Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Like me, Richard E. Sprague believed that JFK was shot with a frozen dart which contained an immobilizing agent. But, he believed the shooter was Umbrella Man, and the weapon was the umbrella, and I don't think that is likely at all. For one, the only way to shoot it with accuracy would be to raise it to eye level and sight down the length of it- as you would a rifle. But, that would have stuck out like a sore thumb, and it could easily have been photographed. 

Sprague made reference to the 1975 Church Committee which displayed the CIA ice gun, but it looked like a gun and nothing like an umbrella.  To say there is speculation in this piece is an understatement. It is wild, fanciful speculation. 

And really, he got everything wrong. He claims that that neck shot came before the back shot, and it was vice versa. The back shot came first. And it came early. Very early. It came before the Croft photo because JFK is reacting to it in the Croft photo. The Croft photo was reportedly taken at Z161, so if it was taken slightly before that, what Zapruder frame are we talking about? It is impossible to say because the Zapruder is so cut-up and cobbled together. You can't get any accurate times at all from it. 

So, forget about Zapruder which is useless for timing and locating anything, but we can safely say that the back shot struck up to a second before the Croft photo, and JFK is reacting to it in the Croft photo, and a lot was done to the Croft photo to cover that up. 

So, the back shot was the first shot to strike the President, and it occurred rather high on the hill, right about when the limo was passing the obelisk. It was taken very close in time to the Altgens photo, either a fraction of a second before or after. And regardless, nothing we see of JFK and Jackie in the Altgens photo is real. The whole bit about JFK raising his fist and Jackie tenderly caressing his arm is fake. It hadn't happened yet. Remember, the Altgens photo is severely cropped. Altgens lied when he told the WC that he zoomed in, and he gave it away when he admitted that his assignment was to capture the "caravan" amid the Dallas skyline, meaning the tops of buildings. How are you going to do that if you zoom in? 

But, the back shot was definitely a straight-on shot. There is no reason to think it was taken from a diagonal. It went straight into his back. So, the shooter had to be directly behind him, not off to the side, as Umbrella Man was. The back shot was taken from the Dal-Tex building.  

Then, Sprague grossly exaggerates the transfer of momentum of the bullet to the body. There is very little. Almost all the bullet's energy goes towards tunneling through the body not towards moving it. Sprague attributes JFK's arm motions to the transfer of energy from the bullet, and that is nonsense. JFK moved his arms with his own energy. Listen to Gilles Jesus. 

Alas, Sprague was an idiot. He actually claimed that there was a "second African-American" at the TSBD doorway whose arm got super-imposed over Doorman's, but that is ridiculous. The Altgens photo is a spasm of photographic alteration, which he missed completely. There was only one black guy.

So, this analysis by Sprague is historically important because it refers to JFK being shot with a frozen dart to deliver a chemical agent that would "paralyze" him before he entered the Kill Zone. But, "paralyze" is not the right word because paralysis refers to the complete loss of innervation to a muscle, whereas what happened  to Kennedy was just the opposite: the spasming of his muscles from a nerve agent. His muscles were hypertonic, not paralyzed. He was rendered spasmodic, and the purpose was to immobilize him.      

A lot of people like to laugh at this piece by Sprague, and I can't say I blame them. But, he was right that JFK was shot with a frozen dart to deliver an immobilizing agent. Umbrella Man was just a signaler to the shooters and not a shooter himself. 

https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/TUM.html