The more I look at this, the more I'm sure that this is in fact our version and not a fake. We did create a low bitrate file for sharing between ourselves, and it was slightly different than the screenshots you see in the newsletter.
A lot of time was spent trying to get the timecode right, and we went through a couple different ways of creating the SMPTE timecode and boxes around the text. The version you saw in the newsletter was the second to last iteration. The one that has been uploaded to usenet was from our final version. Ironically, the screenshots from the newsletter actually show the incorrect version number, as version 3.03 was our final version. I must have had my AviSynth files mixed up when I created those screenshots.
So in short, the file that has been uploaded to a.b.starwars was created by us. It is not a fake, but it is a very low bitrate DivX encode of our original DC capture. It was not created to show off the quality of our capture, but to use as a tool for referencing every frame of the film. Somehow the file found its way into someone else's hands and was uploaded to usenet. I still do not know how that happened, and I am more than irritated at the moment. The more I think about it though, the more I feel that perhaps we should have uploaded this ourselves a long time ago. At any rate, it's out there now for anyone to use.
Here are a few screenshots from my unresized, uncompressed AviSynth file loaded in VDubMod:
(Please note that these frames are not cleaned up or color corrected)