JFK assassination audio to undergo digital scan

WASHINGTON — About a year from now, one of the most vexing mysteries in American history may finally be solved: Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have begun work on a digital scanning apparatus that they believe will be able to reproduce sound from the only known audio recording of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

The recording was made through an open microphone on a police motorcycle during Kennedy's motorcade into Dealey Plaza, where the president was shot to death. The sounds were captured on a Dictaphone belt at police headquarters, but scientific analyses of them over decades proved anything but conclusive, fueling arguments about how many people were actually involved in killing the president.

The federal government's official inquiry into the assassination, the Warren Commission, concluded in 1964 that Oswald was a lone gunman, firing three shots from the Texas Book Depository building above the plaza. But a House committee that investigated the shooting 15 years later concluded that four shots were fired, including three from the tower and one from another location, giving rise to all manner of conspiracy theories.

Like old 78 rpm records, the Dictaphone belt became worn and damaged through constant replay for analysis using a stylus. When it became property of the National Archives in 1990, its technical staff recommended that no further efforts be made to replicate its sounds through mechanical means.

But that left preservationists with a daunting and historically important challenge: How could the sounds on the old plastic belt be captured for posterity, and if they could, would they provide unequivocal evidence of how many shots were fired?

Leslie Waffen, an archivist with the National Archives, said he not only believes that the sound can be captured but that, using digital analysis to map the sounds, scientists can remove extraneous noise like static and distant voices to reveal gun shots.

"This is big," said Waffen, whose unit has custody of the belt as well as the original 8mm home movie by Abraham Zapruder, which showed the assassination in color but utter silence. "That's why we called the experts in. They came up with a recommendation to do this."