"A USAF officer, writing a supposed "memo" to himself, typing it BY himself (and typing it perfectly - I might add!) would NOT under any circumstances, go around REPLACING typewriter balls to "specially type in" TWO letters in HIS OWN UNIT ID designation for a memo that was NOT TO BE EVER PRINTED OR DISPLAYED AGAIN!
"
Who's talking about balls. The Selectric of 1972 did NOT have proportional spacing.
I'm talking about the IBM Executive Model D, which DID have proportional spacing. It WAS available with the superscript "th" as a character above one of the number keys.
I don't know if this is a forgery or not. I'm just saying that it's possible that it is not, and all this stuff about proportional spacing and a superscript "th" is not valid, since both did exist at the time.
Who is to say this was even done at the TANG base. Did Killian have another job? Maybe he dictated these things to a secretary there. I have no idea.
Then the secretary would have added her/his initials and the author's initials.
You need to prove these are real. There is no evidence that they are.
I worked part of the way through college typing on an IBM Executive -- but I can't remember the model number and don't remember there being a "th" superscript key -- I rolled the carriage up when I needed to do it -- but that was 28 years ago and I could have just not realized the key was there, or maybe it wasn't there on all models. (Does this date me or what?)
What I do know is the first electronic fonts were based on common typefaces, like Times Roman and Courier. But the Executive type was/is actually a bit larger than the electronic software fonts. I think it's impossible to tell without seeing the original document what size the type actually is. I'm suspicious, though, of being able to get such an exact copy on MS Word --those things were a royal pain in the behind to use and I used to have to just freaking guess a lot of times when to stop -- you don't want to know how many little white out spots at the end of lines I used to have!!!
Anyway, like I said I think it is improbable but not impossible the document is real. I'd rather have an analysis of the ink and the paper -- the ink in particular I don't think you could fake.