UCI professor emeritus, George Miller stands over the school’s nuclear reactor in Irvine on Friday, October 27, 2017. (Photo by Foster Snell, Contributing Photographer)

UCI’s nuclear reactor was used to help investigate the bullet fragments that killed President John F Kennedy as well as other mysteries in Irvine on Friday, October 27, 2017. (Photo by Foster Snell, Contributing Photographer)

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UCI professor emeritus, George Miller stands over the school’s nuclear reactor in Irvine on Friday, October 27, 2017. (Photo by Foster Snell, Contributing Photographer)

UCI’s nuclear reactor was used to help investigate the bullet fragments that killed President John F Kennedy as well as other mysteries in Irvine on Friday, October 27, 2017. (Photo by Foster Snell, Contributing Photographer)



Forty years ago, George Miller and Vince Guinn were scientists conducting research in a small basement at UC Irvine, when a stranger walked in, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

The basement was filled with a small nuclear reactor, a machine that Miller and Guinn used to conduct the atomic analysis of, among other things, heavy metals.

The briefcase was filled with fragments of the world’s most controversial bullet.

The bullet fragments were so tiny that they were “little more than dust,” recalls Miller, now 80. But, tiny as they were, the fragments were clues in one of the biggest mysteries in American history — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

They’d been collected 14 years earlier by government investigators, the man with the briefcase explained. Now, their government had a request for Miller and Guinn:

Would they use the school’s reactor and their scientific skills to answer the question that still loomed over the Kennedy assassination — did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?

Miller and Guinn were to test the fragments to determine if they came from the same case of bullets. Their answer, whatever it might be, would support or undercut the official account of the Kennedy assassination that was presented to the public by the Warren Commission in 1964.

Late last month, days before the Donald Trump administration released thousands of documents connected to the Kennedy assassination, Miller recalled the weight of the mission brought to him in 1977 by the stranger with the briefcase.

“I’ve certainly never worked on something with such significance to a country,” Miller said.

Connected to Kennedy

Miller no longer sports the bushy sideburns that were stylish when he first started teaching, choosing instead to keep his beard trim while leaving his salt and pepper hair a bit wild. If the look says “mad-but-distinguished scientist,” so be it.

His peers offer praise for a man who has pioneered a branch of scientific exploration — atomic-level investigations — and continues to operate at a high level, even at an age when many others are fully retired. Jonathan Wallick, the lab engineer who runs UCI’s reactor — essentially the job Miller had decades ago — describes him as a “charismatic British man.”

And though he’s not personally obsessed by Kennedy, Miller’s career has been bracketed by two events: Kennedy’s death and, now, the release of once-classified information about Kennedy’s assassination.

The newly released material, which became public Oct. 26, is prompting a frenzy of sorts. Reporters, researchers and skeptics are poring over hand-scrawled notes and internal memos; intelligence agency correspondence and old photos.

Some documents shed fresh light on the chaos and conspiracy fears that plagued investigators from the moment the president was hit. Others offer more details about Oswald’s skills as a marksman or his trip to Mexico in the weeks prior to the shooting.

But none upend the conclusion that Oswald acted alone.

Never out of sight

Miller remembers where he was when Kennedy was shot.

On Nov. 22, 1963, the recent Oxford grad was just two months into his life in the United States, working as a post-doctoral student at the University of Kansas’ chemistry department. He learned the news about Kennedy after seeing other students huddled around TV sets.

Two years later, Miller was lured to California to help found a chemistry program at the then new University of California campus in Orange County. He worked alongside Professors Guinn and F. Sherwood Rowland, who later won a Nobel Prize for his research on how certain gases damage the earth’s ozone layer.

Miller would become something of a rarefied scientific detective. Instead of examining footprints and DNA, he’s analyzed the atomic makeup of things like marble statues, obsidian tools used by ancient humans and, sometimes, bullets.

Once, Guinn, using the nuclear reactor, was able to exonerate a man accused of murder by testing hair samples found in the man’s trunk. It turned out the strands that police viewed as possible evidence didn’t belong to his murdered girlfriend.

That expertise is what brought the man with the briefcase — Miller recalls him as a national archivist — to the lab in 1977. A year earlier, the U.S. House of Representatives had established a select committee to re-investigate the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., two killings that had roiled the country during the 1960s. In a post-Watergate America, congress, and the public wanted to be sure earlier government investigations into those murders had been above board.

While the sensitivity of the situation presented to Miller and Guinn was evident, how they might accomplish the goal was not. Though the three men were alone in the lab, the stranger with the briefcase didn’t want to let the lead fragments out of his sight.

Miller smiled as he recalled how Guinn, who died 15 years ago, explained the problem created by the stranger’s particular requirement.

“These samples are going to be taken and put into the nuclear reactor,” Guinn told their visitor. “You’re not going to be able to follow (them).”

So, with the man hovering near them in the small room, Guinn packed the fragments into a little tube which, in turn, was slipped Russian doll-style into another tube and, finally, a third tube, the last one about the size of a roll of quarters.

With Miller at a control panel and Guinn positioned atop the reactor — which held 2,500 gallons of water to cool and buffer the release of radiation — the bundle of tubes was lowered 20 feet into the pool. As it rotated around a glowing blue cylinder, the reactor bombarded the bullet fragments with neutrons. By measuring the decay of the now radioactive atoms, the researchers could measure the bullet’s composition and determine if the fragments belonged together or if, perhaps, they came from separate guns.

After a few minutes, the fragments were yanked out of the pool and quickly placed into a lead container, a move made to avoid contamination from infinitesimally small amounts of radiation in the atmosphere.

Guinn analyzed the fragments, looking for trace levels of antimony and silver, a signature of sorts that could tell them with some certainty where the fragments had come from.



The process was repeated several times that day to confirm the findings — into the water; around the reactor; yanked out; and, finally, back into the lead chamber.

The results emerged slowly. The bullets were unusual, with some variation in their elemental makeup that was uncommon for ammunition. The fragments registered levels of antimony — an element that is often powdered and used in medicine or make-up — that were lower than what would be found in most commercial bullets. This made them so-called “un-hardened” bullets, a trait that was found in ammo made by Mannlicher-Carcano and typically used in Carcano brand rifles.

Such a rifle was found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building where Oswald fired at the president and the box of bullets he used.

The science supported one conclusion: Someone using one gun fired two bullets into the motorcade, killing the president.

The stranger with the briefcase had his answer.

Theories continued

And it didn’t matter.

More than a generation and eight presidents after Miller and Guinn determined that the fragments came from Oswald’s gun — and only Oswald’s gun — the question of his role as a lone-wolf killer or as a pawn in a broader plot has never been completely put to bed.

Many skeptics continued to argue that gunmen other than Oswald, possibly linked to Soviet-era Russia or Cuba, were involved. Others believe the Mafia was part of a plot. Still others view the former South Vietnamese government, or the CIA, or the Ku Klux Klan, as potential accomplices.

The conclusions reached by Miller and Guinn were picked apart and reanalyzed for decades.

Miller stands by the research of the day in 1977.

“We think we did it right,” he said.

These days, the UCI reactor — one of perhaps 30 in the nation — doesn’t test bullets, except some used by Miller’s students who explore the composition of different bullets to track down a fictitious killer in an exercise he calls “Who shot Roger Rabbit?”

After a career teaching hundreds of budding chemists, Miller is semi-retired, though he still has an office on campus and continues to teach.

He’s also content with the contribution he and Guinn made in resolving a national debate.

“It was a very important thing that we did,” Miller said. “There were various theories being thrown around at the time in terms of whether there was a major conspiracy. …

“(This research was) one small piece in the whole puzzle.”