As I mentioned briefly in my last post, we have been extremely fortunate recently in the publication of nine hours of tape-recordings of the ‘Final’ conference of the STuRP team, kept for 40 years by Rudy Dichtl, and presented to STERA (the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association) for digitisation and upload.
All the recordings can be found at shroud.com, the essential compendium of everything related to the Shroud, founded and maintained by Barrie Schwortz since before the birth of Google! The specific link is https://www.shroud.com/81conf.htm.
The Conference was held between 9 – 11 October, and the tapes cover sessions as follows:
1. Friday 9 October – The end of a Press Conference on the evening before.
2. Saturday 10 October – Morning Session, Presentations by
— John Jackson
— Don Lynn
— Don Janney
— Don Devan
3. Saturday 10 October – Afternoon Session, Presentations by
— Bob Downs / Bill Ercoline
— Robert Bucklin
— Joseph Gambescia
— Joseph Accetta
— Roger and Marion Gilbert
— Sam Pellicori
— Vernon Miller
4. Sunday 11 October – Morning Session, Presentations by
— Larry Schwalbe
— John Heller
— Alan Adler
— Giovanni Riggi
— Sam Pellicori
— Ian Wilson
5. Sunday 11 October – Afternoon Session, Presentations by
— Maria-Grazia Siliato
— Ray Rogers
—Eric Jumper
Question and Answer Session
Conclusion
===============================
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
The tapes seem to start towards the end of the initial press conference, and become audible when an unnamed female moderator introduces Reese Norris, STuRP’s attorney, to make a formal statement about Ken Stevenson and Gary Habermas’s recent book, ‘Verdict on the Shroud‘, which had, it seems, just been published. The statement is over a page long and repeats the words “Shroud of Turin Research Project” on almost every line so I won’t reproduce it verbatim. It utterly repudiates any connection of STuRP with the book, demands the resignation of Kenneth E. Stevenson from STuRP, and denies any record of Gary R. Habermas in STuRP’s records. It demands 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.”
This seems to have put a few cats among the pigeons. Vernon Miller and Ernest Brooks provided photographs, Larry Schwalbe wrote the Foreword, and Robert Bucklin wrote an Afterword, all very much members of STuRP, and the whole book was centred about STuRP’s expedition to Italy. Jackson, Jumper, Rogers, Heller and Adler, and even “Shroud of Turin Research Project” are each mentioned twenty to thirty times each. The first to respond to questions raised about the statement was Larry Schwalbe, who said he was “taking my own disciplinary action, and asking that my foreword be deleted from all future printings.” He said that he had reviewed the scientific data reported and made corrections, but not “very carefully” read the rest of book, and that the “book had become an embarrassment to the Project and is hurting our credibility.” When asked why, he replied: “It pretends that the Shroud of Turin Research Project’s conclusion is that the evidence can only be explained by the Resurrection, and that’s not true.” This is a little disingenuous. The book does not say that the Resurrection is the only possible explanation for the image, nor that that explanation was the conclusion of the STuRP team. His Foreword, which was never removed from subsequent printings, included, “to some people, this [the Resurrection hypothesis] may be shocking; yet if the authors’ hypothesis is consistent with the available evidence, it remains a plausible explanation.”
Robert Bucklin took a slightly different approach. In his Afterword he had written, “While the majority of the scientists have been reluctant to take a stand on this matter, a few of us have openly expressed our opinions that there is support for the Resurrection in the things we see on the Shroud of Turin.” This was rephrased at the press conference to, “As far as I’m concerned personally, there’s nothing in the scientific work which has been done which would preclude the Resurrection.” But he did not claim, in fact specifically denied, that the STuRP team had proved that the Resurrection took place.
This seems mild enough, but immediately someone else, I think Ray Rogers, spoke up and said, “I would also like to point out that Bob Bucklin is not member of STuRP. He was not part of the observations in the palace of Turin. […] If he’s recognised as as member of STuRP, he’s not recognised as one of the scientific members, as far as I’m concerned.” Rogers was furious that he had not been mentioned in the prohibition notice and said that a year previously, when STuRP met for the first time after Turin, he had been “the one, I was the first one who said I wanted nothing whatever to do with any popular books on the subject. […] How on earth I ended up in an acknowledgement in that thing I’ll never understand, but I want my name absolutely out of that in all ways.”
A couple of people, I think John Jackson and Don Lynn, and the female moderator comment in a more placatory way – one to mention that Robert Bucklin was indeed a “contributory member of the Project,” before the conference breaks up as three of the last four buses have already been missed, and people might have to walk back to their hotels.
===============================
SATURDAY MORNING
The first presentation on Saturday morning sounds fascinating, and roughly covers the material of the paper John Jackson finally published in Applied Optics in 1984, with Eric Jumper and Bill Ercoline. Unfortunately, without the battery of slides he refers to, it would be fairly meaningless even to provide a précis. Jackson describes how the difference between the darkest part of the image and the unstained cloth amounts to seven levels of human perception. Given this constraint, two police artists failed to make very satisfactory sketches of a statue that might give as realistic a 3D image as the Shroud. This suggests that it would have been difficult for a medieval artist to do the same thing. He also describes experiments with living volunteers and draped cloth, and demonstrates that the vertical distance between the volunteers and the cloth at any spot correlates to the image intensity at that spot. With a few minutes to go, Jackson explores two mechanisms that could have produced the image, direct contact and radiation, and finds neither of them satisfactory. Later in the morning, after the three Dons have spoken, he returns to his theme, considering two basic mechanisms, which he calls the “diffusion” and the “radiation” of “particles of information,” working from the assumption that there was indeed a body under the cloth, and that the image intensity relates to the distance between the body and the cloth. The equations which cover these mechanisms are explored in some detail, but without the slides that illustrated them they are difficult to follow closely. After much explanation, Jackson concludes that neither diffusion nor radiation could produce the resolution of the image. However, it does seem that every particular point on the body appears to map onto a single equivalent particular point on the cloth, and he considers whether this can be described in general as mapping “normal to the body surface,” “normal to the cloth surface,” or “parallel to the axis of symmetry.” Without his diagram I’m not sure what he means by this last, but I think it means that if the body was horizontal, the mapping was vertical, and if the body was vertical, the mapping was horizontal, and so on. Each mapping would result in very different positions on the cloth of each position on the body. Experiments with volunteers suggested that the third – which we now call “vertically collimated” mapping best describes the relationship. “If one were to take a body surface and if you were to take a series of little flux lines, and let’s map them vertically, but attenuate them with distance away from the body surface, and then calculate the number of flux lines that penetrate the cloth surface, then you can create a little histogram of intensity.” An important addendum to this though, was that Jackson does not claim that some kind of collimated flux was in fact how the image was formed. He compares his model to the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which, via an elaborate collection of epicycles, became a remarkably accurate description of the way the planets move, only to be overturned by an even more accurate model in the 16th century.
Between Jackson’s presentations came three Dons; firstly Don Lynn, who explained some of the image manipulation techniques his team had carried out on various photographs, including the quad mosaics. The main interest in this today is really only as a snapshot of the development of computing power, as everything so painstakingly carried out in his laboratories can be produced today in a millisecond on everybody’s laptop. Again, without his slides, it is difficult to follow his description clearly. However, one explanation that was both clear and relevant to today’s studies concerned their efforts to smooth out the illumination of some of the images, especially the big ones, where the lamps used had produced brighter areas in the middle darkening towards the edges. By blurring out the image and finding the average of the intensity across the cloth, and then subtracting that average from the original, an approximately even level of illumination across the image could be calculated. Another exercise involved increasing the saturation (as we would call it now) of the quad mosaic images. “Unfortunately we found, when we did this, you got this kind of a shading from blue down to green, which said it wasn’t quite right; there was something wrong.” Indeed there was, and yet those images have been touted again and again as illustrations of chemical alteration to one corner of the cloth. “We had to see if we couldn’t correct that, and in fact, fairly recently, like last week, we went through and […] found that in the scanning process one of the sets of quads was shifted incorrectly.” They continued to make corrections, but although they were able to emphasise the blood, they clearly did not correct the spectrum of the whole image. Going on to what he personally had found most interesting, Lynn said, “We’ve had over a thousand requests for information. Now this is a service, to send out references and so on like that and requests for talks. I think that if there is one thing that has surprised me more than anything else out of this Shroud project, it is the incredible interest both from the technical community, and from the normal… and the everyday… people.” At this point, the technical community who were listening intently burst into laughter, and the idea that scientists were not normal people became a running joke for the rest of the weekend.
Don Devan was not able to add a lot to Don Lynn’s presentation, for lack of access to sufficient computer access at the place where he worked. He reiterated the value of digitising the information found in ordinary photographs, and the ability more easily to discriminate details, but emphasised that there would be nothing in the digitisation which was not already present in the photos.
Don Janney was very brief. He outlined the possibility of comparing actual experimental image making to the image on the Shroud by photographing both with a “step-wedge,” which is a greyscale of a series of different, known, intensities from white to black. No doubt a colour wheel would also have been useful. By relating the intensities and colours of each image to its own intensity and colour scale, and knowing that the scales were identical in both photos, an accurate comparison could be made between the two.
===============================
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
Bob Downs & Bill Ercoline. “The topic of this talk is the examination of the Shroud image for possible geometric distortions due to cloth drape.” This rather dry title led to a fascinating description of an experiment involving photographing cadets in swimming trunks lying on a diving board in a swimming pool, vertically from another diving board above them, to try to achieve undistorted photographs, which could be compared to the Shroud image. They were selected for height (170-180cm), lain on a “square tiled background,” and carefully posed in the manner of the Shroud image by having a marked-out copy of the Shroud draped over them. Some photos were rejected because the subject moved out of position, but about 50 were chosen as sufficiently representative to have measurements taken, which were compared with equivalent measurements from some anthropometric data collected in the 1960s, and the image on the Shroud. Detailed analysis follows, with the conclusion that where the Shroud drapes, such as down the sides of the head, body and limbs, measurements of the image are significantly longer than the equivalents on the cadets and standards (about 9%), but where it doesn’t drape, much, such as along the longitudinal axis, the measurements are not significantly different (about 3%). Their conclusion is that their experiments have produced results consistent with the Should having draped a body when it received its image. “Because of what we feel is detectable distortion […] the image was formed by a cloth draped over a body.” However, Bill Ercoline was quick to add that this was a personal conclusion. “I’m not saying that’s the conclusion that STuRP is putting out; that still has to be argued [about].”
The first of the two medical analyses was from the “Los Angeles county medical examiner’s office,” the “professor of pathology at the University of Southern California,” Dr Robert Bucklin. He began by describing some of the scourge-marks on the lower legs. “These are very precise lesions. They show a puncture type injury with the skin denuded and an accumulation of blood and serum on these areas. Fine details show fine linear scratch-like projections which extend from these, which gives an idea of what the instrument might have been.” This was followed by an illustration of the sort of scourge which might have inflicted these wounds. Next Bucklin observes that the wrist wound is not in the palm, which is a somewhat loaded comment. The palm, after all, is not represented on the Shroud at all. He continues with illustrations of the rest of the wounds, including the suggestion that the crown of thorns was more like a cap than a wreath.
Then came Joseph Gambescia, of the St Agnes Medical Centre in Philadelphia, who focussed on the feet, which he had decided had been impaled by two nails, one for the right foot, and another, through both feet, pinning the left foot on top. I think his idea is discussed in ‘Joseph M. Gambescia, M.D. and the Position of the Feet on the Shroud of Turin. The History of an Investigation,’ by Paul Maloney, at shroud.com.
Gambescia went on to suggest that the final position of the crucified Christ was not symmetrical, as shown in most artist’s representations, but, as a result of the pinning of the feet, somewhat irregular, which he thought explained the shape of the blood flows down the arms. Then he looked at various other aspects of the pathology of the wounds depicted in the image, and the characteristics of the stains associated with the blood, especially the separation of the red blood cells from the serum.
Next came Joseph Accetta, who began his presentation by explaining to the “normal” people in the audience the various kinds of electromagnetic radiation. Fortunately, his paper on ‘Infrared
Reflectance Spectroscopy and Thermographic Investigations of the Shroud of Turin’ had been published in Applied Optics a couple of months previously, so we may follow his explanation of the diagrams in it quite closely. Various control samples had been measured in great detail in his laboratory, which could be compared with the rather less precise spectra he had managed to achieve in Turin, and he was at pains to point out that it was not possible to be sure if two fairly similar spectra showed truly slightly different reflectances, or whether they were exactly the same, but different in the spectra by the irregularities of the measurement. For example, even comparing specimens of cotton and linen in the laboratory, it was not possible to say whether the reflectance of the two was in fact the same, or, as apparently shown in the spectra, slightly different.
Note the two different wavelength bands captured, and their different scales.
Interestingly, it was also not possible to say whether the IR reflectances of scorched and unscorched linen were the same or different – although optically I guess, they would be quite different.
“Except for a slight shift in the amplitude of the spectra, there really isn’t any big change […] in the shape.” On the other hand, comparing a sample of clean cotton with “blood on cotton” certainly did result in clearly different spectra (only one wavelength band was published for this):
Accetta then moved on to comparing his laboratory scorch and blood spectra with the scorch and blood spectra from the Shroud.
Of the scorch spectra, he says: “you can see that there are some differences between these two, but if you observe this in both wavelength bands, you come to the conclusion that […] the image area in the Shroud […] looks very similar to a scorch. The question is, is it identical, and I don’t know the answer to that. […] It’s possible that we are dealing with one and the same thing.” However, he was rather more confident when it came to the blood:
“You can see that the Shroud blood here, versus a laboratory spectrum of blood, in this band [left hand graph] is not too dissimilar, and in this band [right hand graph] there is a large difference. Now that led me to speculate that perhaps what we observe on the Shroud is not totally blood but perhaps a composite of blood and some other substance.”
Accetta followed this up with a single instance of a thermographic photo of the Shroud, from the face area, showing that the image he obtained was essentially the same as the visible-light photo, so that no interesting chemical differences from place to place could be determined. He did note, however, that the infra-red image only showed a “bump” over one eye, while the visible-light photo seemed to show one on both eyes, and also pointed out a dark area on the lower right of the thermograph, although that area might compare with a slight darkening of the Shroud visually in that area too.
Joe Accetta was followed by Marion and Rogert Gilbert, who studied the visible-light and fluorescence reflectance spectra of various points on the Shroud. It was introduced by Marion (“the ‘normal’ Gilbert”), who explained visible light reflectance, and Roger, who explained fluorescence. Before leaving for Turin, spectra of yellow ochre (iron oxide) and burnt sienna (iron oxide combined with silicon oxide and aluminium oxide) were obtained for comparison, although these do not appear in the paper they had published in Applied Optics the year before, with whose help we can, as with Joe Accetta’s presentation, use the diagrams in it to match their descriptions on the tape recording. First the Gilberts compare the Shroud image with lightly scorched areas, and find that, “considering the errors in the instrumentation we mentioned earlier, we believe these curves to be essentially identical. […] Also these curves […] look quite different to us that the spectra of any of the pigments run previously.”
Next they looked at the fluorescence of image areas compared to clear,unimaged cloth, and found that the darker the area, the less the fluorescence. Scorches had a similar quenching effect, although dark scorches fluoresced slightly more red than the unimaged cloth, and on closer examination it looked as if they, and the darker body images, also fluoresced more than unimaged cloth at the reddest end of the spectrum.
“Now let’s look at the bloodstains, or, I should say apparent bloodstains. This is a curve of the average of five apparent bloodstains:
“We see here a flat region from 350 to about 500 nm, and then a sharp rise at 550, with a small dip at 630, and then [at the start] a rise again in the ultra-violet below about 330 nm. For comparison we ran curves on a three-month old bloodstain […] and also a sample of iron oxide on linen.” Irritatingly, and significantly, these spectra are not illustrated in their paper, but seem to be similar to those in another paper, by Sam Pellicori, called ‘Spectral Properties of the Shroud of Turin,’ also in Applied Optics in 1980.
“The three-month old bloodstain has some absorption peaks in it here [410nm], and here [550nm], and here [630nm] and even there [660nm], and these are at the various wavelengths that the blood chemists would expect from blood on a piece of cloth that’s that old. The bloodstain on the Shroud, however, doesn’t show any of this. In fact to our eye, which is untrained in this, it appears to take some resemblance to that of the iron oxide sample. I will say that we have this dip here at 630, appearing in both of these, and I should caution people not to put too much significance into that dip, because that’s in a region of substantially greater instrument error, and we’re pretty sure for instance that in the iron oxide that dip is not real. The statistics show that it is marginally real in the blood on the cloth but we’re not sure of that either, so I wouldn’t put too much significance in that, but even so to our eye, the curve does look more like the iron oxide than it does to the fairly recent bloodstained linen. Now, what this means is very difficult for us to tell – as I said, we’re not chemists – whether this means there’s blood and another material as Joe Accetta was suggesting… […] This is at variance by the way with some microscopic spectra that were run by Dr Heller and Adler.”
Marion Gilbert concluded the presentation with a few slides showing the set up in Turin, and together she and her husband thanked the team and their audience.
Sam Pellicori was up next. “You’ve got ten minutes,” growled John Heller, who was chairing the meeting. Pellicori first explained how STuRP’s tons of embargoed equipment were finally released to them in Turin. “A bond of three hundred million lira was put up to release that material. I realise that’s only about ten dollars, but small miracles we’re grateful for also.” He had used a small, portable spectrophotometer to examine various parts of the Shroud. His presentation covered his paper in Applied Optics, with particular reference to some experiments carried out back in the States, particularly with blood, including some 18-month old denatured blood provided by John Heller. All the spectra obtained were characterised by the same slope and absorbance peaks noticed by the Gilberts, and did not match the Shroud blood at all well. “This is something we’re working on explaining. Possibly it’s due to the fact that the Shroud blood is more denatured because of its age, or perhaps the chemistry of the linen affected the actual absorption properties.”
His final experiment was to degrade linen using potassium hydroxide, producing yellowed linen, and possibly providing a chemical explanation for the image.
The penultimate presentation of the day was by the official scientific photographer Vernon Miller, who began by acknowledging the work of his fellow photographers, Barrie Schwortz, Ernest Brooks, Mark Evans, Sam Pellicori, Don Lynn and Don Devan. Then he described the frame which held the cameras, the lighting set-up and the film they used. He had also used a (presumably very early) digital camera, whose advantage was that it could discriminate 200 shades of grey, as opposed to a film camera’s 15 or so. The lighting from the USA had taken a few days to arrive in Turin, and the National Geographic lent some equipment to tide them over in the meanwhile. He then displayed and described many of the photos taken, but without his accompanying slides, this would be tedious to recount.
Finally Sam Pellicori, “Agent-X,” as Heller called him, returned to display the photomicrographs taken by Mark Evans, identifying their locations and magnifications, but without describing most of them in any detail. And that concluded the first full day of the conference.
END OF PART ONE