Bush Guard Documents: Forged

Thu, Sep 9, 2004 at 10:24:36 am PST

I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as “authentic.”

A screenshot of the “original” document as found at CBS:

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A screenshot of my Microsoft Word document:

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The spacing is not just similar—it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same. And I did not change a single thing from Word’s defaults; margins, type size, tab stops, etc. are all using the default settings. The one difference (the “th” in “187th” is slightly lower) is probably due to a slight difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Times New Roman font, or it could be an artifact of whatever process was used to artificially “age” the document. (Update: I printed the document and the “th” matches perfectly in the printed version. It’s a difference between screen and printer fonts.)

There is absolutely no way that this document was typed on any machine that was available in 1973.

UPDATE at 9/9/04 10:57:34 am:

And this is not the only document that was apparently written with Microsoft Word; Jeremy Chrysler had the same idea and discovered another exact correspondence: Bush Guard Documents Forged?

UPDATE at 9/9/04 11:28:55 am:

Here are the two documents superimposed—and please note that when I cut and pasted the images, I just eyeballed it with no special effort to match sizes:

UPDATE at 9/9/04 12:44:26 pm:

Roger L. Simon comments:

It’s fascinating how quickly the blogs and the Internet were able to catch this as compared to intelligence agencies which were so slow off the mark with the Niger documents. Once again: advantage blogosphere!