Sorry to have wandered away from this discussion. My computer fell victim to a "single virus" hit and was out of action for a few days, after which I neglected to pick up on the thread.
We can certainly all agree that single pellet hits CAN break targets. Anyone who's picked up unbroken but "holed" targets will also agree that not all single pellet hits break targets, and sometime 2 pellet hits fail to break targets. Dr. Jones' contention, based on pattern analysis, is that single pellet breaks have to be relatively frequent in order to explain the number of "straights" in skeet--where we know that 100's are not at all uncommon for really good skeet shooters, especially in gauges larger than the .410.
I don't recall--perhaps Rocketman can confirm--that Dr. Jones gave any sort of ballpark figure on what % of breaks are of the single pellet variety (other than to suggest that they occur frequently), nor did he speculate on what % of single pellet hits result in a break rather than a "miss". But I do recall that when his work was first discussed here, quite a few of us remarked that single pellet "misses" are also quite frequent, based on strolling around skeet fields and picking up holed but unbroken targets, and also recognizing that the ground can be responsible for breaking both true misses (no holes) as well as single pellet "misses". Based on analyzing what we'd seen, many of us felt that there couldn't be too many single pellet breaks in a run of 100, because if there were very many single pellet hits, somewhere along the line there'd be a single pellet "miss".
My feeling, on reading Dr. Jones' pattern analysis theory on the frequency of single pellet breaks, was that he needed to spend less time looking at patterns and more time on a skeet field--observing hits and collecting unbroken "missed" targets--in order to collect physical evidence in relation to his theory.
