The previous issue of Fair Play (#20, Jan-Feb 98) featured considerable coverage of the 1997 JFK Lancer "November in Dallas" conference. Alas, a shortage of time prevented me from including everything. So to share some valuable and interesting stuff that was left out last time, I'm taking one more pass at it.
The above photograph was shown, by Joe Backes, at the "Files and Documents" workshop on the conference's first day. It's a photocopy of a newly surfaced image of David Ferrie, the mysterious New Orleans figure linked to Lee Oswald, right wing extremism, the CIA, and organized crime.
As I mentioned in the previous issue, Joe's comments were tape recorded by me, but inadvertantly erased a few days after the conference ended. According to my notes, Joe didn't have a lot of information about the photo. He subsequently said that it "was just there among the enormous material on Ferrie vs. Eastern Airlines. Well, it must be when he was a pilot. What years those were I'm not sure. Probably pre-'62." The photocopy of the picture was included in Document #180-10117-10177 as released by the ARRB, an 87 page document from the Federal Aviation Administration. "Ferrie," Joe commented, "was at one point a normal looking guy."
Greg Jaynes' presentation, called "The Acoustical Evidence," was delivered on Friday morning, November 21. He focused on H.B. McLain, a Dallas Police Department motorcycle cop in the Presidential motorcade. McLain was identified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations --- wrongly, Jaynes says --- as the officer whose police radio inadvertantly recorded at least four gunshots, according to an acoustical analysis ordered by the HSCA.
"What I'm going to show you is contrary to the results of the House Assassinations Committee's acoustics results," Jaynes began. He first described the radio systems used by the Dallas cops at the time of the assassinaton.
There were two frequences used, he said, Channel One and Channel Two. "Channel One was being recorded onto a dictaphone machine, which used a dictabelt to record a signal." The radio signal, Jaynes explained, was recorded onto a plastic "sleeve" in the dictabelt. A needle assembly cut a groove into it, similar to a vinyl phonograph record. The dictabelt had two such sleeves, the second of which would begin as the first one ended, so that an uninterupted recording was made.
Jaynes said that Channel Two was recorded on a different device, called a Gregg Autograph machine, which looked similar to a 78rpm phonograph record.
These recordings were analyzed for the HSCA by the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman [BBN] in 1978. The key questions before them, Jaynes said, were:
The acoustical scientists performing the analysis used a series of tests in their evaluation, Jaynes said. One was to establish that the recordings represented the correct timeframe. "If the impulses that they eventually determined were gunshots happened a minute off time, then it couldn't be true" that the impulses were in fact gunshots.
Other tests, Jaynes said, measured the "uniqueness of patterns" from a spectrographic analysis --- that is, from a graphical representation of the sounds on the recordings. "They can match up the Channel One --- the original dictabelt recording --- with the test firings that they did in Dealey Plaza and see if you get a similar [pattern], which they did."
But was it Officer McLain with the stuck microphone that resulted in the recorded impulses which were determined to be gunshots? "It's a possibility that he wasn't in the correct position" in the motorcade, Jaynes said.
In the Robert Groden video The Case for Conspiracy, a motorcycle cop in the JFK motorcade, identified as McLain, is seen reaching down toward his left leg. The narrator intones, "The microphone was located just in front of his left leg. Watch as his left hand reaches down toward the microphone..." The motorcycle cop seems to be doing what the narrator says.
"When I watched that," Jaynes said after showing the clip, "I always wondered: why doesn't someone ask McLain? You know, what was he doing at that point?"
In an interview videotaped for an upcoming Mark Oakes video, Jaynes and Oakes did just that. Asked about the location of the microphone, McLain replied, "The microphone was up on the crossbars on the handlebars up on the right-hand side" of his motorcycle.
That does not square with the acoustics experts' finding, Jaynes said, which was that the audio signal "bounced off the street into a microphone at that position" --- that is, corresponding to the lower left-hand side of the motorcyle.
Further along in the Oakes video interview, McLain is asked how far down Houston Street he went before he slowed his cycle. He replies, "About midway in the block. Then I stopped."
And what caused him to stop? "The traffic had slowed up because they were making that turn onto Elm Street." It was while he was stopped that he heard "one shot --- I looked up, seen all them bunches of pigeons fly off from behind that School Book Depository." And looking across the Plaza, through gaps in the concrete structures by the reflecting pool, he saw "Mrs. Kennedy up on the back of the limousine."
"If McLain stopped halfway down Houston Street, and he was stopped where he says he was, and he saw Jackie on the trunk of the car, then the acoustics is dead. Because he [would have] had to be at the intersection of Houston and Elm. This is where the test microphone was placed that had the best match, that they determined was his motorcycle."
Jaynes used the Hughes and Zapruder films to establish "who's who on Houston Street" and where McLain was in the motorcade. Before McLain is seen in the Hughes film, Jaynes said, we see Camera Car #1, Camera Car #2, and Camera Car #3 --- all of which were preceded by the Presidential limousine and its Secret Service followup vehicle, LBJ's car and its Secret Service followup, and Earl Cabell's car. Only after Camera Car #3 does McLain appear in the film. He has just rounded the corner from Main Street onto Houston. [Some place McLain after Camera Car #2 --- Ed.] The camera cars were followed by three cars carrying eleven congressmen.
Then, showing Zapruder frame 160, Jaynes said, "We can see that LBJ's Secret Service car is beginning to turn onto Elm Street ... if McLain recorded [at] 160 --- there's no way, in other words, he could have recorded at 160, because he's obviously, in this [Zapruder] frame, [still] at the other end of Houston Street. There's absolutely no way he could have recorded it."
As a final proof of McLain's position, Jaynes showed a portion of the Elsie Dorman film, as reproduced in Groden's The Assassination Films. This shakey footage, shot from the fourth floor of the TSBD, shows the Presidential limousine on Houston, spectators at the corner of Elm and Houston, and finally, McLain turning from Houston onto Elm.
"What do we see in the Dorman film? While we see McLain arriving at [what the acoustics tests would later designate] array four, microphone three, we also see Congressmen car #1 and Congressmen car #2 coming into view.
"Now, I laid it out in the Hughes film where these cars were located. These cars were behind the camera cars. They were at the other end of Houston Street. Congressmen car #2 hadn't even come around the street [sic] by the time the shooting had started. This is well after the shooting is over, when these congressmen cars were there. But yet they're saying that here's McLain with his stuck microphone coming into position to record those shots! So how could that possibly be? The Dorman film shows that McLain was not in position to record the shots as advertised."
Another part of the acoustics question addressed by Jaynes was that of the sirens. "If McLain turned on his motorcycle siren, he would have recorded the sound of the siren from wherever he turned it on, all the way to Parkland Hospital. But that's not what we hear in the Channel One recording. We don't hear any sirens for the first two minutes, and then we only hear them for thirty-six seconds."
During the interview for the Oakes video, Jaynes asked McLain when he turned his siren on. McLain's initial response was "immediately," but when asked if this meant while he was still on Houston Street, McLain said, "Probaby not, because it was foot-operated, and you had to have speed for it to work. And I imagine it was after I got on Elm Street where I could get a little speed to make it make a noise."
But some researchers insist, Jaynes said, that there was no way McLain had his siren turned on while he was still in Dealey Plaza. So he asked him whether he had turned the siren on by the time he reached the triple underpass. McLain's response: "I know I did."
Jaynes said this was very important. "If any of this is true, then the Channel One recording cannot be true."
Jaynes also showed some of his research into police radio timechecks from November 22, 1963. "I mounted a camcorder in my truck and I drove from the spot that's Z-313 to the Parkland Hospital emergency docks. And I recorded it, I have a time stamp running. Now this time stamp starts at zero. And you can see how long it takes me --- about four minutes to get to get there. What we should do is add that time stamp to 12:30, which is the time of the shooting, and listen to the police radio timechecks. This is the timing according to BBN."
At this point he rolled his home video, shot just as he said, from a camera mounted on his truck's dash with a time stamp visible in one corner. This was synchronized to the police recordings, and indeed the times in the audio did not match those on the time stamp. "All the police time checks get off --- more --- they're off by a minute here, and they get farther off as you go."
This brought Jaynes to the issue of "crosstalk," the apparent mixing of Channels One and Two. Where Channel One is supposedly the sounds determined by experts to be gunfire, the faint but distinguishable sound of Sheriff Bill Decker issuing orders can be heard. "And we know that Decker said this on Channel Two, about a minute after the shooting."
How could that be? Jaynes asked. How could Decker be heard on Channel One? "It could be happening only if it was some alteration, in which case, none of this is any good ... or it could have happened if there was a motorcycle that was stuck on Channel One, had its microphone stuck on Channel One --- we don't dispute that there is a stuck microphone --- and another one right beside it was on Channel Two. The one that's on Channel Two, his radio is blaring, anything that comes over Channel Two is broadcast over his loudspeaker. And the one that's on Channel One is gonna record that. And the one that was queued to Channel One recorded this crosstalk a minute after the actual shooting, which would throw off BBN's time." The first thing BBN had to establish, Jaynes reminded the audience, was that they were dealing in the correct timeframe. "This shows that it may be a minute off. It's not conclusive --- but it may be."
Here, Jaynes replayed his home video with the timestamp advanced by one minute; the times here dovetailed very well.
I would suggest that interested readers track down the assassination films referred to in the preceding text, in order to test the ideas presented. All are commercially available. They were an integral part of Greg Jaynes' presentation, and it is regrettable they cannot be reproduced here.
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