Posted by
Polarik on Saturday, November 22, 2008 5:09:00 AM
Obama's Born Conspiracy:
Obama's bogus birth certificate exposed!
By Ron Polarik, PhD
AUTHOR'S NOTE: If you have any problems viewing this report, copies of it are also posted at: The Free Republic, Obama Crimes, and Obama's Bogus Birth Certificate (which also has my rebuttal to Neal Krawetz, someone who fraudulently claims to have "debunked" this report -- but who never read it!
Forward
The following report is the culmination
of over four months of intensive, empirical research whose sole
purpose has been to determine if the images and photographs
posted on the Internet are true reproductions of a genuine
document purported to be Obama's original birth certificate. The
idea for the research actually began from the time when the first
image was posted on June 12 to the Daily Kos blog. I don't recall
on which website I actually saw the story (most likely World Net
Daily), but the news had gone viral basically from the moment
that it hit the Internet.
Before seeing the image, I had no idea
that Barack Obama's birthplace was in question, or that his
status as a natural-born US citizen had never been proven. Like
millions of other Americans, I believed the story he told about
being born in Hawaii to an American Mother (and a U.S. citizen)
and an African Father (a Kenyan national attending college on a
student visa). I had no idea that this issue would mushroom and
take on a life of its own. What I did know, however, was that
from the first time I saw the Daily Kos image, or what I now
call, "Obama's fake birth certificate," that something
was just not right about it. As someone who has scanned hundreds
of thousands of documents in his lifetime, I had a hard time
accepting that this was an original scan image made from an
original paper document. As Fate would have it, right then, on
June 13, I was looking at the conclusive evidence that the text
on this image had been graphically altered, or
"manufactured," as my first blog post would claim.
From that point onward, I had no inkling
of what was to come. I had no idea that I would wind up being the
only person on the Planet (at that time) to have spotted the
anomalies that I knew were the by-products of intentional,
graphic alteration, and to go on record as stating that the Daily
Kos image was a fake. I was also not prepared for what came along
with this knowledge, for what I had to endure for making it
public. Basically, I had painted a big bullseye on my chest and
my research findings, and the critics were now coming out of the
virtual woodwork taking shots at me personally, and my research,
secondly. I had started a new online game called, "Let's
pile on Polarik," and every little error I made was
magnified into a major transgression. Yet, the crux of my
contention was never successfully refuted.
Now, if I had to do it all over again, I
probably would not have done it at all, knowing that I'd be
spending the next four months conducting further research and
compiling evidence on not just the COLB image, but also the
digital photographs that were to follow two months later. The
personal costs to me were enormous, and I will not elucidate on
them (but for those who know me, they also know what were those
costs). What began as sort of a curiosity turned into my personal
quest for the "Holy Grail," so to speak. I was guided
only by the need to uncover the truth, and by the constant
harassment by my critics. Had they left me alone from the
beginning, I probably would not be writing this report today.
I debated, long and hard, about the title
of my report. Aside from it being catchy, I ran the danger of
being lumped into a group of false conspiracy theorists, and
brushed aside as an idiot wearing a "tinfoil hat."
(Actually, that's already happened, many times over). Perhaps
there are a lot of false conspiracies, including some really
outlandish ones, but there would not be laws on the books, both
at a state level and a federal level, that specifically mention
the act of conspiracy when the purpose of that conspiracy is to
either engage in illegal activity, engage in a cover-up of that
illegal activity, or interfering with the investigation of that
illegal activity. Conspiracy can involve all of these. Yet,
somehow, the word, "Conspiracy," has become a
pejorative for "nutty theories from the fringe," as if
there has never been a real "conspiracy."
Do you remember, or ever hear about, the
"Watergate Conspiracy?" Do you remember, or ever hear
about, what happened to President Richard Nixon as a result?
I would tell all of you who think that
"conspiracies" are a joke and that the people who claim
to have found them are "idiots wearing tinfoil hats,"
to just ask an FBI agent what he or she thinks about
"conspiracy." Or, go ahead and ask a federal judge what
he or she thinks about "conspiracy."
"Conspiracy" is no laughing
matter, ladies and gentlemen, and neither is "document
fraud," as in creating and passing a counterfeit birth
certificate.
I should now alert you to the fact that I
have been using the phrase, "Fake birth certificate,"
as a euphemism for "Counterfeit birth certificate,"
which is defined as, "A copy or imitation of a
state-issued birth certificate that is intended to be taken as
authentic and genuine in order to deceive another."
Sound familiar? According to Authenticate-360:
Birth certificates
are generally used as “breeder” documents to gain
other identity documents and to perpetuate fraud. But unlike
Social Security cards, birth certificates are issued by
hundreds, if not thousands, of entities, with little regard
to consistency or security. An accurately forged birth
certificate is a dangerous document, allowing the bearer
significant access to everything from driver’s licenses
to passports...The increasing availability and affordability
of high-quality digital scanners and copiers is a constant
threat to the authenticity of government issued documents.
There are current Federal laws in place
that prohibit the use of false identity documents, such as a
birth certificate, and they are spelled out in Chapter 18 of the
United States Code, Section 1028, Fraud and related activity
in connection with identification documents, authentication
features, and information. In particular, there are specific
paragraphs that relate to the use of a false identification
document:
The term "false
identification document" means a document of a type
intended or commonly accepted for the purposes of
identification of individuals that - (A) is not issued by or
under the authority of a governmental entity or was
issued under the authority of a governmental entity but was
subsequently altered for purposes of deceit;
and(B) appears to be issued by or under the authority of the
United States Government, a State, a political subdivision of
a State, a foreign government, a political subdivision of a
foreign government, or an international governmental or
quasi-governmental organization.
What you are about to read in this report
are well-documented facts arising from evidence collected over a
period of four months and subjected to intense scrutiny and
empirical evaluation. Given the overriding fact that the
individual whose identity document is in question, has repeatedly
failed to provide a genuine identity document, the charge that
this individual, along with other individuals, did conspire to
proffer in its place, a false identification document, is hereby
levied by the American people, by way of one of its citizens. To
summarize the seriousness of these actions and this charge, and
to the importance of what is contained within this report:
There is conclusive
and irrefutable evidence that the COLB image
created and distributed by Obama's campaign to the Daily Kos,
Annenberg's Factcheck, and the St. Pete
Times, Politifact, is, unquestionably, a
false identification document.
Furthermore, there is conclusive and irrefutable evidence
that the photos taken by Annenberg's Factcheck,
in collusion with the Obama campaign, are themselves, false
identification documents, having been made
from the same false identification document image,
as well as from additional false
identification documents created for the same
purpose; namely, to proffer these false
identification documents as true
reproductions of a genuine, Hawaii-issued and certified,
"Certification of Live Birth" document, and
thereby, intentionally deceive the American
public into believing that Barack Hussein Obama is a
natural-born citizen of the United States, and thereby, fully
qualified to become their President.
I never imagined that my studies would
amount to this. I thought, like most Americans, that maybe the
information was accurate even though the document image was fake.
I thought, like most Americans, that Obama would simply present a
copy of his real, original birth certificate, and that would be
that. Yet, here we are, more than twenty months after
Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, and
nearly three weeks after the election, and Obama still
refuses to show his real birth certificate!
Sadly, mainstream media have totally
ignored this inconvenient truth and are not even been willing to
even look at this birth certificate issue. They are all still
in-the-tank with Obama, but even more so now that he is in line
to be President. They all bought into the lies and fraudulent
documents proffered up as evidence on Obama's qualifications.
They have been too quick to label as "trash" or
"garbage" any legitimate questions asked about Obama's
real birth certificate. Even thigh-ranking governmental officials
in the state of Hawaii where Obama was allegedly born, won't
reveal what's on Obama's original birth certificate. All they
have said is that they have it. They have not said (1)
where Obama was born. (2) when Obama was born, or (30 even to
whom Obama was born.
The answer to "What's on Barack
Obama's real, original birth certificate" ranks right up
there with some of the great mysteries of our time -- and that is
really hard to swallow. That a man, with a dubious background,
has been elected to the highest office of the greatest superpower
in the world without ever having to prove who he says he is! That
is not "nutty," that's just plain insane!
With all that said, and without further
ado, I present to you my final and complete report on Barack
Obama's bogus birth certificate, The Born Conspiracy.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since the
beginning of Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential campaign on
February 11, 2007, there had been numerous rumors regarding
Obama’s citizenship status. Several reporters had asked for
a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, however, all requests
were subsequently denied.
On or about
June 12, 2008, the Daily Kos blog, a pro-Obama website, received
an image from the Obama Campaign that they claimed was a scanned
copy of Obama’s “original birth certificate,”.
Before this document image was cropped to 2427 x 2369 pixels, it
measured 2550 x 3300 pixels, or 8 1/2” x 11” when
printed.
Also, on or
about June 12, 2008, the Obama Campaign posted a smaller copy of
the same cropped image, measuring 1000 x 1024 pixels:
“You may have recently heard right-wing
smears questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate and
citizenship. These assertions are completely false and designed
to play into the worst kind of stereotypes. You can see Barack
Obama's birth certificate for yourself and help push back with
the truth...”
The very next
day, which was on or about June 13, 2008, Obama’s Campaign
replaced the first document image they posted with a smaller copy
which they posted to a new website, “Fight The Smears”
(fightthesmears.com). The smaller image was disproportionately
reduced to 585 x 575 pixels, which was almost half the size of
the original posted image, and one-third of its quality.
Also, on or
about June 13, Politifact.org, a supposedly nonpartisan, fact
checking website that is unquestionably pro-Obama, published a
copy of the same image as that posted on the Daily Kos, but was
also disproportionately reduced it to 811 x 786 pixels, or 1/3 of
its size and 1/6 of its image quality.
On or about
June 16, 2008, Factcheck.org, a pro-Obama fact checking website
,posted a full-sized image copy of same document image that
appeared on the Daily Kos. Factcheck’s image copy was
identical to the Daily Kos image copy before that image was
cropped. Factcheck.org is owned by the Annenberg Public Policy
Center of the University of Pennsylvania; a center run by Obama
supporters and funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Factcheck.org
made the following statement to explain how they received their
image copy:
"Bloggers raised questions based on the
absence of evidence, specifically the lack of a publicly
available copy of a birth certificate and the supposed secrecy
surrounding it". According to FactCheck, Tommy Vietor at the
Obama campaign sent a message to them and "other
reporters" saying, "I know there have been some rumors
spreading about Obama’s citizenship, so I wanted to make
sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate."
I first
noticed that the image posted to the Daily Kos and purported to
be the “original birth certificate” of Barack H. Obama,
did not look like a regular birth certificate. This image was
made only from the front side of a COLB: no copy of the reverse
side of this COLB has ever been made, :birth certificate”
document was ever scanned, a side that contains all of the
official certification instruments, such as the official Hawaiian
Seal, State Registrar’s signature, and date stamp of when
the document was printed.
To validate my findings that the text in this COLB
document image was the result of graphic alternations, and not a
result of any printer or scanner artifacts, I made over 700 test
scans and images using an actual paper COLB and different
scanners that were subjected to different combinations of
scanning and image parameters. I was finally able to replicate
the Kos image so closely that other image experts thought it was
the same Kos image, and not my “clone.”
From this date forward, when I first discovered
the evidence of tampering, and regardless of the unfamiliar
format of the COLB and the questionable information it contained,
I collected a great deal of additional evidence, that the scanned
image alleged to be a true copy of Obama’s original COLB was
forged, and that this altered image of an official state-issued
document is nothing less than a false identification document
as defined by Chapter 18, Section 1028 of the United States Code.
All of my findings pertaining to a single source
image and the four copies made from of it that are still posted
on the four (4) websites, DAILYKOS.COM, FIGHTTHESMEARS.COM,
FACTCHECK.ORG, and POLITIFACT.COM, as referred to and described
above, are outlined in my Final Report
On August 21,
slightly more than two months after the publication of the image
on the Daily Kos and Obama's website, Factcheck published their
story about nine photos they claimed were allegedly taken of
Obama's "real" COLB at his campaign headquarters –
the same COLB used to make the document image they posted on June
16.
There was no
longer any question in my mind that the COLB image Factcheck
posted is a forgery and that Obama's real COLB, as proffered by
Factcheck, is a nonexistent document. However, Factcheck created
a conundrum for me: if the image Factcheck posted is a forgery of
a nonexistent document image, then how can any genuine photos be
made of it? The answer had to be that both the image and the
photos were forgeries.
I have thoroughly examined the photographs that
FactCheck published, and have subsequently found clear and
irrefutable evidence of tampering with both the alleged COLB
objects photographed and with the photos themselves. One of those
COLB objects was, in fact, a printout of a forged document image
with the Seal superimposed onto it for the final pictures.
FactCheck’s photos reveal both the absence of
known, relevant features found on genuine COLBs along with the
presence of illogical and impossible features that would never be
found on a real 2007 COLB. Specifically, on the COLB objects
photographed, the security border closely matches the border
found on a real 2007 COLB. However, both the embossed Seal and
the State Registrar’s Signature stamp do not match
the same elements found on a real 2007 COLB, but perfectly match
those found on a real 2008 COLB; or, in other words, something
that would never happen in real life.
Hawaii made three important changes to their COLBs
from 2007 to 2008, including the use of a larger certificate
layout, a new security border, and, much to the chagrin of
Factcheck and the Obama Campaign, a new Seal and Signature stamp
that can now be stamped on a COLB by a machine.
With my experience and specialization in document
imaging, my findings are conclusive and irrefutable that the COLB
images posted by Obama to his campaign website, fightthesmears.com,
to the dailykos.com, a pro-Obama blog, to FactCheck.org,
a pro-Obama political research group, and to Politifact.org,
are, in fact, image forgeries with the intent to defraud
the American People into believing that these images were
digitally scanned from Obama’s genuine, “original”
birth certificate.
With my experience and specialization in
photography and digital imaging, my findings are conclusive and
irrefutable that the COLB photographs posted by FactCheck.org,
a pro-Obama political research group, and to Politifact.org,
are, in fact, photographic forgeries with the intent to
defraud the American People into believing that these digital
photographs were taken of Obama’s genuine,
“original” birth certificate.
Chapter One: In the beginning
In the June 9, 2008 edition of National Review Online, writer Jim
Geraghty posted the following story to his blog, the Campaign
Spot:
Obama Could Debunk Some
Rumors By Releasing His Birth Certificate.
Having done some Obama-rumor debunking that got praise from Daily Kos (a sign of the apocalypse, no doubt),
perhaps the Obama campaign could return the favor and help
debunk a bunch of others with a simple step: Could they
release a copy of his birth certificate? Rreporters have asked for it and been denied, and the state of Hawaii
does not make such records public...There are several
(unlikely) rumors circulating regarding Obama’s birth
certificate.
Geraghty listed these rumors as (1) Obama
was born in Kenya, (2) Obama's middle name is really
"Muhammad" and (3) Obama's first name is really
"Barry," as he was called when he was a child growing
up in Indonesia. Geraghty concluded his article by saying that
"If the concern of the Obama campaign is that the
certificate includes...some other data that could be useful to
identity thieves, that information could easily be blocked out
and the rest released."
Three days later, as if on cue, the pro-Obama Daily Kos blog
posted an image of what that they claimed was a scanned copy of
Barack Obama's "original birth certificate" that
they had received from the Obama Campaign. Before the day was
out, a duplicate copy of that same image (albeit it, much smaller
in size and poorer in quality) appeared on Obama's own
campaign website. A third copy of the same image would
be posted on June 16 by FactCheck.org, a political website linked
to Obama supporters and funders, followed by Politifact.org, a
political website in the same mold as Factcheck.org.
From the first moment that this image was posted, reactions and
criticisms spread through the Internet like a virus. Obama
supporters stood by the claimed veracity of this document, while
Obama critics protested it, not only for the data it held, but
also for the way it looked.
To everyone not born in Hawaii, this
"original birth certificate" looked nothing like what a
traditional birth certificate should look like, and with good
reason: it's not. This document is a short transcript of a
person's birth record, and is called, a "Certification
of Live Birth," or COLB as I came to
call it. A COLB is what Hawaii's Department of Health now issues
in place of actual photocopies of the original, long-form birth
certificate. The COLB is a "short form birth
certificate," and when duly certified, can be used for all
intents and purposes that a regular birth certificate could
be used.
At a minimum, original birth certificates contained the
names of the hospital where the child was born and the doctor who
delivered the baby. Birth certificates had signatures and stamped
or embossed seals on them. By the second week of this
controversy, the American public discovered that this type of
document was not a photocopy of the original birth
certificate completed at birth, but a short transcript of a
person's birth record. The original birth certificate is stored
on microfiche.
The major problem with a COLB is that the birth record it
represents could have been requested late, after a child was
born, and the place of birth as recorded may be anywhere in the
world. Thus, if Obama was actually born in Kenya, his mother
could have registered that birth with Hawaii's Health Department
when she and her son returned to the island. Obama's original
birth certificate which Hawaii's Health Department officials
recently confirmed as being on file, could also have come from
anywhere in the world. In other words, while Obama's original
birth certificate on record does contain the actual time and
place of his birth, the Certification of Live Birth would not if
Obama was actually born overseas.
The COLB (as shown below) contains the names of the Father,
Mother and Child, the "race" of the Mother and Father,
the time and date of birth, and the island and city of birth:
Regardless of a person's actual birth date, anyone authorized to
request this COLB, will receive the specific data
currently listed on a person's actual birth record, on
the date the copy was created. This last criteria is
crucial to understand because so many of the criticisms had to do
with the "apparent" conundrum posed by
getting a computer-generated certificate for people whose
birth predated the computer age.
Computer printout or not, many people were still agitated by the
apparent lack of visually recognizable feature that attest to its
veracity, such as the Seal, signature(s), and date stamps.
Initially, I was also a skeptic, having never seen a Hawaiian
COLB before. Although this COLB image did not look the same
as a traditional birth certificate, what captured my attention
were the image anomalies I saw -- anomalies that never would
appear on any genuine scan of a document.
Specifically, I saw that the text in this image bore the telltale
signs of being graphically altered after the image was
created. From June 13 onwards, the unfamiliar format of this
document, and the questionable information that it contained,
became tangential to my discovery that the scanned
image alleged to be a true copy Obama's original COLB, was a
forged document image. Now, with four months worth of research
and supportive evidence behind me, I can now say, without
any reservations, that my initial recognition of this image
forgery was absolutely correct.
Surprisingly, the same people who posted
this forged image four months earlier, namely the Obama Campaign,
the pro-Obama Daily Kos blog, Politifact, and the pro-Obama
FactCheck group, are still passing it off as a
genuine copy of Obama's original birth certificate.
There are a lot of other people who are treating this iconic
image as if it was an already established fact. At no time during
this 4-month period, did the Obama Campaign submit a second scan
image to corroborate the first one such as a scan of the reverse
side where the certification elements appear: the embossed Seal
of Hawaii, the date stamp, and the signature stamp of Hawaii's
State Registrar.
No one on the Left seemed at all concerned that Obama had been
given a pass on providing real evidence of his citizenship. So
what if everyone else has to show a genuine document. This was
Obama, after all, a man who could not do any wrong in the minds
of his supporters. So adamant were his supporters about this
document image, that anything challenging its authenticity was
quickly and aggressively squelched. Even before Factcheck
published a series of digital photographs purported to be Obama's
real COLB, there were plenty of story lines already considering
the birth certificate issue to be dead on the vine, with such
titles as "Obama's birth certificate: case closed," or
"Obama's birth certificate: the final chapter."
For more than two months, rather than make that second scan,
FactCheck decided to gamble on pulling off the ultimate forgery
by posting suspicious-looking photos of the same document that
they claimed was used to make the scan image that they posted in
June 16. Since I now have no doubt that their scanned image was
fraudulent, I have no reason to believe that their
"photographs" are any less fraudulent.
Supporters of Obama spent a great deal of time trying to explain
away these suspicious actions, but logic and subterfuge are no
substitutes for having independent observers examine not only
Obama's original birth certificate, but also a current
COLB containing his current birth record.
The "COLB" hard facts
Hawaii does not issue copies of the Certificate
of Live Birth, aka, the traditional, long-form birth
certificate. What Hawaii issues in its place is the Certification
of Live Birth, aka COLB, that is a short transcript of a
person's complete birth record on file -- it is only to be given
to the person whose name appears under CHILD'S NAME, or to a
member of that person's family, or someone authorized by the
person to obtain it.
When people hear the word,
"form," they typically envision a pre-printed document
containing blank areas to be filled in later. In reality, nearly
every form is of the "fill in the blank" variety. The
COLB form is different in that it is not a pre-printed form at
all, but a completely computer-generated graphic that is
"redrawn" every time a COLB is requested.
Although the exact process for how these
COLB forms are completed is not known, I imagine that either a
computer operator manually enters the information into the blank
areas provided, or a computer program automatically fills in
these areas with the appropriate information, such as the child's
name, parents' names, parents' race, place of birth, island of
birth, and the date/time of birth. Perhaps the most important
information written onto the form is the Certificate Number which
uniquely identifies the birth record. Regardless of whether a
person or computer fills in the "blanks," the
information for those blanks come from the same place, a birth
record database.
[IMPORTANT NOTICE] On Oct 31, 2008,
the Directors of Health (Fukino) and Vital Statistics (Onaka) in
Hawaii confirmed that there is a "birth record" for
Obama in this database. However, that's about as informative as
me saying, "I got a pen from my mother and it's in my
pocket." You still do not know where, when, and by whom the
pen was made. Logic dictates, however, that if birth record
confirmed that Obama was born in Honolulu, the Department of
Health would have thrown a huge luau in his honor by now.
OK, getting back to the business of
creating a COLB, being a computer-savvy individual, I might find
it hard to imagine that, in this day and age, a staff person has
to manually type the birth data into the COLB form. Then again,
we are talking about a State Government bureaucracy where paper
forms still rule the roost. My bet would be that the completion
of the COLB is not an automated process. Heck, every year when I
have to renew my tag at the DMV, the clerks still have to
manually type in my information. So, it's a good guess that it
happens in Hawaii, too.
A confirmatory note on how these forms
are filled in, is how Hawaii handles a request for a copy of a
COLB. Individuals who wish to received a certified
Certification of Live Birth (meaning that the requisite embossed
Seal and Registrar's signature will be placed on it) are required
to complete a form-fillable PDF file as shown below.
Form-fillable PDF files have been around for some time, and it is
worth noting that, by entering information into this request
form, you are also replicating what a staff person might do to
create the COLB itself.
As shown in the PDF form above, there are
blank areas, called "fields," into which you are
required to write the information requested. When this form is
completed, you are then asked to print it and mail it in with the
$10 fee. You cannot save this form with the information entered,
and I would imagine that the same is true for the COLB form.
Now, here's the rub when it comes to
requesting a COLB. When you fill out the form, you cannot simply
enter the person's name (child's name) and expect to get back a
fully-completed COLB. Hardly. In fact, if the name matches one on
file, all you will get back is about the same as what Directors
Fukino and Onaka said about Obama -- that a birth record exists.
You only get back what you put into it. So, let's pretend that
you had the legal authority to obtain Obama's real COLB (that is,
Hawaii received both written and oral confirmation from Obama
authorizing you to get it), and where it says, FATHER'S NAME, you
type in "BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA II." If the birth record
does not list BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA II as Obama's father, then
what you'd get is a big, fat blank space where FATHER'S NAME
would be.
I believe that the online COLB form is
completed in much the same way. The staff person at Vital Records
is presented with a blank COLB form -- which may or may not look
like the finished product -- and, when the on-screen COLB form is
completed, the COLB graphic is sent to a networked printer
designated to handle all print requests for COLBs. Since all
COLBs are printed on the very same device, all of the text in the
COLB should look uniformly the same (Hold that
"should look the same" thought in your mind as
you read this report).
The COLB is printed on a special, green,
Rattan-patterned paper. What makes it "special" and why
some refer to it as "security paper" are the fibers
embedded in the paper -- somewhat analogous to how our paper
money makes use of specially-embedded fibers to distinguish
counterfeit bills from the real thing (this point is also
important to keep in mind here).
When I originally saw the COLB posted on
the Daily Kos, I did not know that all of it was a graphic. I had
recently ordered a copy of my own birth certificate and was
expecting to see a similar document having text produced by
printer fonts (vector fonts). So, when I saw that all of the text
were written with bitmap fonts, or what a graphics editor
produces, my attention was immediately drawn to it. Not so much
that the fonts looked differently (which is what I originally
reported back in June), but that they looked exactly like text
that had replaced whatever was underneath. That is, the original
text had been graphically altered from what was originally
written there. The signs of this "overwriting" were
patently obvious to me, yet, as I was soon to learn, not at all
obvious to anyone else (anyone, that is, who had personally seen
and analyzed this COLB image, who knew enough about how COLB's
are made, and who wanted to prove to the public that it was a
forged image).
Now, looking back on what I hypothesized
four months ago, I find that I was spot-on about the altered
text, and that's the one distinguishing feature that cannot be
explained away by natural causes -- although many have tried
their best to do so.
What is particularly important for the
reader to realize is that, after four months of controversy over
a single image allegedly scanned from Obama's original birth
certificate, that image is still the only one ever made. Any time
anyone on the Left is asked the birth certificate question, what
we get back is a rhetorical question, like "Do you really
think that a US Senator running for President would fake his own
birth certificate?" How come they never ask why, with over
$600 million dollars collected in campaign contributions, the
Obama campaign could only afford to produce one lousy-looking
image copy?
Of course, the real question is why not
produce a real, paper one to show to the public? Why show just
one image, and only of the front side of the COLB, but not the
back side where the certified Seal and stamps reside? finally,
why would one intentionally render that image to be flawed?
"Image" is everything
Time to clear the air here about what is,
and is not, a "high-res" scan. The way some people on
the other side of the COLB controversy have bandied that term
about, you'd think they were talking about high definition TV.
Many of these COLB believers maintain that this, now infamous JPG
image, is a "high-resolution" scan. This term only
makes sense in a relative way because, in comparison to the
horrendously-smeared image posted on Obama's Fight The Smears
website, every other copy looks "better" (as in
"Easier to read"). In terms of image quality, size does
matter, and the image copy that Factcheck posted to their website
is the largest one of the four. Yes, it is big (2550 x 3300
pixels). Sure, it has a print resolution of 300 DPI (meaning that
it would produce a letter-sized print). But, NO,
it was never intended to be a high quality image,
which is how "high resolution" should be defined.
If you've ever used a digital camera to
take photos and transfer them to your computer, then you already
know, or should know, what is a JPG image. JPG
are the preferred format for photo and image files because they
can contain a lot of visual information in a comparatively small
amount of file space, due to what's called, file compression.
All that you need to know about JPG files and compression is that
there is a direct relationship between the amount of compression
applied to the file and the visual quality of the image when it
is viewed or printed: the greater the amount of compression, the
smaller will be the file size, and the lower will be its visual
quality. Appropriately, the JPG format is known as a
"lossy" one because of the "loss" of visual
information in exchange for a smaller (and more manageable) file
size.
When it comes to posting images and
photos to the Internet, file size is an important factor for
several reasons. File size determines how quickly and easily an
image can be downloaded and/or displayed on your computer. It
determines the costs of maintaining image files on a website as
well as the transmission of them to other computer. I mention
these factors because they will be important in deciding whether
a website owner replaced larger files with smaller ones for cost
considerations, or solely to reduce the amount of information
contained in them. Remember, the bigger the file, the better the
image, all other things being equal.
Why is this discussion relevant to
spotting a potential image forgery? Because, a forger knows that
the evidence of graphical manipulation is more likely to be
detected in a larger image of higher quality than in a smaller
image of lower quality. In the case of digital camera photos,
there is also additional descriptive information about how the
photos were made stored within the photo images themselves --
information that may be incriminating. [NOTE: this additional
information is called Exif data, and will be discussed later on
in this report].
OK, you're probably asking yourself,
"So what's so wrong with the size or quality of the Obama
COLB image? It looks fine to me." That's like the guy who
winds up in the emergency room, not believing that anything is
wrong with him because he thought that he "looked just
fine." There is also a lot wrong with the four image copies
that a layperson would not notice.
The original, forged source image began
its existence as a full-size scan of a real paper COLB. The COLB
is printed on a standard, letter-sized piece of paper. Two of the
four image copies (those residing on the Daily Kos and Factcheck)
are full-size as well (although the Kos image was cropped close
to the COLB's borders). The other two images (on Fight The Smears
and Politifact) are 1/4 to 1/5 the size of the original source
image. The fact that these four image copies vary in their size
and quality is the primary reason why many people thought that
they were made from other document scans, instead of from only
one "scan." Listed in the table below are the four COLB
images along with their image size (in pixels), their file size
(in Kilobytes), and the amount of memory (in Megabytes) that they
would consume when viewed on a computer. You can get a rough idea
of how much JPG compression was applied to an image by comparing
the file size to the memory required to view it (shown as a
percentage of file size divided by memory size):
The amount of compression and the color
count tend to vary with the actual size of the image because, all
things being equal, the larger the image, the more memory it
consumes, and a greater amount of image compression is needed to
save disk space and to improve download times. Keep these factors
in mind as you read the table and view the images. The color
count is an indicator of image quality, as is the amount of JPG
compression. Obviously, the size of an image directly affects how
much of the image can be seen and how clearly. The image that is
the smallest in size and has the lowest color count is the Fight
The Smears image. It is also the hardest to see clearly, and that
is exactly the result the Obama Campaign wanted: if you cannot
clearly see the image, then you cannot see any alterations made
to the image.
The image with the highest compression ratio, where lower is better, and the second highest color count, where higher is better,
was the original Daily Kos image, with a 3% compression ratio, and a
70,604 color count. Next in line was the Factcheck image with a 6%
compression ratio and a 77,903 color count. Although the Fight The
Smears image, and Politifact image had lower compression ratios than
the images posted on the Daily Kos and Factcheck, they were also the
smallest in terms of file size and image size, and had less than half
of the colors displayed in the two largest images.
As for
which of these characteristics are most important, a larger image size
and a higher color count can compensate for higher levels of image
compression. Although the Factcheck image was larger in size than the
Daily Kos image, when it is cropped to the same dimensions of the Daily
Kos image (2427 x 2369 from 2550 x 3300), and saved at a JPG quality
level of 46%, the resulting Factcheck image will now have the same file
size and use the same amount of computer memory as the Daily Kos image.
However, its new color count will virtually be the same as the
original, full-size image (from 77,903 to 77,478).
Normally,
when a JPG image is saved with a quality level, or compression level,
less than 40%, the image that results will not appear to be clear and
sharp unless it is viewed at its original size. However, if you only
get to view an image that was reduced to be a fraction of its original
size, let's say, at the size of the COLB images displayed on Obama's
Fight The Smears website, it will seem to look "just fine" when small,
but look horrible when you try to enlarge it.
One of the other
main differences between the FTS image and the Daily Kos image is its
resolution: the FTS image is 100 DPI versus 300 DPI for the Daily Kos
image. When you enlarge the FTS image to be the same size as the Daily
Kos image, you will see a lot of visual gibberish, which as I said, is
exactly what FTS wanted you to see.
Not only was their
original image intentionally shrunk down to the size of an image
"thumbnail," it was not resized proportionately; i.e., if you change
its height to be the same size as the Daily Kos image, its width would
be seventeen (17) pixels narrower than it should be. In other words,
its aspect ratio was changed, calculated as height divided by width.
The image with the lowest compression
level and the second highest color count was the original Daily
Kos image. Next in line was the , Fight The Smears image, the
smallest image with three times more compression than the Daily
Kos image and less than half of the color count. Politifact's
image, although bigger than the Fight The Smears image, had
almost twice as much JPG compression and a lower color count.
Most surprising of all, however, was the
Factcheck image. Although it had a higher color count, the
Factcheck image, when cropped like the Daily Kos image, was the
same size as the Daily Kos image and used the same amount of
memory. However, its compression level was more than five times
greater than the Daily Kos image, and almost as compressed as the
Politifact image, that is less than 1/4 its size. Normally, any
JPG image saved with a compression level less than 40% is not
going to look that great when it is viewed at its original size.
However, if you only get to view the image at a fraction of its
original size, let's say, at the size of the COLB images
displayed on Obama's Fight The Smears website, it will seem to
look "just fine" -- that is, until you try to enlarge
it. Then, all you will see is visual gibberish, which, as I said,
is exactly what FTS wanted you to see. Not only was the original
image intentionally shrunk down to the size of an image
"thumbnail," it was not resized proportionately; i.e.,
it is wider than it should be.
When you consider that this image copy
came from the same source file as its largest "cousin,"
at the Daily Kos, you begin to understand the total futility of
FTS's deliberate attempt to hide any evidence of foul play.
Additionally, the very last thing that Obama's campaign would
want anyone to see, is the COLB image enlarged to its original
size of 8 1/2" square, and that also goes for Politifact's
image. Both of these websites displayed their copy of the
original forged source file at a fraction of the original size
(about 20 to 25% smaller than what the Daily Kos posted).
The only other scans ever made of a
"Certification of Live Birth," or COLB, are those that
are genuine paper copies, and are in the possession of other
people (myself included), and that, in real life, look decidedly
different from the deliberately altered image pretending to be
what Obama's COLB might have looked like, if it were, in fact,
not a forgery.
No matter how many challenges to my
conclusions have come my way, I have never wavered from the
inescapable truth, that an image of someone's real COLB had been
markedly altered to look like it belonged to Obama. Or so the
forgery conspirators thought.
To summarize, there was one, original
source image that was forged, and four copies of this source
image were distributed to (1) the pro-Obama Daily Kos
blog, (2) Obama's Fight The Smears
campaign website, (3) Annenberg's Factcheck website,
and lastly, the St. Petersburg times Politifact website.
On all of these images, there is a
telltale "dot" (a piece of dirt left on the scanner
glass) that proves they all came from a single source file.
What is also important to know is that I
was the first one, and, really, the only one, to prove
conclusively and honestly, that the images posted to these four
websites were all made from the same forged image, and to explain
exactly how the original forged image would have been made.
In the following image, there is a visual
anomaly in the upper left quadrant that can be seen in all four
image copies. This anomaly is located directly to the right from
the phrase, STATE OF HAWAII on the left side, and below the
letters, "E" and "R" in the border banner,
CERTIFICATION OF LIVE BIRTH (follow blue arrows). This anomaly
was caused by a piece of dirt left on the scanner glass when the
original source image was scanned.
Even though the size and resolution of
these four images vary, with the Fight The Smears image being the
smallest (585 X 575 pixels) and poorest in quality (100 DPI) ,
all four can still be seen in this comparison:
How the forgery was made
The timing of all these images is
something that also confuses a lot of people new to this birth
certificate brouhaha. As I mentioned in Part One, the
"birth" of this conspiracy began on June 10 when Jim
Geraghty questioned whether or not Obama was really born in the
US. Two days later, on June 12, the first forged copy appeared on
the Daily Kos, followed shortly thereafter by a smaller copy
(originally 1000 x 1024 pixels) on Obama's own website,
BarackObama.com. When Obama's Fight The Smears website spin off
was launched on June 13, the image copy was moved to that
location, and its size was cut in half to what it is now (575 x
585 pixels). Politifact was next according to claims that they
also posted their copy on June 13 (although I was not able to
find it until June 27, and I suspect it was back-dated).
Factcheck's copy comes in a distant fourth in this phony COLB
derby:
The forgery began its life as an actual scan of a real, 2007
Hawaiian "Certificate of Live Birth," (COLB) that
belonged to someone other than Obama (No, not his sister). The
image acquired by the scanner was then saved as a JPG file. This
is the file that was sent to the person who would do the actual
forging. Whoever that person was, he or she was sent the
information that was to go on the image. I doubt that the forger
was the same person who did the scan (or scans, plural. In my
analyses, I discovered that there had to be more than one COLB
image used to make the forgery). Whoever did the scan did not
have Obama's real birth certificate on hand, nor did he or she
pull the birth information out of thin air. Only Obama, himself,
knows the full truth of his birth origin, and only Obama would
know which parts of it needed to be "modified."
Somehow, and by some mean, that information needed to be relayed
to the forger.
Recall that I referred to this forged
image as being unique. What makes it unique is that this image
went through three format conversions before it was ever released
to the websites mentioned above. Essentially, the red flags for
me were the predominance of white and gray pixels in between the
letters of the CHILD'S NAME. The almost total lack of green
pixels which should normally be there told me that the editing of
the text was not done when this image was either a JPG file or a
Windows BMP file -- the two predominant file format options when
scanning a document.
Bitmapped graphic images are represented
by colored dots called pixels. The more dots an image has, the
higher the resolution, but also the larger the file. Likewise,
the more colors an image has, the more that image will look like
the document that is scanned (or the subject that is
photographed). Unlike a JPG file where there is a loss of image
information due to file compression, the BMP bitmap image does
not discard any of the colored dots created from the original
source or subject.
There is a third type of file, not
previously mentioned, that is most commonly used on websites.
This format is known as GIF, and it is also a bitmap image.
However, the number of possible colors is limited to only 256;
whereas, in JPG and BMP files, there are millions of possible
colors. The actual number of colors, though, is dependent on the
size of the image. It is strictly a matter of room here, for when
the size of the JPG or BMP image gets smaller, there are fewer
actual colors available.
I realize that this is a bit technical,
but nevertheless, important to know because, when a document is
scanned, a temporary, bitmap image is created in the computer's
memory. From that internal, temporary image, you, the user,
select the image format that you would like the final, permanent
image to be, and the computer program then converts that internal
bitmap image into that permanent image format you chose.
Logically and actually, if you request
the program to use a bitmap image format for the permanent image,
then you will have a file that is as large as the amount of
computer memory used, with the maximum number of pixels and
colors available for an image of that size and format. If you
save the scan as a JPG file, depending on how small a file you
wish or alternately, the amount of quality desired, you will lose
some image information along with some of the colors.
Now, here is why this is critical to the
COLB image forgery.
if the Obama COLB JPG image was created
directly from the scanned internal image with a known amount of
file compression, there would be a fairly predictable range of
colors within that image. If there is a large deficit between the
number of colors in a JPG image that was claimed to be made from
a scan, and the predicted or expected number of colors, you can
that postulate that the JPG image was not made directly from the
scan image. Additionally, if there is also a deficit in the
expected number of pixels of a given color, then you can also
postulate that something was done to the image in between the
time the internal scan was made, and this particular JPG image
was analyzed.
Therefore, since the actual number of
colors in the full-size, 300 DPI Factcheck image is far lower
than what it should be, and there are a significant number of
green pixels missing in the areas between the letters, it is a
safe bet to conclude that this image took a detour somewhere
along the line. It is that detour, I postulated, which diverted
the original scan image to the forger before it ever arrived in
Factcheck's inbox.
This deficit in the total number of
colors counted in an image, coupled with the specific deficit in
green pixels, is absolutely the result of human intervention, and
not any artifacts known to Man.
With that fact firmly in place, then it
is a somewhat simple, but lengthy and tedious, process, to figure
out what would cause these deficits to be there, and then to
reproduce the conditions to validate the process. The answer
turned out to be, that the original scan image was saved as a GIF
file, with its restricted color count, then edited as a GIF
image, and finally, resaved as a JPG file with a moderate amount
of compression. It should also be noted that neither the GIF nor
the JPG, were subjected to any additional smoothing techniques to
enhance the image. Had these techniques been applied, then the
pixel patterns I found would likely not be there.
The resulting JPG image has a final color
count of approximately 70,000, when, if it had been made directly
from the image scan, as those complicit in the forgery claim,
then the color count would have been well over 83,000, at a
minimum. Only through sheer determination and a lengthy
trial-and-error process, that produced over 400 test images, was
I able to discern the right combination of factors that not only
marked the image as a forgery, but also outlined the steps
necessary to produce it. I followed these steps to make a clone
of the Kos COLB image. Unfortunately, I did not keep track of all
the difference changes I made, and so, the actual recipe to make
it will need to be rediscovered.
The steps for making the clone involves
processes that are familiar to most people who work with
graphics. The GIF image, created from the JPG image, was then
imported into a graphics program (NOT Photoshop) where the
existing text was covered over with portions of the background
pattern, and on top of that, in the spaces where the original
text formerly information appeared, fraudulent information was
typed in to make the image LOOK like it was Obama's COLB. I say,
"fraudulent" information, because if it were true
information, then Obama simply cold have gotten a copy of his
COLB from Day One.
When the alterations were completed, it was intentionally resaved
as a JPG, at a 45% compression ratio -- to hide the areas where
the forging was made. That's the reason why the image looks the
way it does.
Added to these steps, are the ones taken
by the four websites, in changing the size, resolution,
dimensions, and amount of cropping (*Politifact claims to have
posted their copy on June 13, but according to the creation date
on the image I downloaded from their site, it was July 8th,
meaning that their web page was rewritten to reflect the earlier
date). As I mentioned in Part One, while the forged image was
most likely distributed to these four websites
by the Obama Campaign, the person who manufactured it could be
anyone inside or outside of the Campaign, or even inside
Factcheck. The reason why I believe that the original forgery
might have been made at Factcheck, is by virtue of their photo
session with Obama's alleged real COLB and their efforts to
squelch any claims of fraud on their part or on Fight The Smears.
The most salient point about the person who created the forgery
(a person I dubbed, "Dr. X") is that he or she was not
very diligent in its construction, even though the process used
was sound. The original image, that served as the basis for the
forgery, was made from a scan of a real, 2007 COLB that belonged
to someone other than Obama (No, not his sister). This image
acquired by the scanner was then saved as a GIF file (an image
format different from the JPG format of the four image copies
posted online). This GIF image was then imported into a graphics
program (NOT Photoshop) where the existing text was covered over
with portions of the background pattern, and on top of that, in
the spaces where the original text formerly information appeared,
fraudulent information was typed in to make the image LOOK like
it was Obama's COLB. I say, "fraudulent" information,
because if it were true, then Obama would have had no reason to
refuse showing a real, paper copy of his COLB from Day One.
After the alterations were made to the text, it was intentionally
resaved as a JPG, at a 45% compression ratio -- to hide the areas
where the forging took place. This is the reason, and the only
reason, why the image (especially the borders) looks so poorly
copied.
When the bogus COLB image was first
posted on the Daily Kos, people immediately wondered why was
there a black rectangle covering up the Certificate Number. I can
tell you now, that this black rectangle was added to the image
using Photoshop CS3 after the forgery was
created in a different graphics editing program (Not Photoshop).
If the entire forgery were to have been created using Photoshop
CS3, it would never have looked the way it did. To put it another
way, the level of Photoshop skills required to change a
decent-looking scanned image into this lousy-looking, COLB image,
exceed what would be required to make a good-looking, forged
image. So, even though the Kos and FactCheck images both had the
same Exif data put there by Photoshop, it is wrong to assume that
the entire forgery was created inside Photoshop (Exif data is
information embedded within an image that describes how, and by
what device or process, that image was made. Most graphics
editors, except for basic ones like MSPaint, can display this
Exif data, and even control which parts of it will be kept).
When the Daily Kos first published the
forged Obama COLB image, the publisher admitted that they had
only cropped the image (remove blank areas on the image) that was
sent to him. However, after examining the Exif data Factcheck
published their copy of the forged image, their image had the
same Exif information as in the Kos image, with the major
exception being the size of the image. A real paper COLB consists
of an 8" square certificate graphic printed on a
letter-sized (8 1/2" x 11") page of security paper,
with no printing on the top 3" of the page. The front side
of the paper has that green-and-white Rattan pattern and a blank
area on the reverse side - on which the embossed Seal, date
stamp, and signature stamp are placed.
The forged image contained a full-sized
copy of the scanned image whose dimensions, as measured in
pixels, are 2550 pixels (width) by 3300 pixels (height) at a
print resolution of 300 DPI, or Dots Per
Inch (actually pixels by inch). The print resolution determines
what the size of the document will be when it is printed out. If
you divide the number of pixels by the print resolution, you will
get the size of the image, in inches, when printed. In this case,
dividing the width (2550 pixels) by 300 equals a width of 8 1/2
inches, and dividing the height (3300 pixels) by 300 equals 11
inches. The image that Factcheck posted was a full-size copy
(2550 x3300, 300 DPI).
Where things get strange is in the Exif
data contained within the Kos image. If you recall what the
publisher of the Daily Kos said, that the image sent to him was
cropped before posting, then you can find the size of the cropped
image reflected in the height and width measurements shown by the
Exif data. In other words, the image after cropping was now 2427
pixels (height) by 2369 pixels (width) but with the same print
resolution.
Not only was the cropped image also 300
DPI, but also the first half of the Exif data remained unchanged,
including the date and time that the image was saved, the name of
the graphics program saving it (Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Mac
computer), and three other variables. However the Exif data
contained in the full-size Factcheck image, has information not
found in the Kos image, including the dimensions of the thumbnail
image and the amount of image compression applied when saving. A
JPG image files can contain a much smaller version of it, called
a "thumbnail") embedded in it.
If Obama's real birth record does not
match anything on the forged image, regardless of what it
actually says, then that is prima facie evidence of document
fraud.
I have been collecting and analyzing information ever since the
Daily Kos image was posted on June 12th. Not only did I discover
that this image was a forgery, but I also discerned and
demonstrated the methods used by the forger by using them to
recreate an Obama COLB clone -- thus, validating my initial
theory. Any attempt at recreating the COLB image MUST show the
same, exact pixel patterns that I found between the letters in
the original forged images. If it does not show those pixel
patterns, then it does not look like the forgery does, and it
does not demonstrate how the forgery was made.
On August 21, when Factcheck published photos that were allegedly
taken of the same COLB used to make the image they posted two
months before, many people thought that the controversy was over.
Yet, two months before the photos, writers like Amy Hollifield
had already dubbed the arrival of the bogus image scan as the
"Final Chapter" in the birth certificate saga.
When Factcheck published their photos of what I had proven to be
a bogus image, they created a major conundrum:
.
The photos cannot possibly be real if the image pictured in the
photos is bogus. If the image is bogus, then so are the photos.
Not just by logic, however, but by careful examinations of these
photos that proved they were not made from a real, paper COLB, or
even several paper COLBs (Yes, there was more than one COLB
object photographed). Some of the photos were taken of a color
laser printout made from the original forged source image rather
than a real, paper COLB.
To date, no one has been able to show
that this bogus image was the result of scanner artifacts, JPG
artifacts, anti-aliased text, or any other naturally occurring
phenomenon. There is only one possible way for the Obama COLB
image to look the way it does, and that's by direct graphic
alteration of the text made after the scan image was saved.
Basically, this is the smoking gun, and
the only smoking gun in this birth certificate conspiracy. Yes,
it is a real conspiracy considering who and how many people are
involved in this forgery and cover-up.
This image is shown below. It was first
posted on the pro-Obama Daily Kos blog
who claimed that it was sent to them by the Obama Campaign:
On the same day, the Obama
Campaign posted a duplicate copy of that same image on
their website, Fight The Smears,
(FTS) although the size of their copy was reduced to about 42% of
the Kos image:
What very few people know about this
image is that it was taken down the very next day, replacing it
with one half as big and poorer in quality (the original FTS
image was 1024 x 1000 pixels, the replacement is 585 x 575
pixels). Did FTS take down the original because some people were
finding anomalies in it? The entire FTS web site has only one
purpose: to mislead the American public by labeling as
"smears" all of the factual statements made about
Obama. Posting a bogus birth certificate on their website
fits their modus operandi.
The headline that redirects readers to
their statement about Obama's birth certificate is shown below.
Following it is the text of the email that FTS urged
supporters to send to their friends.
Barack Obama has
made his birth certificate public and it can be seen here .
You may have recently heard
right-wing smears questioning Barack Obama's birth
certificate and citizenship. These assertions are completely
false and designed to play into the worst kind of
stereotypes. You can see Barack Obama's birth certificate for
yourself and help push back with the truth...
As of September 13, I can confirm that FTS is still
posting the same image, the same headline, and the same
email letter. What is also of interest on the FTS website is
a reference to "the independent group, Factcheck.org."
FactCheck.org is most definitely not independent
group, but belongs to the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the
University of Pennsylvania: a Center run by Obama supporters and
funders.
FactCheck.org was also the third group to post a copy of
the now infamous Obama "birth certificate"
image to their website four
days later. Only this time, an uncropped copy of the image was
posted:
FactCheck claimed that "bloggers raised questions based
on the absence of evidence, specifically the lack of a publicly
available copy of a birth certificate and the supposed secrecy
surrounding it". According to FactCheck, Tommy Vietor at
the Obama campaign sent a message to them and "other
reporters" saying, "I know there have been some
rumors spreading about Obama’s citizenship, so I wanted to
make sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate."
Three months later, no other "reporters" have ever
received a copy of this "birth certificate" image, or
any other birth certificate image, for that matter, from
Tommy Vietor or any one else. To reiterate, there has been one,
and only one, image alleged to have been scanned from Obama's
"original birth certificate," and that the only people
alleged to have received a copy of this document image from
the Obama Campaign have been (1) Markos Moulitsas, the creator of
the Daily Kos, a
pro-Obama blog, (2) FactCheck, a pro-Obama political research group, and (3)
Politifact.
Update to Part One
There have been a number of significant changes that have taken
place on the websites mentioned in Part One.
As you recall, on June 12, the Obama
Campaign posted a copy of the original scan image to their
website, My.BarackObama.com,
which became, "Fight The Smears," (FTS) on the very
next day. The image that FTS posted was greatly reduced in size
and quality from the copy they had posted on My.BarackObama.com
(from 1024 x 1000 pixels to 585 x 575 pixels).
The original headline on Obama's FTS
website (which has recently been changed without comment)
redirected readers to their statement about Obama's alleged
"original birth certificate." The text from the
original web page is shown below.
Barack Obama has
made his birth certificate public and it can be seen here .
You may have recently heard
right-wing smears questioning Barack Obama's birth
certificate and citizenship. These assertions are completely
false and designed to play into the worst kind of
stereotypes. You can see Barack Obama's birth certificate for
yourself and help push back with the truth...
This headline and story line remained
unchanged until sometime in the last week in September when,
inexplicably (except to me), FTS totally
changed their headline and story line, although the same COLB
image as was posted on June 12, remained the same.
FTS also modified its home page as well replacing what was there
with a rather, bulky table, measuring two columns wide
by nine rows high, with an additional top row or
masthead spanning both columns:
This table now takes up at least three-fourths of the FTS home
page. Each of the 18 boxes in this table contains a separate
story about one of the "smears" they found. The
last box in the left column of this "Smear matrix," is
the "new" story about Barack's "birth certificate
:
Clicking on that box will take you to a revised headline
and story line:
What following this introduction is the exact, same image that
has been on their website since it was posted on June 12.
HOWEVER, there's a new wrinkle here -- not about the birth
certificate or his US citizenship, but about his Kenyan
citizenship which Obama had previously denied ever having. The
source of this new story is none other than FactCheck.org, the
supposedly independent, nonpartisan political action group owned
by the Annenberg Group, wholly owned and operated by loyal Obama
supporters. It says the following:
“When Barack Obama Jr. was
born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony,
still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As
a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose
citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality
Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama
Sr.‘s children.
Since Sen. Obama has neither
renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of
allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically
expired on Aug. 4,1982.”
So, now, in addition to chiding others for insisting on
seeing Obama's original, certified, paper birth
certificate, we now learn that Obama really was once a
citizen of Kenya (and maybe was one at birth, too).
Why did FTS change its web page regarding Obama's
"birth certificate, and include a nonsensical statement
about Obama's birth certificate, namely that "Smears
claiming Barack Obama doesn't’t have a birth certificate
aren’t actually about that piece of paper —
they’re about manipulating people into thinking Barack is
not an American citizen?"
Everyone born in this country has a birth
certificate, so if Obama was born here, too, then he
should have one. This isn't rocket science. Yet, Obama
is the only one, out of millions of natural born Americans, who
refuses to show his original birth certificate to verify his
citizenship status. Obama is also the only person and
politician to ever submit a forged document image in place of a
genuine, certified birth certificate, hoping that this act
of fraud would go unnoticed.
FactCheck: fraudulent forensics and
fabricated images
Up until now, I've limited my discussion
to uncovering evidence and motives for fabricating an image that
Obama supporters still claim is a genuine copy of Obama's actual
Certification of Live Birth (or COLB). I have not talked about
the concerted efforts of people and organizations intimately tied
to Obama to squelch this process of discovery. Additionally,
there have been no shortage of critics and detractors who claim
to have no allegiance to, or support for, Obama as a Presidential
candidate. Whatever are their real motives, which they have kept
hidden, their animosity towards the researchers who question the
validity of the COLB image is patently obvious.
Why would anyone, with no professed interest in Obama or this
national election, would want to thwart the honest vetting of a
Presidential candidate -- one, whose continued efforts to
hide his past are both unprecedented and unconscionable
-- is a mystery to me. Nevertheless, their repeated attempts
to both squelch my research and discredit me personally, will
eventually backfire on them, if it hasn't already. Nothing says,
"credibility," as allowing your opponent to find the
evidence you need, while letting them think that they've got the
"proof" to negate your theories.
Sometimes it's better to let your opponents think that you're as
dumb as they say you are. After all, your opponents are not
going to willingly give you anything that you can use against
them.
In this section, I'll show you how and why the forged Obama COLB
image was not the only fabricated COLB image being circulated on
the Internet, nor was it the only COLB image supported by
fraudulent affirmations. It was in this context that FactCheck
was determined to have the last word on Obama's "birth
certificate." What FactCheck thought would be the end-all to
speculation about the veracity and legitimacy of Obama's birth
certificate, turned out to be the bomb that would blow apart
every claim they made about this fraudulent document, along with
everyone connected with what is really, a conspiracy to hide
Obama's origins.
In Part One, I spoke about the research I began immediately after
seeing the suspicious-looking COLB image posted on the Daily Kos
website in mid-June. While I focused on the construction of the
COLB image, other critics were focused on its content, such
as why "AFRICAN" was listed as a race and how could a
laser printed document exist in 1961.
On July 20, another researcher on the forged COLB image took a
different approach than mine, and decided to get his work
published as an "Exclusive story" on three popular
blogs. This publication was accompanied by press releases
proclaiming that a "Computer Forensics Expert" had
found the Obama COLB image to be a " Horrible forgery
that was made using a COLB belonging to Obama's sister, Maya
Soetoro." This researcher's expose gained a lot of
traction on the Internet precisely because of the exemplary
credentials he provided which touting his many years of
experience working for the Federal Government as a forensic image
expert. Naturally, everyone assumed that anyone with such a solid
resume would be beyond reproach as a credible researcher.
However, as things turned out, Obama was not the only one
pretending to be something he is not.
At first, I also thought that, given his credentials, he
seemed to be credible, albeit not trustworthy or reliable when it
came to keeping his promises, or even that knowledgible about the
field he professed to represent. I also discovered a lot of
inconsistencies and questionable statements in his research, as
did a number of his critics. Although the hoopla created by his
"exclusive story" tended to be a bit of a distraction,
I never let it influence my research.
When I received image copies of an original 2007 COLB, not only
did I discover that the border resembled the Obama COLB border,
but also that this other researcher had been lying about having
one. When he said that the 2007 COLB border was
identical to the 2008 COLB border, that blew the lid off his
deception. The resume was real enough, but it did not belong to
him!
The reason why I brought up this story about this person's
now-discredited research is because his fall from Grace as an
"image expert" gave FactCheck all the ammunition it
needed to shoot down all forgery research, and
specifically mine.
In Part Two, there is more emphasis on what FactCheck did in the
four months after June 16, the date they posted their copy
of Obama's COLB image. This is not to say that the Obama
Campaign website, Fight The Smears, did not engage in any
shenanigans (which they did), but that their actions pale in
comparison to the overt, fraudulent scam that FactCheck was
cooking up last August.
If you recall from Part One, FactCheck initially thought that no
one would question the veracity of Obama's COLB image after they
posted their full-length copy of it. However, they were flat-out
wrong to think that no one would notice the flaws in that image.
Even if someone, like myself, were to challenge it,
FactCheck was prepared to squelch any assaults on its
credibility.
They almost pulled it off without a hitch, thinking that their
image copy -- and their adamant statements that accompanied it --
had settled the questions about Obama's birth certificate. Yet,
for every question that FactCheck thought it answered, other
questions began to crop up.
On August 16, FactCheck held a "photo shoot" with
Obama's alleged "real, paper COLB" at Annenberg's
Chicago headquarters. What was it that compelled FactCheck
to run off to the friendly confines of Annenberg, and allegedly
take a series of high-resolution (and highly
suspicious-looking) digital photos of Obama's "real"
paper COLB? Why did they include with these photos a
thoroughly confusing and inconsistent account of their
actions on August 16, only to add an update to that story
five days later?
Why all the changes at FTS and FactCheck?
The answer is simply this:
During the three months of research and evidence that I gathered
about the forged COLB image, everyone thought that all this
"forgery nonsense" would eventually "roll over and
die" as they fully expected it would. If anything, my
research and analysis became an albatross around their necks, a
modern version of the Sword of Damocles dangling above their
heads that just would not go away.
Now, with Obama facing a lawsuit demanding that he produce his
"vaulted" original, long-form birth certificate to
prove his citizenship, along with steadfastly refusing to present
even a current, certified paper COLB, that would have
settled the issue and only cost him $12 to obtain, we have
reached a point in this saga where the folks at FactCheck and the
Obama campaign are circling the wagons, still hoping against
hope, that they can sweep under the rug, one of the greatest
political frauds ever perpetrated in our nation's history.
All those jokes about us wearing "tin-foil hats" are no
longer funny. This is now very serious business, and the longer
they obfuscate and attempt to obstruct this investigation, the
worse this scandal will become.
Unfortunately for FactCheck, all their efforts to thwart an
investigation into their use of forgeries to cover up the
malfeasance of a Presidential Candidate will have been for
naught, because "this bulldog is not letting go of their
leg" until the truth is known.
In case you're wondering who is that "bulldog," all I
can say is, "Woof!"
FactCheck's phony photo forgeries
If we've learned anything about Factcheck.org, it is that
FactCheck most definitely is not an independent
nonpartisan group, but belongs to the Annenberg Public Policy
Center of the University of Pennsylvania, owned and operated by
zealous Obama supporters and funders.
On June 16, 2008, FactCheck was the third group to post a copy of
the now infamous Obama forged COLB image to their website :
As I mentioned in Part One, FactCheck claimed that "
Tommy Vietor at the Obama campaign sent a message to them and to
"other reporters" saying, "I know there have
been some rumors spreading about Obama’s citizenship, so I
wanted to make sure you all had a copy of his birth certificate."
Nearly four months later, no other "reporters" have
ever received a copy of this "birth certificate" image,
or any other birth certificate image, for that matter, from
Tommy Vietor or any one else.
Which brings us to FactCheck's phony photo session that they
allegedly held in August, or as they described it,
"recently." The embedded photo data, know as Exif, tell
a completely different story. According to the date and time
stamps, the photos were taken on March 12 from 10:40 pm to 10:47
pm, or not exactly recently. The Exif data was extensively
detailed and provided little wiggle room for FactCheck to try and
worm their way out of the date/time stamp conundrum.
Israel Insider called them on it, too, and queried them as
to why the date/time stamp was so long ago. However, they did not
pursue it past that point. Their response was that the cameraman
"forgot" to update the date and time, which Israel
Insider took as incompetence on the part of the
cameraman. But, was it just that, or something more
intentional?
There is clear evidence of sunlight streaming through
windows or doors, so the 10:42 pm time is definitely wrong. But,
there are some curious parallels to the date and time of the
alleged original scan of Obama's COLB. The original image was
posted on June 12, and the Exif data in the image indicated
that it was allegedly scanned on June 12 at 8:42 am, or that
date and time may simply reflect the date and time set by Adobe
Photoshop CS3, the program used to modify it.
I wonder: did the cameraman also "forget" to change the
the The story that appeared on FactCheck talked about the COLB as
if they were visiting a sick friend in the hospital.
The wildfire begins
From the first moment this image was posted to the Internet, the
reactions and criticisms spread like a wildfire through a forest.
While Obama supporters -- who still cling to its claimed
veracity today -- celebrated its appearance as a way to
squelch Obama's skeptics, Obama detractors not
only protested its appearance for the data that it held and
lacked, but also for the way it looked to them; that is, nothing
like this one:
To anyone not born in Hawaii, Obama's "original
birth certificate" looked nothing like what a
traditional birth certificate should look like (such as the one
above). At a minimum, original birth certificates
contained the names of the hospital where the child was born
and the doctor who delivered the baby. Birth certificates also
had signatures and stamps or embossed seals on them that
certified their validity. By the second week of this controversy,
the American public discovered that this type of document was
not a photocopy of an original birth certificate
completed at birth, but was, instead, a shortened transcript of a
person's birth record.
This transcript is called, a "Certification of Live
Birth," or COLB as I came to call it. A
COLB is what Hawaii's Department of Health now issues in place of
actual photocopies of the original, long-form birth certificate.
The COLB is a "short form birth certificate," and when
duly certified by them, can be used for all intents and purposes
that a regular birth certificate would be used.
A genuine COLB (as shown below with private data covered by tape)
contains the names of the Father, Mother and Child, the
"race" of the Mother and Father, the time and date of
birth, and the island and city of birth. Regardless of a person's
actual birth date, anyone authorized to request this COLB, will
receive the specific data currently listed on a person's
actual birth record, on the date the copy was created.
This last criteria is crucial to understand because so many of
the criticisms leveled against it had to do with
the "apparent" conundrum posed by a
computer-generated certificate for people whose birth predated
the computer age.
This is the front side of a genuine COLB:
And, this the reverse side of a genuine COLB:
Computer printout or photocopy, notwithstanding, many people were
still agitated by the apparent lack of visually recognizable
features on the Obama COLB that would attest to its validity,
such as an embossed seal, official signatures, and a date stamp
as shown in the images above. Keep in mind that the public was
shown only one scanned image of Obama's alleged COLB, and that
was its front side. Had a scan of the reverse side been
made, the questions about the absence of seals and stamps would
have been answered.
That is, of course, IF the scanned image was genuine.
Which it never was from the beginning.
The birth of the forgery
Initially, as someone who had also never seen a Hawaiian COLB
before, I was also critical of the omissions apparently absent
from Obama's COLB. However, once I got to examine the
alleged Obama COLB up close, the focus of my criticisms quickly
changed.
Although Obama's COLB image did not look the same as a
traditional birth certificate, what captured my attention was not
its contents, or lack thereof, but the image anomalies I saw
-- anomalies that never would appear in any genuine
scan of this document.
Specifically, I saw that the text in this image bore the telltale
signs of being graphically altered after the image had been
created. From June 13 onwards, the unfamiliar format of this
document, and the questionable information that it contained,
became tangential to my discovery that the scanned
image alleged to be a true copy Obama's original COLB, was a
forged document image . Today, with three months
worth of research and supportive evidence behind me, I can
now say, without any reservations, that my initial recognition of
this image forgery was absolutely correct.
Surprisingly, the same people who posted
this forged image three months earlier, namely the Obama
Campaign, the pro-Obama Daily Kos blog, and the pro-Obama
FactCheck group, are still passing it off as a
genuine copy of Obama's original birth certificate. At
no time during this 3-month period, did any of these pro-Obama
groups submit a second scanned image to corroborate the
first one, such as a scan of the reverse side where the
certification elements appear: the embossed Seal of Hawaii, the
date stamp, and the signature stamp of Hawaii's State
Registrar.
Rather than make that second scan, FactCheck recently compounded
their role in the forgery by posting suspicious-looking photos of
the same document that they claimed to have scanned in June 16.
Since I now have no doubt that their scanned image was
fraudulent, I have no reason to believe that their
"photographs" are any less fraudulent. Later on, I will
explain why these photos are so suspicious.
Supporters of Obama spent a great deal of time trying to explain
away these fraudulent actions, but logic and subterfuge are no
substitutes for having independent observers examine not only
Obama's original birth certificate, but also a current
COLB containing his current birth record -- two
things that the American public have yet to see.
I've been working with computers, printers, and scanners, going
back to 1969, and with graphic arts as far back as 1965, and
given a set of printed letters, I can discern what kind of device
made them. Printer output is quite different from the text
created by a graphics program, and even if a document looks
"official," it may not be. More importantly,
graphically altered text in an image would look the same
regardless of what was scanned to create the image.
For comparative purposes, shown below is the same copy
of Obama's alleged ""original birth
certificate," a.k.a, a COLB, that was posted June 12 on the
Daily Kos website. Following the Kos image is the only other
Hawaiian COLB found on the Internet at that time. I verified that
finding by doing an exhaustive Internet search looking for any
other COLB examples, only to come back to that same, single
image:
Both of these images are in JPG format,
which is the most commonly used format with scanners
and digital cameras. The reason why JPGs are the preferred format
is because they can compress a lot of picture information into a
much smaller file size. For example, the image of the Kos COLB
shown above would consume over 16 megabytes of file space if
it were not compressed; but, as a compressed JPG
image, it only consumes one-half of a megabyte of file
space. The tradeoff in space savings, however, is a loss of
fine detail that was present in the original image produced
by a scanner or camera.
Like any printed certificate, the COLB has a border that
"frames" the body of information it contains. The
original COLB certificate is printed on an 8 1/2" x
11" letter-sized sheet of paper having a
green-and-white "Rattan" pattern. The top part of the
COLB is blank, and when removed, what remains is an 8 1/2"
square of paper. The crosshatched border, however, measures
8.09" x 7.90" and is not exactly square. The COLB
borders are changed from year to year as a way to distinguish
them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent COLBs whose
date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does not
corresponds to the border used that year.
Until I received a copy of a genuine 2007 COLB and confirmed that
its borders were similar to Obama's COLB, critics were still
taking issue with the look of its border, as compared to the
borders on 2008 COLBs.
Once the COLB Genie was out of the
bottle, other genuine COLBs started made their appearances on the
Internet:
After seeing how differently the Obama
COLB borders looked in comparison to these other COLB images, I
also had issues about its validity and purpose. Yet, unlike other
critics and researchers, verifying the border was never crucial
to my investigation. From the very beginning, I theorized that
the Obama COLB image had been "manufactured" using
someone else's COLB as a template or starting point. I also made
allowances for the possibility that a real 2007 COLB could have
provided the border for the forgery, even if the rest of it was
not used for the other components of the COLB. I had not actually
seen what a genuine 2007 COLB looked like, so I focused my
research on everything else that lay inside of the border. If the
Obama COLB image was, in fact, graphically altered to make it
look like an "official" birth certificate, then the
border pattern would be inconsequential compared to passing off
fraudulent information as genuine -- especially when no one else
had ever seen a genuine 2007 COLB before.
Then, the unthinkable happened when I
received a genuine 2007 COLB issued less than three months before
Obama's COLB was allegedly issued to him or to one of his family
members. It was a deal-breaker!
Here was a genuine 2007 COLB, with a
border similar to the Obama COLB, that Obama supporters could
triumphantly claim was proof that the Obama COLB was genuine. It
was also a death knell for another researcher who had based his
work on his claim that 2007 COLBs had the same border as 2008
COLBs (as shown above). Needless to say, I was also aware of
other fabricated evidence that he produced, but I had pledged to
a friend that I would keep the revelations to myself.
Before I ever received a genuine paper
COLB, I had no idea how it would look and feel in person. The
most surprising thing about the COLB is how thin is the paper
that it's printed on. It's as thin and light as a piece of cheap
copy paper. The green and white pattern is only on the front
side, and whatever pattern that one sees on the reverse side is
actually coming from the pattern on the front side.
While both the Daily Kos and Obama's website (aka, "Fight
The Smears") posted trimmed copies of the same COLB image,
FactCheck.org posted the letter-sized version of the same image
copy. Although these three image copies are made from the same
source image, they were intentionally made to look different from
one another (this will be explained later on).
For display purposes, I am using the Kos copy of the image
because it was the first one posted on the Internet, and the
first one to catch my eye. Obama's "Fight the Smears"
website posted their small, illegible copy of the image after the
Kos did, and a week later, FactCheck.org posted theirs.
How Hawaii creates (and how one gets) a genuine Hawaiian
COLB.
The entire Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth is a
computer-generated graphic that is printed on specially
patterned, green and white paper (as shown above). Usually,
official certificates are printed on patterned paper that also
have a ready-made border. As a safety measure (or as a
recognition tool), Vital Records has generated different border
patterns every year since November 2001, or when this form
was put into service (as indicated by the footnote in the bottom
left corner). Although the border patterns were changed annually,
the border dimensions have remained the same (well...not exactly
as I'll explain below).
The computer-generated COLB is like a form-fillable PDF file. In
fact, you can order a copy of a Hawaiian COLB (if you're
authorized to get one) by completing an order form that is a
form-fillable PDF file on Hawaii's Vital Records website:
Certificate Order Form.
More than likely, what a computer
operator at Vital Records gets to see, when responding to a
request for a COLB, is a graphically-created template with blank
fields that are replaced by the information requested on the
order form. That's the Catch-22 in ordering a COLB: you only get
back what you correctly request to see. If the name of the father
on the form does not match the name of the father on the official
birth record, then what you get back is a blank space where the
father's name would be.
Once the birth record data has been
inputted into the COLB form, it is then sent to a networked laser
printer to be printed off on a sheet of COLB paper.
Recognizing "red flags"
in an image forgery.
Transferring the computer-generated COLB
into a high-quality image file can easily be done with any
computer scanner (even with ones that cost less than $100).
Scanning a full-sized letter document into a digital image file
initially requires a lot of computer memory and file space.
However, as a way to reduce the file size while maintaining some
of the document quality, the image is saved in a compressed image
file format known as JPG (pronounced, "Jay-Peg"). With
JPG files, there is always a tradeoff between the file size and
the amount of detailed information that can be saved in it. As a
consequence of scanning text documents and saving them as JPG
files, there will always be some degree of distortion in parts of
the document image, particularly around areas of line art and
text in the document.
However, the distortion patterns that I
initially found when examining the text in the Obama COLB image,
were ones that are not produced by either a printer, scanner, or
the compression factor of the JPG image. Critics of mine have
tried to explain away these patterns as "scanner
artifacts" or "JPG artifacts," but to no avail.
The anomalies that I found should not be there if a document was
faithfully scanned from an original paper document. Yet, these
anomalies are there for all to see, and are proof-positive that
the text in an original image was deliberately altered, after the
image was created, by someone using an image editing program.
Normally, there should be a lot of green pixels from the
background showing up between the letters on the COLB,
but there is noticeable lack of green pixels can be seen in
the first four letters of the word BIRTH (taken from CITY, TOWN,
OR LOCATION OF BIRTH) as shown in the following two enlarged
images. A grid was laid on top of these images so that the
corresponding pixels could be better identified and compared
between images. The first example is from the Obama COLB image
followed by an example from the genuine 2008 COLB (which I will
call "Michele's COLB")
Take a look at the area between the
letters in the Obama COLB: very little, if any, hint of green
from the background. Plenty of grey and white pixels instead --
exactly the pattern that would result from replacing the existing
text with other text.
Now, look at the area in between the
letters in Dan's COLB. Lots of green shades from the background
-- exactly what should be there if an image is a genuine
scan of a laser-printed document.
All of the type on this document was
produced by the same graphics program. Whatever made the text for
all of the headings also made the text for all of the entries.
Any text made by a typewriter, laser printer, or even ink jet
printer, on a piece of colored paper, would have that color
showing between the letters. When the paper is digitally scanned,
it would still have some of that color showing between the
letters. What it would not have, are only smeared, black
& white pixels between them. Pixels are the dots that combine
to make a digital image or photo. There would always be several
pixels bearing the same color as the paper. Printed type produced
by a graphics program will look about the same regardless of the
magnification, with a minimal number of white and grey pixel
patterns between the letters.
Here are some examples:
Here is the "HOUR OF BIRTH" header from Barack's COLB
enlarged 5 times:
Here's the same data header taken from
Dan's 2007 COLB scanned at the same resolution with the same
amount of file compression.
This is how this text data should look on
a genuine, unretouched, scanned document image.
Their fate was "Sealed"
When Factcheck published their own copy
of BHO's COLB image, it was no more genuine than any of the other
three copies made from the forged source image, as I explained in
Part One above. Factcheck's COLB image constitutes a counterfeit
document image, that was graphically "manufactured by
cobbling together parts of images made from real COLBs, covering
over the existing textual information with pieces of the
background, and then adding deceptive identity information to it,
thereby creating a false document made to look like what Obama's
genuine COLB might be, if it actually existed in point of fact.
The Factcheck image was the exact, same image as first posted to
the Daily Kos, with the exception being that the Daily Kos
cropped off the extra background on the top and the sides, as can
be seen here:
There is a difference between questioning
the authenticity of a document image and questioning whether the
document image is a deliberate forgery -- especially in this era
of manufactured news stories like Dan Rather's discredited
"expose" of President Bush's military records. If there
were any early critics who were convinced from the moment they
saw it on June 12, that they were looking at a stone-cold
forgery, they did not make themselves known to the public or the
blogsphere until after I began my research to prove that the
image posted was unquestionably manufactured.
There is a quantum leap of a difference
between someone who just suspects that the image might have been
"Photoshopped," (a term I define below), to someone
actually conducting empirical studies to answer the question of
its authenticity. I can safely say now that I was the first
person to do this empirical research and to carry it through
until I was 100% certain that I have found irrefutable evidence
of a forgery. Whatever anyone thinks of me or my research, I am
going to let the evidence speak for itself, because the evidence
leaves no more room for alternate theories. That is the reason
why it has taken me four months to get to the point where the
evidence is so overwhelming, that all I need do is present it,
explain it well enough for as many people as possible, and let
the chips fall where they may.
The three major players in this
little" con game include Obama, his campaign staff, and
Annenberg's Factcheck group, with a supporting role played by
Politifact: a Factcheck sister organization allied with the St.
Petersburg Times. The Daily Kos was just picked as a testing
ground for the fledgling forgery. If the Left bought it, and they
did, hook, line, and sinker, then with enough word-of-mouth, the
rest of the American electorate would also buy it. From the very
beginning, this was a clever plan to both deflect any claims that
Obama might not be a natural-born US citizen and qualified to run
for President, and to promote Obama to the American electorate as
a fully American, a self-made man.
On August 16, two months to the day after
the publication of the image on the Daily Kos and Obama's
website, Factcheck published their story about nine photos they
allegedly took of Obama's "real" COLB at his campaign
headquarters.
As far as I was concerned, there was no
longer any question that the COLB image is a forgery what people
posted published is a forgery and that Obama's real COLB is a
nonexistent document. Because based on the photographs that
Factcheck made of a nonexistent document that they claim is both
tangible and authentic. Because it would be an oxymoron and a non
sequitur for people to say that they now believe that the COLB
document image is a genuine copy
There are no gray areas concerning the
evidence I've collected and presented about the COLB image being
a bogus, nonexistent document, and that same reality must apply
to any and all images and photographs allegedly made from that
same document: they cannot be real if their source is bogus. If
even one aspect of one photo is demonstrated to be fraudulent,
i.e., intentionally altered to create the illusion of
authenticity, then all of the other photographs must also be
fraudulent. The facts are clear. The evidence is black &
white, cut & dried: If anything about the source document is
not real or authentic, then everything about the source document
is false and fraudulent.
Nevertheless, I have thoroughly examined
the photographs that Factcheck published, and have subsequently
found clear evidence of tampering with both the alleged source of
the photos, and the photos made of that source. Factcheck has
committed sins of omission and sins of commission given that
their photos reveal both the absence of known, relevant features
found on genuine COLBs along with the presence of irrelevant and
illogical features that would never be found on real COLBs.
What makes a COLB image genuine?
Feature #1: The tell-tale pixel
patterns
On June 12, when I first saw the image
claimed to be a true copy of Obama's birth certificate posted on
the Daily Kos and Obama websites, I immediately noticed a number
of graphical oddities. What bothered me were the fuzzy grey and
white pixels that I found in between the letters of the text on
the Kos image -- the highest quality copy of the images posted
online. I have been making digital document scans for over 30
years, and I have never seen any scanner produce results such as
these. In other words, these pixel patterns were not
"scanner artifacts" as many others have claimed.
More than that, however, from my
experience in working with digital images, I also knew that the
pixel patterns I saw were not the result of image compression
typically found in JPG files. What I did recognize is how
graphically-created text looks when it has been applied over an
existing image whose original text had first been covered up with
copies made of background on which the original text was written.
Below are some comparisons made between
Obama's 2007 COLB image and the image of a real 2007 COLB and a
real 2008 COLB. I will compare the word, "BIRTH," that
appears in "HOUR OF BIRTH," on the COLBs. The two
comparison COLBs were made to have the same size,color count, and
level of image compression.
Normally, there should be a lot of
green pixels from the background showing up between the letters
on the COLB, but there is noticeable lack of green pixels
can be seen in the first four letters of the word BIRTH (taken
from CITY, TOWN, OR LOCATION OF BIRTH) as shown in the following
two enlarged images. A grid was laid on top of these images so
that the corresponding pixels could be better identified and
compared between images. The first example was made from Obama's
alleged 2007 COLB image followed by an example made from a
genuine 2008 COLB. The first four letters in the word,
"BIRTH," are enlarged five times normal size, and a
pixel grid was placed over it to better identify the individual
pixels:
Obama's alleged 2007 COLB:
A real 2008 COLB:
Take a look at the area between the
letters in the Obama COLB: very little, if any, hint of green
from the background. Plenty of grey and white pixels instead --
exactly the pattern that would result from replacing the existing
text with other text.
Now, look at the area in between the
letters in the 2008 COLB. Lots of green shades from the
background -- exactly what should be there if an image is
a genuine scan of a laser-printed document.
Here's another comparison between the
word, "BIRTH" on Obama's alleged 2007 COLB:
And the word, "BIRTH" on a real
2007 COLB:
The anomalies that I found should not be
there if a document was faithfully scanned from an original paper
document. Yet, these anomalies are there for all to see, and are
proof-positive that the text in an original image was
deliberately altered, after the image was created, by someone
using an image editing program.
As I mentioned in my first blog post, it
is my opinion, as an experienced user of computers and computer
graphics, that the images posted on the Kos website, the
FactCheck website, Barack Obama website (aka, Fight The Smears),
and Politifact, are not the original scanned images of Obama's
Certification of Live Birth or COLB, but are graphical forgeries.
Amazingly, four months after I published my original thesis, that
the pixel patterns found in between the letters of text on the
bogus Obama 2007 COLB were definitive signs of graphical
alterations, aka, forging, the claim is the most enduring,
irrefutable, and also one of the most damning pieces of evidence
supporting my contentions!.
The specific details that differentiate
between a real COLB image and a fraudulent one will be presented
later on in this report. For now, I wish to discuss what had been
the two most prominent features missing from the COLB image when
it was first seen. Missing from the COLB image, at initially as
seen with the naked eye, were the Seal and signatures. These two
elements, along with a missing second fold line, would
subsequently appear in the photos allegedly made from Obama's
real COLB, and the same COLB allegedly used to make a scanned
COLB image. Although the faded outline of the Seal was revealed,
after the image was run through edge detection, and the signature
stamp revealed, albeit barely, after color enhancements, the
lower fold was still nowhere to be found in the image:
Compared to the scans I have that were
made from a real 2007 COLB, both the Seal and the lower fold are
more easily seen than the Obama COLB -- either with the naked
eye:
-- or with edge detection applied:
For that matter, both the Seal and the
folds are easily recognized on a real 2008 COLB without edge
detection:
The Seal, signature stamp, and the second
fold line were all visible in the other real COLB's that have
been posted on the Internet:
Jason Tomoyasu's COLB:
Jeremy Smith's COLB:
The PD COLB:
Of all the features found on real COLBs,
the embossed Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature
are what distinguishes a certified COLB from one that is not. So,
it is understandable why they were also the main points of
contention when the first COLB image was released on the Daily
Kos. Basically, however, it was the fact that the COLB looked
nothing like what an original birth certificate looked like, that
caused the most disbelief among people not familiar with the
short-form "transcript" of a person's birth record.
Once people understood what was (and was not) supposed to be seen
on the COLB, they were more accepting of the images despite the
fact that the second fold line could not be found anywhere in the
image.
The people who doubted the authenticity
of this image included those who pointed to the obviously missing
Seal, Signature, and second fold line, but there was a great hue
and cry raised about the use of the word, "AFRICAN" for
the RACE of Obama's father. To date, that question has not been
satisfactorily answered, but it would be such an obvious mistake
to make if, in fact, the term was never used on any other COLBs.
Perhaps, if African-American was listed as a race, and the father
was not an American, then Obama Sr, would have the
What is "Photoshopping?"
Before continuing, I need to explain the
process of copying one portion of a photo and pasting on top of
the same one, or a different one -- which is the first thing that
comes to mind for most people when the verb,
"Photoshopped," is mentioned. To reinforce this
association, the two most notorious "Photoshopped"
photographs to ever be published in the mainstream media involved
"cloning", a process of duplicating a part of an image
and transferring it one or more times, in successive locations,
on the same photograph. There is a tool in Photoshop, that is
also found in most image editors, called the "Clone"
tool (appropriate name). The way it works is that you place the
tool over the area that you want to copy, press the SHIFT-ALT key
combination to set a marker over the starting point, and then
move the mouse cursor over to the area where you wish to place
the copy. When you begin to trace over the area with the marker,
whatever is under the marker will be transferred to the area
under the mouse cursor.
During the Second Hezbollah-Israel War,
the Reuters news agency published a photo of Beirut -- taken by
an Arab "stringer" (aka, freelance photographer) --
showing multiple plumes of black smoke billowing in the distance.
To the trained eye, familiar with the "cloning" tool
found in Photoshop and many other programs, it was obvious that
most of these smoke plumes were copied from one plume and pasted
next to it to give the impression that Beirut had suffered much
more serious damage from the battle that ensued there.
This act of photo deception was a
deliberate attempt by the stringer, and a very willing,
historically anti-Israel, media outlet to bring further
condemnation on Israel. In fact, making fake photos and videos is
a cottage industry for the Palestinian propaganda machine.
The second, more recent Photoshop
deception, was a photo of an Iranian missile launch that was made
to look like a barrage of missiles had been fired. Recently,
there were other likely Photoshopped photos that surfaced on the
Internet, one of North Korean president, Kim Jong-Il,
apparently standing amidst army officers reviewing a parade.
There was also a graduation photo of Barack Obama apparently
standing amidst his classmates, but there were a number of
objects that were out-of-place, including some shadows that
should have been cast if an actual person was standing where
Obama was allegedly standing.
There is another process similar to
"cloning" that is found in Photoshop and other image
editors. It is called, "stamping" and involves taking
one area of an image and "pasting" it over another
area. It was this simple but somewhat tedious process that the
forger used to take portions of the green-and-white background
from one or more source COLB images, and paste them over the
existing text on the target COLB image. This is the process that
a self-admitted, pretend forger, Jay McKinnon, used to create
blank and partially filled COLB images that some people seriously
thought were the source images for the forgery.
It wasn't until July 3, that this charade
was put to rest in a story that first broke on the Israel Insider
and the Free Republic forum. Unfortunately, what should have made
people more aware of how easily they can be fooled by an image,
never seem to have a lasting affect on anyone's mind.
Nevertheless, the original image forgery that was posted on four
different websites were still drawing a lot of believers and had
a lot more staying power than any of the "imitation forged
images" made since then.
An interesting subplot to the story about
the McKinnon charade is for how long it has remained on the Free
Republic as a place where the original Obama COLB forgeries could
be discussed along with all the efforts made to get Obama to
release his real birth certificate to the public. This July 3
story, appropriately titled, "Blogger admits Hawaii birth
certificate forgery, subverting Obama claims (Uh-oh)," has
become one of the longest running, and most active, topics on the
forum this topic, at last count, was viewed over 17,650 times
with 6,643 comments left by visitors to that post.
"Uh-oh," indeed!
The number of people who believe that
this forged image is a genuine copy of an actual document really
blows my mind because it does not take a person with a trained
eye, or any proficiency in Photoshop, to spot the obvious
alterations to this image. The same can be said for the pictures
proffered by Factcheck as genuine photographs of Obama's real
COLB. Basically, anyone with a good, "old-school"
working knowledge of photography; e.g., how to take into account
different shooting angles and different lighting conditions, and
to manually adjust a camera accordingly," should be able to
recognize when a photo does not reflect reality.
Yet, there may not be that many
photo-savvy people left with all of the improvements made in
digital photography. Even a novice can take professional-looking
photos at the push of a button with a $100 digital camera set on
AUTO.
As someone who has been taking pretty
good photographs with some pretty good cameras for the past 40
years, I do know an unreal photograph when I see one. For
example, if I know that a photo was taken in the afternoon, when
the sun is setting in the West, and I see shadows from other
objects projected to the East, I do not expect to see any shadows
going in the opposite direction, and neither should anyone else.
I don't ask or expect people to accept
what I say solely on the basis of my stated experience (as many
of my critics have done with theirs). If I cannot explain to a
lay person, in common sense terms, why a photo or image appears
to be bogus, using concrete demonstrations to convey to them what
I see, then I don't bother saying it. Period.
What is an "overlay?
Now that I'm done with the basics of
"cloning," Photoshop-style, let me summarize it by
saying that, whether a person is copying an object to make it
appear multiple times, or copying it to superimpose (overlay) it
on top of another part of the same image, the process is
identical. The difference lies in whether the pasted part is kept
solid, as-is, or is changed in some way so as to blend it into
the photo or image.
Therefore, you can take it as a given,
that when I am talking about how the forgery was
"manufactured" or "Photoshopped," I am
talking about how a solid-appearing object, in one photo or
image, was actually taken from another photo or image (or even
from another part of the same source), and pasted onto that first
photo or image to make it look like a genuine, unmodified
original.
Conversely, when I'm talking about
creating an overlay for demonstration purposes, I am referring to
the same process of copying and pasting, with the main difference
being that the copied part is made to be partially transparent so
that the viewer can simultaneously see both the original image or
photo and the part that was copied from another source and pasted
over it.
Feature #2: The Seal
Here are the images of real 2007 Seals as
they actually appear on a real 2007 COLB (color enhanced), both
before and after edge detection:
And, here are the entire COLBs from which
the images of these Seals were made:
One feature readily apparent from the
real 2007 COLBS seen above, is that a real Seal leaves a dent in
the surrounding area of the paper when it is pressed into it.
In stark contrast to the real 2007 COLBs,
the bogus 2007 COLB as shown in Factcheck Photo #5 (from the
Factcheck COLB collection), there is not even so much as a minute
deflection of the paper that would be left by a real, embossed
metal seal:
Here's a picture of a stamper, similar in
effect to what Hawaii might use to make their Seal:
It is, basically, a clamp, and since I
have a real, paper COLB to examine, I can tell you that there is
no mistaking what sort of object made its Seal impression. If you
have ever had a document notarized, the process and results are
identical.
The fact that, in every photo showing the
fake Seal -- especially on close-ups of it, there are no
deflections whatsoever in the surrounding paper. Why should there
be, when you consider that these "fake Seals" were
Photoshopped on a printout of a "paper COLB" and not
stamped on anything genuine?
The Seals show up best under a form of
image enhancement known as edge detection:
Think of it as a way to trace the
outlines of objects regardless of their different colors. A real
2007 Seal has two wide double circles:
The fake Seal has two narrow ones no
virtually space between them:
Notice also that in the real Seal, there
is a break in both outer circles, between the "O" and
the "F" in "DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH." No such
break can be found in the fake Seals:
The example below is an overlay where the
date and registrar stamps on the back of a fake COLB are matched
for size with those on a real 2007 COLB. In order to make the
comparison possible, the real COLB was color enhanced and flipped
horizontally, and the fake Seal was made semi-transparent and
overlaid on top of the real Seal. The result aptly shows that the
real 2007 Seal is noticeably larger than the fake 2007
Seal:
This finding is the norm, and not an
anomaly. On every Factcheck photo, allegedly made of a 2007 COLB,
in which a Seal can be seen, its size is not the same as
the real 2007 Seal pictured above. As also noted above, The word,
"of" is missing from the Seal's bottom
logo, STATE of HAWAII, and in its place are what
appear to be two dashes. In photo #1, the word itself appears to
have been intentionally "scratched out" (and was not
caused by light hitting it):
Below are photos after an edge detection
filter was applied to make the Seal's details visible:
Notice that "DEPARTMENT" in the
"DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH" logo is always blurry. Just as
this word is missing, so, too are all of the letters malformed.
In the middle of the Seal is the
Caduceus, the symbol of the American medical profession for
almost a century. The Caduceus consists of two serpents
criss-crossed around a staff topped by a round knob and flanked
by wings.
In the real Seal, it looks like this:
In the false Seal, it looks like this:
The wings and serpents in the real Seal
are smaller and symmetrical, whereas they are unequal, uneven,
and almost touching the inner ring in the false Seal. In fact,
wherever the false Seal is shown, it has less detail than the
area around it.
The reverse side of a real, embossed seal
can be seen from the front side of the COLB, and right-reading on
the back of the COLB. However, if you were to take the image of a
real COLB, and flip it horizontally, it would not look to
identical how the Seal actually appears on the reverse side. In
other words, the reverse side of a real Seal is concave with the
Seal right-reading. On the front side, it is convex, with the
Seal reverse-reading.
Yet, when the front side of the false
Seal is flipped over, the reverse side looks identical to how it
appears on the back side. The reason for this match is that the
front-side image of the false Seal was, indeed, flipped
horizontally, and superimposed on the back-side image.
When you recognize and realize that the
Seal shown in the photos were not impressed into the document,
but were Photoshopped onto the document photo. In other words,
the Seal is bogus.
In all, except two, of the photos showing
the Seal, the Seal appears to fit inside a circle, or more
accurately, a circle that is barely bordering on being
elliptical:
Either way, this situation would only be
possible when viewing the Seal on the COLB laid flat, with the
orientation of the camera perpendicular to the COLB in all
directions. The COLB is shot with the camera held vertically (in
a portrait layout) and the picture has to be rotated 90 degrees
to the left to view the COLB in its upright position:
Also, if you take the photo of the Seal
(photo #7) and flip it horizontally, so that the Seal is
right-reading, copy it, increase its transparency, and then
overlay it on top of the Seal in photo #6, you will have a
perfect match between them -- not possible since the two photos
were taken of different sides of the COLB and the Seal and from
two, very different angles:
If you also look at where the Registrar's
stamp is placed (although it is at a steeper angle due to the odd
angle of photo #7, you will see that the words, STATE REGISTRAR,
fall inside the bottom border. This positioning can also be seen
by overlaying photo #9 on top of photo #2.
Because the Seal appears too faint to see
all of it, I applied edge detection to this overlay to make it
stand out more:
The position of the Registrar's stamp
would never be put that low on a real COLB because its position
is fully dependent on the position of the Seal. If the Seal is
too low on the page, as shown in both the real COLB and the fake
COLB, the stamp would go off to the right, and not below the
Seal. If you look at where the real Seal is on the real COLB, and
compare it to the faked COLB, you will plainly see that the Seal
on the faked COLB is lower than the Seal on the real COLB - which
has its Registrar stamp off to the left.
For this overlay, I used photo #6 because
the photo that I took of the real 2008 Seal is approximately from
the same angle -- although the paper was laid almost flat,
whereas the subject in photo #6 is bent along the bottom fold
line. However, as I noted above, the top part of the Seal above
the fold line does not appear to be sufficiently angled with
respect to the bottom part of the Seal below the fold line. This
is also the reason why the entire Seal can almost be
circumscribed by a circle drawn around it. Aside from the minor
perspective shown in the upper left quadrant of the Seal in photo
#6, there is a very close match between this Seal and the 2008
Seal I photographed.
Here is the "alleged 2007" Seal
shown in photo #6:
Here is the actual 2008 Seal shown in my
photo of a 2008 COLB:
I used the elliptical selection tool to
highlight just the Seal itself, made a separate image copy from
it, made a minor color adjustment, and reduced it to be
approximately the same size as the Seal in photo #6.
Then, highlighting just the Seal, I
copied it and pasted it on top of photo #6 as a separate layer.
Now, here is an animated GIF showing the
correspondence between the two: focus your attention on the right
side where the word, "HEALTH" and the narrow, double
circle exhibit the most correspondence:
There is another anomaly with this Seal,
along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp.
For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The
Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom
border, which would never occur on real COLBs.
Back when some enterprising individual
had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies
of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially
reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color
balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the
way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all
the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This
rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to
where most of it could be interpolated.
Another individual, also hoping to prove
me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and
Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my
Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this
color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent
JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to
manufacture the image.
The result is an animation that
alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008
COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen
from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed
where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of
the reverse side:
However, the Registrar stamp is, again,
placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or
2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB
whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:
It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a
shown in this overlay:
There is a remarkable (as in "too
close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008
COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:
The COLB coup
de grâce
Now, here comes the coup de grâce
-- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does
deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?
If you recall from the above discussion,
I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of
the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful
way. There's a good reason why:
The Seal is actually a 2008
Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar
stamp!
We saw the effects of this cobbling
together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the
Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the
change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side
Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except
for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the
reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason
for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of
the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason
for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced
off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting
the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the
bottom part.
.Basically, when you are mindful of the
perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you
begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those
photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that
should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are
technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but
are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos.
Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for
COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a
convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed
to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional
ruse used to fool the public.
As noted above, one of the photos
(birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real
COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features
that are not present on the bogus Seals.
The macro shot of the Seal from almost
the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text
fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the
photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the
fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are
two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that
explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.
The center of the Seal and paper also
appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image
too), and not by any beam of light.
The texture of the Seal in all shots is
also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture
is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look
raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and
interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that
connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or
an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.
Feature #3: Self-defeating
evidence presented in support of the COLB.
Case in point: the set of stamps and
folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it
is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other
envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was
trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason --
that the first fold line was present but the second one was
absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be
skeptical of it:
The presence of a very prominent second
fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made
people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan
image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick
these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and
illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the
Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made
recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types
image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has
ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show
where it might have been?
As might be expected in this, "Say
whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB
believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the
"Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse
for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't
these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck
image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this
Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what
the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.
Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for
examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate
occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution,
full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained
images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of
Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300
DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal
information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me,
but with the owner information covered up.
That set of scans was still at twice the
size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send
me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and
resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the
first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and
back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal
traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request,
though).
Where I'm going with this side story is
to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the
Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however,
before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and
resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that,
when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to
the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the
Factcheck image.
Actually, it showed up better on the last
set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof
positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now,
the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought
they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged
COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's
signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was
bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as
shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features
on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see
because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly,
bled through the paper to the front side.
There is a fourth critical feature of
real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would
know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for
an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a
COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on
the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the
software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software
adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he
or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with
the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge
detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using
more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text
printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy
made of the reverse side of the COLB:
In other words, to really ensure her
privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of
the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The
ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the
reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a
real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the
actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of
the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced
Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper
location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted
online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date
stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with,
or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that
the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are
not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The
fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB
would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is
real from what is not.
As would be the case in nearly all of the
evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB
image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to
where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it
did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence
that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I
had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them
had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them
have stepped forward to admit it.
Feature #4: a shot to the midsection
If you have ever taken an art class or a
photography class, then you probably learned something about
perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of
an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right
under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning
off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object
that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we
are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional
one.
The photographer and/or the person
directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object
positioned at different angles. There is not a single,
point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of
the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened
up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo
#3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it,
and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the
photographer's arm covering the Seal area.
These complications were not accidental,
but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear
photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back
side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the
object being held in place was a "three-dimensional"
COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the
COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a
"three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words,
"FactCheck.org
staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the
original birth certificate."
This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an
original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.
Technically-speaking, since we are
discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph
that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of
that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height
(up and down), width (left and right),
and depth (forward and backward). Depending on
how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may
not be visible.
For example, if you have ever watched any
of the CSI shows on TV, then you have probably
seen how they take photographs of objects in their lab. They use
a digital camera mounted on a frame directly over a table on
which the object lies. The camera lens is facing downwards and
perfectly perpendicular to the table in all directions. Now, when
a CSI takes a photograph of a printed piece of paper laid flat on
the table, what is captured by a camera's digital imaging system
is perceptually equivalent to what is captured by a scanner's
digital imaging system. In other words, what is captured is an
image of a flat piece of paper with only two of its three
dimensions visible (with depth being the missing dimension).
To accomplish the same perpendicular
positioning of an object, as if it were lying on a table with the
camera mounted to a frame or tripod directly above it, both the
photographer and the holder have to be directly facing each
other, and the camera has to be held at the same height as is the
object being held. The camera also has to be aimed point-blank at
the object.
Clearly, such was not the case with any
of the Factcheck photos as all of them were taken at an angle --
some more than others.
Granted that taking pictures of an object
with a hand held camera will never be perfectly inline with the
object as it could have been if a mount or tripod was used, there
are guides within the camera viewfinder that can be used to
position the photo. In other words, the photos of the date stamp
and signature block could have been taken without any
accompanying angles. Of the two photos, photo #9 is the closest
one to being perpendicular to the stamps, but it is still off
slightly to the left side. I mention this because I will be
making comparisons between the photos taken of the stamps by
Factcheck with some of the photos I took of the stamps on the
paper COLB I have. I also will make comparisons between the image
allegedly scanned from Obama's COLB with the scan images I made
and have of the 2007 and 2008 COLBs.
For moderately experienced Photoshop
users, manipulating all three dimensions in an image is child's
play. If anything, visually adding depth, or modifying its
existing depth with Photoshop (or another image editor), does
tend to confirm in our brain that we are looking at an object
that actually exists in the real world, and for that reason,
Factcheck decided to take high resolution photos of the COLB
object positioned at different angles to accentuate its depth.
What they did not realize is that whenever you photograph a
printed document from different angles, you are also
photographing whatever is printed on it from the same angles.
Whatever perspective was created by angling the COLB object in
three dimensions, that same perspective should be discernible
across the entire COLB image.
For example, logically speaking (and in
actuality), if you rotate a printed piece of paper to the left so
that the top and bottom edges of the paper are angled to the
left, and if the printed text on the paper is parallel to the top
and bottom edges, then the text should remain parallel to the
edges and be tiled at the same angle as the top and bottom edges.
Now, what if, after tilting the paper to the left, let's say at a
45 degree angle, the text on the printed paper is no longer
parallel with the edges of the paper; that is, they remain level
from left to right as if the paper were never rotated in the
first place?
Well, you'd say, "What's wrong with
this picture. Something does not look right here," and you'd
be on-the-mark, for that is exactly what happened in the
photographs taken of the COLB.
Regardless of whether Factcheck
photographed the COLB object angled in three dimensions simply to
prove that it was a 3-D object, or to obscure the evidence of
forging, the end result for me was the same: showing the COLB
from different angles allowed me to find a lot of things that did
not "look right." In fact, there were a lot of things
about the text on the COLBs that did not look right. So, giving
credit to whom credit is due, I say, "Thanks,
Factcheck," for providing me with a greater number of
unrealistic features to find in your photographs.
For the purpose of these next
experiments, I'm going to use Factcheck's photo #2 and photo #5,
which are the clearest ones made of the COLB's midsection, and
are also the ones showing multiple angles of the COLB.
The first characteristic of these
pictures to which I draw your attention, is the way that
Factcheck kept them partially folded as a way of emphasizing that
this COLB object had two folds -- something their image did not
have. Again, by adding additional angles into the pictures, I can
better see if the text on each folded part is flowing along at
the appropriate angles.
As can be seen in the photo #2 below, the
COLB is rotated at two distinct angles of incident: (1) angled
upwards from left to right, and (2) angled down and away from the
camera. These angles result in the upper right corner (or quadrant)
of the COLB appearing to be closer to the camera, and the lower
left corner (or quadrant) appearing to be further away.
The COLB is sharply angled on both the top and bottom folds in
their appropriate direction of folding (top, folded back, and
bottom, folded forward).
Since the printed elements on the COLB
itself should be similarly aligned with the four sides of the
COLB border and the four edges of the paper, there are four
primary perspective effects in the printed elements that
should be readily visible to the viewer, such as the angle of the
lines of text with respect to the border, to the paper, and to
the camera' POV. To put it simply, if the paper is tilted down to
the left, then the horizontal lines of text directly facing the
camera should also be tilted down and to the left. If the paper
is angled away from the camera lens so that the two fold lines
appear to converge rather than remain parallel, then the lines of
text should also appear to converge.
Unlike the paper on which they are
printed, the position of letters can only vary on two dimensions:
left and right and up and down. We can see in the scan image,
allegedly made from the same document in the photos, that the
lines of text are parallel to the top and bottom borders, and
that the orientation of the letters in the text are placed
parallel to the sides of the borders. Therefore, if one were to
draw a straight horizontal line along the bottom of all the
letters in a text string, as well as to draw a line perpendicular
to this baseline, right next to (or through) the vertical stroke
of one of these letters. "E," "F,"
"H," "I," "K," "L,"
"R," or "T", these two lines should also run
parallel to the borders (either the inside edge or the outside
one):
When looking at photo #5, the center
portion (middle 1/3) of the COLB is facing towards the camera,
the top 1/3 is folded back and away from the camera, and the
bottom 1/3 is folded forward and towards the camera. Since the
top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 are folded by approximately the same
amount, then their surfaces would also be parallel to each other.
This means that the lines of text on both the top 1/3 and the
bottom 1/3 will be wider at the base, the closer it is to the
camera, and narrower at the top the further away it is from the
camera.
These angles and perspective are the
critical features of a document bent, turned and folded in
different directions. So, when I discovered that the printed
lines of text (and objects like the Seal and stamps) do not
appear at all like they should, then something was deliberately
done to either the document, to the photo of the document, or
both, that speaks directly to the way the COLB document was
artificially constructed.
To put it bluntly, the Factcheck photos
have been "Frankensteined," just as the Factcheck scan
image was cobbled together with the parts of different COLBs. The
use of the term, "document" is simply for expediency
sake, as no, single "real" document was used for these
photos or for the scan image.
OBAMA'S 'BORN'
CONSPIRACY - Important and corrections (11/30/08)
MEDIA ALERT!
Lan Lamphere has invited me to be his guest tonight on his
OVERNIGHT AM show. It starts at 10pm EST. Please listen in, and
also visit his website, http://www.lanlamphere.com/public/,where you can listen, and
also send email messages. It would be nice if FReepers would make
their voices heard and support one of their own.
MEDIA ALERT!
Also today, I got a call from Bob Unruh of World Net Daily,
who is doing a story on my COLB research! FINALLY....after four
months in trying to get their attention, they've sat up and taken
notice. Look for his tory in tomorrow's edition of WND.com.
I have some important new information to
disclose, along with making some corrections and clarifications
to my final report on Obama's bogus birth certificate. I recently
received a real 2006 COLB scan image and another real 2008 COLB
scan image from a contact who lives in Honolulu. As with
Michele's real 2008 COLB, and Dan's real 2007 COLB, the personal
information on these two new additions has also been redacted.
These additional COLB scans provide more
indight into the document certification practices used by
Hawaii's Vital Records. They also require me to make a point of
clarification as to the observations I made. I am going to
present them as if they were FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions,
about the COLB forms. Some of them really are FAQ, so the use of
this Socratic method is actually quite appropriate.
A true scientist is not afraid or
recalcitrant to modify his hypotheses and conclusions as more
facts are uncovered, and by the very fact that I am acknowledging
them to the public, and disclosing the priviledged information
that requires this action, I am demonstrating my fidelity to
conducting honest research.
Does Hawaii "change their
borders every year?"
The short answer is, "No," and
here's why. After Obama bastardized the word, "Change,"
I should have used a more fitting word, like
"alternate" or "modify." My efforts to obtain
high quality copies of real COLBs produced in each of the eight
years since this form's inception in November 2001, has been
harder than trying to find that proverbial needle in the
haystack. The 2006 COLB was not exaclty what I expected it to
be., but, in reality, it actually confirmed an earlier theory I
had that the borders were not modified every year, but every
other year. I often go on my gut instincts, but they are
not something that can be experimentally qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!
w, double
circle exhibit the most correspondence:
There is another anomaly with this Seal,
along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp.
For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The
Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom
border, which would never occur on real COLBs.
Back when some enterprising individual
had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies
of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially
reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color
balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the
way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all
the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This
rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to
where most of it could be interpolated.
Another individual, also hoping to prove
me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and
Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my
Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this
color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent
JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to
manufacture the image.
The result is an animation that
alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008
COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen
from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed
where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of
the reverse side:
However, the Registrar stamp is, again,
placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or
2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB
whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:
It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a
shown in this overlay:
There is a remarkable (as in "too
close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008
COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:
The COLB coup
de grâce
Now, here comes the coup de grâce
-- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does
deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?
If you recall from the above discussion,
I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of
the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful
way. There's a good reason why:
The Seal is actually a 2008
Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar
stamp!
We saw the effects of this cobbling
together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the
Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the
change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side
Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except
for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the
reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason
for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of
the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason
for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced
off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting
the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the
bottom part.
.Basically, when you are mindful of the
perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you
begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those
photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that
should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are
technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but
are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos.
Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for
COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a
convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed
to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional
ruse used to fool the public.
As noted above, one of the photos
(birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real
COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features
that are not present on the bogus Seals.
The macro shot of the Seal from almost
the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text
fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the
photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the
fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are
two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that
explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.
The center of the Seal and paper also
appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image
too), and not by any beam of light.
The texture of the Seal in all shots is
also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture
is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look
raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and
interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that
connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or
an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.
Feature #3: Self-defeating
evidence presented in support of the COLB.
Case in point: the set of stamps and
folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it
is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other
envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was
trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason --
that the first fold line was present but the second one was
absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be
skeptical of it:
The presence of a very prominent second
fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made
people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan
image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick
these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and
illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the
Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made
recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types
image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has
ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show
where it might have been?
As might be expected in this, "Say
whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB
believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the
"Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse
for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't
these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck
image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this
Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what
the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.
Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for
examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate
occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution,
full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained
images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of
Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300
DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal
information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me,
but with the owner information covered up.
That set of scans was still at twice the
size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send
me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and
resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the
first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and
back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal
traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request,
though).
Where I'm going with this side story is
to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the
Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however,
before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and
resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that,
when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to
the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the
Factcheck image.
Actually, it showed up better on the last
set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof
positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now,
the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought
they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged
COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's
signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was
bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as
shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features
on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see
because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly,
bled through the paper to the front side.
There is a fourth critical feature of
real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would
know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for
an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a
COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on
the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the
software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software
adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he
or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with
the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge
detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using
more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text
printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy
made of the reverse side of the COLB:
In other words, to really ensure her
privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of
the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The
ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the
reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a
real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the
actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of
the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced
Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper
location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted
online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date
stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with,
or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that
the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are
not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The
fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB
would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is
real from what is not.
As would be the case in nearly all of the
evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB
image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to
where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it
did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence
that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I
had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them
had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them
have stepped forward to admit it.
Feature #4: a shot to the midsection
If you have ever taken an art class or a
photography class, then you probably learned something about
perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of
an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right
under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning
off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object
that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we
are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional
one.
The photographer and/or the person
directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object
positioned at different angles. There is not a single,
point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of
the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened
up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo
#3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it,
and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the
photographer's arm covering the Seal area.
These complications were not accidental,
but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear
photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back
side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the
object being held in place was a "three-dimensional"
COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the
COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a
"three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words,
"FactCheck.org
staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the
original birth certificate."
This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an
original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.
Technically-speaking, since we are
discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph
that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of
that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height
(up and down), width (left and right),
and depth (forward and backward). Depending on
how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may
not be visible.
For example, if you have ever watched any
of the CSI shows on TV, then you have probably
seen how they take photographs of objects in their lab. They use
a digital camera mounted on a frame directly over a table on
which the object lies. The camera lens is facing downwards and
perfectly perpendicular to the table in all directions. Now, when
a CSI takes a photograph of a printed piece of paper laid flat on
the table, what is captured by a camera's digital imaging system
is perceptually equivalent to what is captured by a scanner's
digital imaging system. In other words, what is captured is an
image of a flat piece of paper with only two of its three
dimensions visible (with depth being the missing dimension).
To accomplish the same perpendicular
positioning of an object, as if it were lying on a table with the
camera mounted to a frame or tripod directly above it, both the
photographer and the holder have to be directly facing each
other, and the camera has to be held at the same height as is the
object being held. The camera also has to be aimed point-blank at
the object.
Clearly, such was not the case with any
of the Factcheck photos as all of them were taken at an angle --
some more than others.
Granted that taking pictures of an object
with a hand held camera will never be perfectly inline with the
object as it could have been if a mount or tripod was used, there
are guides within the camera viewfinder that can be used to
position the photo. In other words, the photos of the date stamp
and signature block could have been taken without any
accompanying angles. Of the two photos, photo #9 is the closest
one to being perpendicular to the stamps, but it is still off
slightly to the left side. I mention this because I will be
making comparisons between the photos taken of the stamps by
Factcheck with some of the photos I took of the stamps on the
paper COLB I have. I also will make comparisons between the image
allegedly scanned from Obama's COLB with the scan images I made
and have of the 2007 and 2008 COLBs.
For moderately experienced Photoshop
users, manipulating all three dimensions in an image is child's
play. If anything, visually adding depth, or modifying its
existing depth with Photoshop (or another image editor), does
tend to confirm in our brain that we are looking at an object
that actually exists in the real world, and for that reason,
Factcheck decided to take high resolution photos of the COLB
object positioned at different angles to accentuate its depth.
What they did not realize is that whenever you photograph a
printed document from different angles, you are also
photographing whatever is printed on it from the same angles.
Whatever perspective was created by angling the COLB object in
three dimensions, that same perspective should be discernible
across the entire COLB image.
For example, logically speaking (and in
actuality), if you rotate a printed piece of paper to the left so
that the top and bottom edges of the paper are angled to the
left, and if the printed text on the paper is parallel to the top
and bottom edges, then the text should remain parallel to the
edges and be tiled at the same angle as the top and bottom edges.
Now, what if, after tilting the paper to the left, let's say at a
45 degree angle, the text on the printed paper is no longer
parallel with the edges of the paper; that is, they remain level
from left to right as if the paper were never rotated in the
first place?
Well, you'd say, "What's wrong with
this picture. Something does not look right here," and you'd
be on-the-mark, for that is exactly what happened in the
photographs taken of the COLB.
Regardless of whether Factcheck
photographed the COLB object angled in three dimensions simply to
prove that it was a 3-D object, or to obscure the evidence of
forging, the end result for me was the same: showing the COLB
from different angles allowed me to find a lot of things that did
not "look right." In fact, there were a lot of things
about the text on the COLBs that did not look right. So, giving
credit to whom credit is due, I say, "Thanks,
Factcheck," for providing me with a greater number of
unrealistic features to find in your photographs.
For the purpose of these next
experiments, I'm going to use Factcheck's photo #2 and photo #5,
which are the clearest ones made of the COLB's midsection, and
are also the ones showing multiple angles of the COLB.
The first characteristic of these
pictures to which I draw your attention, is the way that
Factcheck kept them partially folded as a way of emphasizing that
this COLB object had two folds -- something their image did not
have. Again, by adding additional angles into the pictures, I can
better see if the text on each folded part is flowing along at
the appropriate angles.
As can be seen in the photo #2 below, the
COLB is rotated at two distinct angles of incident: (1) angled
upwards from left to right, and (2) angled down and away from the
camera. These angles result in the upper right corner (or quadrant)
of the COLB appearing to be closer to the camera, and the lower
left corner (or quadrant) appearing to be further away.
The COLB is sharply angled on both the top and bottom folds in
their appropriate direction of folding (top, folded back, and
bottom, folded forward).
Since the printed elements on the COLB
itself should be similarly aligned with the four sides of the
COLB border and the four edges of the paper, there are four
primary perspective effects in the printed elements that
should be readily visible to the viewer, such as the angle of the
lines of text with respect to the border, to the paper, and to
the camera' POV. To put it simply, if the paper is tilted down to
the left, then the horizontal lines of text directly facing the
camera should also be tilted down and to the left. If the paper
is angled away from the camera lens so that the two fold lines
appear to converge rather than remain parallel, then the lines of
text should also appear to converge.
Unlike the paper on which they are
printed, the position of letters can only vary on two dimensions:
left and right and up and down. We can see in the scan image,
allegedly made from the same document in the photos, that the
lines of text are parallel to the top and bottom borders, and
that the orientation of the letters in the text are placed
parallel to the sides of the borders. Therefore, if one were to
draw a straight horizontal line along the bottom of all the
letters in a text string, as well as to draw a line perpendicular
to this baseline, right next to (or through) the vertical stroke
of one of these letters. "E," "F,"
"H," "I," "K," "L,"
"R," or "T", these two lines should also run
parallel to the borders (either the inside edge or the outside
one):
When looking at photo #5, the center
portion (middle 1/3) of the COLB is facing towards the camera,
the top 1/3 is folded back and away from the camera, and the
bottom 1/3 is folded forward and towards the camera. Since the
top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 are folded by approximately the same
amount, then their surfaces would also be parallel to each other.
This means that the lines of text on both the top 1/3 and the
bottom 1/3 will be wider at the base, the closer it is to the
camera, and narrower at the top the further away it is from the
camera.
These angles and perspective are the
critical features of a document bent, turned and folded in
different directions. So, when I discovered that the printed
lines of text (and objects like the Seal and stamps) do not
appear at all like they should, then something was deliberately
done to either the document, to the photo of the document, or
both, that speaks directly to the way the COLB document was
artificially constructed.
To put it bluntly, the Factcheck photos
have been "Frankensteined," just as the Factcheck scan
image was cobbled together with the parts of different COLBs. The
use of the term, "document" is simply for expediency
sake, as no, single "real" document was used for these
photos or for the scan image.
OBAMA'S 'BORN'
CONSPIRACY - Important and corrections (11/30/08)
MEDIA ALERT!
Lan Lamphere has invited me to be his guest tonight on his
OVERNIGHT AM show. It starts at 10pm EST. Please listen in, and
also visit his website, http://www.lanlamphere.com/public/,where you can listen, and
also send email messages. It would be nice if FReepers would make
their voices heard and support one of their own.
MEDIA ALERT!
Also today, I got a call from Bob Unruh of World Net Daily,
who is doing a story on my COLB research! FINALLY....after four
months in trying to get their attention, they've sat up and taken
notice. Look for his tory in tomorrow's edition of WND.com.
I have some important new information to
disclose, along with making some corrections and clarifications
to my final report on Obama's bogus birth certificate. I recently
received a real 2006 COLB scan image and another real 2008 COLB
scan image from a contact who lives in Honolulu. As with
Michele's real 2008 COLB, and Dan's real 2007 COLB, the personal
information on these two new additions has also been redacted.
These additional COLB scans provide more
indight into the document certification practices used by
Hawaii's Vital Records. They also require me to make a point of
clarification as to the observations I made. I am going to
present them as if they were FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions,
about the COLB forms. Some of them really are FAQ, so the use of
this Socratic method is actually quite appropriate.
A true scientist is not afraid or
recalcitrant to modify his hypotheses and conclusions as more
facts are uncovered, and by the very fact that I am acknowledging
them to the public, and disclosing the priviledged information
that requires this action, I am demonstrating my fidelity to
conducting honest research.
Does Hawaii "change their
borders every year?"
The short answer is, "No," and
here's why. After Obama bastardized the word, "Change,"
I should have used a more fitting word, like
"alternate" or "modify." My efforts to obtain
high quality copies of real COLBs produced in each of the eight
years since this form's inception in November 2001, has been
harder than trying to find that proverbial needle in the
haystack. The 2006 COLB was not exaclty what I expected it to
be., but, in reality, it actually confirmed an earlier theory I
had that the borders were not modified every year, but every
other year. I often go on my gut instincts, but they are
not something that can be experimentally qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!
Now, here is an animated GIF showing the
correspondence between the two: focus your attention on the right
side where the word, "HEALTH" and the narrow, double
circle exhibit the most correspondence:
There is another anomaly with this Seal,
along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp.
For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The
Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom
border, which would never occur on real COLBs.
Back when some enterprising individual
had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies
of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially
reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color
balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the
way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all
the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This
rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to
where most of it could be interpolated.
Another individual, also hoping to prove
me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and
Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my
Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this
color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent
JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to
manufacture the image.
The result is an animation that
alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008
COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen
from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed
where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of
the reverse side:
However, the Registrar stamp is, again,
placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or
2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB
whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:
It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a
shown in this overlay:
There is a remarkable (as in "too
close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008
COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:
The COLB coup
de grâce
Now, here comes the coup de grâce
-- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does
deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?
If you recall from the above discussion,
I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of
the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful
way. There's a good reason why:
The Seal is actually a 2008
Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar
stamp!
We saw the effects of this cobbling
together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the
Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the
change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side
Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except
for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the
reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason
for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of
the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason
for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced
off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting
the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the
bottom part.
.Basically, when you are mindful of the
perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you
begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those
photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that
should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are
technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but
are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos.
Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for
COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a
convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed
to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional
ruse used to fool the public.
As noted above, one of the photos
(birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real
COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features
that are not present on the bogus Seals.
The macro shot of the Seal from almost
the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text
fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the
photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the
fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are
two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that
explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.
The center of the Seal and paper also
appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image
too), and not by any beam of light.
The texture of the Seal in all shots is
also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture
is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look
raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and
interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that
connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or
an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.
Feature #3: Self-defeating
evidence presented in support of the COLB.
Case in point: the set of stamps and
folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it
is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other
envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was
trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason --
that the first fold line was present but the second one was
absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be
skeptical of it:
The presence of a very prominent second
fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made
people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan
image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick
these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and
illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the
Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made
recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types
image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has
ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show
where it might have been?
As might be expected in this, "Say
whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB
believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the
"Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse
for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't
these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck
image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this
Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what
the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.
Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for
examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate
occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution,
full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained
images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of
Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300
DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal
information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me,
but with the owner information covered up.
That set of scans was still at twice the
size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send
me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and
resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the
first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and
back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal
traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request,
though).
Where I'm going with this side story is
to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the
Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however,
before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and
resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that,
when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to
the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the
Factcheck image.
Actually, it showed up better on the last
set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof
positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now,
the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought
they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged
COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's
signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was
bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as
shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features
on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see
because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly,
bled through the paper to the front side.
There is a fourth critical feature of
real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would
know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for
an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a
COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on
the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the
software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software
adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he
or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with
the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge
detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using
more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text
printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy
made of the reverse side of the COLB:
In other words, to really ensure her
privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of
the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The
ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the
reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a
real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the
actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of
the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced
Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper
location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted
online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date
stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with,
or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that
the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are
not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The
fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB
would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is
real from what is not.
As would be the case in nearly all of the
evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB
image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to
where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it
did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence
that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I
had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them
had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them
have stepped forward to admit it.
Feature #4: a shot to the midsection
If you have ever taken an art class or a
photography class, then you probably learned something about
perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of
an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right
under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning
off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object
that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we
are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional
one.
The photographer and/or the person
directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object
positioned at different angles. There is not a single,
point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of
the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened
up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo
#3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it,
and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the
photographer's arm covering the Seal area.
These complications were not accidental,
but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear
photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back
side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the
object being held in place was a "three-dimensional"
COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the
COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a
"three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words,
"FactCheck.org
staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the
original birth certificate."
This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an
original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.
Technically-speaking, since we are
discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph
that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of
that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height
(up and down), width (left and right),
and depth (forward and backward). Depending on
how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may
not be visible.
For example, if you have ever watched any
of the CSI shows on TV, then you have probably
seen how they take photographs of objects in their lab. They use
a digital camera mounted on a frame directly over a table on
which the object lies. The camera lens is facing downwards and
perfectly perpendicular to the table in all directions. Now, when
a CSI takes a photograph of a printed piece of paper laid flat on
the table, what is captured by a camera's digital imaging system
is perceptually equivalent to what is captured by a scanner's
digital imaging system. In other words, what is captured is an
image of a flat piece of paper with only two of its three
dimensions visible (with depth being the missing dimension).
To accomplish the same perpendicular
positioning of an object, as if it were lying on a table with the
camera mounted to a frame or tripod directly above it, both the
photographer and the holder have to be directly facing each
other, and the camera has to be held at the same height as is the
object being held. The camera also has to be aimed point-blank at
the object.
Clearly, such was not the case with any
of the Factcheck photos as all of them were taken at an angle --
some more than others.
Granted that taking pictures of an object
with a hand held camera will never be perfectly inline with the
object as it could have been if a mount or tripod was used, there
are guides within the camera viewfinder that can be used to
position the photo. In other words, the photos of the date stamp
and signature block could have been taken without any
accompanying angles. Of the two photos, photo #9 is the closest
one to being perpendicular to the stamps, but it is still off
slightly to the left side. I mention this because I will be
making comparisons between the photos taken of the stamps by
Factcheck with some of the photos I took of the stamps on the
paper COLB I have. I also will make comparisons between the image
allegedly scanned from Obama's COLB with the scan images I made
and have of the 2007 and 2008 COLBs.
For moderately experienced Photoshop
users, manipulating all three dimensions in an image is child's
play. If anything, visually adding depth, or modifying its
existing depth with Photoshop (or another image editor), does
tend to confirm in our brain that we are looking at an object
that actually exists in the real world, and for that reason,
Factcheck decided to take high resolution photos of the COLB
object positioned at different angles to accentuate its depth.
What they did not realize is that whenever you photograph a
printed document from different angles, you are also
photographing whatever is printed on it from the same angles.
Whatever perspective was created by angling the COLB object in
three dimensions, that same perspective should be discernible
across the entire COLB image.
For example, logically speaking (and in
actuality), if you rotate a printed piece of paper to the left so
that the top and bottom edges of the paper are angled to the
left, and if the printed text on the paper is parallel to the top
and bottom edges, then the text should remain parallel to the
edges and be tiled at the same angle as the top and bottom edges.
Now, what if, after tilting the paper to the left, let's say at a
45 degree angle, the text on the printed paper is no longer
parallel with the edges of the paper; that is, they remain level
from left to right as if the paper were never rotated in the
first place?
Well, you'd say, "What's wrong with
this picture. Something does not look right here," and you'd
be on-the-mark, for that is exactly what happened in the
photographs taken of the COLB.
Regardless of whether Factcheck
photographed the COLB object angled in three dimensions simply to
prove that it was a 3-D object, or to obscure the evidence of
forging, the end result for me was the same: showing the COLB
from different angles allowed me to find a lot of things that did
not "look right." In fact, there were a lot of things
about the text on the COLBs that did not look right. So, giving
credit to whom credit is due, I say, "Thanks,
Factcheck," for providing me with a greater number of
unrealistic features to find in your photographs.
For the purpose of these next
experiments, I'm going to use Factcheck's photo #2 and photo #5,
which are the clearest ones made of the COLB's midsection, and
are also the ones showing multiple angles of the COLB.
The first characteristic of these
pictures to which I draw your attention, is the way that
Factcheck kept them partially folded as a way of emphasizing that
this COLB object had two folds -- something their image did not
have. Again, by adding additional angles into the pictures, I can
better see if the text on each folded part is flowing along at
the appropriate angles.
As can be seen in the photo #2 below, the
COLB is rotated at two distinct angles of incident: (1) angled
upwards from left to right, and (2) angled down and away from the
camera. These angles result in the upper right corner (or quadrant)
of the COLB appearing to be closer to the camera, and the lower
left corner (or quadrant) appearing to be further away.
The COLB is sharply angled on both the top and bottom folds in
their appropriate direction of folding (top, folded back, and
bottom, folded forward).
Since the printed elements on the COLB
itself should be similarly aligned with the four sides of the
COLB border and the four edges of the paper, there are four
primary perspective effects in the printed elements that
should be readily visible to the viewer, such as the angle of the
lines of text with respect to the border, to the paper, and to
the camera' POV. To put it simply, if the paper is tilted down to
the left, then the horizontal lines of text directly facing the
camera should also be tilted down and to the left. If the paper
is angled away from the camera lens so that the two fold lines
appear to converge rather than remain parallel, then the lines of
text should also appear to converge.
Unlike the paper on which they are
printed, the position of letters can only vary on two dimensions:
left and right and up and down. We can see in the scan image,
allegedly made from the same document in the photos, that the
lines of text are parallel to the top and bottom borders, and
that the orientation of the letters in the text are placed
parallel to the sides of the borders. Therefore, if one were to
draw a straight horizontal line along the bottom of all the
letters in a text string, as well as to draw a line perpendicular
to this baseline, right next to (or through) the vertical stroke
of one of these letters. "E," "F,"
"H," "I," "K," "L,"
"R," or "T", these two lines should also run
parallel to the borders (either the inside edge or the outside
one):
When looking at photo #5, the center
portion (middle 1/3) of the COLB is facing towards the camera,
the top 1/3 is folded back and away from the camera, and the
bottom 1/3 is folded forward and towards the camera. Since the
top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 are folded by approximately the same
amount, then their surfaces would also be parallel to each other.
This means that the lines of text on both the top 1/3 and the
bottom 1/3 will be wider at the base, the closer it is to the
camera, and narrower at the top the further away it is from the
camera.
These angles and perspective are the
critical features of a document bent, turned and folded in
different directions. So, when I discovered that the printed
lines of text (and objects like the Seal and stamps) do not
appear at all like they should, then something was deliberately
done to either the document, to the photo of the document, or
both, that speaks directly to the way the COLB document was
artificially constructed.
To put it bluntly, the Factcheck photos
have been "Frankensteined," just as the Factcheck scan
image was cobbled together with the parts of different COLBs. The
use of the term, "document" is simply for expediency
sake, as no, single "real" document was used for these
photos or for the scan image.
OBAMA'S 'BORN'
CONSPIRACY - Important and corrections (11/30/08)
MEDIA ALERT!
Lan Lamphere has invited me to be his guest tonight on his
OVERNIGHT AM show. It starts at 10pm EST. Please listen in, and
also visit his website, http://www.lanlamphere.com/public/,where you can listen, and
also send email messages. It would be nice if FReepers would make
their voices heard and support one of their own.
MEDIA ALERT!
Also today, I got a call from Bob Unruh of World Net Daily,
who is doing a story on my COLB research! FINALLY....after four
months in trying to get their attention, they've sat up and taken
notice. Look for his tory in tomorrow's edition of WND.com.
I have some important new information to
disclose, along with making some corrections and clarifications
to my final report on Obama's bogus birth certificate. I recently
received a real 2006 COLB scan image and another real 2008 COLB
scan image from a contact who lives in Honolulu. As with
Michele's real 2008 COLB, and Dan's real 2007 COLB, the personal
information on these two new additions has also been redacted.
These additional COLB scans provide more
indight into the document certification practices used by
Hawaii's Vital Records. They also require me to make a point of
clarification as to the observations I made. I am going to
present them as if they were FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions,
about the COLB forms. Some of them really are FAQ, so the use of
this Socratic method is actually quite appropriate.
A true scientist is not afraid or
recalcitrant to modify his hypotheses and conclusions as more
facts are uncovered, and by the very fact that I am acknowledging
them to the public, and disclosing the priviledged information
that requires this action, I am demonstrating my fidelity to
conducting honest research.
Does Hawaii "change their
borders every year?"
The short answer is, "No," and
here's why. After Obama bastardized the word, "Change,"
I should have used a more fitting word, like
"alternate" or "modify." My efforts to obtain
high quality copies of real COLBs produced in each of the eight
years since this form's inception in November 2001, has been
harder than trying to find that proverbial needle in the
haystack. The 2006 COLB was not exaclty what I expected it to
be., but, in reality, it actually confirmed an earlier theory I
had that the borders were not modified every year, but every
other year. I often go on my gut instincts, but they are
not something that can be experimentally qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!
w, double
circle exhibit the most correspondence:
There is another anomaly with this Seal,
along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp.
For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The
Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom
border, which would never occur on real COLBs.
Back when some enterprising individual
had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies
of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially
reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color
balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the
way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all
the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This
rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to
where most of it could be interpolated.
Another individual, also hoping to prove
me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and
Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my
Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this
color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent
JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to
manufacture the image.
The result is an animation that
alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008
COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen
from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed
where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of
the reverse side:
However, the Registrar stamp is, again,
placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or
2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB
whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:
It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a
shown in this overlay:
There is a remarkable (as in "too
close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008
COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:
The COLB coup
de grâce
Now, here comes the coup de grâce
-- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does
deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?
If you recall from the above discussion,
I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of
the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful
way. There's a good reason why:
The Seal is actually a 2008
Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar
stamp!
We saw the effects of this cobbling
together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the
Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the
change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side
Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except
for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the
reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason
for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of
the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason
for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced
off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting
the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the
bottom part.
.Basically, when you are mindful of the
perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you
begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those
photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that
should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are
technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but
are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos.
Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for
COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a
convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed
to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional
ruse used to fool the public.
As noted above, one of the photos
(birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real
COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features
that are not present on the bogus Seals.
The macro shot of the Seal from almost
the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text
fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the
photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the
fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are
two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that
explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.
The center of the Seal and paper also
appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image
too), and not by any beam of light.
The texture of the Seal in all shots is
also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture
is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look
raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and
interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that
connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or
an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.
Feature #3: Self-defeating
evidence presented in support of the COLB.
Case in point: the set of stamps and
folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it
is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other
envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was
trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason --
that the first fold line was present but the second one was
absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be
skeptical of it:
The presence of a very prominent second
fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made
people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan
image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick
these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and
illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the
Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made
recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types
image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has
ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show
where it might have been?
As might be expected in this, "Say
whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB
believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the
"Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse
for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't
these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck
image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this
Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what
the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.
Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for
examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate
occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution,
full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained
images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of
Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300
DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal
information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me,
but with the owner information covered up.
That set of scans was still at twice the
size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send
me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and
resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the
first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and
back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal
traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request,
though).
Where I'm going with this side story is
to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the
Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however,
before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and
resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that,
when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to
the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the
Factcheck image.
Actually, it showed up better on the last
set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof
positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now,
the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought
they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged
COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's
signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was
bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as
shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features
on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see
because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly,
bled through the paper to the front side.
There is a fourth critical feature of
real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would
know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for
an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a
COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on
the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the
software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software
adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he
or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with
the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge
detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using
more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text
printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy
made of the reverse side of the COLB:
In other words, to really ensure her
privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of
the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The
ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the
reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a
real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the
actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of
the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced
Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper
location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted
online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date
stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with,
or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that
the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are
not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The
fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB
would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is
real from what is not.
As would be the case in nearly all of the
evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB
image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to
where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it
did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence
that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I
had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them
had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them
have stepped forward to admit it.
Feature #4: a shot to the midsection
If you have ever taken an art class or a
photography class, then you probably learned something about
perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of
an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right
under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning
off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object
that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we
are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional
one.
The photographer and/or the person
directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object
positioned at different angles. There is not a single,
point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of
the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened
up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo
#3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it,
and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the
photographer's arm covering the Seal area.
These complications were not accidental,
but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear
photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back
side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the
object being held in place was a "three-dimensional"
COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the
COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a
"three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words,
"FactCheck.org
staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the
original birth certificate."
This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an
original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.
Technically-speaking, since we are
discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph
that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of
that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height
(up and down), width (left and right),
and depth (forward and backward). Depending on
how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may
not be visible.
For example, if you have ever watched any
of the CSI shows on TV, then you have probably
seen how they take photographs of objects in their lab. They use
a digital camera mounted on a frame directly over a table on
which the object lies. The camera lens is facing downwards and
perfectly perpendicular to the table in all directions. Now, when
a CSI takes a photograph of a printed piece of paper laid flat on
the table, what is captured by a camera's digital imaging system
is perceptually equivalent to what is captured by a scanner's
digital imaging system. In other words, what is captured is an
image of a flat piece of paper with only two of its three
dimensions visible (with depth being the missing dimension).
To accomplish the same perpendicular
positioning of an object, as if it were lying on a table with the
camera mounted to a frame or tripod directly above it, both the
photographer and the holder have to be directly facing each
other, and the camera has to be held at the same height as is the
object being held. The camera also has to be aimed point-blank at
the object.
Clearly, such was not the case with any
of the Factcheck photos as all of them were taken at an angle --
some more than others.
Granted that taking pictures of an object
with a hand held camera will never be perfectly inline with the
object as it could have been if a mount or tripod was used, there
are guides within the camera viewfinder that can be used to
position the photo. In other words, the photos of the date stamp
and signature block could have been taken without any
accompanying angles. Of the two photos, photo #9 is the closest
one to being perpendicular to the stamps, but it is still off
slightly to the left side. I mention this because I will be
making comparisons between the photos taken of the stamps by
Factcheck with some of the photos I took of the stamps on the
paper COLB I have. I also will make comparisons between the image
allegedly scanned from Obama's COLB with the scan images I made
and have of the 2007 and 2008 COLBs.
For moderately experienced Photoshop
users, manipulating all three dimensions in an image is child's
play. If anything, visually adding depth, or modifying its
existing depth with Photoshop (or another image editor), does
tend to confirm in our brain that we are looking at an object
that actually exists in the real world, and for that reason,
Factcheck decided to take high resolution photos of the COLB
object positioned at different angles to accentuate its depth.
What they did not realize is that whenever you photograph a
printed document from different angles, you are also
photographing whatever is printed on it from the same angles.
Whatever perspective was created by angling the COLB object in
three dimensions, that same perspective should be discernible
across the entire COLB image.
For example, logically speaking (and in
actuality), if you rotate a printed piece of paper to the left so
that the top and bottom edges of the paper are angled to the
left, and if the printed text on the paper is parallel to the top
and bottom edges, then the text should remain parallel to the
edges and be tiled at the same angle as the top and bottom edges.
Now, what if, after tilting the paper to the left, let's say at a
45 degree angle, the text on the printed paper is no longer
parallel with the edges of the paper; that is, they remain level
from left to right as if the paper were never rotated in the
first place?
Well, you'd say, "What's wrong with
this picture. Something does not look right here," and you'd
be on-the-mark, for that is exactly what happened in the
photographs taken of the COLB.
Regardless of whether Factcheck
photographed the COLB object angled in three dimensions simply to
prove that it was a 3-D object, or to obscure the evidence of
forging, the end result for me was the same: showing the COLB
from different angles allowed me to find a lot of things that did
not "look right." In fact, there were a lot of things
about the text on the COLBs that did not look right. So, giving
credit to whom credit is due, I say, "Thanks,
Factcheck," for providing me with a greater number of
unrealistic features to find in your photographs.
For the purpose of these next
experiments, I'm going to use Factcheck's photo #2 and photo #5,
which are the clearest ones made of the COLB's midsection, and
are also the ones showing multiple angles of the COLB.
The first characteristic of these
pictures to which I draw your attention, is the way that
Factcheck kept them partially folded as a way of emphasizing that
this COLB object had two folds -- something their image did not
have. Again, by adding additional angles into the pictures, I can
better see if the text on each folded part is flowing along at
the appropriate angles.
As can be seen in the photo #2 below, the
COLB is rotated at two distinct angles of incident: (1) angled
upwards from left to right, and (2) angled down and away from the
camera. These angles result in the upper right corner (or quadrant)
of the COLB appearing to be closer to the camera, and the lower
left corner (or quadrant) appearing to be further away.
The COLB is sharply angled on both the top and bottom folds in
their appropriate direction of folding (top, folded back, and
bottom, folded forward).
Since the printed elements on the COLB
itself should be similarly aligned with the four sides of the
COLB border and the four edges of the paper, there are four
primary perspective effects in the printed elements that
should be readily visible to the viewer, such as the angle of the
lines of text with respect to the border, to the paper, and to
the camera' POV. To put it simply, if the paper is tilted down to
the left, then the horizontal lines of text directly facing the
camera should also be tilted down and to the left. If the paper
is angled away from the camera lens so that the two fold lines
appear to converge rather than remain parallel, then the lines of
text should also appear to converge.
Unlike the paper on which they are
printed, the position of letters can only vary on two dimensions:
left and right and up and down. We can see in the scan image,
allegedly made from the same document in the photos, that the
lines of text are parallel to the top and bottom borders, and
that the orientation of the letters in the text are placed
parallel to the sides of the borders. Therefore, if one were to
draw a straight horizontal line along the bottom of all the
letters in a text string, as well as to draw a line perpendicular
to this baseline, right next to (or through) the vertical stroke
of one of these letters. "E," "F,"
"H," "I," "K," "L,"
"R," or "T", these two lines should also run
parallel to the borders (either the inside edge or the outside
one):
When looking at photo #5, the center
portion (middle 1/3) of the COLB is facing towards the camera,
the top 1/3 is folded back and away from the camera, and the
bottom 1/3 is folded forward and towards the camera. Since the
top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 are folded by approximately the same
amount, then their surfaces would also be parallel to each other.
This means that the lines of text on both the top 1/3 and the
bottom 1/3 will be wider at the base, the closer it is to the
camera, and narrower at the top the further away it is from the
camera.
These angles and perspective are the
critical features of a document bent, turned and folded in
different directions. So, when I discovered that the printed
lines of text (and objects like the Seal and stamps) do not
appear at all like they should, then something was deliberately
done to either the document, to the photo of the document, or
both, that speaks directly to the way the COLB document was
artificially constructed.
To put it bluntly, the Factcheck photos
have been "Frankensteined," just as the Factcheck scan
image was cobbled together with the parts of different COLBs. The
use of the term, "document" is simply for expediency
sake, as no, single "real" document was used for these
photos or for the scan image.
OBAMA'S 'BORN'
CONSPIRACY - Important and corrections (11/30/08)
MEDIA ALERT!
Lan Lamphere has invited me to be his guest tonight on his
OVERNIGHT AM show. It starts at 10pm EST. Please listen in, and
also visit his website, http://www.lanlamphere.com/public/,where you can listen, and
also send email messages. It would be nice if FReepers would make
their voices heard and support one of their own.
MEDIA ALERT!
Also today, I got a call from Bob Unruh of World Net Daily,
who is doing a story on my COLB research! FINALLY....after four
months in trying to get their attention, they've sat up and taken
notice. Look for his tory in tomorrow's edition of WND.com.
I have some important new information to
disclose, along with making some corrections and clarifications
to my final report on Obama's bogus birth certificate. I recently
received a real 2006 COLB scan image and another real 2008 COLB
scan image from a contact who lives in Honolulu. As with
Michele's real 2008 COLB, and Dan's real 2007 COLB, the personal
information on these two new additions has also been redacted.
These additional COLB scans provide more
indight into the document certification practices used by
Hawaii's Vital Records. They also require me to make a point of
clarification as to the observations I made. I am going to
present them as if they were FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions,
about the COLB forms. Some of them really are FAQ, so the use of
this Socratic method is actually quite appropriate.
A true scientist is not afraid or
recalcitrant to modify his hypotheses and conclusions as more
facts are uncovered, and by the very fact that I am acknowledging
them to the public, and disclosing the priviledged information
that requires this action, I am demonstrating my fidelity to
conducting honest research.
Does Hawaii "change their
borders every year?"
The short answer is, "No," and
here's why. After Obama bastardized the word, "Change,"
I should have used a more fitting word, like
"alternate" or "modify." My efforts to obtain
high quality copies of real COLBs produced in each of the eight
years since this form's inception in November 2001, has been
harder than trying to find that proverbial needle in the
haystack. The 2006 COLB was not exaclty what I expected it to
be., but, in reality, it actually confirmed an earlier theory I
had that the borders were not modified every year, but every
other year. I often go on my gut instincts, but they are
not something that can be experimentally qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!
qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!
w, double
circle exhibit the most correspondence:
There is another anomaly with this Seal,
along with the date stamp and the Registrar's signature stamp.
For starters, the Registrar's stamp is too placed low. The
Registrar stamp is positioned within the middle of the bottom
border, which would never occur on real COLBs.
Back when some enterprising individual
had hoped to prove that the Factcheck image (and all the copies
of it) was real, and that I was wrong, he was able to partially
reveal the hidden Registrar's signature by changing the color
balance on the image by moving the Magenta/Green slider all the
way over to the Magenta side, and sliding the Cyan/Red slider all
the way to the Red side (while preserving Luminosity). This
rendered the pixels of the Registrar stamp partially visible to
where most of it could be interpolated.
Another individual, also hoping to prove
me wrong, created an animated GIF by taking the date stamp and
Registrar stamp from the 2008 COLB that I have posted on my
Photobucket account and overlaying it on top of this
color-altered Factcheck image, using as a guide, the omnipresent
JUNE 6, 2007 date stamp that bled through whatever was used to
manufacture the image.
The result is an animation that
alternates between the Registrar stamp and date stamp of the 2008
COLB and the graphically-enhanced Factcheck image. As can be seen
from this creation, the Registrar stamp and date stamp are placed
where they appear in the two Factcheck photos (#7 & #9) of
the reverse side:
However, the Registrar stamp is, again,
placed lower than what is actually done on either 2007 COLBs or
2008 COLBs, as can be seen by this enhanced copy of a 2008 COLB
whose border on the front side can be seen from the rear side:
It also is too low on a real 2007 COLB, a
shown in this overlay:
There is a remarkable (as in "too
close to be real") match between the stamp used for the 2008
COLB and that used for the faked 2007 COLB:
The COLB coup
de grâce
Now, here comes the coup de grâce
-- that's French for a "death blow" -- that really does
deal a death blow to these bogus photos ever being real. Ready?
If you recall from the above discussion,
I demonstrated, fairly convincingly, why the Seal shown in all of
the photos did not resemble the real 2007 Seal in any meaningful
way. There's a good reason why:
The Seal is actually a 2008
Seal! And the Registrar's stamp is actually a 2008 Registrar
stamp!
We saw the effects of this cobbling
together of COLB features on the Seals. The front view of the
Seal should look vastly different from the reverse, given the
change in angles and in the Seal itself, yet the reverse side
Seal image perfectly overlays the front side Seal image -- except
for the 25% cropped of the top of the Seal as shown on the
reverse side COLB photo. There is no logical or acceptable reason
for not including the entire Seal in at least two photos made of
the back side. Likewise, there is no logical or defensible reason
for doing any cutting on the Seal, let alone the 20-30% sliced
off the top of the Seal. The front view has the fold bisecting
the top part of the Seal and is at a 30 degree angle from the
bottom part.
.Basically, when you are mindful of the
perspective at which the document was allegedly photographed, you
begin to see the unreality of the elements depicted in those
photos. Round Seals that should be elliptical. Flat Seals that
should be bent at an angle. Seals illuminated in ways that are
technically impossible. Seal sides that should be different, but
are the same. Parts of Seals intentionally cropped out of photos.
Seals that appear on different types of paper never used for
COLBs. Taken together, all of the attempts at creating a
convincing illusion of a real Seal on a real COLB actually failed
to do so. Instead, these bogus Seals represent an intentional
ruse used to fool the public.
As noted above, one of the photos
(birth_certificate_1.jpg) was made from a real Seal on a real
COLB, that was subsequently Photoshopped to eradicate features
that are not present on the bogus Seals.
The macro shot of the Seal from almost
the height of the paper, shows two major anomalies: the text
fields off in the distance are either out-of-focus or not in the
photo at all. Test shots of a real Seal confirm that all of the
fields should be visible, albeit, as dark blurry lines. There are
two lines of text missing, and there are no natural reasons that
explain their absence, such as overexposure from a light source.
The center of the Seal and paper also
appears to have been compromised by tool work (Photoshop image
too), and not by any beam of light.
The texture of the Seal in all shots is
also unrealistic, especially in the close-up of #1. The texture
is suggestive of hand-engraving a photo of a Seal to make it look
raised or embossed. The fact that the word, "of," and
interior sections of the letters, such as the slanted lines that
connect the two parallel lines of an "M", or
an"N", are absent, confirms that this Seal is not real.
Feature #3: Self-defeating
evidence presented in support of the COLB.
Case in point: the set of stamps and
folds seen in the COLB. After a COLB is stamped and embossed, it
is trifolded to fit inside a standard #10 envelope. No other
envelope is used for this purpose. Either the COLB you get was
trifolded, or not folded at all, and it was for this reason --
that the first fold line was present but the second one was
absent from the Obama COLB image -- that caused some people to be
skeptical of it:
The presence of a very prominent second
fold line cutting through a very prominent Seal should have made
people wonder; i.e., those who saw Factcheck's alleged scan
image, how in the world did the "scanner" not pick
these up? Yes, the Seal was plainly visible, albeit faded and
illegible, under edge detection. Yes, even parts of the
Registrar's signature stamp on the reverse side could be made
recognizable. So, why is it that with all of the different types
image enhancements available on Photoshop and GIMP, no one has
ever been able to show that second fold line -- not even to show
where it might have been?
As might be expected in this, "Say
whatever comes to mind" debate between the Obama COLB
believers and apologists and myself, hearing them play the
"Well, it was not a very good scan" card as an excuse
for why it was never found, is just, plain disingenuous. Didn't
these same critics say, nary a month before, that the Factcheck
image is a "high resolution" scan? Sounds like this
Factcheck scan is only "high-res" when it reveals what
the COLB believers and apologists think exists in it.
Before I received a real, 2008 COLB for
examination, the owner of it had first emailed me, on separate
occasions, three sets (front and back) of high resolution,
full-page scans that were made from it. The first set contained
images that were twice the size and twice the resolution of
Factcheck's scan (5500 x 6600 @ 300 DPI versus 2550 x 3300 @ 300
DPI). They also contained all of the owner's personal
information. So, I requested a second set of scans be sent to me,
but with the owner information covered up.
That set of scans was still at twice the
size of the Factcheck image, so I requested that the owner send
me a third set, but this time, made to be the same size and
resolution as Factcheck's image and also a little darker than the
first two sets. I got three more images: one set of front and
back images, and a third one of the front side with the Seal
traced with a pencil to make it visible (not by my request,
though).
Where I'm going with this side story is
to say that, on July 8, I posted the second set of scans to the
Internet because I needed to post them, like yesterday. however,
before I posted them, I reduced these images to the same size and
resolution as the Factcheck image. It was on these scans that,
when subjected to the same edge detection procedure as applied to
the Factcheck image, the Seal appeared just as it had on the
Factcheck image.
Actually, it showed up better on the last
set I received. My critics hailed this evidence as "Proof
positive" that the Obama COLB image was a genuine copy. Now,
the COLB believers and apologists had the ammunition they thought
they needed to shoot down the conspiracy theories about a forged
COLB. The missing Seal had been found along with the Registrar's
signature stamp, thus countering the arguments that the image was
bogus because these two elements were missing from the image as
shown. The date stamp, the second of the three critical features
on a real, certified COLB, was hard not to see
because the ink from the stamp had apparently, and allegedly,
bled through the paper to the front side.
There is a fourth critical feature of
real COLBs that only someone who had actually handled one would
know: that they are printed on the thinnest paper imaginable for
an official State document. If you look at the reverse side of a
COLB held up to the light, you can clearly see what is printed on
the front. If a person makes a scan of a real COLB using the
software that came with it, and lets the scanner's software
adjust the brightness and contrast of the image automatically, he
or she can make a copy of a COLB where the Seal can be seen with
the naked eye, as well as show up more clearly after edge
detection. There was another consequence of making a scan using
more contrast and less brightness than the previous one: the text
printed on the front side of the COLB could now be seen on a copy
made of the reverse side of the COLB:
In other words, to really ensure her
privacy, the 2008 COLB owner also covered up the reverse side of
the COLB where the personal information was also visible. The
ability to see on one side of a COLB scan what was printed on the
reverse side proved to be an essential asset to differentiating a
real COLB from a fake one. For example, by seeing where the
actual Registrar's stamp is placed relative to the position of
the COLB border, I was able to judge whether or not that enhanced
Factcheck image displayed the registrar stamp in its proper
location. When you look at all of the other COLB images posted
online by their owners, you can clearly see the Seal, the date
stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp on them, either with,
or without, the benefit of edge detection. You will also see that
the Seal, the date stamp, and the Registrar's signature stamp are
not consistently located in the same place from COLB to COLB. The
fact that the placement of these features vary from COLB to COLB
would also turn out to be a critical factor in judging what is
real from what is not.
As would be the case in nearly all of the
evidence presented in favor of there being a genuine Obama COLB
image, the end-result turned out to be just the opposite, to
where the evidence provided more support to my theories than it
did to my critics. At the very least, using the same evidence
that my critics produced took away their counterargument that I
had somehow "fabricated" them. So far, if any of them
had fabricated their evidence to use against me, none of them
have stepped forward to admit it.
Feature #4: a shot to the midsection
If you have ever taken an art class or a
photography class, then you probably learned something about
perspective, or the visual cues that tell us the orientation of
an object that we see. Whether it is far away from us, or right
under our noses. Whether it lays flat on a table, or is leaning
off the edge. Likewise, it is the perspective of the COLB object
that we see in Factcheck's photographs that tells us whether we
are looking at a two-dimensional object, or a three-dimensional
one.
The photographer and/or the person
directing this photo shoot, made sure to capture the COLB object
positioned at different angles. There is not a single,
point-blank photo of the front of the COLB, nor is there one of
the COLB fully flat. The only photo in which the COLB was opened
up to its original size (but not opened all the way) was photo
#3. Yet, even here, the object was still shot at an angle to it,
and was also out of focus with a large shadow of the
photographer's arm covering the Seal area.
These complications were not accidental,
but were intentionally caused. Had Factcheck taken only one clear
photo of the whole front side, and another of the whole back
side, they would not have needed to convince the reader that the
object being held in place was a "three-dimensional"
COLB. Factcheck went to great lengths in its discussion of the
COLB to remind the reader that they would be looking at a
"three-dimensional" COLB that, in Factcheck's words,
"FactCheck.org
staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the
original birth certificate."
This statement, by itself, is a lie because a COLB is not an
original birth certificate, and Factcheck knows it.
Technically-speaking, since we are
discussing photographs, it is not the object in the photograph
that is "three-dimensional," but our perception of
that object as it appears in three-dimensional space, namely height
(up and down), width (left and right),
and depth (forward and backward). Depending on
how the photos were made, that third dimension, depth, may or may
not be visible.
For example, if you have ever watched any
of the CSI shows on TV, then you have probably
seen how they take photographs of objects in their lab. They use
a digital camera mounted on a frame directly over a table on
which the object lies. The camera lens is facing downwards and
perfectly perpendicular to the table in all directions. Now, when
a CSI takes a photograph of a printed piece of paper laid flat on
the table, what is captured by a camera's digital imaging system
is perceptually equivalent to what is captured by a scanner's
digital imaging system. In other words, what is captured is an
image of a flat piece of paper with only two of its three
dimensions visible (with depth being the missing dimension).
To accomplish the same perpendicular
positioning of an object, as if it were lying on a table with the
camera mounted to a frame or tripod directly above it, both the
photographer and the holder have to be directly facing each
other, and the camera has to be held at the same height as is the
object being held. The camera also has to be aimed point-blank at
the object.
Clearly, such was not the case with any
of the Factcheck photos as all of them were taken at an angle --
some more than others.
Granted that taking pictures of an object
with a hand held camera will never be perfectly inline with the
object as it could have been if a mount or tripod was used, there
are guides within the camera viewfinder that can be used to
position the photo. In other words, the photos of the date stamp
and signature block could have been taken without any
accompanying angles. Of the two photos, photo #9 is the closest
one to being perpendicular to the stamps, but it is still off
slightly to the left side. I mention this because I will be
making comparisons between the photos taken of the stamps by
Factcheck with some of the photos I took of the stamps on the
paper COLB I have. I also will make comparisons between the image
allegedly scanned from Obama's COLB with the scan images I made
and have of the 2007 and 2008 COLBs.
For moderately experienced Photoshop
users, manipulating all three dimensions in an image is child's
play. If anything, visually adding depth, or modifying its
existing depth with Photoshop (or another image editor), does
tend to confirm in our brain that we are looking at an object
that actually exists in the real world, and for that reason,
Factcheck decided to take high resolution photos of the COLB
object positioned at different angles to accentuate its depth.
What they did not realize is that whenever you photograph a
printed document from different angles, you are also
photographing whatever is printed on it from the same angles.
Whatever perspective was created by angling the COLB object in
three dimensions, that same perspective should be discernible
across the entire COLB image.
For example, logically speaking (and in
actuality), if you rotate a printed piece of paper to the left so
that the top and bottom edges of the paper are angled to the
left, and if the printed text on the paper is parallel to the top
and bottom edges, then the text should remain parallel to the
edges and be tiled at the same angle as the top and bottom edges.
Now, what if, after tilting the paper to the left, let's say at a
45 degree angle, the text on the printed paper is no longer
parallel with the edges of the paper; that is, they remain level
from left to right as if the paper were never rotated in the
first place?
Well, you'd say, "What's wrong with
this picture. Something does not look right here," and you'd
be on-the-mark, for that is exactly what happened in the
photographs taken of the COLB.
Regardless of whether Factcheck
photographed the COLB object angled in three dimensions simply to
prove that it was a 3-D object, or to obscure the evidence of
forging, the end result for me was the same: showing the COLB
from different angles allowed me to find a lot of things that did
not "look right." In fact, there were a lot of things
about the text on the COLBs that did not look right. So, giving
credit to whom credit is due, I say, "Thanks,
Factcheck," for providing me with a greater number of
unrealistic features to find in your photographs.
For the purpose of these next
experiments, I'm going to use Factcheck's photo #2 and photo #5,
which are the clearest ones made of the COLB's midsection, and
are also the ones showing multiple angles of the COLB.
The first characteristic of these
pictures to which I draw your attention, is the way that
Factcheck kept them partially folded as a way of emphasizing that
this COLB object had two folds -- something their image did not
have. Again, by adding additional angles into the pictures, I can
better see if the text on each folded part is flowing along at
the appropriate angles.
As can be seen in the photo #2 below, the
COLB is rotated at two distinct angles of incident: (1) angled
upwards from left to right, and (2) angled down and away from the
camera. These angles result in the upper right corner (or quadrant)
of the COLB appearing to be closer to the camera, and the lower
left corner (or quadrant) appearing to be further away.
The COLB is sharply angled on both the top and bottom folds in
their appropriate direction of folding (top, folded back, and
bottom, folded forward).
Since the printed elements on the COLB
itself should be similarly aligned with the four sides of the
COLB border and the four edges of the paper, there are four
primary perspective effects in the printed elements that
should be readily visible to the viewer, such as the angle of the
lines of text with respect to the border, to the paper, and to
the camera' POV. To put it simply, if the paper is tilted down to
the left, then the horizontal lines of text directly facing the
camera should also be tilted down and to the left. If the paper
is angled away from the camera lens so that the two fold lines
appear to converge rather than remain parallel, then the lines of
text should also appear to converge.
Unlike the paper on which they are
printed, the position of letters can only vary on two dimensions:
left and right and up and down. We can see in the scan image,
allegedly made from the same document in the photos, that the
lines of text are parallel to the top and bottom borders, and
that the orientation of the letters in the text are placed
parallel to the sides of the borders. Therefore, if one were to
draw a straight horizontal line along the bottom of all the
letters in a text string, as well as to draw a line perpendicular
to this baseline, right next to (or through) the vertical stroke
of one of these letters. "E," "F,"
"H," "I," "K," "L,"
"R," or "T", these two lines should also run
parallel to the borders (either the inside edge or the outside
one):
When looking at photo #5, the center
portion (middle 1/3) of the COLB is facing towards the camera,
the top 1/3 is folded back and away from the camera, and the
bottom 1/3 is folded forward and towards the camera. Since the
top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 are folded by approximately the same
amount, then their surfaces would also be parallel to each other.
This means that the lines of text on both the top 1/3 and the
bottom 1/3 will be wider at the base, the closer it is to the
camera, and narrower at the top the further away it is from the
camera.
These angles and perspective are the
critical features of a document bent, turned and folded in
different directions. So, when I discovered that the printed
lines of text (and objects like the Seal and stamps) do not
appear at all like they should, then something was deliberately
done to either the document, to the photo of the document, or
both, that speaks directly to the way the COLB document was
artificially constructed.
To put it bluntly, the Factcheck photos
have been "Frankensteined," just as the Factcheck scan
image was cobbled together with the parts of different COLBs. The
use of the term, "document" is simply for expediency
sake, as no, single "real" document was used for these
photos or for the scan image.
OBAMA'S 'BORN'
CONSPIRACY - Important and corrections (11/30/08)
MEDIA ALERT!
Lan Lamphere has invited me to be his guest tonight on his
OVERNIGHT AM show. It starts at 10pm EST. Please listen in, and
also visit his website, http://www.lanlamphere.com/public/,where you can listen, and
also send email messages. It would be nice if FReepers would make
their voices heard and support one of their own.
MEDIA ALERT!
Also today, I got a call from Bob Unruh of World Net Daily,
who is doing a story on my COLB research! FINALLY....after four
months in trying to get their attention, they've sat up and taken
notice. Look for his tory in tomorrow's edition of WND.com.
I have some important new information to
disclose, along with making some corrections and clarifications
to my final report on Obama's bogus birth certificate. I recently
received a real 2006 COLB scan image and another real 2008 COLB
scan image from a contact who lives in Honolulu. As with
Michele's real 2008 COLB, and Dan's real 2007 COLB, the personal
information on these two new additions has also been redacted.
These additional COLB scans provide more
indight into the document certification practices used by
Hawaii's Vital Records. They also require me to make a point of
clarification as to the observations I made. I am going to
present them as if they were FAQ, or Frequently Asked Questions,
about the COLB forms. Some of them really are FAQ, so the use of
this Socratic method is actually quite appropriate.
A true scientist is not afraid or
recalcitrant to modify his hypotheses and conclusions as more
facts are uncovered, and by the very fact that I am acknowledging
them to the public, and disclosing the priviledged information
that requires this action, I am demonstrating my fidelity to
conducting honest research.
Does Hawaii "change their
borders every year?"
The short answer is, "No," and
here's why. After Obama bastardized the word, "Change,"
I should have used a more fitting word, like
"alternate" or "modify." My efforts to obtain
high quality copies of real COLBs produced in each of the eight
years since this form's inception in November 2001, has been
harder than trying to find that proverbial needle in the
haystack. The 2006 COLB was not exaclty what I expected it to
be., but, in reality, it actually confirmed an earlier theory I
had that the borders were not modified every year, but every
other year. I often go on my gut instincts, but they are
not something that can be experimentally qualified.
In my report, I said that "The
COLB borders are changed from year to year as a way to
distinguish them from other genuine COLBS, and from fraudulent
COLBs whose date stamp (and other year-relevant information) does
not corresponds to the border used that year." As it
turns out, Hawaii does modify the borders to thwart would-be
forgers, but they do it every two years rather than every year.
When the new COLB form was literally drawn for the first time in
November 2001, it seems logical that Hawaii might, with only two
months left in 2001, carry over that new border design to the
following year, which was 2002. For 2003, it appears that Hawaii
carried the pattern over to 2003 COLBs.
Although I now have COLB examples for the
years, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2008, I cannot say, with 100%
certainty that the borders in 2004 are different from the
previous pattern, and that the 2004 pattern was also carried over
to 2005, but given that both the 2006 and 2007 COLBs have the
same border, it makes sense that the 2008 border is different
from the previous two. Although it would be helpful to have the
three missing COLBs to complete my collection, I can imagine that
when Hawaii created a new border pattern, they used it for two
successive years before they switched to another pattern.
Here is the 2006 COLB (NOTE: the owner
did the redacting, not me):
Now that we know the 2006 and 2007
borders had the same pattern, and that the 2008 border pattern
was modified, it is logical to assume that the borders for 2004
and 2005 have the same pattern, but are different from either the
2006-2007 COLBs and the 2002-2003 COLBs. Then, when we look at
the border of the bogus Obama 2007 COLB images, we can see that
while they seem similar to the 2006-2007 borders, they also look
different from them.
For comparison purposes, the Factcheck
border corner is shown on the left and since it came from an
alleged 2007 COLB, it should have a border that looks just like a
2007 border. However, now that I see the actual 2006 border, it
looks more like the 2006 border than the 2007 one. Regardless of
which year it is, I said in my final report, that this border was
copied from another image, and overlayed on top of an existing
background image. The telltale signs of this
"Photoshopping" was the more transparent border than
the real ones, and the less defined pattern. The resolution of
this border is much lower than the surrounding background. In
other words, the border is lower in quality than the background
it rests upon.
Has Hawaii "modified their
embossed Seals from year to year?"
The answer to this question will surprise
you as it did me. As you may recall from my report, I
demonstrated that the Seal on the real 2007 COLB looks entirely
different from the Seal on the real COLB, and that the Seal on
Obama's bogus 2007 COLB looks identical to the 2008 Seal. Well,
now, what about that real 2006 COLB I received? What does its
Seal look like? Just like the 2008 Seal!
Now, if you go back to the Seals on the
2002-2003 COLBs, they look identical to the Seal used on the 2007
COLB, but not the 2006 COLB or the 2008 COLB. To put it simply,
the Seal used on all, real 2007 COLBs looks
nothing like the Seals used the year before, or the year after.
Yet, it does look like what was used for 2002 and 2003.
OK, one more time.
Here is the Seal used on a real
2008 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2006 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on a real
2007 COLB:
Here is the Seal used on the OBAMA's
bogus 2007 COLB:
Now, I may have to modify what I said
about the Seal on the Obama's bogus 2007 COLB. I said that is
resembled the 2008 Seal. It also seems to resemble the 2006 Seal.
What it definitely does not resemble is a 2007 Seal.
Either way you slice it, the 2007 Obama
COLB, does not look like a real 2007 COLB; but, hey it does bear
a striking resemblance to a real 2006 COLB. It has a Seal like a
2006 Seal. It has a border that looks more like a 2006 border
than a 2007 border.
Could Obama's bogus 2007 COLB be a forged
image made of 2006 COLB parts? At least!