Non-Fiction Reviews

Head Shot

(2010) G. Paul Chambers, Prometheus Books, Ł21.95 / US $25, hrdbk, 260pp, ISBN 978-1-616-14209-4

In the six-year Glasgow Herald SF short story competition for new writers, it was perhaps inevitable that the judges had to renew acquaintance with the great clichés of SF and fantasy. I did try to issue a few warnings after one year when a full third of the entries ended, ‘His name was Adam and her name was Eve’. But whenever a story began with someone getting out of a UFO or a time machine with the words, “That’s Dallas over there”, we knew what was coming.

G. Paul Chambers is 'an internationally recognised expert in the field of shock physics and has performed high-speed photographic studies of high-velocity impacts and deformations of solids as well as extensive computer modelling of shock wave and matter interactions'. He is the first experimental physicist to write an account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, and his findings should perhaps be required reading for anyone who wants to write SF about it hereafter. He reopens a lot of issues which I thought were long settled, and when such analyses are routine plot elements in programmes like CSI and NCIS, he makes it seem astonishing that the exercise hasn’t been done before.

As I understand it, the main points are these:-

None of the books claiming to prove that Oswald acted alone has been written by a physicist, let alone by a specialist in Chambers’ fields of expertise.
Although it’s undisputed that Oswald fired three shots, the type of rifle he used is virtually incapable of firing three shots within the timescale of the ones in the Zapruder movie. In multiple trials, experts who could manage three shots in the time were unable to take aim as well. Accusations that the movie has been tampered with don’t stand up to forensic examination.
Fragments of the supposed second bullet, which supposedly hit both Kennedy and Governor Connally, add up to more than one round. In any case the fragmentation is inconsistent with the claim that the bullet described a complex path through Kennedy’s head and body while remaining intact.
The autopsy, such as it was, was performed in a crowded room, with multiple interruptions, and cut short. The injuries are not consistent with the Zapruder film or with eyewitness accounts, and there’s anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that the body was removed and interfered with before the autopsy began. Published analyses claiming to explain the injuries described, assume that the head was rolling freely, like a billiard ball on a table, rather than pivoting on Kennedy’s neck.
Reconstructions match the film only if the second shot comes from in front. Two directions of origin for it as possible, one in line with the infamous grassy knoll and the other with a nearby bridge.
After comparison with reconstructions and removing echoes, acoustic analysis of recordings from police radios, etc., yield four shots and a possible fifth.

Uniting all of the above, Chambers’ own reconstructions indicate that the second round to hit Kennedy was fired from in front by a low-calibre, high-velocity weapon such as the Winchester .220 Swift, “a favourite assassination of the 1960s”. This is consistent with the piece of Kennedy’s skull which was blown clear and subsequently retrieved, but cannot be reconciled with any kind of shot fired from the rear.

While in the USA in 1984, I bought copies of the Warren Commission Report and of “Rush to Judgement”, the highly critical assessment which came out the following year. Having lost one in a house move, I’ve never read either, which puts me at a disadvantage with regard to Chambers’ non-scientific claims, namely:-

After being set up, the Warren Commission delayed its investigation under after Jack Ruby’s conviction, leaving little more than ten weeks in which to meet the preset deadline – “pure folly”, says Chambers. It was felt that prior enquiries might compromise Ruby’s legal rights, which makes little sense when he wasn’t accused of complicity in the assassination, and he had committed his own act live on national television.
Three of the five areas of the Commission’s remit were entirely focused on Oswald, allowing no opportunity to consider other scenarios.
The evidence reviewed by the Commission was reselected by just one person, and its findings were subsequently written up by two. Data such as the positioning of wounds were rewritten in order to correspond to the supposed consensus. The Commission was then disbanded, allowing its members no opportunity to respond collectively to criticism or to reassess their findings in the light of it.

It might seem inconceivable that such things could happen to a report of such consequence, but I have known another case. An entire section ( to which I had contributed) of Pioneering the Space Frontier, the report of Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Commission on Space, was deleted on the personal decision of the Chairman who disagreed with it. When the omission came to light on publication, the paperwork relating to it was promptly stolen from its author – the only thing stolen in an obviously targeted burglary. It does happen.

Chambers’ book is full of such instances, from the history of science and from his own experience, to show how the scientific method works, how it can get things wrong but strives to get them right. There’s so much of it that I think to detect the hand of an editor, one saying, “Nobody trusts scientists any more, what with global warming and all. You have to tell people why they should believe what you say.”

But I suspect readers genuinely mistrustful of science will say, ‘Methinks he doth protest too much’, non-scientific readers will just want to get to the facts about Kennedy, and readers with a scientific background will be annoyed by the many digressions. Some of the analogies are far-fetched, and one is just plain wrong (pp. 88-89). It is true that if an observatory’s staff detect a supernova in a distant galaxy, they immediately alert all the rest. One reason is to establish priority; another is to maximise the acquisition of data from a short-lived, rapidly varying phenomenon. Another is indeed to eliminate any chance of observational error, but not “because for both causes to be due to ‘random noise’, or to, say, a 'luminescent dust speck' on the telescope’s mirror, it would require both mirrors have the dust speck in exactly the same place.” (Chambers’ quotation marks and emphases.) 'Since a telescopic mirror may be hundreds of square feet in area, the probability of this happening is astronomically small.' And instrumentally zero: a bright spot on a telescope mirror wouldn’t appear as a bright spot in the image, it would degrade the whole image, probably washing it out altogether.

When Rush to Judgement was published, a member of the Warren Commission was interviewed on BBC TV. “But who were these supposed conspirators?” he angrily demanded. “Who benefited financially from the assassination? Who gained politically? Who has claimed credit? Where are the people behind it supposed to be?” Watching, I thought, 'My God, they’re from the future.' But before I did anything with the idea, all too many others beat me to it. For anyone who thinks they have a new twist on it now, Head Shot would be a good place to start the research.

Duncan Lunan