resurrectionsong

September 09, 2004

Forged Documents? Let's Slow Down (Updated)

Update: Nathan is collecting links on the subject. Look here and here. Wizbang is also running with links and more information. Update to the Update: Am I convinced? Pretty much. Somebody order me a tinfoil hat.

The 'sphere is abuzz with the question of the legitimacy of the documents used to show that President Bush disobeyed a direct order.

In my real life job, I deal with type, text, and computers on a daily basis--and, given time and a few generations of copies, I could easily re-create the precise look of the documents that are in question as long as I had access to a reasonably clean copy of the original signature and a good working knowledge of the subject matter. Forging copies of a document is a pretty easy task, while forging an original is much more difficult.

That doesn't mean that the documents are forged, though. In fact, before definitively saying that documents are forged, I would want to see some pretty powerful proof. I don't think that proof presently exists. And while I am extremely well versed on current typography, my knowledge of word processors and typewriters of the 70's is pretty limited.

What follows are the things that struck me most about the document, though. Take it for what it's worth.

Firstly, below is the original date from one of the documents that is placed next to Times New Roman text added by me. While the text would degrade with various generations of copying, I still find the artifacts on the lower serifs to be interesting. These faces match closely, but not entirely, and the overall feel is not of computer text to me--this looks like typewriter copy.

Click for a larger view.

Second, looking at the signatures, I see two things that immediately strike me: the signature does indeed look clipped in and the baseline of the text is distorted enough to support the idea that this wasn't computer generated.

The way the signature ends at the bottom of the main stroke of the "K" is, as experts pointed out, suspicious. It does look clipped off instead of natural in the way that it ends in a straight cut instead of in the slightly curved end that you expect with a ball-point pen.

The text at the bottom, though, doesn't stay even close to a correct baseline (the light blue line that I added to show how the baseline should run). The movement, especially, of the "e" moving above the baseline significantly and consistently doesn't support the idea that someone just fired up Word and typed it all out. Keeping in mind that the text is running left to right slightly downhill (the document may not have been entirely straight when it was either scanned or copied) makes the jump of the "e" characters remarkable to my eye.

Click for a larger view.

Third, I am extremely curious about the superscripting in the text. That isn't a regular typewriter trick. Typically, a word processor or word processing application like Word would do this for you, but the consensus is that a typical 1970's era typewriter isn't likely to have the capacity to do a proper super- or subscript. The attempt at either usually involved the text staying the same size but being bumped up or down to about the middle of the line of text. To have it put it in the proper place and at the proper size is more than a little unusual.

Whereas later in the body of one of the documents, the superscript looks like this:

On the upper portion of the same document, the area that is later superscripted looks like this:

No matter what objections I raise, though, there is an answer. Where I say the baselines are off enough to make it look as if a typewriter created the document, there are multiple answers--that the generations of copying may have had some effect on the appearance or that the forger used a typeface meant to mimic a typewriter, for instance. Both of these are possibilities and may well be true.

I would also note that there were typewriters and word processors at that time that had proportional width typing, not just the fixed width stuff that always looks a bit odd. There is no way of saying definitively at this point that one of these (admittedly less common) typewriters or word processors wasn't used in the creation of this document. The answer, of course, is the rarity of typewriters that handled proportional type at the time and whether the government did or didn't use them at the time.

My problem with this line of reasoning, though, is that it enters conspiracy theory land--where every reasonable argument is met with ever more convoluted explanations of just how any discrepancies came about. I don't want the document to be real, either; it doesn't reflect well on the man in the Oval Office. My wanting it to be real or not doesn't really enter into the picture, though.

I would say that there is reason to question the authenticity of the documents, but there is nothing that I have seen so far that would establish that the documents are, indeed, forged. The only compelling evidence that these documents may have been forged is the proper superscripting; and I'm not nearly expert enough in the area to know that it is a definitive "gotcha."

There may well be something to this story, but pronouncing our judgment at this point is premature.

See what Charles at LGF did with another of the documents.

This is where I sourced the file that I used in this post.

Posted by zombyboy at September 9, 2004 02:13 PM

Comments

Without passing judgement on the veracity of the document in question, how careful are any of us when we're just jotting off a memo? Do we always check to make sure the paper's in straight? Even in the digital age, the paper goes through crooked more often than not. So I guess I wouldn't make too big a deal out of the baseline issue. Nor the superscript (which my dad's 60s-era Smith-Corona could do, at least for a 'th' or a 'nd' or a 'st'); I think we've all typed documents where we formatted things one way in one sentence and another way in another--particularly if we didn't know what we were typing might help determine the leader of the free world 32 years hence.

Again, I don't want to make any claims about authenticity/inauthenticity here--I'm just saying that this reads (to me at least) like a quick note to a colleague, so I'm not surprised that the typography reflects casual standards.

Posted by: Mark Hasty at September 9, 2004 03:57 PM

Like I said, the baseline issue supports the idea that it was done on a typewriter to me--not that it runs downhill, but that there are inconsistencies in where the letters fall along that line. That is, even if I were to right the letter, there would still be inconsistencies in the baseline.

Given the movement of the paper, the carriage, and the striking mechanism, some inconsistency in the baseline supports the belief that this was done on a typewriter.

As for the superscript, did the ss actually make the typesize smaller? I used typewriters that did superscript, but it didn't change the actually size of the text, just the position of it. I've never used a typewriter that could do that.

I agree, though, overall. I am very skeptical that these are forged documents; I tend to think that they are real (or, at least, assume that they are until I'm given better evidence).

Posted by: zombyboy at September 9, 2004 04:06 PM

What "better" evidence do you need than a small superscript which no typewriter in 1973 could have produced? That, plus the fact that all the other TANG documents we know to be legit look nothing like these phonies, and do not use proportional spacing.

Posted by: Xrlq at September 9, 2004 04:13 PM

First, there are other typewriters in the world and it is possible that another typewriter or word processor was used for whatever reason. Proportional spacing is not, in itself, an impossibility, either. That leaves me with the properly sized superscript--and I don't know how possible or impossible that was in the time period.

Mark's comment leaves me with the impression that it might not have been as uncommon as I had thought, but I'm not sure.

Like I said, I definitely think there is reason to look closer; I don't think we can definitively say that the two documents are forgeries, though.

Posted by: zombyboy at September 9, 2004 04:19 PM

My dad's typewriter had special keys for the few superscript characters it supported--you couldn't type whatever you wanted as ss, just a few special characters. I don't recall if the type size was smaller but, given that there's probably a maximum width that you could make a typewriter hammer before it would start to affect the operation of the machinery, I'd say that it probably did make it smaller.

Posted by: Mark Hasty at September 9, 2004 05:02 PM

Dude, give it up, check wizbang update 4. Game over

Posted by: Paul at September 9, 2004 05:35 PM

Zomby,

is it just me, or does the typeface below the signature look like a different typeface than the date typeface earlier in the post? The sig typeface looks more like an Americana or even a proportional courier-style font. The date typeface looks like Times New Roman (and I didn't think there was significant variation between the two samples).

Curious stuff.

Posted by: bryan at September 9, 2004 07:17 PM

You know, it does look a little different. If I were forced to guess, I would say that this might have been cobbled together from a few different pieces--but it's really hard to tell from such a low resolution (I actually bumped it by about 45%, although all of the full sized samples I made are at the same adjusted size).

It is curious stuff. I would still say that there is a chance that there is a reasonable explanation. I wonder if CBS will bother to provide it?

Posted by: zombyboy at September 9, 2004 07:25 PM

I would still say that there is a chance that there is a reasonable explanation. I wonder if CBS will bother to provide it?

I will be waiting with baited breath. It's really hilarious that the whole presidential campaign may be thrown because of the MS Word auto-correct feature! ;-)

Posted by: bryan at September 9, 2004 07:41 PM

you know, the typeface on this blog is looking a little strange. Zomby, where were you in 1972?

Posted by: Darren at September 9, 2004 11:18 PM

Heheheh.

Hey, pal, do I look that old to you?

Posted by: zombyboy at September 9, 2004 11:36 PM

Here is a question I have. Is there a typewriter (with Times Roman) that six weeks ago a forger could have been typing on and then "doctored" in photoshop or whatever? My point is: a younger person could have thought they were covering themselves by using a typewriter for the organic look and were just clueless. Do any current typewriters provide that kerning style? I just thought I would ask the question.
Any thoughts?

Posted by: Liz at September 10, 2004 12:02 AM

Here is a question I have. Is there a typewriter (with Times Roman) that six weeks ago a forger could have been typing on and then "doctored" in photoshop? My point is: a younger person could have thought they were covering themselves by using a typewriter for an "organic look" but actually trapping themselves by being too ignorant of 1972 typwriters. Do any current typewriters provide that kerning style? I just thought I would ask the question.
Any thoughts?

Posted by: Liz at September 10, 2004 12:06 AM