[sometime lurker]

You don’t get it. It’s not that it’s “explainable,” it’s that it indicates the claimed meticulous investigation was careless or deliberately misrepresenting the evidence.

When that happens, it taints the whole investigation by the Cold Case Posse. It taints all their findings. And it make them look foolish, and everyone who bought into it breathlessly without checking look foolish also.

[fr_freak]

No, you don't get it. It doesn't make the entire investigation look foolish unless you are somebody who is desperate for a reason to dismiss all the findings. They have multiple data points, and what you are arguing is that on one data point, the interpretation is flawed because they may have used the wrong version of an obscure manual to interpret it, and therefore all the data points can be tossed aside, the experiment invalidated, and the researchers discredited. That's like saying that the latest model Ferrari is a POS car because the passenger side view mirror is listed in the owner's manual as having a 1.24 magnification when it really has 1.25 magnification, since 1.24 was from the 2011 model.

This investigation involves uncovering document procedures, standards and practices from a process 50 years old that was used in a region where imprecision was the norm and everything was done on paper in pre-digital times where most of the original actors are either dead or old enough to have forgotten their own names. Expecting perfect, absolutely precise interpretations on every data point in order for any part of the investigation to be valid is beyond ridiculous and is, quite frankly, indicative of a desperate need to believe that this can't be true.