A whacko being interviewed by a wienie. What else did you expect?

"I know the documents are real because the word 'forgery' doesn't appear anywhere on them!"

I don't SEE any proof! (With eyes tight shut.)

In most cases, documents that had been copied and faxed repeatedly, as these appeared to, could neither be authenticated nor proven a forgery, aside from establishing a chain of custody back to the originals (has CBS ever said where they got them?), or interviewing the alleged author (he's dead). As Ravenwood said, the burden of proof should rest on those putting forth the documents as real, not on those questioning them, and CBS certainly didn't try to meet that.

However, in this case you've actually got proof on the face of the documents that they are forged.

1. There is the remarkable agreement between the document formatting, typeface, and quasi-proportional spacing and the default settings of MS Word.

2. Typewriters of the early 1970's simply did not produce text that looked this good. For me, the most crushing comparison wasn't the MS Word one, but the old IBM Selectric manuals that someone posted on the net alongside the CBS documents. IBM's greatest bragging right for the Selectric was that with their top line models and a very-well trained operator, you could use Selectrics for typesetting, and they typeset their manuals on the typewriter to prove it. If you remember what normal typewriter output looked like, those manuals are pretty good, but they look sick not only beside professional typesetting (with molten lead poured into forms), but also beside modern word processor/laser printer output. If those Selectric manuals were the best you could do with a typewriter, there's no question at all that the documents in question weren't typewritten.

3. Finally, you did catch that part about "a very-well trained operator", right? In those days, businessmen and officers rarely did their own typing, rather they hired secretaries to do it. It's inconceivable that a Lt. Col. would have gone to school to learn how to get the most out of a typewriter, or that he'd have worked extra hard to make proportional spacing and all the other fancy features work just for a secret memo to himself. (That he wouldn't have put on paper if he had any sense of self-preservation anyhow.) While the Lt. Col. is dead, his secretary is still alive and says that he did not type...

My conclusion: Either this forgery was produced by someone "born yesterday" who didn't even realize that word processors and laser printers haven't been around this long, or someone wrote a first draft in Word intending to find a typewriter and copy it and then a born-yesterday confederate faxed the wrong document.

The alternate theory that a VWRC faxed it to entrap CBS is not tenable - it was too unlikely CBS would fall for so obvious a forgery. If I had been trying to sabotage them, I'd have sent them a badly typewritten document that looked authentic for an inexperienced typist using an office typewriter after the staff went home - but included dates or other details that could definitely be proven false, but only with a couple of weeks of research. But if CBS was responsible, they wouldn't have gone with a document faxed in anonymously anyway - it would have been merely a starting point for a search for an original that could have been authenticated or a witness that would remember seeing the document back in 1973.

Call it LARRY KINGS LIES