(BJNews, November 02, 2001)      On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City, and attacked the Pentagon in Washington DC. Exactly a week later on September 18th, three letters were sent supposedly containing powdered anthrax spores. Two of the letters were sent to the New York Post and Tom Brokaw in New York City. The third letter was sent to Senator Tom Daschle in Washington DC. The letters appear to be dated 09-11-01 but that is deceiving. All that can be known is that the letters were written after the 9-11-01 terror attack and before the postmarked date of 9-18-01.      Shortly after the letters were received, the FBI did numerous tests on the letters to confirm the powdered contents were in fact anthrax, and apparently other tests were done to determine who was the author. A week later the FBI posted photo images of the letters and envelopes on the Internet. The FBI has announced a large million dollar monetary reward leading to the arrest and conviction of the author of the letters. But this will never happen.

     The simple reason is because the author of the letters is a six year old boy, who had no knowledge of the reason for writing the letters and thus is not guilty of any crime. The person who sent the letters is most probably the father of the young boy, but even still, the person guilty of sending bio-hazardous material through the mails will also not be found, as I will show later. But first, who wrote the letters.

     Most people who see the photos of the "anthrax" letters and envelopes notice the curious writing style and the sloping lettering of the addresses. Most people reading the letters have been misdirected to believe they were written by some crazed terrorist either foreign or "home-grown," meaning someone in the U.S. Most theories assume the author was a bin Laden follower from Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, or possibly even an American "hate group." A more recent theory includes such groups as American Wiccans, though no reason has been presented for including this group other than to add to the confusion of finding the sender.

     First, it is easy to show that all three letters were written and addressed by the same person. By looking at the letter "O" and zeroes, which all slope upward to the right, it can be shown that the writer is right-handed. This would also help to indicate why the addresses all slope downward to the right.

     The lettering style itself would seem most curious, but is quite simply the modified uncial style of lettering taught in American kindergarten and early first grade classes, using only all upper case letters. During most first grade classes young students learn both the upper and lower case alphabets. This would show the author of the letters went through kindergarten last year, and in the first weeks of September of this year when the letters were written had just started first grade but still had not yet learned the lower case letters. Nonetheless, to simulate the capital letters of proper nouns the students are taught to make the first letter larger. In all cases, on the anthrax letters and envelopes the writer uses this modified uncial style indicating that the author is a young boy just starting first grade in September 2001. Thus showing clearly the writer is about 6 years old.

     Could this style of writing be "hoaxed" by an adult attempting to appear to be a youngster? Possibly, but most adults would either write in the full block letter uncial style with all the letters the same size, or simply not being aware that early first graders during the first weeks of September use the modified uncial style, the adult would use blocky but scrawled upper and lower case letters. Most adults are not aware that the modified uncial style indicates a very narrow age range of learning skills and child development, and thus this unique style would probably never be used by an adult attempting to write like a child.

     This is further confirmed by the sloping lines of the addresses on the envelopes. This is typical of young children who do not have the writing experience to notice that the lines on the envelope do not line up with the edges of the envelope. At this age and stage of child development, just learning to color pictures with a crayon and staying within the lines is a great challenge. The ability to use spacial perception and eye-hand coordination to place writing or pictures centered on a page or within the confines of a small object such as an envelope does not develop until around the age of 7 or 8. Thus the writer of the addresses simply did not notice or could not perceive that the letters sloped downward to the right. To him, simply applying the addresses line by line on the face of the envelope was sufficient.

    Since the author was a young child and was seemingly copying the addresses from another piece of paper or book, the child simply used his left hand to slightly rotate his hand and the envelope upward to the left to start each address line. The child typically would rest his left hand on the envelope to hold the paper in place and use the first finger of the left hand as a writing guide. As each line is written the left hand would move the envelope upward (actually rotated) and then the left hand would be moved back down to the new writing spot thus covering up the writing of the previous line. Again with the left index finger being used as a writing guide.

     The young writer probably had never addressed an envelope before and did not notice that this simple procedure for both holding the envelope in place for writing on a small piece of paper and using the left index finger as a guide would result in each line sloping increasingly downward. On all of the envelopes, lines can be drawn through each text line and they would converge at a point just to the left of the envelope.

     This convergence point of the text lines is the position of the heel of the palm where the child rested his left hand while holding the envelope and is the pivot point for rotating the envelop for each succeeding line. Assuming the envelopes were standard letter size then the distance from the center of the envelope to the palm heel pivot point, or the distance from the tip of the writer's index finger to the heel of the palm is only about four inches.

     Again this shows the writer is a very young child. For most adults the index finger tip to palm heel distance is six inches or greater. For an adult simulating child-like writing and using this same procedure the convergence point for the sloping lines would be about four inches beyond the left edge of the envelope, not as is observed about two inches. This would result in sloping lines but with far less degree of slope. Thus again confirming the author of the anthrax letters was, indeed, a young boy of six.

     To further confirm that the author was a young child just entering an American first grade is the nature of the date 09-11-01. Most other countries of the world use a standard date format of day-month-year or 11-09-01, and not the American style of month-day-year. Most older children and adults use a slash to separate the numerals, as in "09/11/01," rather than the typical first grader who is taught to use the hyphens, "09-11-01." Another confirmation of the age and nationality of the child is the style of making the numeral one. In American schools the child is taught to make the numeral one with a small sloping flag on the left top of the vertical line and with a small horizontal line at the bottom. This is to distinguish for the child the difference between a numeral one and the uncial style upper case letter "I," which is simply a vertical line.

     In most foreign countries, children are usually taught to make a numeral "one" with only the top flag to distinguish from the capital "I," but with no horizontal line at the bottom. This style of foreign numeral 1 may occasionally appear similar to the numeral 7 if poorly written. Then to distinguish between the foreign numeral 1's and 7's most foreign children are taught to draw a short horizontal line across the middle of the numeral 7. Most adults in the world other than Americans write the Arabic numerals with the 7 having the mid-cross line and the numeral 1 having only the top flag like a very narrow 7. If a foreigner were to be the author of the anthrax letters then the numeral 1 would not have the bottom horizontal line. Again confirming the author was a young American child.

     In analyzing the three letters, it can be shown the child who wrote them had no idea what they were for, since they are not in the style of a letter. If you ignore the contents of the text of the letters and only look at the shape and format of the text, then they, in fact, have the style of a poem. What appears to be the date of the top of the letter is not the actual date, but is the "title" of the "poem." On the envelopes the sizes of the letters and numerals are the same. In the text of the letters the "09-11-01" at the top is much larger and almost centered above the text as if it were the title or theme of the poem or text below. Most children do not write in this style so it was most probably dictated by the boy's father, who may have told the child it was a joke to be played on some people who would think it was funny and the "poem" was about the theme of the "09-11-01" incident.

     The process of having the youngster carefully address the envelopes and then write the letters was so tiring and time consuming for such a young boy, that in fact, he did not write three letters but only two. The first letter was most probably the one to Daschle. It is the longest with seven lines in the "poem." But this was too much work, so for the next letter the preamble of four lines was shorted to just two lines. The second letter was the one sent to Brokaw. At this point the youngster became so fatigued with writing "joke" poems that the father simply photocopied or computer scanned the Brokaw letter and then trimmed the paper to fit into the envelope for the NY Post letter.

     This copying of the third letter is not obvious by merely inspecting the FBI photos since the text appears to be different sizes, so I have adjusted the sizes of the photos here so that the size of the text lettering is the same. By looking at the number of corrections made by the now fatigued child, such as the double crossing of the tops of the T's and the double lines on the letter A's, the sloppier formation of the uncial letters, and the exact same relative positions of all the characters in both texts, it is clear the Brokaw and NY Post letters are exactly the same and not just traced or hand copied by an adult but were actually photocopied on to different sized paper. On the original handwritten text of the Brokaw letter note that the "title" is centered at the top of the page.

BROKAW LETTER

NEW YORK POST LETTER

     Thus it is shown that the FBI will never arrest and convict the "writer" of the anthrax letters, since the young boy who wrote them is innocent and had nothing to do with the crime of sending the letters. But what of the boy's father? Won't the FBI catch and convict the actual perpetrator who committed the crime? I think not.

     If you read the book "Black Gold Hot Gold" you would notice that the sending of anthrax tainted letters to media and government people in New York and Washington DC has more to do with meeting the goals of the "Empire of Energy," and not any foreign terrorist group or home-grown militant hate-group. Thus the chances of the FBI actually catching the real criminal is somewhere between slim and none. To appease the public, some scapegoat may be caught and tried with fictitious evidence, but the actual perpetrator will go scot-free. Why? Because nobody is looking for him. The clear evidence for that is coming in the next article, "Sending the Anthrax Letters."