Hi folks.

When Hans initially posted the club shot and Natalee side-by-side I tried it on a couple of people without preamble for their reaction. It was exactly the same as my initial reaction - there is "something wrong" with the Natalee-stranger in the club shot; it "doesn't fit" in the context somehow.

So I tried taking the two images and superimposed them using Merge, aligning on the eye pupils. It was very easy to get a good fit in several key elements such as the mouth. Too easy, and too good.

I then tried supering Natalee with *herself* using other known Natalee shots and got more of the result I was expecting - they matched, but didn't match very well and took quite a bit of work to get them even to that point.

Therefore, much as I hate to agree with the Monkeys on anything, I have to conclude that not only is the face of the girl in the club shot Natalee, it's a skilled morph of the very shot Hans posted alongside.

Fashion, p00rn and scandal rags have been doing this sort of thing for years now and the "cosmetic surgery" to nose bob, cheek bones, smile lines, &c, is simply a restrained application of exactly the same technique that turns Judge Judy et al in l'il Shango.

In the bad old days of darkrooms it was called "retouching" or "dodging".

So in a case riddled with fabricated "evidence" here's another item to confuse the issues.

As far as the rest of the Monkey logic is concerned (a plot to prove Natalee is alive); without at least something like a newspaper dated post May 30 2005 in view the shot isn't evidence of anything except the skill of the person who created it.

Tues Mar 27, 2007

Gregor Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 8:38 am

If it's an altered picture to prove Natalee is alive wouldn't it have been widely distributed, especially in the U.S.?

"If it's ... to prove Natalee is alive ..."

I don't think it is.

I'm reminded of some nonsense around the time of the de Veries show concerning Joran paying someone (excessively) to photoshop Natalee into a picture with him.

So I suspect a black sense of humor. I once knew a darkroom operator for a newspaper who would, for example, give some of the schoolgirls in the netball team shot subtle breast enhancements by carefully 'dodging' or darkening shaded areas - long before Photoshop - purely to see what he could get away with.

Whoever did this has demonstrated quite considerable graphics skills, and as we have clearly seen HMI are not the sharpest set of steak knives (e.g. the Boycott, the Renfro Statement, and now the Boston demo).

So if it's not just idle doodling by an artist, or someone having a good chuckle up their sleeve at all of us who still follow this case ("that'll confuse 'em, heh heh"), then it may be taken as a warning lesson to keep some healthy skepticism even when we are looking at "gold plated evidence" such as Lee Broughton's dynamite FBI302.

In the overlays she has been carefully aged, for example removing residual puppy-fat and highlighting cheek bones by changing non-critical shading areas on the cheeks. And while her eyebrows have been hijacked north a la Shango, the critical areas of the mouth and particularly the eyes have been treated very minimally - mainly introducing red-eye to match the other girls and to cover up the signature reflection of the lighting of the source shot. It's a much more skilled job than the Skeeters tape (and I "dips me lid" to the artist).

I want to be quite clear I'm not finger-pointing, just reporting my observations, and that this pic could have orginated anywhere upstream from the Powerpoint presentation where it was found, and for all sorts of reasons that have nothing material to do with this case.

De-conflating Gregor's question; yes, (IMO) it's a fake; and no, it wasn't done to prove anything.

If it contained something in the background like an airliner, building or earthwork that didn't exist in May 2005 it would be an entirely different matter. But apart from "Natalee" having apparently matured in the face a bit and got a nice tan, there is nothing to date this at all, or to show that it is genuine.

While I'm sure it has been Skeeterised I can't go long with the HMI logic that it's part of a deep plot. They see plots under every bush and we should remain careful not to be seduced to even partly buy into their paranoia.