The wound on the inner table, however, was larger and had what in the field of wound ballistics is described as a shelving or a coning effect. To make an analogy to which the members of the Commission are probably most familiar, when a missile strikes a pane of glass, a typical example, a B-B fired by a child's air rifle, when this strikes a pane of glass there will be a small, usually round to oval defect on the side of the glass from whence the missile came and a belled-out or coned-out surface on the opposite side of the glass from whence the missile came.
(At this point, Mr. Dulles entered the hearing room.)
Commander Humes. Experience has shown and my associates and Colonel Finck, in particular, whose special field of interest is wound ballistics can give additional testimony about this scientifically observed fact.
This wound then had the characteristics of wound of entrance from this direction through the two tables of the skull.
Mr. Specter. When you say "this direction," will you specify that direction in relationship to the skull?
Commander Humes. At that point I mean only from without the skull to within.
Mr. Specter. Fine, proceed.
Commander Humes. Having ascertained to our satisfaction and incidentally photographs illustrating this phenomenon from both the external surface of the skull and from the internal surface were prepared, we concluded that the large defect to the upper right side of the skull, in fact, would represent a wound of exit.
A careful examination of the margins of the large bone defect at that point, however, failed to disclose a portion of the skull bearing again a wound of—a point of impact on the skull of this fragment of the missile, remembering, of course, that this area was devoid of any scalp or skull at this present time. We did not have the bone.
In further evaluating this head wound, I will refer back to the X-rays which we had previously prepared. These had disclosed to us multiple minute fragments of radio opaque material traversing a line from the wound in the occiput to just above the right eye, with a rather sizable fragment visible by X-ray just above the right eye. These tiny fragments that were seen dispersed through the substance of the brain in between were, in fact, just that extremely minute, less than 1 mm. in size for the most part.