Expert: 'Forger' of Obama birth record left red herring

President Obama

This is the second in a two-part series of articles examining how researcher Ron Polland duplicated the Obama long-form birth certificate released by the White House April 27 to support his belief that the document is a forgery. The first article detailed the methodology Polland used to deconstruct the White House document for the purpose of constructing his forged version. This article examines Polland's deductions about the alleged forger or forgers.

Researcher Ron Polland, who produced a duplicate of Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate to bolster his argument, believes that the White House-released document was made by a professional forger who created a red herring, intentionally leaving anomalies that could be interpreted as signs of forgery but readily explained.

"The forger was not an amateur and releasing a PDF that looked like an obvious forgery was not an accident," he said.

Autographed copies of Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate?" are available only from the WND Superstore

Polland, who believes there could have been more than one forger, has concluded that the primary forger had a specific appearance in mind for the document. Rather than hide the fact that the PDF was forged, the forger wanted it to be "discovered" initially by critics to be a forgery, he said.

"The forger wanted to create specific anomalies in the PDF that would be interpreted as evidence of forgery, [while] under certain circumstances these anomalies are actually predictable natural outcomes of the software being used," he explained.

The intent, Polland explained, was to enable critics to point to the anomalies as evidence of forgery, so Obama supporters could refute the objections by explaining that the anomalies could be produced, for instance, by running various optimizing, sharpening and adaptive compression procedures resident in Adobe software.

To produce those anomalies, the alleged forger did not "flatten" the PDF file, a process that melds the layers and makes it appear to be a single-layer document.

Polland's expertise includes computer graphics and the use of computer peripherals, such as printers and scanners to input digital images. He earned a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems from Florida State University in 1978 and a masters degree in Educational Research & Psychology from Florida State in 1972.

Polland's conclusions

"I began my analysis by placing myself in the role of the forger and asking questions like, 'What do I need to create first?' and 'How do I create it?'" Polland said. "My plan was to independently identify the features and characteristics of the White House PDF, determine their origin and apply whatever methods I needed to reproduce them under controlled conditions."

After 800 hours of research, forensic testing, reconstruction, retesting and validation, Polland came to the following conclusions:

The primary forger (there may have been more than one) had a specific appearance in mind for his creation. Rather than hide the fact that the PDF was fabricated, he wanted it to be discovered as a forgery. The forger wanted to create specific anomalies that would be interpreted as evidence of forgery, based on the fact that under certain circumstances, these anomalies are actually predictable natural byproducts of the software.
The evidence suggests that more than one forger had a hand in producing the final document as posted; yet, the bulk of the work was done by a single, multitalented individual who had basically finished the PDF prior to a few specific oddities being added to the document prior to publication.
The forger was definitely not an amateur and did not leave the PDF document in an unfinished state by mistake. Except for the oddities added to the document, every feature and anomaly that the primary forger created had a specific purpose for being there and being discovered.
Although Polland's analysis may have been done concurrently and nonlinearly, his final reconstruction of the PDF required more than 100 individual steps to be performed in specific sequences using specific pieces of software. The forger demonstrated an attention for detail much as an artist would.
There are eight major components comprising the construction of the PDF document. Within each of these, there are dozens of subcomponents that had to be produced individually, in order, and then merged into the major components of the hierarchically structured PDF document.
Adding to the complexity of document reconstruction is the fact that many of these components and subcomponents could have been made by more than one method. The only way to be sure of which methods were actually used was to try out each one and then compare and contrast the output to see which one was most likely.
In one or more components, the forger observed a number of protocols in their creation. For example, the contrast or intensity of the black text and graphics determined on which "layer" it would ultimately appear after PDF optimization was applied. A number of deviations from these protocols became "red flags" of forgery.
The White House-released PDF document is a knockoff made from pirated parts, and the sources of these pirated parts are as significant or perhaps more significant than the parts themselves. For example, the signatures of Stanley Ann Dunham Obama and David A. Sinclair were directly copied from known sources and pasted in the forgery.

Use of Adobe software

Polland's experimentation convinced him that the White House PDF was a multi-object file that required various Adobe software products, including Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop, in its production.

"PDF files can be a compilation of many objects," he explained. "However, even if there was a single, flat JPEG image contained within the PDF, that JPEG may have been a composite Photoshop image like the short-form."

He further detailed how his investigation of the White House PDF was a trial-and-error process.

"For example, I did not know what the whitish outline on the security paper was supposed to represent, beyond an attempted enhancing of the black-text template. I did not know that Acrobat leaves behind an outline of the black text and black lines, along with pieces of it, separated from the scan image, and that in some cases, this outline looks somewhat like the whitish outline found in the PDF."

Polland said that it was only when he ran tests in Adobe Acrobat on a variety of scanned sources that he "discovered how adaptive compression separates out the monochrome, grayscale and RGB color components of the scan in order to compress them and save file space."

"Once I discovered this phenomenon, I proceeded to manipulate the source documents and scans and then analyze the results to see if any contained similar phenomena seen in Obama's PDF," he said.

Polland stressed that the alleged forger of the long-form Obama birth certificate "knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted his final creation to be, both from the outside and the inside."

He argued that "the skill set and mindset required to produce an 'amateurish-looking forgery' is more exacting than what is required to make a 'professional-looking forgery.'"

He acknowledged that readers of his analysis may question his thesis and ask, "Why would a forger create a complex PDF document just to have it exposed as a lousy forgery?

"The answer is that the forger wanted to direct people's attention to certain anomalies more than others, knowing that many people would identify anomalies that could also be produced naturally as a function of Adobe Acrobat."

Polland ruled out the argument that Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, was responsible for any of the anomalies observed in the White House PDF by running PDF optimization with and without OCR enabled.

He noted that Hawaii has yet to release from the Hawaii Department of Health vault any of the actual 1961 paper or microfilm Obama birth records that the department may have on file.

"The original 1961 birth records are not accessible, only image copies of them, and that is the rub," he said. "Images can easily be manipulated, whereas actual paper or microfilm birth records are hard to fabricate."

Why a second forger?

Polland said that as he "came to discover how each of the features and anomalies were created, and appreciate how much time and effort was required, I could not imagine that the same individual would then add a number of incongruous and frivolous features to his masterpiece."

He pointed, as examples, to the "smiley face" on the registrar's stamp, the odd-looking "X" or "K" in place of the letter "H" in the 'THE' of the registrar's stamp and the white "butterfly dot patterns" seen at the top and bottom of the document."

As far as Polland was concerned, the effort to create the forgery was monumental, and the addition of oddball features undermined that effort.

WND has previously reported on the "smiley face" in the loop of the "A" in the name of registrar Alvin T. Onaka, the "X" or K" in the registrar's stamp and the "butterfly dot patterns", which, he observed, are also separate layers that were added last to the document.

The 'Polland Forgery'

For comparison purposes, Exhibit 1 shows the long-form birth certificate released by the White House, while Exhibit 2 shows the recently completed Polland forgery.

Exhibit 1: Obama long-form birth certificate released April 27 by the White House

Exhibit 2: Ron Polland forgery of Obama long-form birth certificate

The easiest way to distinguish the Polland forgery from the White House-released document is to observe that the date of the registrar's stamp in Polland's forgery is March 15, 2011, while the date of the stamp in the White House document is April 25, 2011.

A PDF file of the Polland forgery is obtainable here. It allows readers with Adobe software to examine how its multiple layers and various links compare with the layers and links observable in the White House PDF.