How a Popular Misconception Gave Away a Lie by the FBI

[Bob Prudhomme]

The camera distance or zoom is slightly different between photos. Look at the centimeter scale.

That is true, although it should not affect our ability to make accurate measurements. I have enlarged the bottom photo on a printout almost twice what you see on the post. As the scale in the photo gets enlarged as well, it is still relevant to the bullet in the photo.

[Drew Phipps]

I have been following your work, Bob, on this topic (including the history behind the MC 91/38 and its ammo) with a great deal of interest in this, and the other forums that you have posted this matter. You are definitely on to something. I think that you are correct that none of the photos that are on the internet that purport to be of CE 399 in fact depict a MC 91/38 slug after being fired from an MC 91/38 rifle. The slugs that are shown may not even be the same bullet. However, I'm unwilling to jump straight from there to "Frazier perjured himself." These pictures might not be the same bullet(s) Frazier was talking about. Once you say that the government is deliberately misleading us, it is a stretch to rely on some of the stuff they give us to prove that other stuff was false.

I've been counting pixels as a measurement of actual size of the .gif photos that allegedly depict CE 399. Interestingly, in all of the .gif photos I have found (education website, jfk facts, etc) the scale is 13 pixels to 1 mm. .jpg pixels are harder to count as the colors of the pixels are "smeared." The bullets in the .gif photos are too short (in length) to be MC 6.5 mm ammo and too narrow too, if the ruler in the picture is the same distance from the camera lens as the bullet. If the bullet is closer to the lens it would be larger than the predicted measurements, if the bullet is father away it would be smaller.

That all begs the question why the FBI would slap a ruler in a photo and then place the bullet in such a way as to give us (or a jury) an inaccurate measurement of the bullet. Fortunately, there is a way to defeat such tomfoolery. I will reply to this thread on that topic later. I'm ready for dinner and don't have my notes handy.

BTW I'm delighted that Magda has figured out what was keeping me from contributing to this topic for the last couple weeks. Thank you!

[Drew Phipps]

Bob, while I am working on my next bit, can you explain what brand and caliber the bullets are in this picture that you used on another forum? (I hopefully attached it to this post.)

[Bob Prudhomme]

[quote=Drew Phipps]Bob, while I am working on my next bit, can you explain what brand and caliber the bullets are in this picture that you used on another forum? (I hopefully attached it to this post.)

Not sure what the two on the right are but the one on the left is a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Schoenauer. While it is a full metal jacket bullet, I am unsure if it is military issue or not. The FMJ 6.5mm MS was popular with elephant hunters in Africa, as this bullet was capable of penetrating the thick skull of an elephant, without deforming or breaking up, and striking the elephant's brain to kill it.

As I pointed out before, the 6.5mm MS cartridge and its 160 grain bullet are almost identical to the 6.5mm Carcano cartridge and its 162 grain bullet, save for one outstanding difference. While both rifles share the same calibre (bore diameter) of 6.5 mm (.256"), the rifling grooves of the Carcano are deeper than the MS, meaning that the bullet diameter of the MS bullet is the standard 6.7 mm (.264") while the diameter of the Carcano bullet is 6.8 mm (.268"). In order to achieve this, and not have the lead below the copper alloy jacket of the Carcano bullet exposed by the rifling's lands or the jacket weakened, the copper alloy jacket of the Carcano bullet has to be a MINIMUM of .002" thicker on each side than the MS bullet.

In other words, the Carcano bullet is even more robust than the 6.5mm MS bullet, affectionately known in the elephant hunting world as the "flying drill" for its remarkable penetrating abilities.

If the 6.5mm Carcano bullet was so robust, and capable of penetrating so much dense material without deforming or breaking up, how did the bullet that struck JFK's head break apart so completely after only penetrating the thin skull of a human?

Bob

[Drew Phipps]

Do you have any figures for the weight loss that occurs when the Carcano bullet with the thicker jacket is fired thru the MC 91/38? (Harold Wiesberg estimated that weight at half a grain.) You would suspect that a rifle with deep grooves would inflict a higher weight loss on the bullet as it carves out the rifling marks on the bullet than a rifle with shallower grooves. I don't recall anyone but Howard Wiesberg (a fair bit of time ago) adding in this "end-of-barrel" weight loss with the bullet fragments recovered from Connally to determine if CE 399, the magic bullet, was of the proper weight to have left all those fragments. Half a grain seems pretty significant to me.

[Bob Prudhomme]

[quote=Drew Phipps]
Do you have any figures for the weight loss that occurs when the Carcano bullet with the thicker jacket is fired thru the MC 91/38? (Harold Wiesberg estimated that weight at half a grain.) You would suspect that a rifle with deep grooves would inflict a higher weight loss on the bullet as it carves out the rifling marks on the bullet than a rifle with shallower grooves. I don't recall anyone but Howard Wiesberg (a fair bit of time ago) adding in this "end-of-barrel" weight loss with the bullet fragments recovered from Connally to determine if CE 399, the magic bullet, was of the proper weight to have left all those fragments. Half a grain seems pretty significant to me. [END QUOTE]

I'm not really sure, outside of microscopic traces, if bullets jacketed in copper alloys actually leave much in the way of metal depositions in the rifling grooves of a barrel. Bullet jackets were first developed, after all, to solve the problem of unjacketed lead bullets depositing great amounts of lead in the riflings. Half of a grain certainly sounds like an excessive amount, although Weisberg is a scientist and he may know more than I do. However, if each shot deposited half of a grain of metal, it would not take many shots to completely throw the accuracy of the rifle off.

At the throat of a rifle barrel, where the bullet begins its journey, the raised "lands" that actually make the impression seen in a spent bullet do not begin with an abrupt shoulder but, rather, begin gradually; allowing the lands to slowly work their way into the malleable copper alloy without tearing metal away. The tapered nose of a pointed (or round) bullet assists in getting the bullet started, too. If this were not true, each bullet would leave a great deposit of metal at the throat of the barrel. Once the bullet is fully engaged in the riflings, the land impressions are formed on the bullet, and the bullet then travels through the lands like a bolt being threaded through a nut.

P.S. The only exception to the above analogy are the other Carcanos with their "progressive" twist rifling, where the rate of twist begins at a gentle 1:20 or so, and eventually tightens to around 1:8. One would think that such a dramatic change in rate of twist would tend to tear the jacket up, yet the bullets fired from these rifles really don't look different from other spent bullets. Perhaps the copper alloy is malleable enough to allow it change shape as the rate of twist changes.

[Drew Phipps]

Half of a grain certainly sounds like an excessive amount, although Weisberg is a scientist and he may know more than I do.

Harold Weisberg is a former OSS agent and JFK researcher and habitual litigant who died in 2004 (?) after having written the very first of many books to criticize the Warren Commission. So he could well have been wrong about the bullet weight loss. As I said, no one since then has grabbed that banner and run with it. So the jacket actually becomes slightly more compressed and dense as it is pressed inward at the throat of the barrel, as opposed to being peeled off like a banana? Good fact to know.

[Drew Phipps]

The problem I referred to in a former post, is that of photographic perspective. Closer objects look bigger than far away objects. Since photos are 2D, our binocular vision can't help us as we are used to. So subtle differences in position might make photographic measurements less reliable.

The good news is, that objects don't change their relative proportions when they get smaller or larger (closer or farther away). An object that is 3 feet long and 1 foot wide will always display that same 3/1 proportion no matter how much it is magnified or reduced. It will also have that same proportion whether measured in feet, millimeters, light-years, or pyramid inches. Using Bob's excellent history and technical specs (and Fraziers' WC testimony) we see that a MC rifle bullet should be 29.21 mm long and 6.78 mm wide, a proportion of 4.31 (L) to 1 (W). No matter how we measure it or how we reduce or enlarge it we should always get the same proportion.

I used the 4 pics (which I am hopefully attaching to this post) to count pixels. I used maximum magnification to count pixels, and the pixels are easily visible at top magnification. (I concede that I could have miscounted a pixel or 2.) I counted the length thru the center line of the image from tip to tail. I realize that this method of length might actually produce a count a tiny bit greater than the actual size, in that the rear pixels of the image (at a rear edge is the point are closest to the camera, and the front pixels of the image (at the tip of the nose) are slightly farther away from the camera. (Someone better at math, and cameras, than me will have to tell you how much error that introduces.) I measured the width at the widest point just aft of the nose, to avoid any distortion from the tail end flattening of the round

Photo 3317 L = 381 pixels W = 86 pixels proportion = 4.43
Photo 3318 L = 374 pixels W = 83 pixels proportion = 4.51
Photo 3319 L = 362 pixels W = 82 pixels proportion = 4.41
Photo 3320 L = 381 pixels W = 84 pixels proportion = 4.54

Average proportion = 4.47

These proportions are about 4% higher than they should be, if the 4 photos were of the same bullet. That means that if the pictured bullet was truly a MC 6.78 mm caliber bullet, it would measure 30.54 mm in length (which is wrong). If the length of the bullet was actually the WCC MC length of 29.21 mm, the caliber would be 6.53 (which is also wrong, but corresponds to .257 ammo). I think, however, that the true conclusion is more shocking. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that photos 3317 and 3319 show a different bullet entirely than photos 3318 and 3320. And I'm hoping that Bob is going to help me nail down exactly what kind of bullets these might be.

There are also problems with the twist ratio engraved on these bullets. Assuming that the scale measurement is in fact correct, the twist ratio on these pictures is faster than the 1 twist per 8 inches that the Italians used for one of their 2 kinds of mil spec barrels. If I pretend that it's a single WCC MC bullet, and use Bob's data for land and groove width, I get a spin of 1 per 7 inches, but a couple of the photos individually appear to show a faster spin rate than that impossible if it's all the same bullet. (The other type of mil spec barrel would have been the sawed-off progressive twist 31 inch barrel from the original MC long rifle, which had a much slower rate of spin than 1 / 8 inches for the 21 inches closest to the chamber.)

I cannot say at what point these images were procured and became something other than what they claim to be. (They are .gif, which wasn't invented until after the WC and the HSCA.) It could be pre-Warren Commission, or some or all of these photos might have been added to the National Archives, or substituted later. Or, since this is the internet, these images might not be accurate representations of what is in the National Archives at all. But it is clear that these pictures are not a single WCC round fired from a MC 91/38 rifle.

Forgot my second conclusion:

IF we assume that this is all the same bullet and IF we assume that the ruler in the background is the same distance from the camera lens as the bullet, then the actual measurements of the bullet average out to length 28.8 mm and diameter of 6.44 mm, which corresponds to a .254 caliber bullet.

The below photos appear to have been downloaded from NARA, which does contain apparently identical .gif images, but I did not download them myself directly from NARA.

[Bob Prudhomme]

Excellent work, Drew. This is definitely where things begin to get complex, but I believe there is an answer hiding in those photos and Frazier's testimony. The only correction I can offer to your work is the rate of twist of the M91/38 Carcano short rifle, which was 1:8.47 and not just 1:8. This is a small figure, of course, but makes things even worse for the CE 399 in the photo, which we both determined to have a rate of twist more in the range of 1:7.

The only Carcano rifle even close to this would have been one of the true carbines (not the sawed off long rifle variety) with the progressive twist rifling that went from 1:15.3 - 1:7.48.

The more I look at these photos, and the rest of Frazier's evidence, the more I wonder what really happened. None of it makes any sense, and what we can figure out is so bizarre, I can only wonder, why would anyone go to such lengths to produce this grade of false evidence?

[Drew Phipps]

Don't know if this is good news or bad, but this isn't the first time that this particular feat of trickery has been spotted. A gentleman with the unlikely name of Walt Cakebread, a former Navy man and gun enthusiast, looked at a published photo of the "magic bullet" (unknown if it was labeled CE 399 or not) in 1964 and concluded that there were 6 set of lands and grooves on the bullet, and determined that the spin rate was 1 / 7.37 inches. Knowing that wasn't right for a M-C 91/38, he shopped his observations around but wasn't taken seriously. 10 years later, the HSCA comes along and publishes a different pictures of the bullet (almost certainly by now labeled CE 399), and it shows a different pattern of lands and grooves! When Cakebread realizes that this meant that either the WC evidence was a forgery, or the HSCA evidence was, he again tried to interest researchers in it. He had no luck until he ran into author Jack White. Jack White examines all of the bullet photos and concludes that CE 399 has 5 sets of lands and grooves, and published a short article about it.

You can read all about Walt Cakebread and Jack White in the Harold Weisberg Archives (online). It appears that Harold used the article as "evidence" in support of one of his many FOIA lawsuits.