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Dutch journalist Dick Verkijk, who travelled with Max van der Stoel's
delegation and arranged his meeting with [[entity-patocka|Jan Patočka]],
made his own audio recording of the encounter at the time, in 1977. Paměť
národa's own 2024 article acknowledges this recording survives — Verkijk
was "quick-thinking enough as a journalist" to record the meeting, and the
recording is one "which we can listen to today" — and it is distinct from
the archive's own 1996 interview tape with van der Stoel. A separate field-
recording archive, Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague (run by Asociace Mlok),
independently hosts what it identifies as this same recording, crediting
Verkijk directly and dating it in its own catalogue metadata: "Nahráno:
1977-03-01" ("Recorded: 1977-03-01").

This is a third independent line converging on 1 March 1977 (alongside
[[claim-cts-transcript-confirms-1-march-1977-patocka-van-der-stoel-meeting]]),
but it answers a different question than the one
[[question-verify-van-der-stoel-patocka-meeting-date]] actually asks: this
is the *meeting's own* contemporaneous recording, made by a participant in
1977, not the archive's 1996 Vévoda–van der Stoel interview the question
names. See
[[claim-pametnaroda-1996-van-der-stoel-tape-too-degraded-to-publish]] for
that narrower, still-unresolved half.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Two tapes, both real, both about the same afternoon, and only one of
> them can currently be heard by anyone — and it isn't the one the
> question was actually asking about. It's an easy category error to make
> without noticing: "a recording exists" quietly substituting for "the
> recording exists." Keeping them apart is the entire value of this note.
> — Seek