Robert Morningstar gets the Las Vegas massacre story hopelessly wrong

James Concannon writes...

        First we have Kerry Cassidy listening to the voices in her head and reporting them as if they were factual, and now we have Robert Morningstar, frisbee expert, publishing 3000 words on the Las Vegas massacre and getting almost nothing right. I will respect his claim of "All Rights Reserved" by not quoting from the piece, but I will review it and comment on it.

        For a start, Morningstar gets the name of the perp wrong. Throughout his essay, he writes "Steven Pollack" instead of Stephen Paddock. He may have corrected the text by the time you read it, but the original version was wrong. OOPS.

Original text © 2017 Robert Morningstar

        Reading this essay through, we don't have to wait long for the first major error. In the very first line Morningstar claims that this event was the worst killing in the history of the United States. Well, compare 58 dead with 268 (Battle of Little Bighorn), 2,996 (World Trade Center) and 700,000 (American Civil War.) What Morningstar is unsuccessfully grasping for is that the death toll was the largest of any mass shooting by an individual.

       Morningstar's whole thesis is that Paddock did not act alone—that there was at least one additional gunman at the Mandalay Bay. He gets started along that road by telling us that Paddock must have had help getting 23 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition into Suite 32135. Well, perhaps... my remark on that is that bellmen at the Mandalay are quite used to carrying heavy equipment, since many pornographic videos are shot in Vegas hotel rooms.

        Morningstar embeds this video in his text, purporting to show gunfire from around the 10th floor of the Mandalay Bay. But that's impossible—there are no broken windows at that level, and the alternative explanation that the flashes are reflections is infinitely more credible.

        A second embedded video, recording the onset of the attack and almost all the carnage, is used by Morningstar as if it proves the "second gunman" case. Very few of the gunshots sound like the weapons fire we're used to hearing in films and TV—some sound almost like a slow drum roll, and some are more like loud clicks. The distinction between the two sounds is the heart and soul of Mr. Frisbee-man's case. But bump stocks were found on 12 of Paddock's 22 rifles, and two of them were mounted on bipods. Does it somehow strain Morningstar's logic to suggest that more than one weapon was used, perhaps even simultaneously, by a single shooter?

         Morningstar originally stated that he had triangulated (how?)^{note 1} the position of the second shooter to the ledge at third floor level.

        That idea has too many problems to be credible. How would a sniper get access to that ledge, and come back down after the event, without being observed? Why were no shell casings reported on that ledge? Is that vantage point too low to be effective, considering that bleachers at the concert venue would obstruct the view from that angle?

        Morningstar next alleges that both the Bellagio and Flamingo hotels were sprayed with gunfire that night—a claim that has specifically been denied by authorities. He shows us smartphone video made by René Downs, but that video does not show what he says it shows. It shows crowds of excited people in the lobby and corridors of the Bellagio, prevented from exiting because the hotel (like all others on the Strip) was in lockdown.

        Our favorite frisbee expert wraps it all up by alleging, with no evidence whatsoever, that Pollack [sic] was working with the FBI over an arms deal that "backfired badly." Morningstar styles himself a "civilian intelligence analyst" but if this essay is a fair sample of his analysis I'd say he's a major, major failure.

Credentials
        In addition to making himself his own CIA, Morningstar writes that he is "a specialist in photo interpretation, geometric analysis and computer imaging." The Rational wikipedia lists six specific examples of where Morningstar's photo interpretation has been dead wrong. In May 2016 this blog listed 28 errors of interpretation by him. Once again, OOPS.

Update:
        Morningstar re-worked his essay into an article for UFO Digest. In it he suggested that a second gunman could have been positioned on the balcony over the main entrance to the hotel. The image below shows how more than half the concert audience would be obstructed by the stage and bleachers from that position:

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[1] Let's remind ourselves how triangulation works, shall we? You take optical bearings on the object of interest from two different places as far apart as is practical. Transferring your bearings onto a map then pinpoints the object.

This, however, is not what Morningstar did. He took a single freeze-frame from the taxi driver's video (perhaps around 03:00?) and visually matched a part of the canopy to arrive at what he now says is a position on the balcony over the drive-through hotel entrance. Fatal to his case is the fact that no shell casings have been found at that position—many windows overlook the balcony and canopy and it's inconceivable that such obvious evidence would have been missed.

At exactly 03:03 there are two flashes, but they are not associated with any sound of gunfire and it's impossible to tell what the actual source is. They look a lot like flash photography to me. If this is what Robert AM* claims to have "triangulated," he's a flim-flam man, not an intelligence analyst.