Historian Ambeth Ocampo has always maintained that our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal stood closer to 5'3" than the 4'11" he had been pictured to be for over a century now.

This week, Ocampo sought to provide proof other than his measurement of the still existing clothes vetted to have been worn by Rizal. It was literally, a "eureka!" moment, he wrote in a Facebook post on 1 August.

Ocampo said he was filing his scans of the hero's manuscripts when he stumbled upon an entry in which Rizal wrote that at age 19 and four days, he stood at one meter and 61 centimeters or 5.28 feet.

There's no doubting the handwriting to be Rizal's as those manuscripts' authenticity had been looked into by experts and, thus, bore the requisite markings like "Government Property."

But did Rizal give his stature nearly a four-inch boost, at least on paper, through his quill? What's the point of jotting his height at age 19? Was he taking supplementation with a growth elixir and was baselining data on his height?

Here are more questions. Would it be beyond Rizal to figure-pad? Or is it just another error in his writings, like some of the dates and other figures he had been found to have erred on? Rather, unlikely.

At any rate, only an exhumation of Rizal's body could settle once and for all Rizal's actual adult height through scientific, forensic science-aided measurements, like those done on Egypt's mummified pharaohs like Tutankhamun.

Sacrilege? Not if one considers that the hero's own mother, Doña Teodora Alonso, was known to have shown the skull of Rizal to some special visitors to their house to spice up her tales about her famous son.

Lolang's show-and-tell at their house in Binondo happened after Rizal's remains were dug up in 1898 from a grave marked only with RPJ at the Paco Cemetery and before they were interred at the Luneta at the base of his statue in 1912.

RPJ is Rizal's initials put in reverse out of his family's fear that his body would be stolen by the Spaniards, so the Katipuneros would not have a grave serving as a shrine for them to draw inspiration from.