This is the true story of DCFFKBC.
Dr. Conspiracy
For a long time, I have been a commentator on Obama conspiracies. Prompted by Lucas Smith’s appearance here, I decided to get a little more involved and become a character in the story too — I hired a detective.
The detective was not someone who contacted me, but someone I more or less randomly selected from a directory of private detectives in Kenya. I gave him this task:
I want to obtain a copy of a birth certificate for any person (preferably deceased) born in 1961, and issued by the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa. My interest is in the characteristics of the certificate, and not information about any particular individual. I would want to receive a scanned copy of the document via email.
What I received in return was the certificate following, which had my name on it. The detective explained that this is what a certificate looks like, not that of a real person. I have redacted identifying information from the certificate, just because I expect it will get passed around a lot and I don’t know what if anything on it is for an actual person, nor exactly what part of it is authentic and what part is a mockup. One obvious defect (among several) in the image it is that the font is wrong for the year of birth.
Dr. Conspiracy's First Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate (click to enlarge)
When I explained that I wanted a hospital-issued certificate, the detective went from Nairobi to Mombasa and contacted the hospital to see if a certificate could be obtained. I posed a few questions about what years the hospital had records for, whether they issued certified copies, and when Dr. Maganga was Chief Administrator. The detective submitted the questions and the certificate request in writing to the hospital. While waiting for a response, he told me that the official dates of Heltan Mananga’s tenure as Chief Administrator were June 1, 2009 – December 4, 2010.
The Questions
1) Do they keep birth records as far back as 1961?
2) Do they issue certified copies of birth certificates?
3) On what date did Heltan Maganga become Chief Administrator of the hospital?
4) If they do issue birth certificates and have data from 1961, will they give you one? If they have privacy objections, could they photocopy a 1961 certificate and CUT AWAY the name of the parent and child?
This is when the story gets really strange.
My detective suddenly started talking strangely, saying that I had not told him the whole truth and that we were opening “pandora’s box.” He said he had a certificate and a letter from the hospital, “you know deep down whoz mane is in that doc” (my detective doesn’t type very well) and that he expected more money for his trouble than I had paid him. He asked for a total of $1,000. I must hasten to say that the detective never actually said whose name was on his certificate, but since I didn’t specify any particular person among the hundreds if not thousands of children born at the Coast hospital in 1961, I cannot think otherwise than that he meant me to think Barack Obama.
I told him that I had no interest in a fake Barack Obama certificate, but the detective insisted that what he had wasn’t fake. He vehemently said in a series of emails that he and his company didn’t deal in fakes. He had “spy cam” video. I told him to go home and that is basically the end of the story.
The detective was leading me on about more money, but it was not until after he went to the hospital that his notes became animated and he started speaking in riddles. This leads me to think that that Coast Province General Hospital staff are well-aware of the quest for Obama birth certificates and told the detective about it. After much consideration, I think the detective probably has a birth certificate for someone and a letter answering my questions, and spy cam footage of him obtaining the certificate. However, he thinks he can obtain much more money from me by trying to make me think through vague hints and code language that the certificate is that of Barack Obama.
I’m not going to pay him any money for a promise, nor any money for a fake Obama certificate. Some may conclude from the story that Barack Obama really was born in Kenya and that I am too biased to admit it. I can’t help what people think. All I can say for sure is that I paid a few hundred bucks for an education.
Perhaps we’ve proven that Doc isn’t an NBC and was really born in Kenya?
Dr. Conspiracy’s First Fake Kenyan Birth Certificate
Are we to infer there will be more? 🙂
USURPER !!!!!!
7 years between the date of birth and registration? That’s one hell of a delay
I suppose it proves that for the right price you can get a piece of paper saying whatever you want in Kenya.
And most any where else, I think.
I sure hope not.
I eagerly await the birtherstani response to this post…
I wonder if there is a store like Staples in Kenya where one goes and gets books of official documents. This looks like it was torn out of such a book, then folded and mussed up and then typed on It looks like the typewriter is a carbon ribbon type rather than ink ribbon because the letters are crisp.
Unless it’s an optical illusion, it looks like the document was folded vertically so that the printing was on the outside. Wouldn’t it be more logical to fold it inward?
This is why I think debates over documents and fonts and registration numbers and who was director of a hospital when are playing the game on the birther’s field. The real argument is over narratives. One narrative is of a young mother giving birth where she, her parents and her husband lived and where excellent medical care was available. This narrative makes sense and is true. The other narrative involves a 22,000 mile return trip, birth in a place where the mother knew not a soul, in a country in the midst of a conflict wiith less than superb medical facilities. This narrative makes no sense and is false.
Now many here are lawyers and are looking at documents from the perspective of what is needed in a court of law. But, as we all know, this case is never going to be in a court of law. The only court that matters is the court of public opinion. And in that court, the best narrative wins. The O-Bots not only have the better narratiive, they have the only narrative. That, not documents, is where the focus should be.
Hi Dr Conspiracy!
I support what you have done. I rarely (though I do sometimes) find anyone (supporter or skeptic) that is willing to conduct field research and much less pay several hundred dollars for it!
I’m pretty busy right now so I wont be able to post a whole lot on your blog but I will try to do some posting here.
I do have to point out that the birth certificate that you have displayed (that your the detective supplied you with) is NOT A COPY of an ORIGINAL BIRTH RECORD. It’s basically an abstract’ which is certifying that a birth was registered on such and such date under such and such name in such and such location.
Furthermore, the heading on the certificate reads “Republic of Kenya”. This is NOT a Kenya Colony document or a Kenya Protectorate document and certainly not a hospital record (no doctor listed or other authorized staff member listed).
However, the template of the Kenya Republic document could be real (though I have some real doubts).
Lastly, in your new blog report you claim that procuring a birth certificate in Kenya (in any name) appears to be easier, and much cheaper than $5000. I, Lucas, don’t believe that that is true. Thatt is not supported by the facts that you present
The birth certificate that you have displayed in your new blog report is not a new (2009, 2010 or 2011) certified copy of an older birth record. What you have displayed, if the photocopy digital image (at least somewhat altered to display your name) of an authentic abstract of birth (or rather, supposedly authentic) from 1968.
I’d like to see someone present a tangible (not digital image) FAKE 2011 certified copy with embossed seal a signature (of a real person working at CPGH now) of a CPGH birth record from 1961. …..Doc, I don’t think that would be easy and I don’t think the price would be cheap and furthermore I DONT BELIEVE THAT IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE.
However, if you’d like to take the challenge I welcome you to make contact again with someone in Kenya and request such a FAKE document. Again, I don’t think you be able to get one.
In any event, I was at that hospital on February 19th, 2009. And I remember very much the people that I talked with there on that day and I’m sure that at least one or maybe two of them remember me very well too.
I think that your field research is fantastic and I wish that I’d see more of it from others (whether they be a skeptic, supporter or impartial).
Lucas D. Smith
Doc
I think you should put it on Ebay ASAP – for publicity purposes only, of course. 😉
It’s highly unlikely – if you were there, why did you get a document stamped by an administrator that couldn’t spell his own name and wouldn’t start the job for over 3 months?
Whether or not that is true, I don’t know (though I doubt it). What I do know for sure is that Stanley Ann Dunham was not there on August 4, 1961 (or ever).
At 7:24 pm as the real birth certificate from Hawaii and the clumsy forgery both state.
I was hoping you would drop by and comment. The detective offered to send me the paper copy by mail as part of the $1,000, along with spy cam videos of him talking to the hospital folks. Of course I won’t ever see those without forking over the money, and then again I may not see them if I did. You should have taken a spy cam with you 😉
By the way, I sent the detective a copy of “your” certificate and asked him if it looked like “his”. I don’t know what real information would come from an answer one way or another, but I thought I would ask anyway.
If your story is true, you were ripped off. Since you are a convicted forger, you should have realized how easy it would be for others to prove its falsity? Why didn’t you investigate the hospital enough to know what its correct name was, who the administrator was and what its DNS entry was? In addition to being dishonest, intellectually dishonest, and intellectually lazy you think that everyone else is in the same boat. You should think again.
Would it have said 1924 instead of 7:24pm?
Possibly but more importantly, the likelihood of it being a fluke or coincidence is ludicrous. It’s just one more flag in a growing list of ineptness on the part of a forger.
Birth certificates are supposed to be user-friendly documents. I’ve seen certificates in state databases that looked like “19:24 AM” [sic]. I’ve seen kids born on February 31. I’ve seen children and their mothers born on the same date. People not in the profession have no idea what garbage there is in old databases.
I can’t think of any scenario whereby somebody on the hospital staff would produce a certificate listing a Chief Administrator who was not then, nor ever before, the Chief Administrator. The POSFKBC could only have been made/issued after June 1, 2009.
Let’s posit that Lucas Smith was really somewhere in Africa in February, 2009. If he made the certificate after June 1, he might have back dated it to the time he was in Africa. I’m totally guessing here.
> The other narrative involves a 22,000 mile return trip, birth in a place where the mother knew not a soul, in a country in the midst of a conflict wiith less than superb medical facilities. This narrative makes no sense and is false.
The most recent birther take on that issue is that supposedly 1960 was the “Year of Africa” and “an African man would have done anything to have his son born in Africa”. Obviously that includes traveling the long route from Nairobi to Mombasa when the wife could have given birth in Nairobi without a problem.
The argument smells of more racism. The “this black man was so full of self-centered racial pride he forced his pregnant white wife to take a journey half across the world into the wilderness” line of thought.
1. The President was born in 1961 not 1960
2. They would have known the sex of the baby before birth in those pre-ultrasound days.
3. When my wife was pregnant, I couldn’t have gotten her to go to the mountaiins for the weekend, never mind Africa.
The story is absurd. No document, however realistic the font, makes it less absurd. Anymore than the beautiful paper Bernie Madoff printed his statements on meant he could earn 12% every single year, regardless of the markets.
As I’ve said numerous times, Lying Lucas, I, Smith, didn’t have a fake BC when he first launched his Ebay scam. That’s why it took so long before he showed the BC in a video – almost two months if I remember correctly. It took him that long to come up with something to show people.
I believe this was Lying Lucas, I, Smith, trying to get anything that would work:
http://www.africaguide.com/forums/read.php?9,19444
http://www.africaguide.com/forums/read.php?9,19776
Notice the dates. Lying Lucas, I, Smith’s first Ebay attempt was on June 26th. The first link above is June 27th, 2009. Lying Lucas, I, Smith’s first video showing the fake BC was after July 27th, which is the date seen in the 2nd link above.
And finally, Kahunah in the second link is Jim Byrne, aka mocorrupt.
Regardless of all the smoke and mirrors and floating Virgin Marys, Lying Lucas, I, Smith’s story falls apart because Maganga was not the Chief guy in February, 2009. As Dr. C points out, the BC was made later on, after Maganga was in charge…and Lying Lucas, I, Smith, failed to research who was in charge in February….of course, prior to naming February, Lying Lucas, I, Smith, claimed “Spring.” So many lies, so little honor.
I had forgotten about the Africa Guide posts. Fun reading. While reading that thread again I found your link to the site where Lucas was trying to sell his house and claimed the Virgin Mary had appeared there. Maybe the Virgin Mary dropped off the Kenyan BC on one of her visits, kerning and all.
http://usabig.com/atnmst/obama_bc_files/houseforsalevirginmary.html
> Maybe the Virgin Mary dropped off the Kenyan BC on one of her visits, kerning and all.
Nah, I guess she would have known the exact birth date of Obama Sr. 😉
When then there would be a new conspiracy in Obama Sr.’s exact birth date. Who provided the date?
Maria Virgine (Gregorian Calendar)
Theotokos (Greek, Julian Calendar)
Or maybe he just answered “African” when asked his race by the hospital in Hawaii 😉
There’s no one like the birhters for scoring ‘own goals’… (and being completely unaware of the fact).
BTW, my detective is still asking for more money.
I am coming to the conviction that the detective actually has a 1961 birth certificate from the Coast Hospital and a letter answering my questions, and spy cam video of the whole thing.
What I think is happening is that when he went to the hospital he learned of the whole Obama thing and thought he could get more money out of me intimating that the certificate was that of “you know who”.
I’m not going to play that game. I asked him flat out whose name was on the certificate. If the answer is Obama, then we’re done. If it’s someone else, then there may be room to bargain.
Doc is outed as the Usurper Fake Doc Conspiracy and the same week, the RSS feeds for the site stop updating for about the day (at least on my Google Reader).
SEE, IT ALL FITS!!!
I am not sure what it fits into but, why bother with trifles.
Articles in the Lounge category don’t appear in the RSS feed.
There you go again, dubunking another conspiracy. 😛
Looks like an enterprising bunch at CPGH.
It’s a more honorable way of making a buck than birhter paypal buttons in my book… At least Doc would be getting some sort of forgery in return.
I don’t really nderstand why it takes so long to end this Lucas hoax. The flaws have been pointed out: wrong chief administrator and wrong spelling of the wrong chief administrator’s name. They way to verify it is quite simle but first a few things need to be cleared:
Coast PGH is a government owned Hospital
The Chief administrator is a public officer
The governing authorities are the Ministery of health
http://www.statehousekenya.go.ke/government/health.htm
and the Ministery of Medical Services
http://www.medical.go.ke/
they both can be contacted
plus there is the statutory body for registering medical practitioners
http://www.medicalboard.co.ke/
all these can be enquired without the need of private document investigators (who are basically scammers)
I have rewritten the last part of this article.
Thanks for the helpful collection of links. The detective was hired to get a sample birth certificate from the Coast Hospital in 1961, which I think would be difficult to do over the phone. The dates for Mananga just came up later in the discussion. I am coming into agreement with your comment that the detective is a scammer.
and the scammer’s dates are most probably wrong since Maganga has been quoted as CA well into 2011.
But I would like to make some speculation at this point.
1 Why has the date FEb 19th been used on the certificate ?
2 Who made this certificate ?
3 Did Lucas act alone or did he receive the fake from someone else ?
1. Most commenters have concluded that this date was a slip in an otherwise fairly well conceived hoax. In my opinion the date could have been drawn from another fake document similar to the one you posted. The document needed to be “americanized” for propaganda purposes: it had to seem perfect vis-a-vis the Obama Colb. The information gathered had to be reorganized in a birther-friendly format. Another point to be made is that Lucas, a notorious forger-scammer, needed to embed his “personal signature” on the document on order to sell it
as a personal adventure (and profit out of it).
The date stamp is his personal signature. This is what makes the entire Kenya-trip, his personal heroic feat, the cornerstone. In the aftermath I would say this a was a brillinat mediatic intuittion.
So why Feb 19th ? The question is still open but there must be a reason and my guess is that this was the date of issuing of the master-document. The master document had been obtained in a way much similar to yours from kenyan forgers (an industry in that country). An American forger somehow jumped along to make it birther proof.
2 I believe this certificate has a long story and it leads to WND and Jerome Corsi and his arrest in Kenya in Oct 2008. This document is based upon the “October surprise” which has never seen the light thanks to Kenyan police who, IMHO, acted under US democrats advice.
Following his arrest Corsi was met by a representative of the American embassy a highly unusual procedure. It is sad how our overpowerful news industry can loose all curiosity when having to investigate and not simply comment. Anyway this was when the contacts to the local forgers had been established by WND. The one question to be answered is why Lucas felt the desperate need to contacd WND-Farah after his e-bay bids. Or was it the other way round ?
Corsi was very promt to debunk Lucas forgery with the assistance of his “local contacts”
3 Lucas got his hands on a forged document and went on to personalize it. This is when the conflict with WND starts.
document forgery is seen as a cancerous problem in Kenya:
On Youtube you can find a lengthy documentary in three parts made by Kenya’s NTV called
“The Masters of Forgery” (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3)
After having viewed it you will agree with me that forgery is an industry in Kenya and , as you have seen yourself, obtaining a false kenyan BC for Sarah Palin is relatively easy.
Can you provide a citation?
I had considered this, but if Kenyan forgers were making Obama certificates, wouldn’t we expect to have seen a lot more of them by now?
just backchecked. I mixed up 2011 and 2010. No references found by me for 2011. Sorry Doc
all is possible but you must consider that the document forgery industry is quite lucrative even without Obama thanks the Kenyan bureaucracy that makes the incessant production of documents a nightmare for ordinary Kenyans.(these are the sort of things that sooner or later lead to revolts)
As many semiauthoritarian Nations, Kenya has instituted since indipendence, a powerful bureaucracy that demands all sorts of certificates for all sorts of things. Here we have this terrible habit of reading everything through American lenses so we tend to assume that we are somwhat setting the guidilines for proper bureaucracy and the ensuing pile of certificates, certifications, etc. The US was in fact one of the LAST industrialized nations to institute mandatory registration for births, and it’s introduction was much criticized at the time. Also we don’t understand the concept of Public Hospitals and how they differ from private ones.
We in fact cannot cope with the fact that WE are the (positive) exception to a general rule of heavy breaucracy and rigid procedures. This distorted viewpoint is what makes us fall into the birther trap and have us search in the wrong direction (for example demanding view of Lucas’ Kenyan passport VISA, or Mombasea Hotel receipts) instead of simply enquiring the competent authorities.
There are no misteries here: either he is Heltan or he is Helton
and the government statutory body says he is Heltan
signed by the official public registrar
http://www.medicalboard.co.ke/
either he was or he wasn’t the Chief Administrator.
This could be found by enquiring for the official ACT of Appointment and this site could be very useful – the National Council for Law Reporting
http://www.kenyalaw.org/klr/index.php
an authoritarian beraucratic State is what birthers seem to desire. A State capable of excluding form citizenship all those born to single mothers, born outside hospitals, born to underage mothers (a monstruous illegal human). A State that refuses affidavits and privacy, a State based upon preemptive mistrust of its’ own citizenry. They feel the ridiculous comfort of having abided to Law with their own birth. Somewhat like the pride of being born Arianin in Nazi germany.
But one thing absurd I would like to ask these advocates of the Super bureaucracy:
how About Obama being born in Kenya without him knowing about it ?
would his foreign birth amount to treason or to the equivalent of the original sin ?
Or would it be comparable to a German discovering his Jewish ancestry after the SS having told him so ?
Come on, Lucas, my dear little forger, you know very well why this template must be a forgery. Look carefully, the mention “Coast province” is not in the name of the hospital. It says Mombasa District in Coast Province and claims to be from 1968.
Remember our little dispute about that? A hospital could conceivably maintain its old name for five-sisx years, but an actual administartion of births would use the correct term.
For those who have no idea what that little joke was about (it seems that in the birfer world everything gets reloaded and recycled), there was no such thing as a Coast Province between 1962/3 and 1970. Kenya’s seven primary divisions (1963 saw the birth of the eighth, North-Eastern, formed from Northern and part of Coast) were called Regions. In 1970, Coast Region, now reduced, was renamed Coast Province.
Do not forget that when Obama was born, hospitals in Nairobi were still segregated.
LOL! Sort of like finding a Roman coin with the date XIV BC.
Well, a little bit different, since “Coast Province” was founded by the British. So, it is more like a birth certificate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo issued in 1990.
If “Coast Province” were in the name of the Hospital, it would be less of a giveaway. A hospital could still have stationery from years before, or could have kept its name for some time.
Sorry for confusing everybody (except Lucas, of course).
What I meant to say was that in 1962/3 the Kenyan Provinces were renamed Regions. In 1970, the Regions again became Provinces. The Coast province of 1970 was smaller than 1962 Coast province, however.
It was part of a de-Europeanization phase in all Africa, that sometimes went mad, as in Congo/Zaire/Congo. At a time when other African countries actually returned to sanity, Zaire’s dictator Mobutu decided to zairize all names, even his own. When he went, the name Zaire went with him, in 1997.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,905656,00.html
And yet you can’t even provide a single piece of documentation showing that you have been to Kenya at all! Or Africa!
At least you are entertaining, Lucas.
Actually the only bit I remember reading about your alleged visit to Kenya on the net was a post by a Kenyan barrister (who may or may not have been legitimate — who knows?) who claimed it never happened and called you a fraud in rather colorful terms. (They seem to know who you are indeed.)
I wouldn’t consider that evidence per se, but it’s interesting that even purported Kenyans call you a liar.