil produced.

The principles involved in the so-called "Jet Effect" theory as applied to the Kennedy assassination are essentially similar. First let us consider the "effect". The effect of the "jet" alluded to in the Kennedy case was to throw his head sharply back and to the left in response to a bullet which allegedly entered from behind. In order to produce such an effect, the jet had to develop sufficient thrust to overcome the forward momentum of a human head weighing around 12lb, overcome the additional forward mementum imparted by the impacting bullet and the speed and direction of travel of the vehicle in the president was travelling. Further, the thrust developed would also have to overcome substantial musculo-skeletal resistance and ambient atmospheric pressure.

So how much energy would an impacting bullet have produced?

I will call upon wound ballistics expert and Lner-guru Dr Martin Fackler to keep us right on the details:

A projectile crushes the tissue it strikes during penetration, and it may impel the surrounding tissue outward (centrifugally) away from the missile path. Tissue crush is responsible for what is commonly called the permanent cavity and tissue stretch is responsible for the so-called temporary cavity. These are the sole wounding mechanisms. In addition, a sonic pressure wave is generated by projectiles traveling faster than the speed of sound. In air this wave trails the projectile like the wake of a ship. The sonic boom experienced after passage of a supersonic airplane is an example of a sonic pressure wave. This pressure wave travels at the speed of sound in the medium through which it passes, and sound travels four times as fast through tissue as it does through air. Thus the sonic wave precedes the projectile in tissue. Contrary to popular opinion (3, 30), this wave does not move or injure tissue.

To further confuse the issue, pressures of up to 100 atmospheres are incorrectly attributed to temporary cavitation by many authors (39, 40,55-57). These authors appear to have confused the sonic pressure wave with the pressure generated in tissues by temporary cavitation. Temporary cavity tissue displacement can cause pressures of only about 4 atmospheres (31). A careful reading of Harvey's paper (31) should correct this confusion.

The above passages from Dr Fackler is the type of factual information Lners avoid like the plague..they prefer to talk in terms of 100's of atmospheres. To the uninitiatied, 4 atmospheres is 60lbs. That is the approximate amount of energy which would have been released from JFK's skull at the point of exit of a rear entering bullet. But there's more...

The so-called exit wound above and slightly behind JFK's right ear was not a small, neat hole. The side of JFK's head exploded, leaving a hole several inches wide.

To understand the significance of this, I would like to use our firemen again. Firemen often use small, hand held CO2 fire extinguishers which are pressurised to around 750psi or 50 atmospheres. These extinguishers have a horn around the nozzle which is there to diffuse the thrust of the escaping contents. Typically, these horns have a terminal diameter of around 2". Without a horn, anyone using a pressurised CO2 extinguisher would run the risk of a broken wrist from the recoil produced by the contents escaping at 50 atmospheres. At the business end of a CO2 extinguisher, the contents have been diffused to around 5psi....one third of an atmosphere.

The significance my orginal claim quoted above, is that the large hole in JFK's skull would have diffused the escaping brain matter in exactly the same way as the horn on a fire extinguisher. From Dr Fackler's work, we know that the pressure released would be of the order of 4 atmospheres, further we now know that a 2" horn fitted to a fire extinguisher will diffuse pressures of 50 atmospheres down to around a third of an atmosphere. The extrapolation should be obvious, a pessure of 4 atmospheres released through a 5 inch hole would produce very little thrust at all. The fact of the matter is that at no time would a release pressure of 4 atmopsheres produce sufficient thrust to throw JFK's head back and to the left at all, let alone as sharply as seen in the Zapruder film. Even allowing for the increased thrust possible through a much smaller "nozzle" (ie small exit wound), it would still not be possible to produce sufficient thrust to cause the reaction seen in JFK.

Nobel Laureate Alvarez bamboozled himself with his own wierd science, the analogies above are a simple, incontrovertible proof of same. There never was any appreciable "jet effect", there never was any head shot from the TSBD.

I hope this clarifies the quote from my article.

Bill

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