[narby]

I understand that, but there are certain commonalities that really don't change, especially with regard to the first letter of a first or last name. My signature always starts out with an identifiably similar "B" and then goes to hell from there, but the "B" is always structurally the same. The "K" in "Killian" in these signatures is significantly different.

Secretaries often signed for their bosses. I'm going to try and find this guys resume somewhere. I'll bet he had a secretary in a posh office and that explains the non-military terms, high end typewriter and signature.

We're going to get embarrassed here.

(I really hope it's ME that gets embarrassed when someone nails CBS, but I'm afraid that CBS might just be right - these memo's are really worthless - we shouldn't even keep them in the press)

[william clark]

I thought about the secretarial signature aspect, but I don't think that's the answer for a couple of reasons. First, when that happens, the secretaries initials are supposed to appear next to the signature to indicate a proxy. And I don't know if that practice would have been used in the military for such a document. Secondly, the rest of the signature looks similar enough to make me wonder if someone was trying to forge it. The odds of someone's secretary having a signature (which they'd have no need to disguise) so similar are pretty astronomical, I'd say.

[ex 98C MI Dude]

On military documents, it is possible for someone else to sign in the commanders place. However, the alternate signee must sign his or her own name and handwrite the word 'For' to the left of the commander's signature block. They are not authorized to sign the commanders name themselves, but must use their own, I say again. So there is no way that the signatures on the suspect documents are Lt Col Killian's. Nowadays the military uses inkstamps to 'sign' documents when the CO isn't available (or his/her hand is just plain wore out).

[bootyist-monk]

Pretty amazing that the margins are a perfect match for the Word default, and that the author of this memo hit their carriage return in the exact same places that Word automatically wraps text. Also, Times New Roman was not a font used by the Selectric or the Executive, according to the folks that run the Selectric Museum. I call BS.

[VRWC_minion]

I'll bet he had a secretary in a posh office and that explains the non-military terms, high end typewriter and signature.

I remember having a secretary type letters for me. There is absolutely no way any self respecting secretary in 1973 that would have typed those memo's as they were written. The grammar is beyond awful. Secretaries were trained to type memo's and letters with correct grammar and correct spelling. They were also taught to initial everything they typed.

no self respecting secretary would have typed that memo. They would have slit their wrists before preparing something that read like that.