Talk:Killian documents authenticity issues/Archive 2

No mention of the superscript "th" question?
Given that the Killian Documents Authenticity Issue is aka Rathergate because the superscript "th" in the CBS documents is widely considered the most glaring modern anomaly in the questioned documents, the removal of all discussion of the "th" issue was quite a move. Joseph Newcomer has documented this issue very well and is a reliable source within the typesetting community, so the total removal of all mention of a key point in the authenticty issue is remarkable. Naaman Brown (talk) 15:34, 6 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, for one thing, Newcomer is not at all any sort of recognized typography expert -- what publications he has listed on his site are all related to computer programming and nothing else, and none of those even touch upon typography. Also he and the other not-quite-experts failed to note that only some of the "th's" are superscripted and none of the "st's" -- which makes no sense whatsoever if a modern word processor was used (once you figured out how to do it, it's trivial). This does, though, make total sense if a very old word processor had been used: many of the optional print elements typically had a small "th" font for superscripting (aka half line feeds) but not "st's" and superscripting was a manual operation. Research into the features and capabilities of old word processing systems and proportionally printing typewriters might greatly facilitate your understanding of these points. -BC aka 66.251.53.50 (talk) 16:09, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Bias
I find this article to be totally one-sided in its (incomplete) presentation of fact. I have added a balancing statement to the lead as a first step in remedying this clearly non-neutral, heavily-unbalanced article. Here is the statement I added: "The Columbia Journalism Review, however, points to political bias and a rush to judgement in these allegations of forgery and misconduct, noting, "But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule.""  Here is a link to the cited article:  http://spot.colorado.edu/~jrsteven/docs/pein-bloggate.pdf   Blog-gate - Columbia Journalism Review, Retrieved Dec. 9, 2012. Heavenlyblue (talk) 00:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * If you can read Pein's polemic without noticing the blatant errors, it's not surprising you would find a honest report "totally one-sided". We know that the memos were created in Microsoft Word, and therefore are fake. Furthermore, given that the memos "contained Army terminology that the Air Guard never used", it is fairly obvious who faked* them, though I have not seen that person named in any source that could be cited in Wikipedia (see also WP:BLP). * I was going to say "forged" but the deception was too feeble for that word.
 * The key thing to understand is how word processors lay out text on printers with 300 or more dots per inch.
 * Cheers, CWC 02:10, 10 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Both Wikipedia's articles on the Killian Documents are dumpsters of confusion, garbage and deliberate disinformation. While the likes of "CWC" might want to claim, "We know that the memos were created in Microsoft Word," that supposed "knowledge" originated from right wing bloggers utterly ignorant of the state of common office technology at the time, the correct formats of military documents, how the documents compared to official records, and pretty much everything that would have any bearing whatsoever on genuine "authenticity issues." The mainstream media did a nice fall on face in looking at matters afterwards, seemingly unable to muster up any energy to look up military equipment records or contemporaneous military memos, to push Bush or any of his people for a definitive response, or to even just hit a good library for information about typewriters and especially word processors from that era (not only were they around then, but IBM was actually already making more money selling them than typewriters at the time.) In any case, it's water not just under the bridge, but out to sea. Nobody really cares anymore outside of people not too happy with incompetent, sloppy, utterly non-investigative reporting. But as an FYI, there is literally not a single bit of real evidence showing forgery -- without exception all the suppose "evidence" presented and discussed in the main Wikipedia articles is based on confusion, very faulty logic, fake experts, fuzzy memories, and/or outright screw-ups (the Washington Post and the CBS Panel, for example, both made a complete botch of what the format is for official records versus what it is for memos and personal letters.) -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 22:00, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Are there RS pointing to the equipment in that office then that could have made the documents? No one, even you, has found such. You've found many claims that it was possible (most of which I don't find credible, let alone reliable.) The evidence showing forgery is that the document claims, on its face, to be something it cannot be. It may have been a modern copy of an authentic document, but that does not make the copy not a forgery, because it does not claim to be a copy. htom (talk) 01:07, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * What you think is utterly irrelevant given your history with this topic. There is no evidence supporting forgery, including how *all* writing guides from the 70's as well as *all* archived memos and personal letters (which have similar formatting) from the early 70's going back to the late 50's are not only are formatted the same way as the Killian memos, but are mostly printed proportionally. But you know all this since you and your buds blocked and/or removed including any of this in favor of unverified nonsense from bloggers and fake experts. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 04:55, 2 January 2013 (UTC)


 * (Edit conflict: I wrote the following before seeing htom's comment.)
 * Oh hi, "BC". I hope you're well and that life goes well for you.
 * As it happened, I learned enough about computer typography in the 1980s and 1990s that I could tell from the PDFs themselves that either they had been typeset or produced on a laser printer — and no-one hires printers to typeset CYA memos. If you understand how proportional computer fonts work when printing to 300+ dpi devices, that famous GIF that Charles Foster Johnson created proves that the documents were created in Microsoft Word. (The size difference comes from photocopying.)
 * Aside #1: Why, yes, I am a bit geeky about computer typography. I sometimes forget that 'normal' people are bored by it.
 * Aside #2: Johnson now is a left wing blogger, and I seem to remember that he denies ever being a right-winger.
 * It is true that IBM sold one-line-at-a-time 'word processors' — but they were very expensive (too expensive for office work, especially in an ANG office during the post-Vietnam wind-down) and their layout resolution was much too coarse to produce the 'Killian' memos. (I have some IBM documents from the 1970s: the manuals are typeset, the notices were typed on an ordinary typewriter).
 * Aside #3: The years after the US abandoned South Viet Nam were tough for the USAF and the ANGs. Specifically, former combat pilots were having trouble getting enough flying hours to keep their flight pay bonus, and they were given priority over pilots like Bush. Many of the irregularities in Bush's ANG record are due to this, IMAO.
 * Aside #4: I'm afraid "incompetent, sloppy ... reporting", "confusion, very faulty logic, fake experts and/or outright screw-ups" are pervasive throughout the website-hit-hungry traditional news media these days. To expect decent reporting is to guarantee disappointment. On the whole, New Media is even worse, but at least you can find some New Media outlets that are largely reliable.
 * So I say that in fact there are many "bit[s] of real evidence showing forgery", starting with the documents themselves. I know you disagree. That's life.
 * Would you happen to know of any useful articles/books/whatever about this mess from the last few years? I haven't seen anything, per aside #4. Cheers, CWC 01:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but I don't believe that was exactly a sincere "Hi" -- you were, and apparently still are, one of what one might call the "problem" editors on this topic: elevating your obviously nonexpert opinion as fact whenever you could (sorry, but claiming "I learned enough about computer typography in the 1980s and 1990s" means absolutely nothing in this context). Indeed, everything you posted above is unresearched rubbish: copier machines, word processors and even typewriters were commonly leased in those days, not bought (and if someone had bothered to look up office equipment records from those days, this would very likely be shown); I found multiple declassified old memos online in PDF format (like this for instance) to be proportionally printed -- as they should be since proportionally printing typewriters, and later word processors, were common before Selectrics began to dominate; IBM sold sophisticated multipage word processors starting in 1964 with the MT/ST family; Johnson's GIF overlay shifts too much for his recreation to have been the exact Times or Roman-like font that was used in the memo, and indeed Johnson's little trick utterly fails with the longer Killian memos, which is why he only did showed the results of "recreating" the shortest of the Killian memos CBS used; and Bush's "irregularity" in his flight records goes far beyond pay issues -- his flight records, which were released only after CBS had obtained all the memos, showed him having to go back to trainers and simulators for a while, which happens to correspond timewise with concerns made by Killian in a very short memo that CBS never used (neat trick for a forger since the flight records are the only records that backed up the memo, but they were sealed for over 30 years and not released by the DoD until, again, only *after* CBS had obtained the memos.) Someone didn't do his homework, eh?


 * As far as new info about this mess, since you ask, there is this Texas Monthly article from last May, which has these not exactly surprising revelations:
 * In any case, MacDougald’s [Harry MacDougald aka "Buckhead" whose post in the Free Republic started the whole forgery nonsense] arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”
 * So the guy who started the whole forgery meme initially based solely on the font and proportional printing of the memos quietly admitted 4 years later that he lied or had no clue what he was talking about, and even CBS's own scapegoating investigation showed the blog-o-verse and its supposed citizen-journalists to be nothing but the land of confusion. As was pretty much the case as I described it all along. How do you like them apples? -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 04:55, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * That does not matter. Go find some RS that claim the Killian documents are authentic, demonstrating which hardware available at the TXANG then and there was used to make them and you'll have a minority view. If a RS was to find other documents putting forward the same claims as the Killian documents, that would not change the status of the Killian documents at all, they would be copies pretending to be originals and that makes them forgeries. As it is, you are beating the bones of a very dead horse. htom (talk) 16:49, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I have a better, more logical idea: why don't *you* find some genuinely reliable sources -- that is, they're not fake/pretend experts, clueless bloggers or opinion writers who didn't fact check anything, or mainstream news outlets that didn't demonstrably botch their use of primary sources -- that actually support the forgery charges in no ifs or buts verifiable ways? After all, the whole point of both Wikipedia articles on the Killian Documents is that there were charges that the documents were forged, yet the original instigator of the forgery meme, "Buckhead" of the Free Republic, backed away from his original claims, and all subsequent claims, from document format to equipment, from terminology to Mother's Day, are *all* demonstrably no more than poorly researched -- if researched at all -- rubbish. See, I never offered myself up as being any expert -- I simply did a little research and pointed out actual, real evidence that contradicted pretty much all key parts of these nonsensical forgery claims. Actually doesn't WP:PROVEIT kind of cover this? You claim someone forged something -- isn't it up to you to give good reason for that claim? And if you offer up sources that supposedly back your claim, but the sources turn out to be rubbish, then what?


 * Take for instance, oh say, your statement, "Go find some RS that claim the Killian documents are authentic, demonstrating which hardware available at the TXANG then and there was used to make them and you'll have a minority view." That's actually requesting me to prove a negative: the assumption is that proportionally printing typewriters and word processors didn't exist on Bush's base, even though such devices were pretty common by sales records at the time, and indeed proportionally printed military memos and even personal letters can be found dated from the early 70's to the 50's. Actually, I can show that there was at least one proportionally printing typewriter at TexArng at least during Bush's time of service. So who really has the burden of proof here? All these researched and logic-impaired bloggers and news outlets that were fall-down-on-face failures as would-be Sherlocks? All the editors of these Killian Wikipedia articles who combed the Internet for pretend/fake WP:RS good enough slip through Wikipedia's Swiss cheese verifiability checks? Or some random dude who doesn't want to waste anymore time battling willfully obstructive/ignorant editors, puppets, anonymous IP's and random/confused admins/puppet admins, but who isn't all that bad at pointing out relevant primary sources? -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 21:30, 2 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I am claiming they were not there, and asking you to demonstrate that they were. If they were so common, this should be easy. Manufacturer, Model Name and number, typeface and size that produced the Killian documents. Other documents produced then and there. You don't have them, do you? The .pdf you're showing looks a little like an IBM Executive D, which will not do the required spacing of the documents. There are many ways to do "proportional" typewriter, and you haven't produced any, let alone shown they were there then. htom (talk) 02:11, 3 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh, yeah, I almost forgot -- you use be in the military and you've used your fuzzy memory of that period to justify leaving in unsourced rubbish, especially regarding document formats. Remember how much you wanted to protect "Some of the formatting of the Killian memos is inconsistent with the Air Force style manual in effect at the time" despite no sources for this? And how likewise you and your buds blocked including *any* actual military writing guides like the "Tongue and Quill" or any samples of contemporaneous military document samples because actually improving the article was apparently the last thing you and your friends wanted to happen? I know you use to claim that the "Tongue and Quill" was written much later than the Killian documents, but that was a lie that I kept pointing out was a lie to no avail. Those were the good old days, eh? (Whatever happened to "Some of the formatting of the Killian memos is inconsistent..."? Did someone finally manage to successfully apply Wikipedia rules to that semi-recently?) And now you are pretending to be a document expert as well in regards to proportional printing?


 * In any case, not being a complete, research-impaired dummy, I knew back in 2004 that the proportional printing typewriter Gen. Ross Ayers used for his memos and personal letters was not of the same type (so to speak) that created the Killian memos, but at the time just having proportional printing was what initially was used for claims of forgery by Buckhead and others. I also knew, though, that there were a number of ways those memos could have been printed out. More importantly, I figured out that those memos could not be truly duplicated as is with current everyday software and printers, including MS Word and LaserJets, without resorting to deliberate forgery involving sophisticated means more suited for the CIA. Take Charles Johnson's little animated ode to ignorance that's still featured on the other Wikipedia article -- it shifts too much to be a true replica: it's much more in keeping with overlaying a modern Times or Roman style font over an older, different Times or Roman style font since there was some consistency in the spacing overall for those types of fonts well-predating the Killian memos. The memo Johnson used is the second shortest of all 6 documents that both CBS and USA today obtained (the shortest was this one.) Logically, if modern Times Roman computer fonts only approximate the earlier Times/Roman-type font used in the memos, then while there might be a semi-good match with the shorter memos, there should then be a growing mismatch with the longer ones. And that turned out to be very much the case, as Thomas Phinney, the Adobe typographer and forgery believer, inadvertently proved when he tried his hand at recreating one of the longer memos, as this closeup clearly shows. And, no, you can't blame the poor match-up on fax distortion: ignoring how common fax machines from around 2004 were actually pretty good, even if a cheap, crappy old fax machine was used, it would distort entire sections of the document and not just the spacing between individual characters. I can go on, but again, there is *no* evidence whatsoever supporting the forgery claims, and whatever supposed evidence that's listed or cited by Wikipedia (or anywhere else for that matter), it falls/will fall apart under any serious scrutiny.


 * Now as far as your cute little suggestion that I dig up the exact model of whatever device created the Killian Memos, well I did look up what typewriters and word processors were available during the early 70's and found out that there was already a huge business in word processors by 1975 with many models. So as an experiment, since Diablo daisywheel printers became a standard early on, I looked up some proportional print samples from one and then tried to replicate them as best I could with modern fonts, and I then ended up with this. All well and good, but I do believe that this and your suggestion both constitute original research and would violate WP:OR. So even if I did find the exact model of device that was used to create the Killian memos, it would not be allowed to be used in either Wikipedia article on the Killian memos. Could we not just agree, instead, that not only is there is no verifiable evidence of forgery, but that all verifiable evidence that is easily-enough available actually contradicts all the forgery claims. Simpler, no? -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 16:33, 3 January 2013 (UTC)


 * (Oh, how I wish Wikipedia would accept :n and :+ and :-) I understand you seem to feel a desperate need to prove that the Killian memos are genuine, but you have not done so. You haven't even really demonstrated that it was possible for them to have been created then, let alone that they were. The character widths, intra-letter, and intra-word spacings are not exactly compatible with the known machines of the time. You have found some that are closer than others, but this isn't horseshoes, and closer doesn't count. You have to find a match. There may be some combination that is; find it, then show that it was there in the TXANG when the memos claim to have been typed. Until you can do that, the supposition that they are forgeries (by an unknown person for unknown reasons at an unknown time) is going to stand, and challenges will pretty much be ignored. htom (talk) 21:37, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually, wouldn't it be good for your soul to finally and simply admit that you've never had any skills, knowledge nor even interest that would have been helpful here, and all you've ever done was help keep this article in its garbage state? You and the other obstructive editors have always mostly just gamed Wikipedia rules to include rubbish references as well as slip in your own utterly clueless beliefs and/or political agendas. I happen to know that the only "research" you've ever done was poll some military buds from way back to see if they remember seeing daisywheel printers, but they had no clue whatsoever what they even were (did I ever mention that I do my homework?) One of the gaming tactics you and the other maliciously obstructive editors have regularly engaged in was to simply ignore any discussion points you didn't like, and to instead go off on some loony tune tangent that: A) has nothing to do with the points raised; B) asks illogical or nonsensical questions, or makes goofy, dopey requests; C) demonstrates that you have no understanding whatsoever of the main topic; and/or D) that you are here due to some political or ideological agenda that completely precludes actually improving the article in any way. All your visible posts on this page show this, as well any and all of your past talk page posts. As I mentioned, the Killian Documents are water under the bridge and out to sea. No forger will ever be found, but nobody outside of do-gooding techies like myself even cares, so why do you still want to keep the articles in their current garbage state? Anyway, I do believe that I've yet again overstayed my time here, and that I know from way, way back that trying to "discuss" anything with you for real is a complete time-sucking waste. I've had my say and I'm done here. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 02:00, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Dan Rather's Interview With Marion Carr Knox
Under News items, I have added Dan Rather's September 15, 2004 interview with Marion Carr Knox at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqVaNSzEgEw. Knox stated: "I did not type those memos," which had been shown on the original broadcast. "However, the information in those is correct." I am wondering if these quotations should be incorporated in the article itself. Italus (talk) 03:00, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Phinney at Reddit
Reddit recently ran a Q+A session with Dan Rather. Someone asked him about the Burkett documents. Rather said that no-one has ever proved they were forged. Thomas Phinney responded by saying that they were "blatant forgeries". Phinney's main comment is here (verification).

At first glance, ISTM that Phinney's main comment might be usable in the article. What do other editors think? CWC 03:28, 10 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Phinney's own attempt to recreate a Killian memo was a complete failure. He has no credibility here. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 05:04, 12 May 2013 (UTC)


 * It's easy to recreate the documents using equipment available in 2004 AD. It appears to be exceedingly difficult to recreate them using equipment available to an ANG base in 1972, leading to the conclusion that they were not created in the form we have them in 1972, and thus, that they are forgeries -- that is, not what they claim to be. htom (talk) 23:56, 12 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Don't you ever tire of lying about how you know anything at all relevant to this stuff? I always have cites and links, like above, but you...you have yet to offer a single cite or reference that has ever supported any of your many, many claims, like what you just did now. None. And I do believe, although correct me if I'm wrong, that even Wikipedia doesn't consider vague, confused memories to be reliable sources. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 01:07, 15 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Exactly which equipment available to the Texas ANG was available to be used then and there that would make documents that match those submitted? It's not a memory, it's a question. Make and model. And you don't appear to have an answer, other than hand-waving about IBM's sales nationwide of machines that were not at the TANG (most of which would could not have produced the documents even if they were at TANG.) You've never replied to the paper size discrepancy. The forgery claim is about the actual documents produced (or rather the actual documents that have never been produced, only fax copies of them being produced), it is not about what Bush did or did not do. It may be that Bush was as derelict in his duties as you claim, but these documents do not show that; they show that someone made modern documents in support of that claim. htom (talk) 04:06, 15 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but you had posted "It's easy to recreate the documents using equipment available in 2004 AD," which is a boldfaced lie. Thomas Phinney failed, which I had explicitly pointed out with links, and that Charles Johnson's recreation of the shortest memo that CBS featured actually isn't that accurate, and he too completely failed at replicating the three longer memos, and for the reasons I posted further up. As I said, you have yet to offer up a single cite or reference that has ever supported just one item in your long, long string of empty claims, yet you think it's totally reasonable to ask me to go to Texas and somehow hunt down an inventory of all the equipment that not only was at the base, but also at any other nearby military-connected office that Killian might have access to. Yeah, right. Seriously, why should I humor at all a liar and one of the trolls who has kept both Killian articles in their garbage states?


 * As I had also pointed out -- with a reference to this article -- that the guy who started the forgery charges, "Buckhead," admitted that he had basically lied about the proportional printing and superscript stuff. Are you saying that this doesn't matter? Actually pretty much all the claims and rationales for forgery have turned out to be confused rubbish, and are easily disproved by primary sources -- oh, but wait: Wikipedia doesn't like the use of primary sources, so you and the other trolls have used this little loophole to block any inclusion of them, regardless of how much more accurate and informative they would have made the article. Which means that you and the others apparently feel it's totally OK to include utterly unsubstantiated, if not completely fabricated, charges and evidence of forgery, but demand that hard proof -- as long as it doesn't include primary sources that is -- be presented to contradict those unsubstantiated, fabricated charges. Am I right? Are you and the others so unethical and morally corrupt that after all this time, and regarding a topic that nobody but do-gooder techies care about now, you still want to keep these articles in their current state as political cesspools of garbage information? Why are you here, seriously? It's obviously not to improve the article in any way, for sure. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 18:22, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Drop the stick. Stop beating the dead horse. Capitalismojo (talk) 03:56, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
 * I guess the real question is what exactly is the "dead horse" here you're referring to: a Wikipedia article (two actually) on a forgery claim originating from lying and/or confused bloggers that got traction in the mainstream media only because nobody thought to do any real research at the time, including even doing basic forensic document examinations? As I pointed out, a much more recent article touching upon the matter basically blew away all of the initial rationales for claiming the documents to be fake. In some ways, this is like the somewhat more current fake IRS Tea Party "Scandal" -- you can call it a scandal all you want, and even justify it by Wikipedia technicalities, but...it only became a "scandal" through political maneuvering and posturing, confusion about tax laws, and terrible, poorly researched news reporting. Non-terrible news reporting, as little as there's been so far, paints a very different picture. As I pointed out on the Wikipedia talk page for the IRS "scandal," these types of Wikipedia articles based on basically manufactured controversies and scandals driven by opportunistic and malicious political posturing and lousy, inept news media reporting don't benefit anybody at all looking for clear, no-nonsense information. And these Killian document articles are indeed like dead horses left in the corner of a very big barn in terms of their encyclopedic contribution to knowledge. -BC aka 209.6.38.168 (talk) 12:19, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

This ought to be renamed "CBS/Burkett "Killian" documents authenticity issues" because the source was not Killian's office
According to his family and the secretary at his ANG office, Col Killian did not use a typewriter (it was the 1970s after all). Killian's secretary says she used only the Olympia typewriter during that time. The authenticated memo I have seen from Killian's office (an evaluation report on Bush) is in a monospaced typewriter font; not only is the typography totally different from the CBS/Burkett "Killian" documents, the signature does not match. The Kerry campaign was contacted by Mary Mapes and offered both the "Killian" memos and the services of Bill Burkett: the Kerry campaign dismissed the memos as fakes (possibly a hoax by Karl Rove) and after their first and last meeting with Burkett dismissed him as a crank. There are authenticity issues because they are not authentic. -- Naaman Brown (talk) 23:30, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
 * "(it was the 1970s after all)" That comment shows the sort of complete ignorance of office tech from the 70's, 60, and even earlier that surrounded this "controversy": IBM word processors were in common use *by* 1970 and the market exploded during the 70's with many other manufacturers getting into the market, and law firms were the among the first to adopt them. Further, the issue of proportional printing was even more nonsensical: while references to early office tech are mostly available only in large physical libraries (check on your local online library catalog), proportionally printed documents from the 60's and even 50's be readily found accessed through online archives -- check out this memo from the Eisenhower era for example. -BC aka 209.6.92.99 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 13:06, 8 April 2017 (UTC)
 *  Col Killian did not use a typewriter (it was the 1970s after all). Col Killian's family said he did not use a typewriter at home; Marian Carr Knox said if any typewritten memos came from Killian's office, she would have typed them on her Olympia. By "It was the 1970s" I meant that in the 1970s real men did not type: secretaries typed, men dictated. Sure there was equipment that could produce proportional type with interword variable spacing, and some equipment that could do interletter kerning, but it was not in common use at the time, and it was not present at Killian's office at Ellington AFB TX in the 1970s. None of the documents known to come from Col Killian's files in TxANG archives match the typography of the Burkett memos. --Naaman Brown (talk) 01:55, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

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"Truth" (movie)?

 * Read this:
 * http://dailysignal.com/2015/10/30/the-truth-about-dan-rathers-deceptive-reporting-on-george-w-bush/
 * 98.118.62.140 (talk) 19:18, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

September 2017
Wired recently published an interesting article about "Font Detectives" which covers the "Killian" 'documents' in some detail. I've added it to the article, and added short mentions of the inconsistent Word-superscript-prevention and the $1,000 offer.

Please check and improve my edit. Cheers — CWC 03:44, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Differing Apostrophes
On the other hand here is a interesting link

http://www.maverickexperiments.com/fonts.html

Claustro123 (talk) 22:50, 2 January 2018 (UTC)


 * (I've put this under a new heading. Claustro123's message originally came right after 98.118.62.140's.)
 * Microsoft Word (and other Microsoft products) support so-called smart quotes in ways that are mostly helpful but sometimes weird and confusing. In this case, I'd say that Word took the "'" key to mean "’" in one case but not in the other. (The root problem is that (1) keyboards have one key for left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark and apostrophe, and (2) ASCII uses one character for all three of those. Off-topic gripe: worse still, Unicode uses "’" for both right single q.m. and apostrophe!)
 * Also, it's true that many typewriters had superscript th keys, but no typewriter ever did proportional fonts and kerning at better than 2-point resolution.
 * Cheers, CWC 09:03, 3 January 2018 (UTC)