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company specialized in acoustical analysis, working not only on such projects as underwater detection devices for the U.S. Navy, but also on studies of matters of national importance. In 1973, during the investigation of Watergate, the firm advised on the famous gap in the White House tapes. Its expertise had been used, too, in the prosecution of National Guardsmen involved in the shooting of students at Kent State University.
    Nobody expected very much from the crackly Dallas police recording submitted to Dr. Barger. His work, though, along with a further study performed by two scientists at the City University ofNew York, turned out to be pivotal to the deliberations of the Assassinations Committee. Technical processes, including the use of equipment not available in 1963, enabled Barger to produce a visual presentation of the sound-wave forms on a part of the tape that—his initial findings indicated—had great significance.
    With his New York associates, Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, Dr. Barger then designed an acoustical reconstruction in Dealey Plaza. Early one morning in 1978, guns boomed once again at the scene of President Kennedy’s murder. The results showed that impulses on the police recording matched sound patterns unique to the scene of the crime. Certain impulses, the scientists theorized, were indeed gunshots. They declared that the sounds had been picked up by a microphone moving along at about eleven miles per hour at the time of the assassination. They surmised that this was mounted on the motorcycle of a police outrider in the presidential motorcade, and that the recording had been made because the microphone button was stuck open at the time. Working from photographic evidence and testimony, Assassinations Committee staff decided that the motorcycle had been one ridden by Officer H. B. McLain. It appeared that the scientists and the investigators had achieved a tour de force of detection.
    The Committee’s experts concluded that gunfire had come from in front of the President as well as from behind him. At least two gunmen were therefore involved in the assassination. Aware that acoustics today has a rightful place in forensic science, that it has been admitted into evidence in court, the Assassinations Committee was forced into a dramatic reassessment. The acoustics finding formed a major plank of its official finding that President Kennedy was “probably” murdered as the result of a conspiracy.
    Soon,however, came dissenting expert opinion. First from the FBI, with a skimpy report declaring the two-gunman theory “invalid.” Even a lay reading revealed this critique to be hopelessly flawed, and it deserves no public airing here. The first serious blow to the acoustical evidence came in a 1982 report by the National Academy of Sciences. A panel of distinguished scientists concluded that the Committee’s studies “do not demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot.” At the core of the finding lay not some abstruse scientific deduction, but the curiosity of a drummer in Ohio, Steve Barber.
    Barber came to the controversy thanks to a girlie magazine. In the summer of 1979, Gallery offered its readers, among the nudes, a record of the section of the police Dictabelt that includes the noises said to be gunshots. Barber, who played it again and again, detected something the experts had missed. What had been thought to be unintelligible “crosstalk”—conversation coming in from another radio channel—Barber’s ear identified as the voice of Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead car of the motorcade. The sheriff’s voice occurs at the same point on the recording as the sound impulses that the Committee’s experts said were gunshots. What he is saying is, “Move all men available out of my department back into the railroad yards there … to try to determine just what and where it happened down there. And hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get