The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was a committee of the United States House of Representatives that operated from 1976 to 1979 to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Assassination of Martin Luther King. The committee was established to reexamine both cases following public dissatisfaction with the findings of the Warren Commission (1963-64) and the investigations into King's death. These calls for reexamination occurred alongside broader public skepticism toward official government accounts during the 1970s, while defenders of the original investigations maintained that their conclusions remained well-supported. Some aspects of the committee's methodology, evidentiary handling, and ultimate findings remain contested; these are addressed in the Controversies section below.
The HSCA issued its final report in 1979, concluding that President Kennedy was “probably” assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, based primarily on acoustic analysis of a Dallas police dictabelt recording that the committee's experts interpreted as containing a fourth gunshot. The committee could not identify the individuals or groups it believed were involved, though it stated that it did not believe the Soviet government, Cuban government, organized crime, or various other organizations as institutions were involved, while leaving open the possibility of individual conspirators connected to such groups. With respect to King's assassination, the committee concluded that James Earl Ray was likely not acting alone and that a conspiracy “probably” existed, though it could not identify specific co-conspirators.
The committee's acoustic-based conspiracy finding for the Kennedy assassination was later challenged. In 1982, a National Academy of Sciences panel reviewed the acoustic evidence and concluded that the sounds the HSCA had relied upon did not correspond to gunshots, casting significant doubt on that specific finding. The Department of Justice subsequently stated it had found no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy. The committee's broader investigative record, including witness testimony, ballistics analysis, and documentary review, continues to be cited by researchers across different interpretive camps. For background on the committee's formation and proceedings, see house-select-committee-on-assassinations-history.