#1: Agreed.
#2: I don’t know of any scanning software that randomly assigns colors to specific characters. That’s just wierd.
#3: Go look at the file in 400% enlargement, and tell me you think the “S” and the “TANLEY” came from the same source. Trust your eyes.
Regarding #4: The date is a stamp, the kind with rolling months, days and years. Nobody wrote anything. You can tell it is a stamp because it is fully aligned off-horizontal. But the “AUG 8, 196” looks is one color, and the “1” is a whole different color, resolution, background, etc.
#5: I’m no expert. I’m offering an avenue of investigation. Just me and my eyes (I’m a photographer, so I look at enlarged stuff all the time) tell me there was a cut and paste job, and not a very good one. When I go retouch a photo, I can handle each pixel if I want to. Someone cut-and-pasted whole letters here, in my non-expert opinion.
Some scanners use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to add a higher contrast to characters that it recognizes as a font. For fonts it doesn’t recognize, it can just scan them individually as pixels. I’m not sure if that’s what’s happened here, but I know having worked and scanned enough documents that letters sitting next to each other can come through looking quite differently.
It’s the same as the 10641 number at the top of the COLB. The final 1 appears quite different than the first 1 even though they all appear on the same line in the same format.
There is most definitely something really fishy about the date stamp in blocks 20 and 22. The “1” in 1961 is perfect, and looks like it has been inserted over what was there before.