Joseph DeMartino
Senior HTF Member
Anyone who has spent any time with cops and lawyers or served on a jury (and I dated a cop, worked for a law firm and was foreman of a jury) will tell you that eyewitness and earwitness "evidence" is among the least reliable elements of a case. And reliability of such evidence declines over time. Perceptions can be way off within seconds of an event - they can lose all connection with reality with a year or two. (People begin to "remember" things they never saw or heard, only read about or learned from others.)
Consider: Until the wreck was actually discovered virtually every depiction of the sinking of the Titanic showed the ship going down in one piece. That was the conclusion of the official inquiries. But nearly half the people in the water reported that the ship broke up on the surface and that the stern sank after the rest of the ship had gone down.
That's a fairly large sample size - a little more than 700 people - witnessing the most dramatic and traumatic event of most of their lives, yet they split virtually 50/50 on what would seem an important and obvious point. And the official record and every subsequent dramatist and historian agreed with the bare plurality who said "one piece" - until this conclusion was blown apart by the physical evidence.
It is also important to remember that initial reports (which so much of the conspiracy "literature" relies upon to find "inconsistencies") are almost always sketchy, incomplete and rife with errors. Witnesses will blurt out that the suspect was wearing a black jacket - then later remember seeing him run past a black van, at which point he realized the jacket was really navy blue. A cop tells a reporter the suspect had a Glock. When the gun lands in ballistics the tech sees it is really a cheap knock-off built to resemble a Glock. These people are not conspirators, they're human. And that means they're fallible.
Pretty much every criminal investigation, reconstruction of an historical event or attempt to establish the reason that anything failed (from a business plan to an airliner) is going to have a lot of (usually minor) disagreements between witnesses and participants as to the sequence of events, details of what was said or not said, and a host of other things.
When Lincoln was assassinated most people reported that John Wilkes Booth shouted, "Sic Semper Tyranus" ("Thus be it always to tyrants", the state motto of Virginia.) Others insist he said, "The South is avenged!" A few historians think he said both, but that audience members heard only one or the other because he turned while speaking. We'll probably never know for sure. And that's a fact from one of the most written about events in American history. Practically every person present that night wrote up an account of the night in a diary or a letter within hours of Booth's pulling the trigger, and most of them have found their way into university archives and thus the hands of historians. (The 19th century was a much more literate and literary time than 1963 Dallas, and the audience at Ford's theater would have been more so than the average.)
Here's a famous experiment in perception (Gil Grissom mentions this one in a CSI episode, but the experiment cited was real):
A group of college students is shown short video clip of a group of people in white and black t-shirts passing a couple of basketballs among them . The students are asked to count how many times the balls are passed. Part way through the clip a guy in a gorilla suit walks out into the midst of the people, stops, and looks at the camera before moving on. When the clip is over the students are asked what they thought of the gorilla. About half of them say, "What gorilla?"
Several insist there was no gorilla even after being told by the students who had noticed the gorilla that there had never been one and that the students with the more accurate perceptions were wrong. (In this context we can call refer to these students as "The Connellys".)
Details (including the actual video) can be found at these links:
A Matter of Perception
A Gorilla in the Midst
Watch the Basketball Video
As for people running up that goddamned "grassy knoll" - I mentioned many pages ago that Dealy Plaza was (and is) an echo chamber. It is very difficult to tell the exact direction that any loud noise is coming from. Odds are the people ran up that slope because they thought, mistakenly that they'd heard a shot come from there. (Or maybe they thought they'd heard a shot from the opposite direction and were prudently running towards the wall to take cover behind it.
Either way the wall would have made an excellent surface to bouce the sound of the shots off, confusing that portion of the crowd.)
Regards,
Joe
Consider: Until the wreck was actually discovered virtually every depiction of the sinking of the Titanic showed the ship going down in one piece. That was the conclusion of the official inquiries. But nearly half the people in the water reported that the ship broke up on the surface and that the stern sank after the rest of the ship had gone down.
That's a fairly large sample size - a little more than 700 people - witnessing the most dramatic and traumatic event of most of their lives, yet they split virtually 50/50 on what would seem an important and obvious point. And the official record and every subsequent dramatist and historian agreed with the bare plurality who said "one piece" - until this conclusion was blown apart by the physical evidence.
It is also important to remember that initial reports (which so much of the conspiracy "literature" relies upon to find "inconsistencies") are almost always sketchy, incomplete and rife with errors. Witnesses will blurt out that the suspect was wearing a black jacket - then later remember seeing him run past a black van, at which point he realized the jacket was really navy blue. A cop tells a reporter the suspect had a Glock. When the gun lands in ballistics the tech sees it is really a cheap knock-off built to resemble a Glock. These people are not conspirators, they're human. And that means they're fallible.
Pretty much every criminal investigation, reconstruction of an historical event or attempt to establish the reason that anything failed (from a business plan to an airliner) is going to have a lot of (usually minor) disagreements between witnesses and participants as to the sequence of events, details of what was said or not said, and a host of other things.
When Lincoln was assassinated most people reported that John Wilkes Booth shouted, "Sic Semper Tyranus" ("Thus be it always to tyrants", the state motto of Virginia.) Others insist he said, "The South is avenged!" A few historians think he said both, but that audience members heard only one or the other because he turned while speaking. We'll probably never know for sure. And that's a fact from one of the most written about events in American history. Practically every person present that night wrote up an account of the night in a diary or a letter within hours of Booth's pulling the trigger, and most of them have found their way into university archives and thus the hands of historians. (The 19th century was a much more literate and literary time than 1963 Dallas, and the audience at Ford's theater would have been more so than the average.)
Here's a famous experiment in perception (Gil Grissom mentions this one in a CSI episode, but the experiment cited was real):
A group of college students is shown short video clip of a group of people in white and black t-shirts passing a couple of basketballs among them . The students are asked to count how many times the balls are passed. Part way through the clip a guy in a gorilla suit walks out into the midst of the people, stops, and looks at the camera before moving on. When the clip is over the students are asked what they thought of the gorilla. About half of them say, "What gorilla?"
Several insist there was no gorilla even after being told by the students who had noticed the gorilla that there had never been one and that the students with the more accurate perceptions were wrong. (In this context we can call refer to these students as "The Connellys".
) Details (including the actual video) can be found at these links:
A Matter of Perception
A Gorilla in the Midst
Watch the Basketball Video
As for people running up that goddamned "grassy knoll" - I mentioned many pages ago that Dealy Plaza was (and is) an echo chamber. It is very difficult to tell the exact direction that any loud noise is coming from. Odds are the people ran up that slope because they thought, mistakenly that they'd heard a shot come from there. (Or maybe they thought they'd heard a shot from the opposite direction and were prudently running towards the wall to take cover behind it.
Regards,
Joe
