When I first saw the Mills photograph I had the very same idea as “howdoiknowthisinfo” (Howdy for short), that a real shooter could have been placed behind the supposed patsy and his victim as long he remains on or near the line of sight.
From a perpetrators point of view, this brings an obvious advantage with respect to the relatively large uncertainities when later on small impact angles have to be determined.
Well, much has already been written about Mills and his 20+ years of association with the White House, the Emma E. Booker photograph of Bush in 2001 and so on. But it is difficult to ascribe motives and name them evidence.
Mill’s photograph has the obvious problem that even if you assume a projectile speed of 1000 m/s, the (assumed) vapor trace in the photograph is about 2.4 times as long as it should be, translating to a projectile speed of 2,4 km/s.
Apart from a complete falsification two possibilities remain: Mills had embellished his work by extrapolating the vapor trace a bit, or truly hypersonic ammunition had been used. I’ve no idea if this is possible with small arms, but it is at least not unthinkable if a sub-caliber projectile was driven by a sabot.
Because I still assumed that the inclination could be real, I downloaded the highest available resolution from the NYT (link below). Several attempts to manually correct for the perspective using the campain board as a reference left me with an horizontal inclination between 1.3° and 2.3°. The rather large error range stems from an insufficient image resolution, a pincussion distortion and a suboptimal contrast, which all induce subtile ambiguities.
But one can also determine the angle between the horizontal campain billbord and the vapor trace by simply measuring both inclinations against rectangular grid lines. In sum that results in an true horizontal inclination of 1.8°. Superposing the images and measuring the angle at once naturally led to a very similar result. I used gimp, but someone with access to photogrammetric software may please check that value.
When applying the sine theorem and the inverse sine function to calculate the inclination angles from Trump’s ear to the roof of building 6 and the more distant building “x”, I get the following figures:
a.) according to roger-knight’s hypothesis, elevation and distance estimates (AGR building 6, in feet, result in degrees):
asin((17.4-15.4)/((518-78)))*180/pi
0.2604363
b.) according to Howdy’s hypothesis, elevation and distance estimates (AGR building “x”, in meters, result in degrees):
asin((9-2.99)/237)*180/pi
1.453099
Hence, if that estimate of an inclination of 1.8° has some truth to it, then Howdy’s hypothesis might be more to the point than an implant under the roof of AGR building 6.
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Hi-res link to NYT/Mills:
ttps://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/13/us/politics/13election-live-photo-assess/13election-live-photo-assess-superJumbo-v2.jpg
Doug Mills’ lens position can be calculated from the live stream published by NTD.com at the 08:51 mark. He is the photographer with the white hat and black hatband, standing a bit left from the middle of the lectern. The jpeg linked above is still a cropped version since there are also some low res reproductions elsewhere on the net, showing a vertical pole near the right rim of the image. According to Mills, upon recognizing its implications he immediately sent the raw image data to the FBI. Maybe his collegues and especially some congressmen could ask him (and the FBI) for a copy.