posted 01-21-2011 05:01 PM               

About 20 years ago while I was sent to our factories in Boston and Austin for six week at a time. I would spend my free weekends going to various collector shows (I was mainly looking for George Reeves Superman and Clayton Moore Lone Ranger items for myself). I decided it might be a good time to also collect a few special items for my children. I thought the best thing would be signed 8x10 Apollo 11 photos. I ate cheap during the week, and saved my perdiem money for investing into these photos.

After asking several people's advise, I decided to try to collect inscribed items when possible, because they were much less likely to be forgeries or autopens. I have three children (now in their mid 20's) and I wanted to put together a set of all three Apollo 11 astronaut photos for each of them. I got two complete sets, and a third set missing a Michael Collins, but have an extra Buzz Aldrin. I haven't had these out in years, and want to finish off the last set soon.

I ended up getting to two uniscribed Mike Collins and Buss Aldrin. I would appreciate your input as to their authenticity. I got them from well known autograph dealers which are still in business today. I've taken this first Michael Collins photo, and used every example of forgery, autopen, and secretarial example I could find, and using Photoshop, overlayed the signatures on my photo. Some are similar, but none of them close to matching exactly (I can email someone this file if desired, because each layer has a different example which can be viewed over my photo).

Here is my second Collins, which I also compared with every same of bad example I can find, and seems to "pass":

posted 01-21-2011 05:02 PM               

Well, is scares the heck at my to now ask for your feedback. I literally scrimped and saved for these for months while away from my family, and it wasn't until I started seeing all of the posts here about non-authentic autographs that I ever thought to even question them. My desire is to be able to pass down a set of legitimate photos to my children, so it is better now to find out what I really have.