> There are conceivable reasons why they may be telling a half truth here. Just engaging the public is a worthy goal here.

Asserting an ulterior motive without supporting proof is to engage in conspiracy theories.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[0]

0 - https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/12/just-a-cigar/

The alternative is me saying that appealing to their “expertise” is an appeal to authority fallacy that flies in the face of general evidence that modern OCR is far better than humans at character recognition. Especially random non specialized humans.

Fair point.

It doesn't look like a cigar (very tricky documents) though. Hence the skepticism.