"Would a guy who doesn't type really go through this procedure of centering when typing a memo to himself?
"
Well, of course not. I said as much.
My point here, as it has been in all of this is to debunk things people are saying that are simply not true. The document is a forgery, but what's in these threads is a hash of half-truths, non-truths, and just plain silliness.
Yesterday, I tried to do this.
Proportional type was available on the IBM Executive typewriter, not on the Selectric, except for the Selectric Composer, which certainly would not have been in that office. The IBM Executive could have been, however.
The IBM Executive allowed for replacing individual type bars. I know for a fact that one available set offered the superscript "th", "rd", "st" and "nd" as superscript characters for use in typing ordinal numbers. Would that have been in this office? Perhaps. Since unit designations are often written as ordinal numbers, logic says that such a machine might have been available. The military did all sorts of strange things as experiments.
It is indeed possible to center text...on any typewriter. I just described how to do it.
The odds of all this coming together are miniscule. The document is a forgery. BUT...it's incorrect to say that the document absolutely could NOT have been created at that time. It COULD have been. It was not, but it COULD have been.
There has been so much misinformation here about the technology of 1972, written mostly by people who weren't even alive then, or by people who never used the modern office equipment of the day.
There are those here who did use the equipment, who were in the USAF at the time. I saw IBM Executive typewriters in the headquarters office of my detachment at Ft. Meade in Maryland in 1968. I have USED that typewriter and have typed superscript ordinal number endings. I KNOW that capability existed. I have centered headings more times than I want to remember. I KNOW that one of the typefaces on the IBM Executive is very similar to the face in the Times New Roman TT font in Windows.
I also am quite certain that this document is a fraud.
Okay...so forget the type...that still doesn't account for Staudt's name being used when he retired a year before the memo was written.
The Pentagon was asked about the P.O. Box on one of the documents.
The Pentgon confirmed that would not have been military protocol for documentation and confirmed it was "highly unusual".
That's pretty strong. They could have said, "I have not seen any of the documents and cannot confirm or deny"
Even the most experienced typist, with the most expensive proportional typewriter, and all of the wiz-bang replacement keys could not duplicate the kerning used in modern word processing software and laser printers. These documents clearly display this kerning.
Therefore, there is no way these documents could have been typed on the dates identified in the documents.
Was kerning possible, where one letter would share horizontal space with the immediate previous letter?