Rumors, innuendo and inconclusive photographs do not a true story make, but the fact of the matter is that three years after the birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin, there is no proof that Sarah Palin is his biological mother.

If you believe that the news media — or anyone else — has no business pursuing the question of whether John McCain’s 2008 running mate put over an enormous hoax on the American public because the whole idea is so . . . well, yucky, then you need read no further. Besides which, a kid with disabilities having a home with a loving family that has plenty of dough is enough for many people who are averse to questioning Palin’s motives.

But if you like me remain curious about Palin’s serial evasions concerning her alleged pregnancy and Trig’s birth, as well as her unwillingness to provide any proof to tamp down rumors that she faked the birth of the Down syndrome child, then stick around.

This is because the story deserves to have legs because the former half-term governor turned author and reality show princess not only has not gone away, but she continues to inject herself into national politics and refuses to shoot down another rumor — that she will run for the Republican presidential nomination.

This alone demands that the story should be kept alive and pursued, however belatedly, by a mainstream media that to date has been conspicuously uncurious, let alone the fact that if Palin lied about the pregnancy then her fitness for higher office is highly suspect.

The events leading up to and after Trig’s alleged birth — and yes it is alleged at this point — three years ago today are copiously documented in an academic paper by Bradford W. Scharlott, a former reporter and professor at Northern Kentucky University who believes there may have been a conspiracy hoax and like me is deeply disturbed about the disinterest of a mainstream media that at the same time is unable leave alone far-fetched Barack Obama birther conspiracy theories.

In late February 2008, Palin’s bodyguard, Alaska State Trooper Gary Wheeler, had accompanied her to Washington, D.C. for a Republican Governors Association conference where she met McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis, who was to be in charge of the vice-presidential nomination selection process. Palin had been mentioned as a potential vice presidential choice for the eventual nominee, albeit a long shot, for several months in conservative publications.

Wheeler recalls that when Palin changed into jeans upon her arrival in the capital, there was no apparent sign that she was pregnant.

On March 5, 2008, McCain all but clinched the Republican nomination.

On March 6, the Anchorage Daily News reported that Palin had announced she was expecting her fifth child and already was seven months along. “That the pregnancy is so advanced astonished all who heard the news,” wrote reporter Wesley Loy. “The governor . . . simply does not look pregnant. Even close members of her staff said they only learned this week their boss was expecting.”

On April 15, Palin and her husband Todd flew to Dallas where she was to give the keynote speech at a Republican governor’s conference on energy. Trooper Wheeler, a 26-year veteran who had provided security for several other Alaska governors, was told at the last minute that he was not needed. He says that no explanation was given.

On April 17, the Palins cut out early from the governor’s conference after Sarah Palin gave the keynote speech. Shortly after the speech, Todd Palin emailed three friends, writing that her speech “kicked ass,” but said nothing about the status of her pregnancy or hurriedly arranged return trip.

After laying over in Seattle, the Palins landed in Anchorage about 10:30 p.m. local time and drove to the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, which is close to the Palin’s home in Wasilla. The trip took a total of 10 hours. Airline personnel on the return flight said they did not notice that Palin was pregnant, let alone was showing signs that she might be about to give birth.

Meanwhile, investigative author Geoffrey Dunn writes in his forthcoming The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, that a woman said to be a close friend of the then-governor also expressed skepticism.

He writes that the friend told him that “Palin did not look like she was pregnant. Ever. Even when she had the bulging belly, I never felt that the rest of her body, her face especially, looked like she was pregnant.” When the woman asked Palin point-blank if she was certain the baby was hers, she says that Palin said, “No. I don’t know what to believe.”

According to a later story in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin gave birth at 6:30 a.m. on April 18 after Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who is her personal physician although not an obstetrician, induced labor.

Later that morning, a crew from KTUU-TV in Anchorage showed up at Mat-Su in pursuit of a tip that Palin had given birth. The crew taped Chuck and Sallie Health, Palin’s parents, in a hallway holding an infant that Chuck Health said was their new grandchild, Trig. Sarah Palin did not appear. The source of the tip is believed to be KTUU executive Bill McAllister, who became Palin’s director of communications three months later.

A press released issued by the governor’s office announced the birth of the Palins’ “fifth child this morning. The Palins were thankful that the Governor’s labor began yesterday while she was in Texas . . . but let up enough for her to travel on Alaska Airlines in time to deliver her second son . . . ”

The press release did not say where the birth took place, Mat-Su did not list Trig among the babies born there that day, nor has any hospital official ever confirmed that Trig was born there, let alone when, or said anything publicly about the birth. (Update: A writer for Slate reported in late April that a clerk in Mat-Su’s family birthing center told him that Trig was born there.)

Baldwin-Johnson has never publicly said a word about the birth, while Palin herself has refused to produce a birth certificate (but demands that Barack Obama produce his). She has shown stretch marks on her abdomen to “prove” she was pregnant, which puts an interesting spin on a favorite Ronald Regan aphorism — “trust but verify” — that she often cites when out on the hustings.

Later that day, KTUU newscaster Lori Tipton reported that “An unnamed source that is close to the family said that early testing revealed Trig Palin has Down syndrome.” The source is again believed to be McAllister.

On April 21, Palin returned to work and held a press conference. When a reporter asked if her water had broken in Texas, she balked at the question but later indicated that it had. Palin wrote in Going Rogue, her 2009 autobiography, that her water had broken prior to her giving the keynote speech, meaning that she waited some 20 hours before going to a hospital that did not have a neo-natal intensive care unit to give birth to a one-month premature baby with Down syndrome and, as it later turned out, a heart condition.

Following McCain’s surprise announcement on August 28 that he had selected Palin as his running mate (and, it turned out, never bothering to vet her), bloggers at Daily Kos and several other blogs published posts claiming that Bristol Palin, the Palins’ 17-year-old daughter, was Trig’s mother and Palin actually was his grandmother. None of the posts had attribution, and several large blogs, including the Huffington Post, responded by writing that the Democrats would hurt themselves by pursuing conspiracy hoax rumors.

In a pattern of accepting unproven claims by Palin as established fact that was to become so familiar, the mainstream media showed no interest in the conspiracy hoax rumors, although the Anchorage Daily News reported on the Daily Kos post, saying it was “a version of a rumor — long simmering in Alaska — that Palin’s daughter Bristol was pregnant and the governor somehow covered it up by pretending to have the baby (Trig) herself.”

On September 1, the McCain campaign announced at Palin’s behest that Bristol Palin was in her fifth month of pregnancy, the implication being that she therefore could not be Trig’s mother. The announcement was curious insofar that if accurate the pregnancy had been a private matter for months and Bristol, who had dropped out of school and been out of the public eye, was being subjected having it revealed to the national media at the Republican convention.

Stories portraying Palin as a courageous woman for running for vice president despite Trig’s problems appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and other leading newspapers. Only the Philadelphia Inquirer went off key in writing that “Palin’s decision to chase the vice presidency even as she gave birth to a son with Down syndrome seems naive.”

Although the McCain campaign never allowed Palin to appear at an open press conference where she might be asked about Trig, she repeatedly promised that she would release her medical records as had Barack Obama and Joe Biden. When McCain finally did so on November 3, the day before Election Day, there was a page-and-a-half long letter annexed to the records signed by Dr. Baldwin-Johnson stating that Palin followed proper pre-natal procedures and follow-up evaluations and nothing had precluded delivery of Trig “at her home community hospital.”

The wording of the letter is awkward in the extreme. Baldwin-Johnson avoids mentioning the hospital by name or even that she was the delivering physician, let alone present for the delivery. The timing of the letter insured that the news media would have no opportunity to ask follow-up questions, and Palin and Baldwin-Johnson later declined to answer questions because Palin was no longer a candidate.

The September 1 McCain campaign press release regarding Bristol’s pregnancy becomes even more problematic given the circumstances surrounding the birth of Tripp Palin.

People magazine quoted a great-aunt in Seattle as saying she got an email from Chuck Health, Sarah’s father, saying that Tripp was born on December 28, which would put the date of conception at late March or thereabouts. That quote is the only contemporaneous account about the birth of the child. Palmer was mentioned as the place of birth, but again no hospital was named and again Mat-Su Regional Medical Center had no comment.

Palin’s office initially declined to comment on the birth, explaining that it wanted the event to remain as private as possible although Palin and the McCain campaign had made a big deal of Bristol’s pregnancy four months earlier. No photographs of baby Tripp were published, and no one outside the immediate family saw him until seven weeks after the birth.

When Bill McAllister, who had become Palin’s director of communications, did issue a press release, he said that it was to correct erroneous information. The press release did not mention the hospital or place of birth.

Following the election, the Anchorage Daily News assigned reporter Lisa Demer to try to get to the bottom of the conspiracy hoax rumors, which had not gone away and continued to be pursued by a few journalists, notably blogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been excoriated by writers for several mainstream publications although Palin still had not provided any proof of her pregnancy and a lot of contradictory and sometimes false information.

Demer too was unable to obtain proof that Sarah Palin was Trig’s mother, although she did get an angry response from Palin after Demer’s editor published an account of her efforts on his blog on January 12, 2009.

I will preface my own take on this long-running story by noting that I was an investigative editor and reporter for many years. Series and stories that I supervised were nominated for four Pulitzer Prizes.

While that background does not make me omnipotent, I trust my instincts when wading through and weighing facts — or in this case the absence of them — which has taken me on a journey from being highly skeptical of there being a birth conspiracy hoax to conclusions that academic paper author Scharlott tells me he finds to be “incisive and correct.”

Weighing against the hoax is that large-scale conspiracies are virtually impossible to keep quiet, something noted by Palin hoax skeptics. This is why 9/11 conspiracy theorists will be treading water forever.

But this is not a large-scale conspiracy because beyond Palin’s immediate family only the officials of a hospital on whose board Palin served and Dr. Baldwin-Johnson would have to remain silent, something made easier by the possibility that Trig was not born at Mat-Su, but had been born earlier, smuggled in by a family member, and the hospital was not directly involved and Baldwin-Johnson was not present.

In fact, it may not be a conspiracy at all but rather a product of a dysfunctional family. Bristol was sent to live with an aunt in late 2007, halfway through her junior year to be home schooled. She may have had Trig in late February, possibly under the care of Baldwin-Johnson, who is the founder of The Children’s Place, which specializes in helping teenagers in trouble but was unable to place Trig for adoption because he was a Down baby.

Weighing for the hoax is an Alaska-sized array of circumstantial evidence: That attendants on the April 17 flight from Texas to Anchorage, along with Palin’s own staff, Trooper Wheeler and almost everyone else with whom she came in contact in the weeks and days before the alleged birth, did not believe that she was pregnant. This perhaps not coincidentally was a period during which no one can account for daughter Bristol’s specific whereabouts or activities.

In fact, it may not be merely a conspiracy but also the product of a dysfunctional family, something that the Palins sadly seem to be.

Bristol was sent to live with an aunt in late 2007, halfway through her junior year, ostensibly to be home schooled. She may have had Trig under the care of Baldwin-Johnson, who is the founder of The Children’s Place, which specializes in helping teenagers in trouble, but was unable to place Trig for adoption because he was a Down baby.

Evidence based on photographs of Palin in the weeks and days before the alleged birth is not only inconclusive, it is contradictory because a seven-month pregnant woman simply cannot hide a fetus.

Yet Palin looks thin in some of the photos such as the one above (which academic paper author Scharlott, a digital image expert, says was most definitely not Photoshopped) and pregnant although not pregnant in the right way in others. This leads Scharlott to suggest that Palin might have been wearing padding on some occasions, something that doesn’t seem far-fetched when I closely examined the photos.

Furthermore, a late February interview with her by a reporter with a film crew from an Alaska broadcast outlet shows a woman who does not appear to be pregnant who is walking on snow in high heels while holding a cup of coffee in one hand.

One question remains: If there was a hoax, why did Sarah Palin perpetrate it?

While Palin used Trig as a stage prop during her vice presidential run and has used Trig and other family members similarly since then, she also has been fiercely protective of them. While Palin’s post-nomination popularity went through the roof in part because of the omnipresent Trig, claiming that she was the mother of Bristol’s baby may have been less an act of political opportunism than personal expediency, if not altruism.

I do lean strongly toward there having been a hoax, and in the end it comes down to this for me: If Sarah Palin was the mother of Trig and her own narcissism aside, she would not have acted recklessly by bypassing hospitals in Texas, Seattle and Anchorage with neo-natal units capable of delivering premature babies. She simply would not have endangered Trig’s life.

Reaction to Scharlott’s paper has been mixed, but he says none was as vociferous as that of Bill McAllister, Palin’s former director of communications.

Scharlott said he sent a copy of his paper to McAllister asking if he had any comments since he is presented in an unflattering light.

“He went ballistic,” Scharlott told blogger Laura Novak. “He called me a ‘scumbag’ who is ‘in the service of evil.’ He said he would slap me if he ever saw me, and that in a former age he would have challenged me to a duel. And then, under the heading ‘Brad Scharlott disgraces your university’ he sent that critique of me in an email to all my colleagues in my department.”

If this reaction seems familiar, it is because this has been a go-to tactic when Palin or her inner circle respond to unflattering portrayals. The veracity or factual accuracy of the portrayal is not disputed while the author is impunged, sometimes in threatening terms like Mcallister used.