Earwitnesses to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) did not agree about the location of the gunman even though their judgments about the number and timing of the gunshots were reasonably consistent. Even earwitnesses at the same general location disagreed. An examination of the acoustics of supersonic bullets and the characteristics of human sound localization help explain the general disagreement about the origin of the gunshots. The key fact is that a shock wave produced by the supersonic bullet arrived prior to the muzzle blast for many earwitnesses, and the shock wave provides erroneous information about the origin of the gunshot. During the government's official re-enactment of the JFK assassination in 1978, expert observers were highly accurate in localizing the origin of gunshots taken from either of two locations, but their supplementary observations help explain the absence of a consensus among the earwitnesses to the assassination itself.
Introduction
President John F. Kennedy (JFK) was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Within days, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, appointed a blue-ribbon panel of seven legislators and statesmen to investigate the assassination. The commission was headed by the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, Earl Warren, and consisted of about 400 staff and a budget of about $10 million. The commission held public hearings and officially interviewed over 500 people. About 10 months after the assassination, the commission published a report of nearly 900 pages plus 26 volumes of interviews, depositions, and exhibits, all of which came to be called the Warren Report (Warren Commission, 1964). This was arguably the most thoroughly investigated murder in the history of the world.
