My Recycled Life — My Father’s JFK “Proof”

Regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, my father Dale Jensen had his “theory” and his “proof” according to him. Working for years from his own personal knowledge of engineering and military ballistics, he built an inches-thick file of notes, writings, calculations, and diagrams, which he endlessly and adamantly insisted “proved” that Lee Harvey Oswald must’ve been aiming for John Connally. This angle gets kicked around periodically, but the way my father kicked it could’ve got him on an all-star team.

In the decades before the Internet, my father repeatedly tried and failed to get his research into the JFK assassination published in a conventional outlet, and became very frustrated over the lack of interest in his data on the science and technology behind his findings. He was just a small fish in the enormous sea of JFK assassination literature, after all. I know that in his final years, he presented his findings as a lecture at some engineering conference, but I don’t know the details.

After my father’s death in 2015, I found his file on the JFK assassination was one of the few meaningful piles of paper he left behind. Most of the papers in his cabinets, crates, drawers, I had no qualms about putting in the recycling bin (or the shredder, or the garbage). Some things I wanted to save for my own use or for family history, but I didn’t share my father’s interest in (or obsession with) the JFK assassination. The file didn’t just contain paper, either, but multiple transparency sheets intended to be used as visual aids during a lecture.

Somewhere in this country, I reasoned, there must be a library or museum with a special collection dedicated to the JFK assassination. I searched using the Internet and found the sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository, crime scene of the assassination, is now a museum dedicated to the assassination. The museum has a simple name, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, and it’s housed in what’s now the Dallas County Administration Building.

So I gifted my father’s JFK file to the museum. I got a nice response from the museum’s curator and collections manager, Lindsey Richardson, “Thank you so much for sending us your father’s notes, writings, and research materials. His work studying the assassination from an engineering and ballistics angle is fascinating, and as such I know it will be appreciated by our curators and educators, as well as visitors, teachers, and researchers for years to come.”