Ten years ago today in Dallas, Texas..

...Tammy and I found ourselves at Dealey Plaza.

The original plan was to blog all along the trek that the two of us had going across America, just as I've blogged about seemingly everything and anything since 2004.  But I discovered about this point of our odyssey that journeys of self-discovery lose something when you're also documenting it for public viewing as you venture forth.  It was in Dallas that I went on a respite for awhile, that lasted almost two years.  But in the end I came back, none the worse for wear, and filled with lots of stories to tell.

Such as August 1st, 2016.  Now, I had come to Dealey Plaza the day before, on Sunday morning.  There was very little traffic in the area.  And I had to drive through it twice before I realized where we were.  Dealey Plaza is much smaller than I had expected.  This is the most analyzed, scrutinized, discussed, debated, and bitterly argued about patch of land in modern history.  This is the focal point.  This is where all the theories of the past sixty years and more converge upon.  Dealey Plaza is where it all comes together at.

I thought it would be far bigger.

I really wanted to have a picture taken of us, but no one else was around. So we came back the next day about noon when there were more tourists about.  That's when the above picture was taken.  If you click and enlarge the photo and look at Elm Street  behind where we're standing, you can see a small white mark on the road, noting the position of the car when President John F. Kennedy received the fatal blow.

There's a parking lot near the old Texas Schoo Book Depository building (now a museum).  And it just so happened that there was an empty spot precisely at the picket fence atop the grassy knoll, where depending on what you choose to believe is where the second (or is that only?) gunman was who fired from in front of and toward the right of the Lincoln Continental carrying President Kennedy, Texas governor John Connolly, and their wives.

So here's me and Tammy atop the grassy knoll:

Dealey Plaza is well worth a visit if you're ever in Dallas.  The city has done a terrific job making it easy for people who find all the notable spots of that day, such as where Abraham Zapruder was standing when he shot the footage - the most studied length of film in history - with his camera.

This was a place I had long wanted to see with my own eyes.  The assassination of John F. Kennedy is something that I still haven't come to any resolute conclusion in my own mind about.  As I've gotten older I find myself increasingly believing that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but I've also come to maintain an open mind about what happened on November 22nd, 1963.  This is the grandest mystery in American history, and we are not likely to ever have any solid finality about it.

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The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection has been released

President Donald Trump is making good on his promise to release all the documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.  This has been a LONG time coming for many, many people.  It bothered me in high school when I realized how much my government was holding back and it made a lot of my classmates mad too (this was right at the time the movie JFK was out).

But after sixty-two years since this collection began to coalesce, we're finally getting a look at it all.

Here's the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection's main page at the National Archives.  A lot of stuff had been made public already.  But what you're probably most interested in is what has been released because of Trump's executive order.  That stuff started getting dumped a few days ago: more than thirty-three thousand pages across nearly twelve hundred PDF documents.  Here's the link to that newly-released material, and word on the street is that there's more still to come.

What do I think so far?  I've only had time to peruse a little bit of it but there is some interesting stuff in there, a lot of it having to do with anti-communist activities on the part of the American government in the early Sixties, especially in regard to Cuba.  I found one document describing how a ballerina dancer was actually a communist agent.

But most people are going to want to home in on the meaty stuff pertaining to the assassination.  And they are finding some interesting things.  Among the more fascinating come upon so far: Gary Underhill, a CIA agent who stated the day after the killing that there was a clique within the agency that was responsible for carrying it out.  A few months later Underhill was found dead, it was ruled a suicide.  Just one more mystery among the pile of the biggest enigma in American history.

Back in 2016 when I was traveling across America with my dog Tammy, we spent a few weeks in Texas and during that time I got to visit Dealey Plaza in Dallas.  This was it: the most analyzed patch of land in the annals of man.  This is where all the theories span out from and where many more converge again.  And after a lifetime of wanting to see it for myself I was finally there.

Here are some of the pictures that were taken...

Behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll.  This is the spot that several witnesses said they heard the sound of gunshots coming from.

Tammy and me atop the grassy knoll.

The spot where Kennedy was when the fatal shot hit is marked by a small white X on the road (click to enlarge)

The former Texas School Book Depository, from a window on the sixth floor of which is where Lee Harvey Oswald presumably fired the shots as the presidential motorcade passed by on the street below.

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48th anniversary of the JFK assassination

Here's a rare photo from happier times, when Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and "White Hat" were still a band...

Fifteen years after first seeing that and it's still about the gosh-darned funniest Photoshop job that I've ever beheld :-)

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President Kenendy demanded classified UFO files ten days before assassination

Somewhere tonight, The X-Files creator Chris Carter is certainly licking his chops about this...

President John F. Kennedy wrote two letters to the head of the CIA, asking for highly classified files pertaining to the existence of unidentified flying objects.

And JFK sent the letters on November 12th, 1963: just ten days before he was killed by an assassin(s?) bullet(s?) in Dallas, Texas(?).

One of the letters asks for the UFO files and in the other letter, Kennedy expresses a strong desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union on space activities.

Very interesting. And no doubt going to be the fodder for a whole new industry of conspiracy theories :-P

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