Post by DrSchadenfreude on Nov 28, 2021 22:59:38 GMT -5
“Peer Reviewed” Medical/Scientific Journalism Has Been Corrupted by Warren Commission Apologists
Written by Gary L. Aguilar, MD and Cyril Wecht MD, JD
Demonstrating how so much pro-government nonsense has gotten through peer review and into scientific journals, Gary Aguilar MD and Cyril Wecht MD, JD, expose the cherry-picking and outright deception in pseudo-science articles from Warren Commission apologists like Luis Alvarez, John Lattimer, Larry Sturdivan, Lucien Haag, Michael Haag, Ken Rahn, and Nicholas Nalli.
November 22, 2021
Introduction
In his new book, Last Second in Dallas, Josiah Thompson, Ph.D. (philosophy) reported that Nobel Laureate, Luis Alvarez, committed scientific fraud involving the JFK assassination in a peer-reviewed journal, The American Journal of Physics (AJP). It was an extraordinary charge. But as physicians who have reported on the shoddy, biased work of numerous official, credentialed government-funded JFK assassination investigators,[1] we weren’t particularly surprised. We had long ago grasped that pro-Warren Commission journal articles generally fell into the category of junk science. But it was only from Thompson that we learned that the junkification of science traces all the way back to a Nobel Prize winner writing in 1976.
The AJP may have been the first respected science outlet to publish nonsense related to JFK’s death. It wouldn’t be the last. In the years since, many respected “peer reviewed” outlets have published rubbish churned out by a small band of anti-conspiracy activists. Among the most active during the past 20 years are some of the darlings of the mainstream media and the rapidly dwindling band of Warren Commission loyalists: Mr. Larry Sturdivan, Mr. Lucien Haag, Mr. Michael Haag (father and son), and Ken Rahn, Ph.D. In the past three years, a new star has soared into the JFK-junk science heavens, Nicholas Nalli, Ph.D.
An atmospheric chemist with no prior credentials in the JFK case, Nalli published two allegedly “peer reviewed” papers resuscitating the original, moribund theory that Alvarez had introduced in the AJP.[2] Namely, that it was a “jet effect” from Lee Oswald’s bullet that drove JFK “back and to the left.” He failed in spectacular fashion, not only because he placed his faith in Alvarez’s junk science, but also because he concocted a bit of junk science of his own. Predictably, Nalli’s paper was widely heralded. WhoWhatWhy’s Milicent Cranor, a serious student of the Kennedy case, noted that “It has been promoted in Daily Mail, Newsweek, history.com, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and several other places.”[3]
His efforts were not without value, however, for they served as reminders of the consistency with which Commission loyalists corrupt the peer review process in support of the government. And they demonstrated, yet again, that the Warren Commission’s theory of the assassination is a flop, including the “jet effect.”
THE “Jet Effect” and JFK:
Nobel Laureate Luis Alavarez and Jet Effect
America first saw the Zapruder film on March 6, 1975, when ABC broadcast Geraldo Rivera’s program, Good Night America.[4] Seeing Kennedy being blown back and to the left following the fatal shot at the infamous Zapruder frame 313 had an enormous impact on the public. To the eye, it sure looked like JFK had been struck from the right front. So how could Oswald’s shot from behind have driven JFK’s head back toward the assassin? The “scientific” answer came the following year.
In the September 1976 issue of the AJP, Alvarez announced that, “the answer turned out to be simpler than I had expected. I solved the problem (to my own satisfaction, and in a one-dimensional fashion) (sic) on the back of an envelope.” Although JFK’s head was struck from behind, he claimed it was the jettisoning of cranial contents out of the right front side of his skull that drove it back and to the left. The ejecta, he wrote, carried “forward more momentum than was brought in by the (impact of the) bullet…as a rocket recoils when its jet fuel is ejected.”[5]
To satisfy skeptics, including Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson who he named in the AJP, Alvarez ran experiments, and took a turn into the dark side: he shot at light weight, soft-skinned melons, not at all like bony human skulls, and he used the wrong kind of gun and the wrong kind of ammo. He declared:
It is important to stress the fact that a taped melon was our a priori best mock-up of a head, and it showed retrograde recoil in the first test…If we had used the ‘Edison Test,’ and shot at a large collection of objects, and finally found one which gave retrograde recoil, then our firing experiments could reasonably be criticized. But as the tests were actually conducted, I believe they show it is most probable that the shot in (Zapruder) 313 came from behind the car.[6]
Alvarez’s inventive hypothesis was subsequently buttressed by more analogous tests. This time shooting a Mannlicher Carcano, urologist John Lattimer, MD demonstrated the “jet effect” phenomenon. In 1995, in the “peer reviewed” Wound Ballistics Review, Lattimer reported that he shot both at melons as well as the backsides of filled human cadaver skulls that he perched atop ladders. Both melons and skulls recoiled back toward the shooter.[7]
Among Warren loyalists, those unexpected results are foundational. Skeptics remain dubious. But in 2018, Alvarez and Lattimer got new, theoretical support in a paper Nalli published in the supposedly “peer-reviewed” scientific journal, Heliyon. Reaffirming “jet effect” via a withering array of complex calculations, Nalli concluded:
It is therefore found that 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.[8]
Unfortunately, all of this lofty “peer reviewed” research is bunkum. It, and the JFK “jet effect” theory, are not only junk science, much of it is borderline fraud.
First, is it remotely credible that, as Alvarez claimed, a soft-shelled melon, even a tape-wrapped one, is the “best mock-up” of a bony human skull? A melon weighs about half what a human head does. A bullet would cut through it like a knife through butter. Second, it was no less than Warren loyalist John Lattimer, MD who revealed a key element of Alvarez’s work that the Nobel Laureate never mentioned in his paper. Apparently unable to get the results he wanted firing “slow,” ~2000 ft/second, jacketed Mannlicher Carcano bullets, Alvarez instead shot non-jacketed, soft-nosed .30-06 rounds, but not just any old .30-06 rounds, with their ~2800 ft/second muzzle velocity. Instead, he “hot-loaded” his cartridges to 3000 ft/sec. Only then did his melons exhibit his famous recoil “jet effect.”[9],[10],[11] Worse, Professor Alvarez also withheld other relevant information about his tests.
A few years ago, Josiah Thompson was given access to the photo file of the original shooting tests by one of Alvarez’s former graduate students, Paul Hoch, Ph.D. (physics).[12] As Thompson reported in LSID, Alvarez had, in fact, “shot at a large collection of objects”—coconuts, pineapples, water-filled jugs, etc. The only objects that demonstrated recoil were his “a priori best mock-up of a head,” the dis-analogous melons that were struck not by Oswald’s slower, jacketed bullets, but rather by supercharged, soft-pointed rounds. (Fig. 1)
In his new book, Last Second in Dallas, Josiah Thompson, Ph.D. (philosophy) reported that Nobel Laureate, Luis Alvarez, committed scientific fraud involving the JFK assassination in a peer-reviewed journal, The American Journal of Physics (AJP). It was an extraordinary charge. But as physicians who have reported on the shoddy, biased work of numerous official, credentialed government-funded JFK assassination investigators,[1] we weren’t particularly surprised. We had long ago grasped that pro-Warren Commission journal articles generally fell into the category of junk science. But it was only from Thompson that we learned that the junkification of science traces all the way back to a Nobel Prize winner writing in 1976.
The AJP may have been the first respected science outlet to publish nonsense related to JFK’s death. It wouldn’t be the last. In the years since, many respected “peer reviewed” outlets have published rubbish churned out by a small band of anti-conspiracy activists. Among the most active during the past 20 years are some of the darlings of the mainstream media and the rapidly dwindling band of Warren Commission loyalists: Mr. Larry Sturdivan, Mr. Lucien Haag, Mr. Michael Haag (father and son), and Ken Rahn, Ph.D. In the past three years, a new star has soared into the JFK-junk science heavens, Nicholas Nalli, Ph.D.
An atmospheric chemist with no prior credentials in the JFK case, Nalli published two allegedly “peer reviewed” papers resuscitating the original, moribund theory that Alvarez had introduced in the AJP.[2] Namely, that it was a “jet effect” from Lee Oswald’s bullet that drove JFK “back and to the left.” He failed in spectacular fashion, not only because he placed his faith in Alvarez’s junk science, but also because he concocted a bit of junk science of his own. Predictably, Nalli’s paper was widely heralded. WhoWhatWhy’s Milicent Cranor, a serious student of the Kennedy case, noted that “It has been promoted in Daily Mail, Newsweek, history.com, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and several other places.”[3]
His efforts were not without value, however, for they served as reminders of the consistency with which Commission loyalists corrupt the peer review process in support of the government. And they demonstrated, yet again, that the Warren Commission’s theory of the assassination is a flop, including the “jet effect.”
THE “Jet Effect” and JFK:
Nobel Laureate Luis Alavarez and Jet Effect
America first saw the Zapruder film on March 6, 1975, when ABC broadcast Geraldo Rivera’s program, Good Night America.[4] Seeing Kennedy being blown back and to the left following the fatal shot at the infamous Zapruder frame 313 had an enormous impact on the public. To the eye, it sure looked like JFK had been struck from the right front. So how could Oswald’s shot from behind have driven JFK’s head back toward the assassin? The “scientific” answer came the following year.
In the September 1976 issue of the AJP, Alvarez announced that, “the answer turned out to be simpler than I had expected. I solved the problem (to my own satisfaction, and in a one-dimensional fashion) (sic) on the back of an envelope.” Although JFK’s head was struck from behind, he claimed it was the jettisoning of cranial contents out of the right front side of his skull that drove it back and to the left. The ejecta, he wrote, carried “forward more momentum than was brought in by the (impact of the) bullet…as a rocket recoils when its jet fuel is ejected.”[5]
To satisfy skeptics, including Mark Lane and Josiah Thompson who he named in the AJP, Alvarez ran experiments, and took a turn into the dark side: he shot at light weight, soft-skinned melons, not at all like bony human skulls, and he used the wrong kind of gun and the wrong kind of ammo. He declared:
It is important to stress the fact that a taped melon was our a priori best mock-up of a head, and it showed retrograde recoil in the first test…If we had used the ‘Edison Test,’ and shot at a large collection of objects, and finally found one which gave retrograde recoil, then our firing experiments could reasonably be criticized. But as the tests were actually conducted, I believe they show it is most probable that the shot in (Zapruder) 313 came from behind the car.[6]
Alvarez’s inventive hypothesis was subsequently buttressed by more analogous tests. This time shooting a Mannlicher Carcano, urologist John Lattimer, MD demonstrated the “jet effect” phenomenon. In 1995, in the “peer reviewed” Wound Ballistics Review, Lattimer reported that he shot both at melons as well as the backsides of filled human cadaver skulls that he perched atop ladders. Both melons and skulls recoiled back toward the shooter.[7]
Among Warren loyalists, those unexpected results are foundational. Skeptics remain dubious. But in 2018, Alvarez and Lattimer got new, theoretical support in a paper Nalli published in the supposedly “peer-reviewed” scientific journal, Heliyon. Reaffirming “jet effect” via a withering array of complex calculations, Nalli concluded:
It is therefore found that 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.[8]
Unfortunately, all of this lofty “peer reviewed” research is bunkum. It, and the JFK “jet effect” theory, are not only junk science, much of it is borderline fraud.
First, is it remotely credible that, as Alvarez claimed, a soft-shelled melon, even a tape-wrapped one, is the “best mock-up” of a bony human skull? A melon weighs about half what a human head does. A bullet would cut through it like a knife through butter. Second, it was no less than Warren loyalist John Lattimer, MD who revealed a key element of Alvarez’s work that the Nobel Laureate never mentioned in his paper. Apparently unable to get the results he wanted firing “slow,” ~2000 ft/second, jacketed Mannlicher Carcano bullets, Alvarez instead shot non-jacketed, soft-nosed .30-06 rounds, but not just any old .30-06 rounds, with their ~2800 ft/second muzzle velocity. Instead, he “hot-loaded” his cartridges to 3000 ft/sec. Only then did his melons exhibit his famous recoil “jet effect.”[9],[10],[11] Worse, Professor Alvarez also withheld other relevant information about his tests.
A few years ago, Josiah Thompson was given access to the photo file of the original shooting tests by one of Alvarez’s former graduate students, Paul Hoch, Ph.D. (physics).[12] As Thompson reported in LSID, Alvarez had, in fact, “shot at a large collection of objects”—coconuts, pineapples, water-filled jugs, etc. The only objects that demonstrated recoil were his “a priori best mock-up of a head,” the dis-analogous melons that were struck not by Oswald’s slower, jacketed bullets, but rather by supercharged, soft-pointed rounds. (Fig. 1)
