“Laughter, disgust and hilarity”

In a recent podcast,¹ Dale Glover asked Kenneth Stevenson (ex-STuRP) and Brian Donley Worrell to review my recent experiments. Both are quite prominent in the authenticist field, and might perhaps have presented valid challenges to them, but disappointingly neither of them appeared to have listened to the podcast in which I discussed my experiments or read my blogpost ‘How was it done?’ at all thoroughly, and most of the 80 minutes or so was spent on cheerful but mean-spirited abuse. Glover also read out a brief ‘response to my response to his response’ from Giulio Fanti, which was also longer on abuse than actual criticism. Where there was actual criticism, they had either not read, or misunderstood what I said, or they had misremembered information from STuRP that they thought they knew. In a comment below the podcast, Glover has written, “Lol, I wonder what Hugh’s reaction will be when he sees this, I know he is watching it as he plans to write a Blog post in response apparently. I probably should just change the name of the show to “Shroud Wars: Hugh Farey’s Shellacking” hahaha (just kidding).” Fine. You got it, kid!

It takes Dale only 46 seconds to say “peer-review,” one of his favourite words. This was with reference to Giulio Fanti’s effort in Medical and Clinical Case Reports Journal, called “Turin Shroud: Comprehensive Impossibility for a Work of Art.” In a previous podcast Dale explained that he had investigated the integrity of the Medical and Clinical Case Reports Journal, and found it “a credible peer-reviewed science journal,” “a very high-quality secular medical journal,” “an incredibly high quality journal,” “expert level, peer-reviewed literature,” which “maintains a rigorous peer-review process.” However, as I commented at the time, a slight tarnish fell on this glowing review when we read, in the citation panel below the title, “Received: 01 February, 2025; Accepted: 02 February, 2025; Published: 04 February, 2025.” A rigorous high-quality, expert-level, peer review which took three days. That’s absurd.

Anyway, on with the show, and after brief introductions, Ken Stevenson lays in with gusto. I have, according to Ken, a concrete mind: “thoroughly mixed up and permanently set.” The first reason for this lies in the book, ‘Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on the Shroud of Turin,’ which he edited. “We gathered some 40 scientists from the top labs in the country if not in the world…” Really? Perhaps he’s right, but the book only lists 24 authors, including 10 from no laboratory at all. Even allowing for a little hyperbole, 14 is hardly 40.

At the conference, says Ken, “We were able to reproduce a three-dimensional [image] from the Shroud, using a spin-off of space technology.” Really? This is the famous VP-8 Image Analyser, which was not a spin-off of space technology, and was never used to analyse photographs of planets or the moon. Another misremembering.

Round about ten minutes in, Ken tries to explain, albeit in roundabout terms and without explicitly mentioning any details, why he was the only member of STuRP whose resignation from the team was demanded. At what was called the final meeting of STuRP in 1981, Reese Norris, STuRP’s attorney, made a formal statement utterly repudiating any connection of STuRP with his and Gary Habermas’s book, ‘Verdict on the Shroud,’ insisting that Ken was not the official spokesman for STuRP, and demanding his resignation. “The Shroud of Turin Research Project wishes to emphatically state that this book does not represent the findings of The Shroud of Turin Research Project. It is neither authorised nor approved in any fashion.” The statement goes on to demand that every acknowledgement to John Jackson, Eric Jumper and John Heller be expunged, and insists that “Any statement by the authors or publishers of ‘Verdict on the Shroud,’ which represents that the book reports the findings of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, or is in any way affiliated with the Shroud of Turin Research Project is false and misleading.”² I cover this more extensively in ‘The 1981 STuRP Conference – Part One.’

Ken’s idea is that his 40 scientists (we have jumped a few years, but shroud.com only lists 33 members of STuRP) were afraid that if they said the Shroud image was Jesus, their professional reputations would be destroyed, but I don’t believe that’s the bottom of it. It sure looks like Jesus, and almost all their papers acknowledge that; what they refused to accept was that their findings necessarily vindicated a miracle. That would be going beyond what their discoveries actually told them, and beyond what their remit – to discover how the image had been created – required. Somewhat counter-intuitively, one of the reasons STuRP tried to have the book withdrawn was that it would prejudice their negotiations “with the officials of the Italian Church and the exiled King of Italy for permission to conduct carbon-14 testing upon the Shroud of Turin, and we wish to assure those officials, as well as the public and the media, that the book entitled ‘Verdict on the Shroud’ does not report the findings of the Shroud of Turin Research Project.”

Since 1981, individual members of STuRP have softened their attitude, and I think Ken has been to a certain extent rehabilitated. Larry Schwalbe’s introduction to the book, which he was determined to have removed in 1981, is still present in the latest editions, and John Heller and Ray Rogers, who were particularly furious with their inclusion, have died. And life’s too short to bear a grudge, anyway. However I think it’s important to reiterate, for those who like to appeal to authority, that Ken has not been the “official spokesman for STuRP” for over forty years, and his book still carries the information that “neither the book nor its conclusions or interpretations are endorsed or approved by the Shroud of Turin Research Project.”

Naturally, Ken repudiates McCrone, by saying that McCrone’s claim that sub-micron red ochre was used had to be false, because basically he was referring to “Jewellers’ Rouge, which wasn’t invented until hundreds if not a thousand years after the image was already known to exist.” Ha! Ha! McCrone refuted! Really? Has Ken read McCrone’s book? What McCrone says is, “I thought at first that only a synthetic iron oxide, Jewellers’ Rouge, available only after about 1800, was present on the Shroud. However, I now see evidence for older forms of iron oxide, especially, natural oxide pigments that have been used for many hundreds of years; in fact, were used by Stone Age man in decorating cave walls many thousands of years ago.”³ The use of sub-micron particle sized red ochre in ancient times is attested in, for example, ‘Core-Shell Processing of Natural Pigment: Upper Palaeolithic Red Ochre from Lovas, Hungary, István E. Sajó et al., Plos One, 2015; and also Daniela Eugenia Rosso et al., ‘First identification of an evolving Middle Stone Age ochre culture at Porc-Epic Cave, Ethiopia,’ Scientific Reports, 2023; and also R. S. Popelka-Filcoff et al., ‘Microelemental Characterisation of Aboriginal Australian Natural Fe Oxide Pigments,’ Analytical Methods, 2015.

Then Ken tries to slag off McCrone by mockingly, but wholly incorrectly, quoting his Vinland Map findings (titanium oxide, not iron oxide), and seems not to know that he has been completely vindicated, and the map now acknowledged a deliberate fake;⁴ and that is followed by a simple out-and-out lie, claiming that McCrone encouraged his students to lie if their results did not match their expectations. He says:

“One of the guys found in his textbook, in MacCrone’s textbook, that ‘You’re the expert. You’re the microscopist, you’re the expert; if you don’t like the results of your test, put the results down that you wanted.’ In other words, lie. I’m sorry, but these are facts.” No, of course they’re not. They are squalid insinuations based on deliberate untruths, and utterly unworthy of anybody claiming to be a pastor.

And on he goes, making up nonsense out of whole cloth. On the radiocarbon dating: “I didn’t realise how many of these people in the carbon-14 field were already convinced it was a fake and just wanted an opportunity to say so.” Nope. Made-up. “All fourteen [protocols] were violated by the three labs.” Nope. Made up.

And so Ken Stevenson concludes his first 15 minutes – without mentioning one single point that I made that he thinks is incorrect, or any evidence that I am “mixed up and permanently set.”

The next few minutes is handed over to a “real’ scientist, in the words of Giulio Fanti, who wrote a response to my comments on his comments on my comments…. etc. Here are his words, with my comments in bold.

“If we were all honest scholars and behaved humbly before the Holy Shroud, putting aside our frequent arrogance in wanting to prove at all costs that we are right, I believe that much more constructive results would emerge. [Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.] Unfortunately however, you have wanted to invite people like Hugh Farey on your podcast, and a listener of your April 20, 2025 podcast […] commented, defining Hugh Farey in this way: ‘Hugh knows it is the truth; otherwise it would make no sense for him to literally dedicate his life to proving the opposite. He is a snake in the grass as you well know. Pray for him.’ […] [Does this make any sense? If I believed the Shroud to be authentic, why should I argue against it? Does the commenter think that although I actually believe it to be authentic, I wish it wasn’t? Why should I? And as for literally dedicating my life to it, that’s absurd, as anybody who knows me in real life as opposed to on the Internet would know.] Instead of objectively commenting on scientific truths, he very skilfully masks the aspects contrary to his goal, presenting a considerable series of information that confuses the public not expert in the matter and on the other hand he makes very questionable statements in his favour. For example […] Hugh Farey claims to be able to reproduce the body image of the Holy Shroud using a technique modified by him and initially proposed by Emily Craig back in the 1990s, which proved to be absolutely unacceptable. [Unacceptable to whom? The only scientist to have commented so far is Fanti himself. Dan Porter found my experiments very acceptable.⁵] Microscopic analysis clearly shows that Hugh Farey is not able to reproduce the characteristics of the image fibres on the Holy Shroud, which are coloured only in correspondence with their superficial layer, not with pigments or additional substances according to a chemical colouration defined by experts as dehydration and oxidation of the primary cell wall of the individual linen fibres. [I agreed! Is that arrogant or confusing? I said Fanti was quite correct in his comment on the fibre he included in his comment. I also went on to show that other fibres seemed to be coloured without being covered in particles. In general, I agree that the colouration of the image is probably due to degraded cellulose, and have said so many times. However, I also note that Ray Rogers completely disagreed with that, and thought that the image was to be found on a coating of starch.⁶ Giulio never mentions that, so surely it is he who “masks the aspects contrary to his goal.”] In Hugh’s blog, to confuse the public Hugh Farey compares a micrograph of his linen fibres, rich in additional particles or colour obtained from his experiment, with a fibre of the Holy Shroud not of pure image but of a bloody fibre, and therefore also rich in additional particles, namely red blood cells. [I did not show that Shroud fibre to confuse the public at all. I deliberately chose a fibre from a sticky tape slide of an unimaged part of the Shroud, so that its position would not influence whether it was blood, image, or adventitious junk. All I did was show that my particle encrusted fibre looks like a Shroud particle encrusted fibre. Giulio insists that it is blood fibre because the particles are red corpuscles. This is in direct contradiction to the findings of Heller and Adler, who said that the sub-micron red particles were iron oxide,⁷ and depends on his much questioned hypothesis that under certain conditions red corpuscles can shrink to sub-micron size.⁸ He is quite alone in this.] Hugh Farey in his blog then advances a very questionable criticism of the chemical physical characteristics of the body image of the Holy Shroud published by me, together with several experts of the Shroud Science Group, subjectively destroying, without demonstrating his point of view, extremely important characteristics, some of which have recently been recognised by an important international journal,⁹ that reiterated without having subsequently received contrary comments, the double superficiality of the body image. [On the contrary, I demonstrated my point of view in great detail, showing Fanti’s own demonstration of the image disappearing into the crevices where the threads overlap. Here it is again; the black arrows point to just a few of the places where the image is deep in the clefts between threads.¹⁰

The paper he refers to is an intelligent demonstration of the possibility that there is an image on the ‘other’ side of the cloth, but the only evidence put forward to demonstrate that there is no connection between the two is directly contrary to his own observations on the image above. Of this, he says: “A colour concentration can be detected in correspondence to furrows where two or three yarns cross each other, or between two coloured parallel yarns.” In his double superficiality paper he says, “Since the body image on the front side is superficial, and an image on the back side exists, the central part of the fabric was clearly not involved in the creation of the image – i.e., the internal part of the linen fabric does not have an image.” Confusing the public? You bet.] Consequently I am always open to honestly and objectively discussing the results of scientific research in order to get closer to the truth about this very important relic, but I refuse to have discussions with certain people, till they stop making arrogant statements, not based on a verifiable scientific basis, but of a goal oriented type. In addition I do not believe it is appropriate to compare serious scientists who have dedicated their lives to the study of this important relic with people who continue to make statements equivalent to declaring that the earth is flat.” [Well, I agree, of course. The question is, however, which of us is really the serious scientist and which one the flat earther?]

Before turning to Brian Donley Worrell, Dale makes the first sensible comment of the podcast, which is to suggest that an attempt to reproduce something should be judged by how closely it adheres to an agreed set of characteristics laid out beforehand. That’s a good idea. However, the key word in the sentence is ‘agreed.’ My reproduction of the Shroud process was not an attempt to fulfil a commission for somebody, like making a birthday cake, where the client specifies chocolate and if I make a sponge I don’t get paid. Although I sent Fanti some experimental results at his request, I was not concentrating on his personal requirements but on how I have assessed the characteristics of the Shroud, characteristics which I have carefully explained the reasons for. As it happens, as we shall see, some of these characteristics are indeed ‘agreed,’ but others are not, and if my experiments don’t adhere to those I disagree with, that’s hardly dishonesty.

So how does Brian Donley Worrell open his critique? “The words, laughter, disgust and hilarity seem to leap to mind immediately.” Clearly, we’re in for a reasoned and objective review… “Some people are just flat-out liars.” I expect they are. Am I? Let’s see. “I have a degree in Chemistry. As a scientist, the bedrock of what we do is based on facts. When you find something that is a fact, you run it past other scientists, and they can all determine whether or not those things are indeed, facts, or whether they are opinion. […] Once a group of the top scientists in the world, in every field [..] have all agreed that different sets of information are indeed fact, and then we have other scientists… […] all of these scientific peers around the world all review the findings […] and they all say, yup, we all agree, those are indeed facts, not opinion, facts.”

So far so good. I wonder what these facts are.

“Once it has been established that facts are facts […] in order for a person to come along and say, ‘Hey, I have a suggestion; that’s not how it works,’ and they say something that is not only erroneous but laughably inconsiderate of what has been considered peer-reviewed factual information, it angers me and makes me very sad at the same time.”

Does it? You said it made you laugh and you found it hilarious.

“When someone such as […] Hugh Farey comes along and says something which is completely ridiculous… […] I define that as willingly and knowingly in violation of peer-reviewed scientific facts. That’s what I mean by stupidity. When you do that, in my opinion, the term I use is: you flat out lie. […] There are so many holes in his theory, I mean so many you can’t even begin to count them.”

Wow. That’s powerful stuff. I think we get the gist. But is any of it substantiated? So many holes you can’t begin to count them? Unfortunately, Brian is unable to enunciate a single one. He rightly says that my bas relief hypothesis included the application of a pigment, whereas, he says, there is no pigment on the Shroud, but a) my hypothesis specifically does not say that the image is made of pigment, and b) no peer-reviewed paper says there is no pigment on the Shroud. One peer-reviewed paper says there is indeed pigment on the Shroud, which, according to Brian’s peroration above, is a fact that it is ludicrous, stupid and a flat-out lie to deny.

At this point Brian peters out, and appeals to Ken, who is eager to, as he puts it, “jump in.” What follows is Ken’s list of peer-reviewed facts, as he sees them, with my comments, as before, in bold. I appreciate that in conversation, people can’t expected to provide precise references, but in a review such as this, I think they should, so here are the peer-reviewed papers I quote below:
• L. Schwalbe & R. Rogers, ‘Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin,’ Analytica Chimica Acta, 1982
• J. Heller & A. Adler, ‘A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ Canadian Society of Forensic Scientists Journal, 1981
• J. Accetta & J.S. Baumgart, ‘Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy and Thermographic Investigations of the Shroud of Turin,’ Applied Optics, 1980
• R. Gilbert & M. Gilbert, ‘Ultraviolet-Visible Reflectance and Fluorescence Spectra of the Shroud of Turin,’ Applied Optics, 1980
• W. McCrone, ‘The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist’s pigment?’ Accounts of Chemical Research, 1990

Over to Ken:

“The facts, that are peer-reviewed, I want to mention just a few of them, peer-reviewed facts.
• [1] The Shroud image is superficial. Peer-reviewed fact. Only the upper curved surface of the fibres of the threads. [Peer-review: Schwalbe & Rogers. Slightly depends on the meaning of “upper curved surface,” as Mark Evans photos show image deep in the crevices where threads overlap.]
• Two: it’s photographically negative; probably the easiest characteristic for modern science, having cameras, to reproduce. [No peer-reviewed paper says this, because it isn’t true. Official STuRP photographer Barrie Schwortz denied it, and Schwalbe & Rogers refer to “apparent negative characteristics.” My experiments also have apparent negative characteristics.]
• Three: it’s encoded with three-dimensional information. I want to state unequivocally, that none of the man-made images can reproduce the accurate three-dimensional information that we get from the Shroud, none. I’ve seen bodies, I’ve seen bas reliefs, I’ve seen paintings, all of it. None of it produces an accurate 3-D. [The 3-D effect is mentioned in Schwalbe & Rogers, and is easy to reproduce by various methods, including mine, as accepted by Giulio Fanti, in his “peer reviewed” paper.] But by the way, that’s a spin-off from space technology used to map out the surface of the moon. [Nonsense. The VP-8 analyser would be useless for such a task, and never was used for it.] […]
• Four: it’s composed of degraded, dehydrated cellulose fibres. [Peer Review: Heller & Adler, and Schwalbe & Rogers. Fair enough. It’s what I was aiming for.]
• Five: it’s non-directional. [I don’t know if this is peer reviewed, but I agree with it anyway.] […]
• Six: it’s detailed enough for a virtual autopsy. [Not a peer-reviewed fact, and not very sensible anyway. Any picture of a dead body can be discussed medically, however crude.]
• Seven: It’s thermally stable; heat doesn’t change it. [Schwalbe & Rogers discuss this, but it is not easy to assess, as the image hasn’t been experimentally heated. Rogers pointed out that the 1532 fire has acted as a sort of experiment but as it had the effect of darkening the cloth until the image was invisible, it is not clear whether the image changed, or at what temperature.]
• Eight: it’s chemically stable. [No, it isn’t. It can be removed with bleach. See Heller & Adler.]
• Nine: it’s water stable. [Peer Review: Heller & Adler, although if there is any other component of the image than the degraded cellulose, it may have been washed off, or migrated with the edges of the ‘water stains’ on the Shroud.]
• Ten: it’s positive in the infra-red. [This is meaningless or wrong. In a peer-reviewed paper, Accetta & Baumgart write, “The IR imagery is a reversed approximate replica of the image observed in the visible region.” That means the image is negative in the infra-red.]
• [11] It’s sepia toned. [Simple observation. The word ‘sepia’ does not occur in Heller & Adler or Schwalbe & Rogers.] I need to point out that as the Shroud ages, the colour of the linen is catching up. […]
• [12] The blood on the Shroud prevents image formation. It obviously had to be there first. Fact. […] Scientific fact. The blood was there first. [Not a peer-reviewed scientific fact. Schwalbe & Rogers specifically say “At this time, the most interesting unanswered question is whether the blood or the image was applied first. So far, the results of most tests have provided little information pertaining to this problem.]
• Thirteen: the blood was human. [Not peer-reviewed at all.]
• Fourteen: the colour spectrum is very similar to a scorch, which has suggested some type of energy form created the image in the first place. [Peer Review: Gilbert & Gilbert] […]
• [15] It’s never been successfully duplicated. [Not peer-reviewed] Anybody who says so has a real problem with the truth. [I don’t think anybody does say so.] […]
• [16] There’s no pigment, powder or dye. [Peer Review: McCrone says there is copious pigment. Schwalbe & Rogers say, “The primary conclusion is that the image does not reside in an applied
pigment,” which does not deny the presence of pigment. Heller & Adler say, “Most of the red particulates ranged from submicron to about 3 µm, and the birefringent red particulates from 0.7 µm to about 1 µm diameter. […] The birefringent materials are Fe₂0₃ while the non-birefringent are proteinaceous. Schwalbe & Rogers also say, “No pigment particles can be resolved at 50X magnification in image areas.” All seem agreed that sub-micron particulate iron oxide is present on the Shroud.] […]
• [17] It’s scripturally accurate. [By far the single commonest argument seen around the internet rejecting the authenticity of the Shroud is precisely that it is not scripturally accurate.]
When you put all these facts together please explain to me how Hugh Farey [etc.] can justify saying this is a fake.”

Given that fewer than half of the statements above are peer reviewed, or ‘facts,’ as Brian describes them, I don’t think any justification is needed.

But off Ken goes again, embarking on a new thread, the radiocarbon dating. Does he know anything about it? We’re not placing bets…

“And speaking of which, they start with the medieval date of the carbon dating. Hey, want to talk some peer-review? [Yes, I’d like to talk about peer-review. The radiocarbon findings were reported in one of the most respected peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world. Paul Damon et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin,’ Nature, 1989. That makes their conclusions incontrovertible facts, according to Brian.] Ray Rogers […] spent the last days of his life looking at errors in the carbon dating, and he came away convinced that the reason the date was wrong was that they mostly dated cotton. [No, he didn’t. Ken has either not read or forgotten Rogers’s paper.] Cotton is not a Middle Eastern fabric [It is, actually, but that’s not the point here.], and cotton was woven into the Shroud following the fire that occurred. [No, of course it wasn’t and nobody studying the radiocarbon corner has ever said it was. Poor Joe Marino, whose claim is that the corner was repaired many years before the fire, is forever having his research misquoted like this.] […] When he died he gave all of his basic research to a fellow scientist at Los Alamos […] He asked him, would you check my work. That scientist came to a conference that I attended and he basically said, Ray was right. [Really? Who?] […] And can I tell you, there was a secret dating that was done, and it came out that it was very likely 2000 years old. [No, it didn’t. There are different accounts, of which the most commonly retold is that it split in two, and the two ends dated 1000AD and 200AD.] The reason it was secret is there was no unbroken chain of custody with the sample that was used for that date.” [No, it wasn’t, it was because the custodians of the Shroud had specifically forbidden any of the Shroud to be radiocarbon dated, and Alan Adler knowingly disobeyed that instruction. Naughty STuRP!]

At this point, even Dale is beginning to sound a little concerned, as he is much better informed than either of his colleagues, and knows very well how feeble are their protestations. I expect he could see this very article looming in his mind’s eye. In the forlorn hope of keeping them on track, he plays a clip of me demonstrating that superficiality – in this case the lack of seepage into the inner fibres of a thread – is not only easy to achieve, but actually quite difficult not to achieve. Naturally, Ken instantly misunderstands, and says if only he’d known he could have shown an actual microscopic photograph of the Shroud, to show how different it was. Did he miss my saying that in order to demonstrate my point more clearly, I had deliberately put far more colourant onto my cloth than there is on the Shroud, so of course they are different?

In case you missed it, here is my presentation slide:

Ken thinks that because my experiment differs from the Shroud, it “questions not only [my] veracity, but is willing to twist the truth in order to try to make a case. It fails miserably. There is an image that I use in my presentation, and on the image you can see dirt that goes around the fibres; you can see blood that goes around the fibres, but the image itself clearly – absolutely clearly – reveals itself to be superficial.” I don’t believe this for a second, but Ken doesn’t seem to notice that my demonstration also actually demonstrates superficiality; it doesn’t deny it. “Bogus, bogus, bogus,” says Ken, with no idea what he is talking about. The conversation gets increasingly bizarre from here…

Dale: Hugh is saying, ‘Look, even if it is superficial, so what? I can soak this cloth in paint and I also get superficial results. What do you make of that?
Ken: It’s a lie. There’s no other way of saying it.
Brian: That’s true. It’s a lie.

What’s a lie? Did I soak the cloth or not? Did I get “superficial results” or not? What, about this whole episode, is a lie?

But Ken’s off on one again. “Like I said at the beginning. Why are we even having this debate? This stuff has been debunked and disproven so many times as to… hey, why am I wasting my time with this guy?”

Well, to be frank, that’s exactly what I feel, but luckily, we now move on to Brian Donley Worrell, so let’s see if he’s been paying more attention.
Question: What’s your take on Hugh’s superficiality claim?
Answer: It’s a lie because he used a bas relief.
Eh? Nope, Brian’s not paying attention either. Still let’s hear him talk about bas reliefs…

“Giulio Fanti actually demonstrated that the bas relief process actually fails eight out of twelve of the key features of the Shroud of Turin. [Two of these key features, the blood, and whether the Shroud image conforms to a human body, are irrelevant to my experiment. Two, that the image is a photographic negative, and that the image is “doubly superficial,” are untrue. Of the remaining eight, my experiment conforms to five. It is true that my resolution is better than the Shroud’s, resulting in sharper edges, it may be true that there is more cementation on my sample than on the Shroud, and it may be true that the proportion of colour due to pigment rather than degraded cellulose is too high. Carrying out the experiment on a larger scale would resolve the first, and I think a little tweaking of the proportions of the ingredients would resolve the last two.] For example, with the bas relief dabbing paint seeps into threads [No, it doesn’t. I’ve shown you that.]; paint leaves a residue [Not if it’s thoroughly washed.]; and it fails all of the forensic tests that were used by the Shroud of Turin Research Team, the top scientists in the world. […] [Name one.] Imagine you have a piece of fabric. Let’s say you just have a piece of cotton – take a shirt. And I take […] a Coca Cola and I pour it on the shirt. […] If that fabric gets wet, doesn’t that liquid seep into the fabric? Common sense. Sure it does. [No, it doesn’t. It seeps between the threads, and may wet the other side, but it does not necessarily penetrate to the interior of each thread.] Well, guess what, on the Shroud of Turin there is no seepage whatsoever because there was no liquid applied to it. [Mark Evans’s photos suggest that there was seepage, at least into the crevices where the threads overlap, if not all the way through.] […] Also, imagine if you […] left it out in the sun and you let it dry. When you take that piece of cotton, and let’s say you start to just scrunch it up, you’re going to wind up with all of this residue from the dried Coca Cola. […] If you just ball up the cotton fabric, you’re going to wind up with all this dust and residue on it. Well, guess what, there’s no dust and no residue whatsoever on the Shroud of Turin. [Not much, I agree, but that’s because it was almost all washed off, just like my experiment.] […] There are just so many… it basically fails in everything, pretty much. […] Mr Farey’s… I don’t want to call it analysis but – he’s not even able to really address the physiological features that are more than prominent on the Shroud of Turin. […] [What makes Brian think that? I was experimenting on a method of producing discoloured cloth not on the physiological characteristics of the Shroud image. Of course I am able to address them.]

The two of them, Brian and Ken, then wander off into considerations about whether a medieval artist could illustrate various physiological features, saying he would do this and he wouldn’t do that, which is all speculation based on wishful thinking, and nothing to do with what Dale was trying to get them to focus on. At one point they mention Dr Bucklin, and claim, as several people have before, that he was “literally the man that they patterned the Quincy program after.” I’m sure he was a fine Medical Examiner and would have been a good candidate, but no, he wasn’t the model for Quincy M.E., as anybody who cares for truth and accuracy can easily find out.

Again Dale drags them back to my experiment, which because of the small detail and sharper edges of the little dragon has a better resolution and sharper edges than the Shroud. This is a feature of the nature of the bas relief, but the whole concept of detail and resolution is quite difficult to understand properly so I can’t complain that Ken and Brian don’t get it at all. In case there are readers who would want to see what the confusion is about, have a look at this, which shows about 10cm x 10cm of both a human face and my brass dragon, and the Shroud (with its ‘noise’ removed) and one of my prints underneath.

There’s not much detail on the face, so there’s not much on the Shroud, and a lot more on the dragon, so there’s more on the print. It’s not that complicated…

Next Dale attempts to draw his wayward pupils’ attention to the particles on the fibres, with an egregious misquote from me. Bad move. This is what he says I said: “STuRP: they didn’t know what they were doing. They were out to lunch. Even STuRP reports these fibres were loaded with pigments. And he refers to Eugenia Nitowski’s thing…” This is garbled, of course, but Ken interrupts with “who?” He has never heard of Eugenia Nitowski, and covers his ignorance by saying she was never a member of STuRP, and that it is wrong of me to pretend that she was. But I never did. I know perfectly well who she was and the part she played in the story of the Shroud. Unlike Ken. What’s more, Ken did not know every member of STuRP. He was expelled in 1981, and knows nothing of the subsequent attempts to get further access to the Shroud, including the chance to carbon date it. He can’t even name the 40 scientists he thinks were members of STuRP, because the 1978 team only consisted of 33 people. Who here, I ask myself, is “out to lunch”?

What’s more, I don’t think he’s heard of Aldo Guerreschi either. He says, “If I had a screen-shot of the small of the back, there’s a water stain there, created when water was thrown on after the 1532 fire. That water created a stain on the Shroud. There is enough iron in the water to cast an X-ray, but the imagery that is clearly visible on the Shroud to the naked eye […] is gone [on the X-ray photo]. So please again, explain to me how those chemicals, ochre, iron oxide, whatever, that you claim make the image, disappear when you do an X-ray, but the iron oxide in the water is clearly visible.” There is so much wrong with this it’s difficult to know where to start!
a) The water stain on the small of the back was not from water thrown on after the 1532 fire.¹¹
b) The water stain on the small of the back was not X-rayed at all.
c) The other diamond shaped water stains between the longitudinal scorch lines, which were X-rayed, are not visible at all, let alone “clearly”.
d) Morris, Schwalbe & London¹² showed that iron content decreases from the centre of a water stain towards the outside, although the visible stain gets darker, suggesting that the iron was not responsible for the visibility of the stain.
e) I have never claimed that ochre or iron oxide makes the image. My proposal, like that of Luigi Garlaschelli,¹³ is that the Shroud is made of degraded cellulose, as Heller & Adler also proposed. Most of the iron oxide, which was the principle chromophore when the image was made, has been washed away.

Dear me. Every time Ken opens his mouth he puts his foot in it. What does Brian say? After a while he announces that “sub-micron iron oxide has only been available for about two hundred years, the last two or three hundred years, so it could not have been used in a medieval painting,” without remembering that this had been discussed before – and is completely wrong (see above) – and then moves on to “the image on the Shroud is only on the very outermost fibrils,” which was also discussed before (see above). Not only has Brian not read my paper, he has difficulty remembering his own colleague’s contributions to the discussion a few minutes earlier.

His next point is that the Shroud image does not exhibit directionality, in terms of the sweeping of brushstrokes across the surface of the Shroud. He has not understood that my method does not sweep anything across the surface; it pushes straight down. When Dale mentions that, quaintly referring to “what the British call a pouncer,” both Brian and Ken fall about laughing, declaring that it would “make no difference whatsoever.” They clearly don’t understand at all, and don’t seem to want to understand. Poor show.

The compound their ignorance by misunderstanding the entire process I illustrated in great detail, especially the removal of almost all the pigment and the medium, so that the image primarily resides, as Heller and Adler speculated and Garlaschelli demonstrated, on the surface of the fabric.

Back to Ken, who is asked by Dale to comment on the fact that all Heller and Adler’s conclusions were based on sticky tape samples pressed so lightly to the Shroud that little more than surface debris was removed. Ken asks us to remember that samples were also taken by Max Frei, Giulio Riggi, and Luigi Gonella, but forgets to remind us that none of them were available to the STuRP team. I have mentioned before that Max Frei-Sulzer’s tapes, in particular, would tell us far more about the cloth, image and blood than they do about the pollen if they were properly examined, but this has never been done. Ken doesn’t get this at all.

By now, their humorous abuse is getting wearisome even to the double act, and they reject everything Dale presents out of hand without considering it. One of Mark Evans’s photos showing very slight but distinct colour changes in the image from one part of a thread to the next? Ridiculous. Avoiding facts. Muddying the waters. Really? Does the slide show difference in colour or not? If it does, why? They can’t say. They don’t even look. Luckily at this point the meeting breaks up as Ken has to leave.

Throughout the interview, both Statler and Waldorf pepper their comments with sweeping generalisations and synonyms of ludicrous (absurd, ridiculous, laughable), but have real difficulty in finding anything wrong with what I have said except by misquoting me. In the comment section below Dale’s podcast, Brian makes up a funny scenario to suit his own agenda, misquotes me, and concludes that Hugh Farey is lying. Quite honestly, with friends like these, the Shroud needs no enemies. They damn it from their own back yards quite effectively enough.

1 ‘Shroud Wars Panel Review (Part 16C)- Refuting Hugh Farey,’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxC8tZv7GVU&t=1512s.

2 The recording can be found at shroud.com, https://www.shroud.com/videos/1%20Press%20Conference%2010%209%201981.mp3, starting about four minutes in.

3 Judgement Day for the Turin Shroud, Walter McCrone, 1996

4 ‘Vinland Map,’ at https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/32496925

5 ‘The Most Important Article you’ll Read in 2025 about the Shroud of Turin,’ at https://shroudstory.com/2025/04/10/the-most-important-article-youll-read-in-2025-about-the-shroud-of-turin/

6 ‘The Shroud of Turin: An Amino-Carbonyl Reaction (Maillard Reaction) may Explain the Image Formation,’ Ray Rogers & Anna Arnoldi, 2003, at https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/rogers7.pdf

7 ‘A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ John Heller & Alan Adler, Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences Journal, 1981

8 ‘New Insights on Blood Evidence from the Turin Shroud,’ Giulio Fanti, Archives of Hematology Case Reports and Reviews, 2024

9 ‘The Double Superficiality of the Frontal Image of the Turin Shroud,’ Giulio Fanti & Roberto Maggiolo, Journal of Optics A Pure and Applied Optics, 2004

10 Giulio Fanti et al., ‘Microscopic and Macroscopic Characteristics of the
Shroud of Turin Image Superficiality,’ Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2010

11 See ‘Photographic & Computer Studies Concerning the Burn & Water Stains Visible on the Shroud,’ Aldo Guerreschi & Michele Salcito, IV Symposium Scientifique International du CIELT, 2002, at shroud.com

12 Roger Morris, Lawrence Schwalbe and Ronald London, ‘X-Ray Fluorescence Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ X-Ray Spectrometry, 1980

13 Luigi Garlaschelli, ‘Life-size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and its Image,’ Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, 2010