I’ve received more than a hundred emails pointing out serious new problems in the CBS News documents. Several readers mentioned the “19 May 1972” document as a particularly striking example; so I typed this document into Microsoft Word as well, again with default margins and tab stops… and once again, the character spacing, line spacing, line breaks (and remember, any 1972 typewriter would have had a manual or manually triggered carriage return), and letter forms in my MS Word document exactly match the CBS News “original.”

Here’s the CBS “original:”

________________

And here is a screenshot of my Microsoft Word version:

________________

There are so many points of correspondence between these two versions that anyone arguing the CBS “original” could have been created with anything but MS Word is either: 1) dishonest, or 2) ignorant.

It’s very telling that the automatically word-wrapped MS Word version exactly matches the line breaks in the CBS “original” for 11 lines, with not a single discrepancy. And the last line does not automatically wrap … until you type the final period.

If you look closely at the CBS “original” you can see that there’s quite a bit of distortion and shearing, probably caused by whatever technique was used to artificially “age” the document. So the overlay technique is not as effective with this one; but if you overlay them and nudge one of them by single pixels from side to side, words and lines come into exact focus in different parts of the image.

UPDATE at 9/11/04 7:38:14 pm:

For reference, here is the Microsoft Word document I created.