Willy Wonka and the Ra^thergate Forgery

Wizbang is covering an interesting coda to the Ra^thergate story. A professor in Utah has done an analysis of the CBS memos claiming that he has been able to reproduce them (the web pages in question have mysteriously disappeared, so no link for now). Oddly, however, the way he reproduced them was by using a computer typeface that was created in 1974, two years after the memos were supposedly written. Not only that, but that font, ITC American Typewriter Condensed Medium, was made as an homage to classic typewriter fonts. It is not an exact replica of any real typewriter font. AND...there are very clear differences between that font and the font used in the CBS forged memos, the most obvious of which is the number "4." In the reproduction made by the professor, the "4" has a foot. In the memos, it does not.

But wait! There's more...The House of David catches another problem with the professor's analysis: he compares the on-screen version of Times New Roman with the memos, instead of the printed-out version. Meanwhile, Shape of Days checks the memos against Adobe's American Typewriter Std Condensed, and can't get a match with that either.

Here's the last bit of weirdness: if you search Google for the name of the place where this professor supposedly works (the "Interactive Media Research Laboratory" at the University of Utah), you only get 36 hits. The ones that go that group's actual website are currently non-functioning, a couple are from the University of Utah's English department, and the rest of the links are blog links from the last day or so. Could it be that this professor is a sort of digital Willy Wonka, and is actually conducting some kind of research into how the blogosphere works? That would almost make more sense than the ham-handed reproduction attempts.

UPDATE (12:48PT 10/01/04):
No, apparently this was a real attempt at verifying the memos. 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes was counting on them to as a defense. Wizbang has the goods.

UPDATE II (3:24PT 10/01/04):
A Bluegrass Blog has a very interesting post regarding some of the work Mary Mapes did when she was still with KIRO TV in Seattle.

UPDATE III (12:08am PT 10/06/04): Reader NOYBW points out that I have confused Dr. Hailey's workplace - he's with the Interactive Media Laboratory at Utah State, not the University of Utah. Hence my limited findings when Googling him. Thanks for the correction.