William Flynn, a forensic document specialist with 35 years’ experience, said the CBS documents raise suspicion because they use proportional spacing. Documents generated by the kind of typewriters widely used in 1972 space letters evenly across the page, so that an “i” uses as much space as an “m.” In the CBS documents, though, each letter uses a different amount of space.
While IBM had introduced an electric typewriter that used proportional spacing by the early 1970s, it was not widely used in government. In addition, Flynn said, the CBS documents appear to use proportional spacing both across and down the page, a relatively recent innovation. Other anomalies include the use of the superscripted letters “th” in phrases such as “111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron,” Bush’s unit.
“It would be nearly impossible for all this technology to have existed at that time,” said Flynn, who runs a document authentication company in Phoenix.
Other experts largely concurred. Phil Bouffard, a forensic document examiner from Cleveland, said the font in the CBS documents appeared to be Times Roman, which is widely used by word-processing programs but was not common on typewriters.
CBS says its forensic document experts verified the papers' authenticity, but the network is declining to identify any of its experts. |
