Looking through his photos taken at the Pennsylvania campaign rally Saturday night that turned into an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a veteran photographer from New York TimesDoug Mills, realized he might have captured the image of a bullet passing near the former president’s head.
A hypothesis that seems plausible to Michael Harrigan, a retired FBI special agent who spent 22 years with the Bureau.
“It could very well be air displacement from a projectile,” Harrigan said in an interview Saturday night with the New York Timesafter reviewing the high-resolution images taken by Doug Mills. “The angle seems a little low for the bullet to have gone through his ear, but it’s not out of the question if the assailant fired multiple shots.”
Ballistic calculations have shown that it is indeed possible to photograph the trajectory of a bullet, as Doug Mills appears to have done, Harrigan said.
The photographer was using a Sony digital camera, capable of taking 30 frames per second. Its shutter speed (or in other words, exposure time) was 1/8000.e of a second, which is extremely short.
The other factor is the speed of the bullet. On Saturday, law enforcement found an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle near a dead man they believe to be the shooter.
“If this is an AR-15-type rifle, the .223 caliber bullets that this weapon uses are going about 3,200 feet per second as they exit the barrel,” Harrigan said. “With a shutter speed of 1/8000e of a second, the bullet can travel about four-tenths of a foot [soit 12 centimètres] while the shutter is open.”
“Most of the cameras used to take pictures of bullets in flight are very high-speed cameras, which are not typically used for regular photography,” Harrigan said.
To photograph a bullet on a sideways trajectory as seen in this image is a one in a million chance: it’s almost impossible, even if you know the bullet is going to be fired.
Retired FBI Special Agent Michael Harrigan
In his last assignment, Mr. Harrigan led the Bureau’s firearms training unit and currently works as a consultant in the firearms industry.
“Given the circumstances, I don’t see what else it could be other than the trajectory of a bullet,” he concluded.
This article was originally published in the New York Times.