Discovery Channel, Assassinations and Adventure
I get to do some weird and interesting stuff. My latest commission - re-enacting the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas for the Discovery Channel - must register fairly high on the weird and interesting meter. It began with a suggestion made some months back to an acquaintance in Hollywood. I told him that it would be intriguing to test by practical experiment the official version of the JFK shooting (all the more with the 40th anniversary coming up). Read More
Well, I have been at it again - recreating the Kennedy assassination in Dallas for a Discovery Channel documentary. The more I look at this tragic incident, the more suspicious it all gets. Regular readers of this magazine may remember that some years back, I was also in Dallas on the Kennedy trail. On that trip, I proved that the shots could be made with the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano rifle allegedly used by Oswald and fitted with a cheap ‘tin-whistle’ 4 power telescopic sight. Read More
Truck hunting is not my normal thing, but I have a few arguably relevant qualifications. As well as the usual BASC member’s profile (game, clays and stalking), I have been an army officer, knocked around Africa a bit and been shot at and bombed (more is the pity) in Lebanon and Afghanistan. I spent a couple of years training people to shoot police weapons. Recently, I have been working as a ballistic consultant and ‘sharpshooter’ (their term not mine) for the Discovery Channel ‘Unsolved History’ series. Read More
“Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot,” shouted Oliver Wendall Holmes, then a young Union army officer (and later a famous Supreme Court Judge), to the tall man in a stove pipe hat standing near him on the parapet. Apparently, he had not recognised the towering figure (6’ 6” without the hat), and made his comment in extremis as a man between them fell to a Confederate bullet. Read More
If a member of the special forces of a foreign but friendly country phoned you up and told you that he needed a cameraman PDQ for an expedition to Kilimanjaro in a couple of weeks what would you say? Well, I said yes. It’s another chapter in my increasingly improbable life. I have always wanted to climb Kili and the prospect of doing it with a special forces team led by a sheik who happens to be an amusing companion and an excellent soldier was too good to resist. Read More
If you read my articles regularly you are used to my increasingly eccentric globe trotting antics. I sometimes wonder what will happen when no-one wants to offer me the chance to shoot doves in Timbuktu or presidents in Dallas. This month I have been in the ancient and beautiful Turkish city of Bodrum. Read More
There are many unanswered questions surrounding the death of Robert Kennedy, not least the fact the Sirhan, Sirhan, the alleged assassin (still languishing in jail), had an eight shot revolver but there appear to have been more than eight bullet flying around the murder scene. Sirhan’s alleged weapon was a gate loading, 8 shot Iver Johnson revolver. He did not have time to reload, nor is there any suggestion that he did. Read More
