Ocean Club Guest Lists: How Were They Generated? [HELP WANTED from computer experts familiar with OCR and spreadsheet procedures]

Does the forum have anyone that understands the process by which the PJ prepared the files that were released onto the DVD? I think that it is key to understand this. I understand the role of the translators in producing the English language text to accompany the image files of Portuguese (statements et al). But I recall that whereas lots of people believed that TM had issued the PJ with black & white scans of holiday photos, in fact there is a strong suspicion that the PJ converted the colour images that they were given to low resolution black & white scans to protect individuals identity and privacy, especially the children, when publishing.
 
My interest is the Guest Lists and all other Ocean Club lists. I'm especially referring to:
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615 to 638- OC Check-in lists used by Tapas restaurant
"Pages 615 to 638"

They should be scanned copies of printed, system generated lists showing all guests in alphabetical order for the days May 1st to May 7th (May 2nd is missing). ALL exhibit typo' errors that can only be from either manual transcription or OCR being used at some point in the production. In fact they are ALL without exception LITTERED with typos. However, they are presented as jpeg image files (e.g. scans) and some contain handwriting and 4 hole punch holes - not what you would expect if OCR had been used. I have a theory as to one possible explanation that involves skulduggery on the part of The Ocean Club. However, I need to know what the PJ did when presenting the files to see if some of this has a more harmless explanation. I can't see it, but all avenues need to be covered off.
 
There are other issues with these lists that point to manipulation (e.g. not connected to the typos mentioned) which I am going to expand upon, but the typos would reinforce the issue of manipulation, if we properly understood them. I have read the old CMOMM posts from Stella and read the Textusa blogs on this.
 
All help greatly appreciated

Although a separate issue and strictly speaking off-topic, it does raise another question, i.e. whether any of the creche records were forged.

The ones for Madeleine's 'Lobsters' group are clearly of special interest.

Those alleging that Madeleine was not in that creche must assume that there was a forgery, carried out either by Cat Baker alone, or by Cat Baker with the help of another, possibly someone from Mark Warner management.

If, say, it was known by Cat Baker that Madeleine wasn't alive from Monday onwards, the forgery might not have been too difficult to accomplish

It is imperative to validate whether The Ocean Club, or any of its employees were deliberately withholding information that would help the investigation or indeed deliberately misleading the PJ’s investigation. The wider theories of a death at an early stage of the holiday and many other “No Abduction” theories  would need to involve (and implicate) The Ocean Club operatives. It is my assertion that the Tapas Guest Lists have been altered and they are not a true record of the Guest Lists for the period 1^st May to 5^th May 2007.

 
The so-call “Tapas Guest Lists” are published by the PJ as:
·         03_VOLUME_IIIa_Page_615.jpg
(through to)
·         03_VOLUME_IIIa_Page_638.jpg
I believe that the earlier work done by Textusa has been a double-edged sword. We are indebted to Textusa’s blogs “irrefutable Proof” and “Definite Proof” for highlighting many important features of the guest lists. Textusa has painstakingly documented the typographical errors and inconsistencies across the Guest Lists.  But through selective looking and a few gaps in IT knowledge, Textusa’s blogs have inadvertently brought this area of research into disrepute. The difficulty for researchers is in understanding:

•          The intricate details of how the Leisure industry works and the way that data is used within hotels, complexes and their service outlets
  
•          The IT systems that have been deployed to potentially create the sheets presented on the PJ Files site.
  

 I do not have knowledge of the Leisure industry, but I do have sound business knowledge and I have worked in computer programming and worked extensively with databases and spreadsheets during my career.
 
Here’s my problem with the Tapas Guest Lists:
 
Over the pages of the Guest Lists (“Listagem de hóspedes”) as exhibited in the PJ files, there is an obvious lack of consistency in page formatting, proper noun spellings and number / character formatting. Why is that an issue? Normally behind the systems used by operatives lies a database. That database will have lists of guest names referenced against booking reference numbers, room numbers, dates and other critical details. Normally the key data field for a reservation system database would be the Booking Reference. Further, commonly occurring Proper Nouns (such as the Agency names in the Guest Lists) are always preloaded and selected via a drop-down list. The applications that access the database allow it’s users to query the database against a given set of criteria – say “give me a list of all guests staying here during the dates ‘x’ to ‘y’. List the data as these columns, (Booking Ref, Surname, Room #, ) and list in name order alphabetically A to Z......” etc. The query is normally created as a report that can be run repeatedly for printing and / or data storage. The list would be either printed directly and formatted by the application to a standard page width or it may export the data fields to another application, e.g. MS Excel. Obviously where the data is exported to a spreadsheet such as Excel, unless the data cells are protected, someone could alter the contents of the data cells. But you need to understand how the List is going to be used to determine how it is likely to operate. Textusa got some negative feedback over their lack of understanding of such systems. Claiming that the Tapas Guest Lists were “irrefutable proof” of a cover-up, Textusa went on to put heavy emphasis upon the time of day that appeared on each sheet and mistakenly claimed that it proved that the sheets were not genuine. It is my assertion that the sheets are NOT genuine, but it has nothing to do with a printed time field and the time field is unlikely to ever be considered “irrefutable proof” of anything.
 
Anyway, we’re lead to believe that the Tapas / Ocean Club process was as follows:

• After the close of normal services at the restaurants, crèches and bars, the night staff were tasked with printing out a report called the guest list from the “Profitus LDA” system and filing the printed list in a ring binder for reference. Some have claimed that these lists were daily amended and extras added manually, hence the need to allow them to be altered.
  

However, this makes no sense. The Guest Lists are; just that, a list of all current guest bookings by name for each day. They do have a ‘Balance’ field that you can see incrementing day on day as the guest spends more around the resort, but these lists are clearly NOT a repository for any transactions, they just show the running balance. In fact the only obvious amendments that the Tapas staff may have been making is to hand write the day of the week onto the top of the page, presumably for ease of identification.
So, we are left with the conundrum, why do the daily printed guest lists display so many mistakes and formatting errors? Software systems are stupid slaves that keep repeating the same pre-programmed stuff time after time. Rubbish in – rubbish out, but it is always consistent. Errors of the type that creep in and out from one day to the other have to come from either:
·         Human intervention / manual transcription
·         Optical miss-reading by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition)
We even can see key data fields such as the Booking Reference mistyped as (say) A3655 for someone called HAMILL on one sheet, whereas it is otherwise always correctly showing as 33655. We see days where the person’s name is miss-spelled – i.e. ‘30988 PLUMB’, becomes ‘30988 P L M B’. We see Mark Warner spelt in a variety of ways from nARKWARNER (note the n key is next to the M key on a qwerty keyboard) to MARKUARTtWR to MARKWAINIR. But only spuriously, not consistently by booking! We see Room Numbers miss-typed, as in G30 becomes 030.
Now, if this is human error, someone is hitting the wrong keys from time to time. To err is to be human. The major question here is, why is someone manually re-typing data in these lists if they are merely a printed reference? It would clearly point to deception.
If the issue is connected to the deployment of OCR the main question is how could OCR be deployed? OCR is the process of scanning a hard-copy document, analysing the dark content of the image against the paler background and attempting to recognise characters from the image and to recreate a digital copy of all characters recognised. The output of the OCR process is a digital file containing all electronic characters recognised from the hard-copy document. Typically this would be output to something akin to MS Word for text content or as a CSV file for numeric content. The PJ files in question are not digital files, they are image files presented as jpeg files and some of the pages contain hand-written content. That said there are strong indications that OCR has been used. The Guest Lists are alphabetically listed by surname. A clear error on page 615 is “BARBER, DONALD”. His name appears as “BXRBER, DONALD”, however his name is perfectly sorted between “BAMFORTH” and “BARBER, SIMON”. Obviously the database has his name correctly spelt and ordered correctly, but we see a wrong character in his surname. This is a classic type of OCR error. The “A” and “X” chars are close but not adjacent on the qwerty keyboard and there’s plenty of other OCR type errors to make me believe that OCR has a part to play. Why? Whoever was given the job of doctoring these files (and that seems to be the case – they were doctored), may have taken the easy way out. I’ve painstakingly re-created some of these sheets in Excel manually – it takes FOREVER! So, what if someone decided to speed up the process and remove some of the labour:
 
1.       Take the existing hard-copy Guest Lists and scan them. [These would appear clean, i.e. “BARBER, DONALD”]
2.       Apply OCR software and create a new digital copy. [These would introduce errors, i.e. “BXRBER, DONALD” if the paper was dirty, creased or of poor print quality in areas]
3.       Amend the offending aspects of the data within the digital copy for each day. [E.G. change some names or add/ delete some guests?]
4.       Format and arrange the digital files to be as close to the originals as they could be bothered to make them (note, I suggest that they didn’t spend too much effort on this aspect!)
5.       Print the amended digital copies as hard-copies
6.       Write the handwritten elements (e.g. Terça for Tuesday) onto the sheets, punch holes and add some highlighter spuriously to mimic the originals
7.       Scan the result to a jpeg file and submit as the originals to the PJ
I don’t know for certain whether the Guest List errors were manually transcribed through painstaking re-creation of the hard-copies into spreadsheets, or whether the errors occur due to OCR issues. I don’t really care. What we can be very certain of is that the files that we see are not original print-outs taken directly from the booking system.
 
What we’ve looked at so far are typographical errors. However, I think that I can see a real “smoking gun” within the data. As we saw above, the system knew that BXRBER, DONALD was really BARBER, DONALD and sorted it into the correct order. The system also knows that OON BURNESS is really DON BURNESS, as it is ordered in between DAVIES and DONHAM in the list. But something else strange occurs between the sheets for the 1^st May through to the 5^th May. There’s a block of surnames that do not appear to be in alphabetical order at all. The names appear in the following way:
 

MACKENZIE

MANN, LINDSAY ELIZABETH

MARKWARNER.CO.UK

MASULO, GIOVANNI

MCCABE

MACCANDLESS

MCCORMICK, DOMINIC

MCGARRY, PAULA MARIA

MCLENNAGHEN

MACNAMARA, CHRISTOPHER

MCPHILLIPS, FRANCIS

MILLS, ADAM

MILNES, PAIJLINE

MORGAN, PHIL

McCANN, GERALD PATRICK

NAYLOR

NEWMAN, MATHEW PHILIP

O'DONNELL, BRIDGIT MARY

OBRIEN, RUSSELL

OGDEN, SHEILAGH JENNIFER

OLDFIELD, MATHEW DAVID

 
 
At first glance this looks a mess. However, some of it reveals something about the underlying system. Different systems use different algorithms for determining the alphabetic order of names. This is typically done to provide language support, especially in countries where special characters occur in names, e.g. O’DONNELL in Ireland. The basic system for sorting characters is using the ASCII value for each. In short ASCII assigns each character a numeric value. ASCII orders special characters (e.g. the apostrophe) ahead of normal letters and capital letters ahead of lower case letters. Using the ASCII values is just one example of different sorting methods. Excel (and many other spreadsheets and query languages) use more complicated algorithms. In this case, there are two indications that the system was using the raw ASCII values to sort the guest names. Hence McCANN with its lower case letter  appears after MILNES and MORGAN and hence OBRIEN (without an apostrophe) appears after O’DONNELL. So, that clears up two apparent cases of incorrect sort order in the above list. But there’s more. There’s no system in the world that would give us this run of data as an alphabetical listing:
 

MASULO, GIOVANNI

MCCABE

MACCANDLESS

MCCORMICK, DOMINIC

MCGARRY, PAULA MARIA

MCLENNAGHEN

MACNAMARA, CHRISTOPHER

MCPHILLIPS, FRANCIS

MILLS, ADAM

 
Interestingly, had the names MACCANDLESS and MACNAMARA been spelt as; MCCANDLESS and MCNAMARA, the sort order would be perfectly correct. Also, remember the sort order is based upon the data fields in the underlying database, the addition of the extra “A” character cannot be a factor of OCR, or anything other than transcription.
 
Put simply; if the original data field was entered with the extraneous “A”, the sort order would have been different in the printed report. But, if the data field was entered without the extraneous “A” the sort order would be as we see it but THE “A” should not be there! My limited knowledge of common surnames leads me to think that the correct spelling of both names is without the “A”. I would therefore postulate that if either guest’s name appears in the original booking system, they would have been entered correctly without the “A”, hence the sort order we see in the (supposed printed list). Indeed we have a strong indication that this is the case. If we look at the “Listagem de check-in’s efecttuados” presented via the PJ files as:
03_VOLUME_IIIa_Page_611.jpg and
03_VOLUME_IIIa_Page_612.jpg
 
We see that MCNAMMARA, CHRISTOPHER is correctly spelled. It is thus almost inconceivable that the database has the incorrect spelling. Only the Guest List report is incorrect.
Someone has re-typed these names (and probably more besides) and in these cases accidentally misspelled the names and failed to notice that this impacted the sort order. They certainly didn’t expect me to be analysing their shenanigans to this level of detail! Further, it would appear that whoever made the changes either did not have the skills needed to alter the underlying data and instead choose to modify the reports. This raises the tantalising prospect that the original unaltered data could still exist in either digital or print archive. One suspects that it has long since been destroyed.
 
Note, further; the alphabetical listing from after the date that the T9 were no longer originally booked in to the Ocean Club (i.e. the 6^th May and 7^th May) returns to perfect harmony.
 
Note. Curiously, I can only see one example of a guest’s name being entered with a lower case character and that is McCANN, GERALD PATRICK. Normally systems such as this would prevent the use of characters such as a lower case “c” if they wanted to always show upper case characters. If that wasn’t the case with this system, it seems strange that all the other Gaelic surnames are entered all in capitals, whereas our main protagonist is the only one that gets the honour of a lower case “c”. As McCANN is consistently spelled across the Check-in and Guest Lists, I’m assuming that the system was happy to accept a lower case character in the name field.
 
Now, from the above analysis we begin to get a feel for the people that were struggling to cover the tracks of someone (or something) that occurred at The Ocean Club during this period. I reckon that there must be a fair chance that MACCANDLESS and MACNAMARA became miss-spelled for a reason. Perhaps the author, or authors of the changes deleted some entries and had to shuffle all subsequent entries so as to not leave gaps? We might even speculate that the authors of the changes could be English / Irish. Faced with a complex foreign spelling, one might expect a Portuguese author to pay express attention to the order of the letters in this spelling. However, imagine “dumb and dumber” from MI5 (or a PR company per chance?) with one calling out the names to be entered to the other and dumber knowing the name McNamara and assuming it is spelled MacNamara. Easy to do? Of course we do not know how it happened. What I think that we can say is, there’s every chance the list of names between MCCABE and MCPHILLIPS has been tampered with and there’s more than a fair chance that the entire list of names for this week has been tampered with and cannot be trusted.
 
What is now to be determined is:
 
 
WHO DID IT, UNDER WHOSE INSTRUCTION? TO WHAT END / WHY?

crispbee2000 wrote:

The “A” and “X” chars are close but not adjacent on the qwerty keyboard and there’s plenty of other OCR type errors to make me believe that OCR has a part to play. Why? Whoever was given the job of doctoring these files (and that seems to be the case – they were doctored), may have taken the easy way out. I’ve painstakingly re-created some of these sheets in Excel manually – it takes FOREVER! So, what if someone decided to speed up the process and remove some of the labour:

I think this is a very important post - and whether [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is right or wrong in his suspicions about the Ocean Club undoubtedly he has done a huge amount of forensic work on this matter and for that every member of the forum should be very grateful.

Regrettably, though I can see exactly what he is driving at, I freeze when I see acronyms like OCR, IIC11, EXCEL etc., and don't really understand how they work.

We badly really need a computer expert familiar with OCR procedures to help us

Thanks Tony.

I'd be grateful for a named IT expert to vet my findings, it's always good to have a second pair of eyes go over such a complex analysis. Especially if they were able to couch my findings in a way that less-computer literate people could better understand.

Until then, let me at least paraphrase my findings again:
1. The inconsistent nature of the errors on any given guest record from one day's report to another is cast-iron proof that the documents are not the original system printed reports.
2. The typographical errors are very consistent with errors seen when documents are scanned and converted to digital files using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This is not a process you would expect to see in the context of these printed reports.
3. The Alphabetical sort order inconsistencies further point to doctoring of the guest lists. Simply, no system could ever generate the list this way - they have to have been edited by someone.

Building from the above and in reference to the "WHY" (did someone doctor the Guest Lists):

WHY?
 
The documents are a list of guests. Thus we must assume that it is the name of a guest (or guests) that needed “doctoring”. If the offending guest was already under a “pseudonym” we would assume that the guest list wouldn’t need to be doctored, so presumably the guest (or guests) were on the original booking system and guest list as themselves. Let’s call them “Family X”. If this was the case, surely there’d be some photographic evidence of Mr and / or Mrs “X” and their child / children. They could have been inadvertently photographed by any number of guests at various activities around the village and beach front. If this was the case, you’d probably need a high-level official (e.g. Jim Gamble of CEOP) to request all holiday images to be submitted to him for vetting to suppress disclosure of Family X being there. That’s exactly what did happen. Plus you would imagine that someone would be VERY carefully vetting all images requested by the PJ to insure that they did not contain any images of “Family X”. If you looked at this case and saw that no less than Alex Woolfall, Head of Risk for international PR company Bell Pottinger personally helped to edit the McCann’s photos before putting them on a disc for the PJ, you might get to think that this was connected to the doctoring of the guest lists. To the initiated, Bell Pottinger were working as PR and Risk Management for Mark Warner Holidays.
 
Can anyone proffer any other viable explanations for why:
The Guest Lists appear as they do?
What the nature of the doctoring was and for what purpose?

Adobe Distiller.

I think we've been down this road before:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

and there are probably other threads on here as well

together with Textusa's blogs:

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'Knitted' got a good handle on this and there was certainly something iffy going on, but without being able to interview the staff involved I'm not sure we can actually take it much further.

I have always thought the guest list and creche sheets had been tampered with. crispbee2000 obviously knows their stuff.

What I don't understand is, why would a high profile guest who didn't want to be recognised, go to the Ocean Club which is family orientated.

There must have been ordinary families there. 

Or was it an high profile person who would only be recognised by certain other high profile people and by being there would have raised eyebrows in certain circles.

I can't see any problem with the Ocean Club guest list - looks fairly straight forward to me but then I guess if you look hard enough you will always find something to justify suspicion. What is the foundation of this particular suspicion - a clandestine meet of VIPs into the 'swingers' movement?

Or perhaps a meeting of medical minds debating the whys and wherefores of child mutation or such like?

I know one thing for sure, if I was a VIP called to a secret meeting/event, I'd demand my money back if accommodated at the Ocean Club Praia da Luz!

Textusa is well known for producing lengthy indecipherable theory.

Good luck with this one.

They, whoever they are, could do a bit of manipulating of the guest list, but they could never stop people from saying that they saw whoever the high profile person was.
Once the holidaymakers had got home they would be telling everyone "we were at the Ocean Club when Madeleine was taken and guess who we saw there". Then somebody would be selling their story about the famous person they saw there to the papers.

Do we know of other misinformation that week?

Yes - lots!

The Last Photo
Payne at G5A on 3 May
Contradictions about the 'high tea' on 3 May
The lies of Nuno Lourenco
Buying the sunglasses on Tuesday
Cat Baker's flawed evidence about Madeleine being in the creche
etc. etc.

Another curiosity I want to throw into the thread although off-topic I admit...

...has anyone else noted how many people there that week seemed to go out of their way to make very helpful statements in support of the abduction claim and Madeleine's disappearance on the evening of 3 May?

Nuno Lourenco - lied about 'Sagresman'

Stephen Carpenter - dubious statement about 'accidentally' meeting Robert Murat on the morning of 4 May

Jeni Weinberger - cock-and-bull story about seeing an alleged abductor with a child who could be Madeleine

The Wiltshire sisters - saw strange men

Carol Tranmer - saw strange man 

Philip Edmonds - Director of world's largest steel firm, Stemcor, said he had a photo of Madeleine on Thursday but never revealed it

Cat Baker - dodgy creche records 

Charlotte Pennington - dodgy statements

Amy Tierney - dodgy statements

Robert McCluskey - reminded of seeing woman carrying child

Martin Smith and family - bogus sighting of 'Smithman', then says it's Gerry

Pamela Fenn - says she heard a child 'more than two years old' on Tuesday night     

wife of Julian Totman - reportedly said her husband was 'Tannerman' 

manger of Burgau beach bar - corroborated Nuno Lourenco's unlikely story.

Then there's the Tapas 7


I'm sure there were several others

Verdi wrote:I can't see any problem with the Ocean Club guest list - looks fairly straight forward to me but then I guess if you look hard enough you will always find something to justify suspicion.  What is the foundation of this particular suspicion - a clandestine meet of VIPs into the 'swingers' movement?

Or perhaps a meeting of medical minds debating the whys and wherefores of child mutation or such like?

I know one thing for sure, if I was a VIP called to a secret meeting/event, I'd demand my money back if accommodated at the Ocean Club Praia da Luz!

Textusa is well known for producing lengthy indecipherable theory.

Good luck with this one.

I think that you are missing the point Verdi. With a system generated report from a database, you should NEVER find something to justify suspicion. It is NOT a factor of "how hard you look". It simply should not be there. If you run the same report in a thousand years time, you should get the same result. I'd welcome independent expert analysis. At this point I can only see one possibility. Someone has manually altered the Guest Lists for the days 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th of May 2007. WHY? All The Ocean Club had to do was to scan the original hard-copy files and send the jpegs or PDFs to the PJ. Regardless of how the errors got there, a person made it happen. It was tampered with.  

I never said that there were swingers, famous people flaunting themselves around the Village or anything else of that nature.  What I am saying is:
"SOMEONE ALTERED THE GUEST LISTS BEFORE GIVING THEM TO THE PJ" (unless the PJ come back to us and say that they did it .......??).

What I want to know is - WHAT CHANGES DID THE AUTHORS MAKE (APART FROM THE ERRORS WE CAN DETECT) AND WHYY????

An obvious surmise is that there was information in the original guest lists that somebody needed to hide. Let's collectively seek to find out what that information is.

crispbee2000 wrote:An obvious surmise is that there was information in the original guest lists that somebody needed to hide. Let's collectively seek to find out what that information is.

Count me out, frankly I think you are trying to make a big deal out of a big nothing.

My experience of hotel bookings and management, they very much have to go with the flow.  Guests don't arrive;  guests want to change rooms;  guests book-in under a false name ( );  guest leave before scheduled departure;  the names of guests are foreign to the hotel staff - generally natives of the country;  guests stay longer than the original booking - guests are seldom satisfied with anything.

One occasion I recall, a woman on holiday with her husband. He had a massive heart attack and was rushed to a nearby clinic, the woman's daughter and her husband arrived within hours and booked in at the hotel. There they stayed until the patient's condition was stable and he could be returned to their homeland by air ambulance. These situations happen all the time.

The guest list would originally emanate from the tour company - Mark Warner, Thomas Cook, blah blah blah.  Names pass through many hands.

That aside, back in 2007 you can't assume what system was in place by the Ocean Club for holiday booking, restaurant booking, childcare booking or any other records.

Why are folk so predisposed with thinking documents have been altered, forged, adjusted or any other form of deceit.  Some long time ago a member here on CMOMM  was convinced the UK police had altered a witness statement - all because of minor changes in handwriting.

Back to basis.  A three year old child was reported missing, the McCanns and their group of friends propagated the abduction scenario, most probably by a paedophile or child trafficking syndicate.  The start of the PJ investigation was confounded by this false lead as they had no other pointers to guide them.

In the summer of 2007 through to the summer of 2008, the McCann team had no idea the case files would be released into the public arena.  All these so called altered documents are contained within the PJ files.  I can't see a single reason why it would be necessary to alter/forge documents to mislead without knowing the future of the case, that is laid bare before the public eye.

As I've said many times in the past about different aspects of this case, it's so much easier to simply destroy a document rather than alter the content, which could be so easily detected.

No, I haven't missed the point.  No disrespect crispbee2000 but since joining CMOMM you have posted on many diverse subjects, of interest to you personally - apparently.  Few of which make much sense or are just random observations which as you say yourself, are of little interest to anyone but you.

This is not a criticism, just an observation.

I don’t want a tennis match over this, but I would like to encourage others to “count themselves in” in trying to resolve the issue. As your post could dissuade others from doing so, I need to make the following points:
 
I agree that hotel bookings are dynamic and constantly being updated. There will be a chain of systems passing data down the line and each adding some new details from Travel Agent all the way down to The Ocean Club. We are only concerned with one system managed by The Ocean Club called ‘PROFITUS LDA’. We are told that the night staff print a standard report called “Listagem de Hóspedes”, translated to Guest List. Of course any errors input to this system will persist unless edited by an administrator. On the PJ DVD we are presented with scans of this report generated for the days of May 1^st through to May 7^th, with the report for May 2^nd missing. I appreciate that some people might struggle to go through all of my detailed analysis. However:
 
On the 1^st May on page 4 of the report, the system miraculously forgets its own name and spells it “PROFITUS LUA”. (03_VOLUME_IIIa_Page_634.jpg)
On the 6^th May on page 4 of the report, the system miraculously forgets its own name and spells it “PROPITUS LDA”. (03_VOLUME%20_IIa_Page_618.jpg)
 
The system name is hard-coded, this is not a data entry field.
 
Nothing that can be said about the complex and dynamic nature of holiday booking systems can explain away what we have here and elsewhere in these reports. In my earlier analysis I explain the only way that these errors could have come about. Either the Ocean Club have altered them, or the PJ have altered them.
 
If we can find an innocent explanation, I’ll accept it and throw this line of enquiry into the “Red Herring” box and move on to examining the veracity of other data put before us in the search for the truth. Until then, I’ll keep looking for explanations and I ask others to engage and add whatever they can.

crusader wrote:They, whoever they are, could do a bit of manipulating of the guest list, but they could never stop people from saying that they saw whoever the high profile person was.
Once the holidaymakers had got home they would be telling everyone "we were at the Ocean Club when Madeleine was taken and guess who we saw there". Then somebody would be selling their story about the famous person they saw there to the papers.

I agree. For many reasons it is unlikely that anyone removed from the guest list would have been a high profile recognisable person. It still begs the question, what other reasons could there be for altering a guest list for the days 1st - 5th May 2007?

crispbee2000 wrote:

Verdi wrote:I can't see any problem with the Ocean Club guest list - looks fairly straight forward to me but then I guess if you look hard enough you will always find something to justify suspicion.  What is the foundation of this particular suspicion - a clandestine meet of VIPs into the 'swingers' movement?

Or perhaps a meeting of medical minds debating the whys and wherefores of child mutation or such like?

I know one thing for sure, if I was a VIP called to a secret meeting/event, I'd demand my money back if accommodated at the Ocean Club Praia da Luz!

Textusa is well known for producing lengthy indecipherable theory.

Good luck with this one.

I think that you are missing the point Verdi. With a system generated report from a database, you should NEVER find something to justify suspicion. It is NOT a factor of "how hard you look". It simply should not be there. If you run the same report in a thousand years time, you should get the same result. I'd welcome independent expert analysis. At this point I can only see one possibility. Someone has manually altered the Guest Lists for the days 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th of May 2007. WHY? All The Ocean Club had to do was to scan the original hard-copy files and send the jpegs or PDFs to the PJ. Regardless of how the errors got there, a person made it happen. It was tampered with.  

I never said that there were swingers, famous people flaunting themselves around the Village or anything else of that nature.  What I am saying is:
"SOMEONE ALTERED THE GUEST LISTS BEFORE GIVING THEM TO THE PJ" (unless the PJ come back to us and say that they did it .......??).

What I want to know is - WHAT CHANGES DID THE AUTHORS MAKE (APART FROM THE ERRORS WE CAN DETECT) AND WHYY????

An obvious surmise is that there was information in the original guest lists that somebody needed to hide. Let's collectively seek to find out what that information is.

Hi Crispbee2000. I audit large complex systems in my professional life (hardware & software, though not of hotels) and fully endorse your analysis, so well done! I could not professionally support the documents as verifiable evidence in a court of law. 
The hotel 'mainframe' system would hold all of the customer bookings and support client billing and probably the staff payroll module, with pre-formatted reports that would spool in ASCII files and support export via printer/PDF and Excel CSV format. As an auditor, I would always insist on witnessing a report run by an operator, eg the guests over the last 2 weeks with both hard & soft copy for further auditor team analysis
Our conspirators are clever on creating the doctored evidence trail but not brilliant, as you deduced that they simply modified the hard copy reports and did not hack the source system data. As to their methodology, I would concur that they probably used OCR for importation into a tool such as EXCEL, due to character encoding errors/wrong fonts plus the crude typo errors. I can also see that the reports in the files have been photocopied (grey shadows at the top, curling in horizontal lines) as well as being scanned and were run typically after midnight, as per the common time stamp. (Sorry Textusa, this would be the system report run time, not the EXCEL page print time on multiple printers). 
I cannot ascertain if they re-spliced their own doctored tables into jpegs for outputting as a new print run for the PJ or literally printed and pasted their amendments onto the orginals before photocopying (which has the benefit of reducing resolution) but hey, they were working overtime that night 
I would then envisage that the doctored print-outs were either smartly pre-prepared for the local PJ, or provide on demand.. "sure Inspector, we can get you the guest reports, just give us a day to print them out and we will have them ready for you to pick up tomorrow" 
To further nail the fiction and draw a conclusion, we need to understand WHAT CHANGES DID THE AUTHORS MAKE (APART FROM THE ERRORS WE CAN DETECT) AND WHYY????. We could verify the metrics, as found at the bottom of each weekly report as well as the customer IDs, dates and room codings - A bit of a big job (OCR and modify or double branch key punch, then DIFF into EXCEL). NB The PJ/investigator could simply ask the system software maintainer Profitus LDA (not Propitus!) for a report export, as they may still have system archivings. 
My gut feel is that they aren't hiding a serious VIP here; they don't stay at grotty hotels, rather they holiday in large private villas or on yachts, avoiding the plebs. They could be (a) HM forces operatives, see the military style use of surnames or (b) Could the McCanns have simply been there a week earlier? (note the incorrect overwriting of McCANN, it should be ASCII MCCANN and also the MCCANDLESS)

Thanks for your in-depth analysis Cammerigal, it is much appreciated. I too have had professional experience of data parsing from legacy systems into Oracle for the likes of ICI and others and have been around programming from machine code to C++. I think that we fully concur with most of what has gone on here. 

On the metrics. I'm in the middle of analysing them. First thoughts are they look wholly inconsistent until you count MW stats only, rather than all accommodation types (tipo) across all agencies / owners. Even then there's some strange things on the T2 counts. However, without full knowledge of what the totals were at that time, I don't think that it will be possible to find a "hidden" accommodation from what we have.

I agree, for a "hidden" guest, an important (to the authorities) unknown undercover agent and family(?) would be my best bet in the light of other factors. 

2nd May is missing. I'd love to have the PJ verify whether the OC failed to give them the list for the 2nd, did give it to them and either the PJ cocked up in posting to DVD or deliberately withheld it. We need a reliable PJ contact.

One of my thoughts (probably rubbish) is that the tapas bar was only booked for 8 people not 9. 1 missing every night due to a for a foreseen 'illness.' They took in turns to do the listening service. 
If so, the listener surely held key cards in case of a problem. Or at the very least  everyone's mobile numbers? But the rest didn't have phones with them. Hmmm.

Some of the tapas reservation sheets seem to me to be allowing more than 15 diners at once contrary to what Kate says is the limit in her book. Please correct me if i have got this wrong.

This is a very interesting finding, well done @Crispbee for all your detailed hard work on this.  I am familiar with computer systems and databases (although I have no OCR experience).  It is obvious to me that something is very wrong with these lists.

Taking the list of names in one of the above posts as an example:

MACKENZIE

MANN, LINDSAY ELIZABETH

MARKWARNER.CO.UK

MASULO, GIOVANNI

MCCABE

MACCANDLESS

MCCORMICK, DOMINIC

MCGARRY, PAULA MARIA

MCLENNAGHEN

MACNAMARA, CHRISTOPHER

MCPHILLIPS, FRANCIS

MILLS, ADAM

MILNES, PAIJLINE

MORGAN, PHIL

McCANN, GERALD PATRICK

NAYLOR

NEWMAN, MATHEW PHILIP

O'DONNELL, BRIDGIT MARY

OBRIEN, RUSSELL

OGDEN, SHEILAGH JENNIFER

OLDFIELD, MATHEW DAVID

In the database systems I am familiar with (MSSQL), the name O'DONNELL would appear after other 'O' names due to the apostrophe, also the lower-case 'c' in McCANN would be treated the same as an uppercase 'C' (basically the letter casing is ignored in the sort order).  I verified this by creating a table with these values entered as records, and selected from it in order of name.

And as for the second example list of names:

MASULO, GIOVANNI

MCCABE

MACCANDLESS

MCCORMICK, DOMINIC

MCGARRY, PAULA MARIA

MCLENNAGHEN

MACNAMARA, CHRISTOPHER

MCPHILLIPS, FRANCIS

MILLS, ADAM

There is no way that I can see of getting these names to print out in this order.  (Unless the sort order was on some other hidden field, e.g. an ID field, but the fact that the names are obviously "attempted" to be in alphabetical order means this is quite unlikely).





Additionally, the numerous mistakes throughout the files, different misspellings of the same name, just cannnot happen in a normal database system.  Of course due to 'typos' it is possible that a guest's name could be entered wrongly, but that same wrong spelling would occur all the time.  It would not change.

Imagine for example guest "Gerry McCann" is typed in as "Jerry McCann".  Every time the guest lists are printed from the database they would of course show this wrong spelling, but it wouldn't change from page to page - it would always be "Jerry McCann", not "Jery McCann" one day and then "Jerry McCCCann" the next, etc.

So I do believe this is a valid thread, and I just wanted to offer my support to the theories presented herein.