Let me start first with my personal viewpoint: I am not a birther. I have not one single doubt that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, just as both forms of his birth certificate have stated. This blog does not exist to try and prove otherwise; instead, my raison d'etre is to look at early 1960s flight schedules I've purchased from eBay in order to do my best to determine the duration and cost of traveling from Honolulu to Nairobi, Kenya in 1961, the year of Obama's birth.
My intention is to be transparent about exactly which airline schedules and bits of information I possess (and which I don't), and to use those schedules to reconstruct a typical trip from Hawaii to Kenya, two places nearly literally on the opposite sides of the world from each other. (Honolulu's precise antipode is in Botswana. Click the "Antipode" link on the bottom-left of this page.) I'll also include some bits of readily available information about the Obama family in 1961, to ask questions like: would an 18-year-old pregnant American girl undertake a very long and expensive trip to Kenya to meet her new husband's other wife, neither of whom knows the other exists? Who would have been served by such a trip?
If any birther conspiracy theorists read this, I don't expect to change their minds (nothing can, really), and nor do I mean to suggest that it was impossible to get from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961. Of course it wasn't impossible: President Obama's Kenyan father made the same trip, in order to attend the University of Hawaii. I only want to interject a bit of humdrum realism into the discussion and discover for myself what it entailed to get from one place to the other at the dawning of the Jet Age. The other bonus for me is that I get to work my airline-nerd side and go deeply into schedule arcana and maps and plane types and all the rest. So let's get started.....
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