There’s a new analysis that made some news on MSNBC. Basically, there’s a former FBI metallurgist and a couple of Texas A&M researchers who think that the bullet fragments deserve more analysis with newer techniques. Slashdot picked up the story and some of the comments are really amusing. I thought this was the most insightful.

Personally, I think stories like this will keep coming up as new techniques come along. The assassination just has spawned too much controversy for people to ignore new techniques that could have provided a clearer picture of the event in 1963. To me it just re-emphasizes the imbalance between a random ‘loser’ like Oswald and a king-like president like JFK. People want there to be something else to help explain how someone like Oswald could assassinate someone like JFK. People can’t understand the simple explanation and keep seeking a technological reason to explain away their confusion.

The story also made me realize that I never posted my comments about my trip to Dealey Plaza. My initial one-sentence impression of the Dealey Plaza was that it is much smaller and more eerie than I thought it would be. Dealey Plaza itself is no more than 2-3 city blocks large and at least half if not more than half of it is not what you would consider a part of the “crime scene.” Basically everything that happened was contained within a distance of about a single city block, probably less.

Another implication of the smallness of all of this is that I truly believe if Roger Clemens was standing in Oswald’s sniper nest he probably would have been able to seriously wound JFK simply by throwing a baseball at him. Hell, I could have probably hit him at least once with a baseball from there given a couple throws. The total distance involved amounts to not much at all. It just seems so much larger when all you see are sketches and drawings with perfectly straight sight lines, sweeping landscape shots or overhead maps of the parade route and plaza. It’s extremely hard to get an idea of the perspective of the place with just pictures.

I also mentioned the eerie feel of the place. This is also hard to capture. I can say things like “The buildings haven’t changed.” or “The plaza looks almost identical to what it did back in 1963.” or even “It would be easier to tell you the few things that have changed than to try and tell you what has not changed.” — All of which are true, but even knowing this didn’t prepare me for the feel of it. It’s just strange. It’s an itch in the back of your mind.

You can walk through the pedestrian crossing under the triple underpass and just get a feeling that this is the tunnel where Jackie would have seen the true extent of the damage to her husband’s head. Maybe that’s where she flipped his skull fragment hanging onto his scalp back up to cover what was left of his brain. You just don’t know, but it itches at your mind that something unnatural happened to someone here.

The place is surreal. If you are ever in Dallas and have an extra hour, go to Dealey Plaza and walk around. If you have two hours, get a ticket to the museum. The stuff on the walls isn’t really anything more than what you can get from a book, but you can go see the sniper’s nest and look down on the street from the window next to the one Oswald used. It gives you a truly unique perspective on the whole thing.