Somebody Forged The Alien Briefing And Left The Scratch Marks In

ITHACA, N.Y. — Put the two signatures on top of each other and turn the light up.

One is on a genuine memo from the president to Vannevar Bush, dated 1 October 1947, about a research committee. The other is on the Majestic 12 briefing, the document that is supposed to have told an incoming president about recovered craft.

They are the same signature. Not similar. The same — the same length, the same slope, the same tiny break in the downstroke of the first letter, the same flaw at the same place where the pen skipped on the paper sixty years before either of us was born.

A person does not sign their name twice identically. A photocopier copies it perfectly every time.

The recipe, not the verdict

The verdict is old. The Bureau called these documents bogus in 1988 and the analysis has been in print since the 1990s. Our standards editor has noted, correctly and in the box below, that this story is a restatement with better pictures.

So we have written it as a recipe. Twelve tests, what each one is, what it returned, and how you run it yourself. Because the next document will not be this one, and the tests will still work.

How to run the signature test at home

You need two scans and a piece of software that can put one on top of the other at reduced opacity. That is all.

The presidential library sent us a clean scan of the 1947 memo, free, in four days, to an address anybody can write to. The briefing document has circulated for forty years and is everywhere.

Scale both to the same signature width. Overlay. Set the top layer to 50 per cent.

If the strokes drift apart, you have two signatures. If they lock — if the loops sit inside each other and the flaws land on the flaws — you have one signature and a photocopier.

Kenneth Duplessis-Nam, whom we paid $1,900 for a second opinion so that this would not rest on our own eyes, put it in one line: "Two signings never register. Not once in thirty-one years have I seen two genuine signings register."

The comma

The second-best test costs nothing and requires no equipment.

The briefing document dates itself in a hybrid style — a civil day-month-year with a comma dropped in where military format does not take one. 18 November, 1952.

Government typists of that period did not write that. They wrote one convention or the other, consistently, because they were trained to and because a typing pool corrects you.

The person who did write it that way, repeatedly, in personal letters over years, is one of the men who brought the documents to public attention. Those letters are public. We are naming neither a forger nor a conclusion here, and this newspaper stops at the punctuation.

The man who was abroad

The third test is the easiest of all and the one we would teach first.

One memo names its author and bears a date. The author's travel and appointment records for that week are in a presidential library, open to anybody, and on the date the memo carries he was out of the country.

That is not forensics. That is a diary.

What this does not do

It does not settle anything about craft, or recoveries, or what any government knows. A forged document about a subject tells you about the forger.

Our data editor asked for one line at the end and she gets it, because it is the reason The Vault has a rejected drawer at all:

"People think the hard part is spotting the fake. The hard part is that spotting the fake feels like an answer, and it is not one. It is a cleared space. Somebody still has to go and do the work in it."