[n.b.. All the recordings can be found at shroud.com (https://www.shroud.com/81conf.htm), the essential compendium of everything related to the Shroud, founded and maintained by Barrie Schwortz since before the birth of Google!]
SUNDAY MORNING
Sunday began with an explanation of the X-ray fluorescence spectra, by Larry Schwalbe. His diagrams seem to be those published in Morris, Schwalbe and London, ‘X-Ray Fluorescence Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ X-Ray Spectrometry, 1980, and I shall use them here. Schwalbe begins by apologising that the signal-to-noise ratio was very low, so that deriving useful information was difficult, but that nevertheless it wasn’t so bad that nothing could be achieved. His first slide showed:
“The top spectrum is a typical spectrum from a non-blood area, and they all looked almost the same. […] The bottom one is a spectrum from the side wound area, and it’s typical of the blood, and you’ll say, ‘Hey! There’s a big difference here. He’s going to tell me that’s another artefact,’ but that turns out to be the iron peak. The peak at 6.4kV is characteristic of iron. And, it was at this point that it was realised that there is something really different between the image and the background, and it looks like iron.” I think Schwalbe is misspeaking here, and means the ‘image (top, from the nose) and the blood (bottom, from the side wound),’ not the image and the background.
Apart from the big spike at 6.4kV, he went on to explain the significance of the other peaks, with reference to the spectra below, from an average of the face-scan measurements (a), and a ‘blank’ spectrum from pure white filter paper (b):
According to Schwalbe, peak 1 is an artefact of the paper, peak 2 is calcium, 3 is iron, 4 and 5 are artefacts of the equipment, and 7 is strontium. He doesn’t mention 6, which does, however, seem to be significant. Schwalbe explains that they had originally thought the calcium and strontium peaks came from limestone dust, but had now decided that there was too much calcium (about 1% of the weight of the entire cloth) and not enough dust. So, “since there was no dust on the tapes, someone came up with another hypothesis […] that this calcium and strontium and perhaps also the iron, which is also fairly uniform in the non-blood stains actually became attached to the cellulose molecules through an ion-exchange process while the linen was being retted.” As for the extra iron in the blood areas, “about 30 – 40 µg/cm2 above measured or inferred background in those regions. [… Then] we measured whole blood iron; we found there were about 0.5 µg/mm3 and that about 25 mm3 saturated a 1 cm2 area of Whatman 42 [filter paper], and if you do your arithmetic right you can estimate from those measurements just how much iron you might expect from a blood stain on cloth and it turns out that the difference in the iron concentration that we see in the blood areas is roughly what you might expect if the Shroud areas were indeed blood.” This is a little strange, as 25 mm3 of 0.5 µg/mm3 iron contains 12.5 µg of iron, which is less than half the value “above measured or inferred background” mentioned above, but I have to say that as he wanders from physics into chemistry, Schwalbe becomes more hesitant, as if he can feel the gimlet eyes of John Heller and Alan Adler boring into his skull. He mentions that he didn’t find any potassium (of which there is much more than iron in blood), but attributes that to the very poor signal to noise ratio. He does not mention any of the other metals commonly found in blood such as Copper, Magnesium and Zinc. Extraordinarily, he goes on, “there was also the added complication that potassium compounds in blood are soluble, and the medical people felt that there was really no good reason for potassium to be there.” This is truly grasping at straws; almost all blood components dissolve in water, including the iron-containing compounds. However, he is correct that “the absence of potassium does not disprove that blood is there.”
The last slides showed the iron concentration across the two transects, from the heel and from the nose, which are combined into a single graph in the Morris, Schwalbe and London paper:
The top two square points are from “right on the bloodstain” of the heel, and the two left hand circular points, from the nose, are also slightly elevated, although these, thought Schwalbe might be due to some “particulate matter” observed there, rather than just the image.
Now it was the turn of the chemists, beginning with John Heller, who rather humbly declares that he had been erroneously labelled as a “blood specialist, which is the last thing in the world that I am.” He says that he had thought it would be a lot easier to identify the blood than it turned out to be. He describes how initially all their attempts to identify the minute speck of material they had as blood or anything else proved fruitless, and how they then moved from chemistry to physics. He thought that by now, the attendees at the conference were probably fed up with spectra, so he didn’t go into too much detail, but focussed on “one band, in the spectra, called the Soret band, and it’s unique to porphyrins.” He went on to explain that the Soret band was in the ultraviolet area of the spectrum, and that he wasn’t sure if the microspectrometer they were using would generate enough light for it to be discoverable, but that “Hallelujah, we found the Soret brand, so we knew we had blood.” I have already discussed this finding in a previous post, which demonstrates that they did not, in fact identify the Soret band, and either did anyone else.
Heller goes on to talk about the image, and the possibility that it was “made by a paint of gelatin plus red iron earth oxide. We didn’t think that this made an awful lot of sense because of the X-ray fluorescence data that you’ve just seen, which did not show an increased concentration of iron in the image and from the whole variety of other spectral work that the other investigators did. So the problem was, was there any possibility at all that this might have been a paint? And so we began to take a look at that.” They discovered that one type of retting involved leaving harvested flax stems in a natural body of water for weeks until the extraneous material has rotted away leaving thin flexible fibres that can be spun into linen. “While it resides in the water, it acts as an ion-exchange resin, […] and it selectively takes up calcium, iron and strontium, and that’s how the iron got on the Shroud.” This claim is often repeated, but I have never seen any evidence for it. Heller and Adler couldn’t see any iron particles, and they couldn’t detect any protein, although they used “the most sensitive protein detectors that exist, […] a thousand to ten thousand times more sensitive than those that had been used before.” They were unable to remove the yellow colour of the image using proteases, acids and alkalis, and all kinds of solvents, concluding that the colour was part of the cellulose of the cloth, and not due to any paint, pigment, dye or stain. They did find a few tiny black spots of silver and one single spot of cinnabar, but neither of these was adequate to sustain any painting hypothesis. Furthermore, says Heller, “virtually all red iron earth pigments have contaminants of manganese, nickel and cobalt, and there was none in the iron on the Shroud. The iron on the Shroud are two kinds; one picked up by the retting process […] and the other is biological, from haemoglobin.”
Alan Adler took over from Heller, and described his involvement and some of the background to their experiments. Of some interest is his statement, “there are 35 such samples [sticky tape], and we received 22 of these.” Most later publications raised the 35 to 36, and there may have been more. “Unfortunately, predominantly most of the slides we obtained were actually blood slides. As it turned out later in the testing, it would have been nice if we’d actually had more of the pure body image area slides.” Then he classified the fibrils they had found, in line with the descriptions in their paper, ‘A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,’ published in the Canadian Society of Forensic Scientists Journal in July 1981. He emphasised the corroded nature of all the fibres which were not “very pale yellow” and associated with control locations. The fibrils of the non-image areas of the Shroud itself were yellow, of the image areas darker, and of the scorch areas darker still to black, and under a phase-contrast microscope appeared more and more corroded; “as if somebody’s taken a smooth pipe and etched it with an acid. […] This is actually part of the process of the oxidation of the surface. Then we found there were red coated fibrils, from the blood areas, and here the coating varied from very smooth – we had some that looked like a piece of red spaghetti over the top of a solid core – to fractured, to particulate-appearing, […] and the colours varied anywhere from a deep red through to an orange, down to […] in some of the scorch areas, quite dark. […] None of these red-coated materials were birefringent or pleochroic. Birefringent means when you look at them through crossed polarisers they should light up, because they’re optically active […] Pleochroic means that the colour changes as you rotate the polarisers.” The implications here is that these materials are not simple chemical compounds and probably organic. “We also found, in blood-adjacent areas, that we could find some fibrils that were also coated, except instead of being this red colour, they’re a golden-yellow or honey. […] Except for the colour they had the same general appearance as those we found in the blood areas. In the water stain margins, and in the areas where blood was near a scorch, we found that there were birefringent red particulate coated fibres. Now these looked quite distinctly different from those we found in the blood areas. It varied from a deep red to a dark brown; they were birefringent and pleochroic, and furthermore, in the phase-contrast study, we could see that some of these particles were actually inside the medulla of the linen fibres. Linen looks like bamboo: it has joints and there’s a hollow space in the middle, and some of these [particles] were seen inside that core, between intact joints. Then we found things that looked shards, like roof-tiles, that were broken off from ceramic roof-tiles. These were in the blood areas, and what they were were replicate coatings, from the coated fibrils, that had fractured off. Instead of fracturing off as small parts, they fractured off as tablet-shaped materials. These again were not birefringent or pleochroic, and in fact some of these were quite interesting because near the scorch areas, they were distinctly an olive-brown colour, rather than a red or an orangy colour.” Adler goes on to describe various less distinct “globs” which nevertheless had the characteristics of the other non-birefringent, non-pleochroic material. From the way all the material above is presented aurally, it seems that this description was accompanied by illustrative slides, and it is a great pity that as far as I know these have never been published.
Adler goes on to describe some control experiments carried out on some 300-year old Spanish linen that Mrs Heller had provided, to the effect that when stained with blood it looked like the Shroud under the microscope, but when smeared with iron oxide paint it didn’t. They also treated their Spanish linen with saponaria, and with an old recipe for khaki involving iron oxide, and found that in various observations the first did not resemble the Shroud, but the second did.
In a hilarious tongue-in-cheek interlude Adler describes the team-work that enabled them to carry out over a thousand tests on the various fibrils, each taking something like twenty minutes, with the surgeon (JH) just standing about occasionally being told to cut out a new fibre, while the chemist (AA) pored over the microscope doing all the work. Extracting the fibres from the “stickum” was a major obstacle to their efforts.
Then he describes the many, many different components of blood, under different conditions and in different stages of decomposition, and shows that some of Mark Evans’s micrographs of blood areas demonstrate considerable variety themselves. This is followed by an attempt to reconcile the two spectra illustrated in ‘Blood on the Shroud of Turin,’ their first paper, and mentioned by John Heller, above:
I’m afraid I don’t find this very convincing. Spectrum A is a transmission spectrum from one of Adler’s “shards,” and Spectrum B is a conversion of reflectance to transmission of one of Sam Pellicori’s spectra discussed earlier. Adler explains that A might be expected to be more accurate towards the blue end of the spectrum (400-500nm), and B more accurate towards the red (600-800nm). That may be true, but the fact is that they look nothing like each other. Apart from a general trend of high absorption on the left and low on the right, there is no comparison in slope, position of idiosyncrasies or numerical values. I think the explanation is weak. Then Adler considers the dome shape at about 420nm on spectrum A to be “the expected Soret peak for an iron porphyrin.” As discussed in an earlier post, Heller considered the peak to be at 410nm, and was very precise about how they measured and identified it. However, Adler continues “this is an absolutely characteristic feature of these materials. No other compound known to man will give you that intense absorption in that region.” This is a bit of a contrast to what they wrote in ‘Blood on the Shroud;’ “Although the spectra of the Shroud fibrils are, in fact, indicative of such a spectrum, the high degree of scattering from these solid samples makes the visible band shape features less distinct and does produce peak shifts from the solution spectra. […] Therefore, this identification is much less positive than desired.”
Adler continues by identifying bile pigments, such as bilirubin, and explains that the anomalies found in the various spectra described by the physicists which do not appear to resemble blood, can be explained by the presence of these and similar breakdown products. Although I don’t doubt that Adler’s explanations can apply to these specific anomalies, or the truth of his reiterated statement that “this is a legally acceptable test for the presence of blood in a court of law,” overall the spectra are sufficiently unlike other published spectra for blood for us to suspect that other materials, such as pigments, may at least play a contributory part to the bloodstains.
From blood, Adler moves onto proteins, where he is perhaps on surer ground, and fails to find any on the image fibres (where there also wasn’t any iron oxide either) or at the waterstain margins (where there was), but does find it in the bloodstain areas. They also found it at the uncoloured fringes of some bloodstains, supporting the idea of a proteinaceous ‘serum-ring.’ Thence to the colour of the image itself and the complete failure of any chemical tests but two to identify anything. The only chemical tests that proved positive on the image areas were for aldehydes and for carboxylic acid groups, which can only be achieved by dehydrative oxidation. “Now, it turns out that there’s two ways you can oxidise cellulose. […] If you oxidise this under alkaline conditions, with ionising radiation, it will give you carboxyl groups only, where it oxidises; no aldehydes. And in fact if you oxidise linen this way it stays white. On the other hand, if you oxidise it under acidic conditions, or pyrolytic conditions – that’s like scorch conditions – then you dehydrate before you oxidise, and you get aldehyde groups forming. The chromophore is in fact a conjugated carbonyl group. The ultraviolet absorption peaks for conjugated carbonyls of course depends on the degree of conjugation, but the peaks are characteristically found between 315 and 350 nm. You may remember that the peaks you saw yesterday in the Gilberts’ spectra and Sam’s spectra in the ultraviolet aren’t back in the region of 315 to 350. In fact the evidence on the spectroscopy supports the notion that we find in the chemistry, that in fact the image is due to nothing except dehydratively oxidised cellulose.”
Various other tests continued to reinforce the idea that the image was composed solely of degraded flax, and nothing else. One interesting thing found was that “when you treat the non-image fibrils, or the control fibrils, with sulphuric acid, [after] about half an hour they turn yellow, and are absolutely microscopically and chemically identical to [image] fibrils.”
So, the chemistry seems sorted, but, “this presents us with a problem. […] Our problem is we know the chemistry of the image; we know the physics of the image, but we don’t know how to put the two simply together. The types of things John Jackson talked to you about would suggest the image was made by some type of projective radiation process. I’ve just told you that would give us the wrong chemistry. That would give us carboxyl groups only and no aldehydes. On the other hand we’ve told you the chemistry is suggestive of some thing like a scorching process. […] But the trouble is if we use the scorching process, we’d have one of those problems John talked about in the image formation. You could not get the resolution; you would get severe distortion; you’d get things which are not characteristic of the image. […] We can tell you what it is, but we can’t tell you at this point how it got there.”
The next presentation was by Giovanni Riggi di Numana, whose written paper was read – it sounds as if it is being translated on the fly – for him by John Heller. He had extracted material from the surface and from the space between the Shroud and the backing cloth using a miniature vacuum of his own design, and taken photographs of the underside of the Shroud using a miniature camera and fibre-optic cables also of his own construction. Samples were also taken of the reliquary and the warping cloths. Very little of the material obtained had been examined thoroughly [and indeed, it is not clear that that it ever has been]. Interestingly, Riggi wrote “absolutely nothing has been done to conserve or preserve the Shroud according to modern museum practices. It’s just kept, rolled up, in a box, in a box, in a box.” From examination, it was clear that the image was not represented on the underside of the cloth, although the blood stains were. What’s more, “basically he’s saying that […] the blood flows like a type of red viscous molasses, and it will go through but it will not penetrate into the empty portion of the microfibrils, that have been described like bamboo. The blood is too thick to get into the interior.” I think Heller misunderstands Riggi here. It’s not just the lumens of the fibres that the blood doesn’t reach, it doesn’t even penetrate the threads to any great extent, as was discovered by the 1973 Italian commission. Blood like molasses wouldn’t even penetrate the surface of the cloth.
Riggi went on to enumerate some of the things found among his vacuuming, such as numerous common bacterial and fungal spores, most of which Heller was unable to pronounce and some of which seem to have been renamed between 1981 and now. Samples of the dust from each area were randomly selected for Scanning Electron Microscopy, revealing frequent and abundant pollens, some of which appeared recent, as they were “clean,” and others much older, as they seem to have been coated in a calcium deposit. There was also a fossil pollen – a Lycopodium – from the Cretaceous period. “Special attention was paid to the possible finding of pollen from Saponaria officinalis, but [up to] now, no trace of such pollen, even blurred by a coating or anything similar in shape or dimension has been detected. […] A large number of tiny insects exist on the back surface of the Shroud. The technical preparation of the samples does not permit us to say that such insects still exist [alive] today, but we can certainly maintain that in the past they have invaded the surface. […] Comparative research on dust drawn from Egyptian mummies […] has provided us with very similar insects at the Scanning Electron Microscopic level, and in some cases they are superimposable [identical]. Their classification is very difficult. They are unquestionably mites and according to the Institute of Systematic Zoology of the University of Turin, are at least ten times smaller than the mites which are known today. […] Possibly these are the exoskeletons of juveniles. “Mineral dust represents the bulk of the materials drawn. In some instances their crystal aspect identifies them but in most cases their uneven shape does not permit any assumption [of identification]. […] The most interesting findings are related to the areas of the the hand and the face. In these areas, but not only there, many particles, mostly made of light elements, are observed. The prevailing chemical elements were silicon, sodium, aluminum, phosphorus, sulphur, chlorine, potassium and calcium, which is the most abundant of all. Iron, copper, silver, lead and gold (this last one for technical reasons [specimens for SEM examination are coated with gold]). […] In the above [collection] we can say that the light elements are often linked together in a complex and numerous combination that can suggest the abundance of various acid carbonates. Among the heavy elements, iron is prevalent in the samples examined. It shows to be two possible kinds of combination, suggesting in the qualitative analysis the presence of organic and inorganic iron. There are particles of iron oxide on the cloth, which are pure iron oxide. There is iron linked to elements such as potassium, calcium, sodium and others, which seems to be of organic origin, probably blood or its derivatives.”
“Examination of comparative dusts, using the same research methods employed on the Shroud. After some unsuccessful attempts, on dusts from fabrics of difficult comparison, the analysis of dust from Egyptian mummies of a period around 1100 BC has provided the best, and perhaps the most surprising results. In fact, the dust drawn from the skin of mummies beneath the innermost layer of the bandages showed considerable similarity in our microanalysis with most of the microanalysis made on Shroud dusts. Moreover, important biological similarities were also noticed, such as, for instance, pollen incrustations […] and bits of tiny insects found in both cases.”
Various comparative slides were shown, with samples from the Shroud and from Egyptian mummies for comparison, and then there was mention of more modern contaminants, including “substances related to current, ever-increasing atmospheric pollution. Frequently, some particles have been recognised as hydrocarbon combustion derivatives, originating, to a large extent, from central heating in the Turin area. Other pollutants are related to the presence in the atmosphere of commercial detergents. It’s also been found that articles which came in contact with the Shroud, such as ex-voto, sacred vestments and painted copies of the Shroud have transferred traces of their constituents to it. In fact, extremely small particles of gold, silver, bronze, candlewax and shreds of different fabrics and so forth have also been detected.”
Riggi concludes by mentioning the importance of “an airtight container filled with inert gas” to help preserve the Shroud for the future, and comparing the burial of the man in the Shroud to his ancient Egyptian contemporaries.
The last paper in the chemistry aspect of the symposium was given by Sam Pellicori, who began by thinking that data by itself was rather boring, so that he was now going to speculate as to what it might all mean, in particular, in an attempt to suggest how the image got onto the Shroud. He gave his talk the title, “Laboratory Simulations of the Shroud data in an attempt to reproduce it and thereby explain it.” By taking samples of linen, treating it in different ways and heating it for different times at different temperatures, he was able to achieve numerous spectra which could be compared to spectra previously derived from the Shroud itself. Some of his spectra seem to be related to those reproduced in his paper, ‘Spectral properties of the Shroud of Turin,’ published in Applied Optics in 1980. Some of his tests involved iron oxide, at low concentrations, but both his discussion and the graphs in his paper are confusing. At a concentration of 4µg/cm2 iron oxide is barely visible to the eye, but the spectrophotometer identifies a characteristic curve, essentially low and level below about 550nm, high and level above about 600nm, with a steep gradient between the two levels. Iron oxide is red. The Shroud curve, both background and image, has a more of less constant gradient from 350nm to 700nm. The Shroud is yellow. Difficult to argue with that. However, Pellicori goes on to say that this is a “confirmatory piece of evidence to the chemistry, which says that, yes, there’s iron there, there’s even some iron oxide, but to a very low level. In fact, the amount of iron or iron oxide is so minute that it’s not visible to the eye. Therefore it doesn’t contribute to the visibility of the Shroud image.” If 4µg/cm2 is “barely visible,” then what are we to make of Morris, Schwalbe and London’s lowest estimate of iron in the non-image areas of the Shroud of 6.8µg/cm2, rising to 10.8µg/cm2 on the eye and 13.0µg/cm2 on the cheek? That should be clearly visible to the naked eye. Even so, Pellicori’s earlier point, that iron oxide is red but the Shroud is yellow, remains valid.
He moves on to describe how Alan Adler “applied some very nasty chemicals to rehydrogenate [?] the reaction that occurred here, restor[ing] the linen to its original colour, thus proving the […] oxidative, dehydrative, conjugation chemistry, that explains what the body image is.”
All Pellicori’s attempts to replicate the colour of the image involved baking his samples in an oven, to simulate an aging process, strongly implying that there was minimal image on the Shroud when the image-making process began. He also emphasised that just because some of his additive tests succeeded in achieving the correct colour, that didn’t mean those additives were actually used. He used tea, orange juice, lemon, urine, sweat and olive oil, as well as iron oxide. However, he did think he had succeeded in reproducing many of the characteristics of the image.
“Some of the kitchen laboratory experiments used olive oil and we got a stain that was measurable. This had had some previous exposure to sunlight [… which] does some degree of pre-sensitisation. […] I applied some lemon juice to my fingers and got, after baking, a visible image. […] This demonstrates that, with an aqueous solution of one of these stimulating materials, you can get an image on only one side of the cloth. […] I’ve used oily materials Iike olive oil and also aqueous materials, and both produce the accelerated degradation of the cellulose. The amount of penetration differs, of course, between an oily material and an aqueous material. […] Here is, probably barely visible to you, an olive oil stain done on my fingers. Now, we are attempting to reproduce some of the properties that we see on the Shroud. We had that processed under the VP-8 analyzer, and you can see that we have reproduced cylinder-like objects, resembling the original fingers. The way I did this follows a suggestion by John German, a team member, that, if you apply a stimulating material to, say, your fingers, put the cloth on top of the fingers, and then lightly apply pressure on the very tops, and slightly begin to form around the fingers to pick up the curves, you can reproduce the contour. The idea that Mr and Mrs German have is that the cloth placed on the body […] would absorb moisture and become more flexible, such that it begins to contact around the curve. It spends most of its time at the crown of the curve, and less time going around the curve. The fact that it spent most time on the crown meant it picked up more of the stimulating material [there] than it does on the side and therefore the image is darker. This might give contour information.”
This is a new idea to me, even though it is over 40 years old! The graduation in intensity may be a function of distance, or of pressure, but this is the first occasion I’ve come across that considers time of contact as a relevant factor.
“The photomicrograph of the tip of the nose, showing the discoloured fibrils, with some reddish material.” I have to say I don’t see any more extraneous material on the nose than anywhere else.
However, Pellicori was also able to reproduce the stochastic nature of the image in the laboratory. “Here we have clumps of coloured fibrils adjacent to uncoloured fibrils. We have colouration only on the topmost fibrils – it doesn’t penetrate – so we have succeeded in reproducing several of the image characteristics. We’ve reproduced the colour; we’ve reproduced the physical location of some of the stains; we have also reproduced, to a certain extent, contour information on the fingers.”
Pellicori continues with a rather disjointed review of the photographic evidence presented so far, which is difficult to follow without the accompanying slides. He makes, however, an interesting case for a direct contact mechanism for the image, which he did not think was either scorching, radiation, or diffusion. “The skin wounds on the chest… […] The UV has shown us that there is detail in the skin wounds that is really scratch-like, to the millimetre scale. This tells us something, and what it tells me in particular is that the cloth had to be in direct, intimate contact in order to transfer such detail from the skin to the cloth. […] So the next logical step to take, is that the foreign material that was on the skin, whether it be the natural perspiration and skin oils or burial ointment, also transferred from the skin to the cloth by direct contact. This then, was the catalyst or stimulant for the chemistry, the darkening of the cellulose in those local areas that accounts for the body image.”
He goes on to examine the scorches on the Shroud, but without the accompanying slides this is less easy to follow. He does conclude, however, that because of the fluorescence characteristics, the image cannot be a scorch, and in a rather convoluted summary, reviews all the evidence presented and finally leaves his own, contact, mechanism as a valid solution to the problem, producing a latent image that developed slowly overtime into what we see today. However, in order, the largest objections to this hypothesis were firstly that he had not succeeded in making a comparable image to the Shroud face, because the contours are too pronounced, secondly that the front and back of the body had produced very similar images in terms of pressure, which was not as well explained as it needed to be, and finally that there was no trace of any of his possible “stimulating agents” on the Shroud today.
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SUNDAY AFTERNOON
This session began with a presentation by Ian Wilson, who was not a member of STuRP, but who had been invited because he would represent the Historical side of Shroud studies. Interestingly he began by implying that there was more evidence of authenticity from a scientific than from a historical viewpoint. He traces the ‘conventional’ likeness of Jesus back to the 6th century, but not beyond, and wonders where it came from. And so, via the Veronica, the Vignon markings and the Pray Codex, to Wilson’s well established hypothesis about the Mandylion of Edessa. Unfortunately the tape cuts off in mid-flow, so we can’t tell if anything surprising was revealed at the end.
Wilson was followed by Maria Grazia Siliato, whose paper was read by a colleague. She addressed some archaeological considerations regarding ancient weaving, tombs, the use of spices in burial rites, the nature of Roman scourges, the crown of thorns and crucifixion. Although her paper is authoritative and carefully referenced, it is often over-exact in its elucidation of ancient artefacts and literature, and none of the examples she gives really relates to what we know about the Shroud and its markings.
The presentations were brought to a close by Ray Rogers, Eric Jumper and Larry Schwalbe. Between them they tried to bring together the somewhat different strands of evidence and conclusion presented so far and achieve some kind of consensus. Rogers explained Scientific Method, and demanded the use of ‘Multiple Working Hypotheses.’ “The worst thing a scientist can do is to choose one hypothesis, dig in, and protect it to the death. You have to use multiple working hypotheses, and this is certainly one place not to exercise a closed mind. You can cast any kind of hypothesis you want. With the Shroud, you can say, ‘I believe that was painted in the Black Forest by elves,’and that is a perfectly legitimate hypothesis to propose, and you’d better test it right along with all the others.” This illustrates the problem that you can never be sure that you have evaluated all the possible hypotheses, or that one that you have missed isn’t correct. Still, you do your best and then gradually, on the basis of relevant observations, you reject the weaker ones, and carry out experiments that test the ones you have left. “Then the little isolated pieces that you have seen and heard reported are bricks in the wall that we’re trying to build, and now we’ll try to give you an idea of what we think the wall looks like. And feel free to shoot holes in it. That’s what everybody should do. Don’t leave any stone unturned, if you can turn it. It’s fun and games. Throw everything at it you can.”
The contributions of Jumper and Schwalbe are missing. Jumper’s summary of the presentations is abruptly cut off, and the next tape begins during a Question and Answer session which, presumably to the frustration of the scientists, was really about the authenticity of the Shroud as a conclusion, and not the scientific detail. The first answer is to a missing question, which may have been to the effect that John Heller had claimed to have proved that there was a body under the cloth when the image was formed. Schwalbe (I think) replies: “I’m not sure that John actually said such a thing. […] But I will go as far as I think the team would go, in kind of at least a majority. […] There are certainly dissenters, but I would say that, in general, I think people are beginning to think that there was a dead body under a cloth. But even that we cannot prove. I don’t think that anyone would go beyond that statement, to thinking that it’s the burial cloth of Jesus. I don’t think that anyone has allowed themselves the privilege of having that kind of opinion, simply because we have access to the information. And until the carbon dating comes out I, for one would not like to be made the fool of.”
The questioner seems to have persisted, in wanting to know how many of the team now believed the Shroud was authentic, to which the reply was that that was an inappropriate question.
A suggestion, from the spokesperson for Maria Siliato, concerned the possibility of “the aloes being a dessicant, and the idea of there being lots and lots of it in the tomb sprinkled around as a powder as opposed to what we thought. It’s very interesting with resect to the textural question over there, I think. I don’t know whether a dessicant would make linen more stiff or whether its weight would press it down giving a little bit closer contact and tend also to draw moisture from the body more than we had normally thought through the linen to give a greater image.” This was followed by somebody wondering if the reason there was no myrrh or aloes found on the Shroud might be that the mites had eaten it. After all, “they must have been there to eat something.” Al Adler replies that he thinks the reason he didn’t see any myrrh or aloes on the cloth was that it wasn’t there. That was also the conclusion of Giovanni Riggi, who also explained that mites only eat cellulose, and would have had plenty to eat from the cloth itself.
The next questioner wondered why the question of the coins over the eyes had not been discussed during the conference. The first response was that, “No one else that I know, in looking at the images, has seen the characters that Fr Filas reports,” but that simply meant that they couldn’t say whether they were there or not. Someone else said, “I think many of us have seen what Filas is talking about, but our opinion is, we don’t interpret it the same way. We think he’s looking at something which is just an artefact.” By artefact, he clarified, he meant an irregularity in the cloth, not an extraneous object. Then Vern Miller, who was after all the scientific photographer for the team, said he had spent a week with Fr Filas examining photographs of the alleged coins, but that his opinion was that “what we’re seeing is light and shadow, crowns of the threads and shadows cast from the cylindrical shape of the threads and fibres, and dependent on which way this cloth was photographed and the lighting, […] when we enhance the shadows, making them larger or smaller, and the highlights larger or smaller, you can make out anything you want to out of it.” He illustrated this with close-up slides. Jumper concluded, on behalf of STuRP generally, “The point is that we have tried to look at this, and we do not see any substance to what he is saying. […] At the moment, we do not find any credibility to it.” And this in spite of the fact that it was Jumper himself, with John Jackson, who had first observed “disc-shaped things” over the eyes on the VP-8 analyzer images.
A questioner who identified himself as Roger Richards asked if the image was on the inside (body-side) of the folded cloth, or on the outside. This had implications about which side of the man had been pierced with the lance. After someone (Schwalbe?) says, “of course, you can’t rule out the idea that the image would form on the outside, Al Adler says, “we don’t have any evidence that it actually wrapped a body; that’s an opinion not a scientific fact,” to which Jackson replies that the cloth-body distance correlation curve was made on the assumption that there was a body under the cloth, but that the ‘loop’ demonstrating that the assumption was correct, had not yet been closed. “Without the mechanism, you really cannot close the loop. “As Adler has just said,” he goes on, “there is no definitive proof that there was a body under the cloth. As I say, it’s an opinion that some of us share, but not everyone.” This is a slight modification of what Adler actually said, converting “we don’t have any evidence,” to “there is no definitive proof.”
The next questioner wondered if the team had any thoughts about investigating other Shrouds with images on, as described by Maria Siliato, to see if the mechanisms were the same. The reply was that those images were not sufficiently similar to the Shroud to make it worthwhile. They appeared to be the result of the decomposition of the body and were very indistinct. This was agreed to by Giovanni Riggi and Luigi Gonella.
The next question was whether the proceedings of the conference were to be published (that was the intention, but I don’t think it ever actually happened), and the next wondered why the Shroud showed no damage, such as holes or tears, as might have occurred if it had been unwrapped from a body. Adler suggested you could just lift it off, but I think the questioner was imagining a more mummy-style wrapping. Jackson wondered if he was referring to the condition of the bloodstains, and said, “when I was in Turin, looking at the Shroud, one of the first things that struck me when I looked at the bloodstains […] was that the bloodstains looked as if they were coming apart. They’re blading [?]; they’re crumbling, and how one could make a statement in the light of that as to what the initial conditions of those blood stains were, when you see them today, as being eroded… I don’t think that one can make that kind of a conclusion, just based upon what we see today.”
Bridgit Smith wanted to say that as a believer she didn’t need any additional evidence for her faith, and felt that she had attended at autopsy when she had really just come to mourn, but nevertheless asked whether real blood wouldn’t have decomposed over the years since the burial of Jesus, and in turn caused the decomposition of the cloth. The response, from John Heller, was the single word, “No. I think that the chemistry of the blood is well understood at this time and that we are seeing degraded blood in all sorts of stages from whole blood down to the final products.”
Another questioner wanted to ask the pathologists (Robert Bucklin and Joseph Gambescia) why the fingers were too long. Unfortunately they had left, and anybody else’s response is cut off by the end of the tape, although some reference to the statistics of anthropometrics seems to be being discussed at the beginning off the next one.
The next question referred to a slide shown earlier, to the effect that the Vignon vaporograph and the Pellicori contact hypothesis were good candidates for the image formation mechanism, but that “projection” had not been included. The questioner wondered why not, even though it might imply a supernatural element, since we had been told that even Black Forest elves could be considered a valid hypothesis. Larry Schwalbe said it was his slide, and a reflection of his own personal summary of what he thought at the moment, and not necessarily definitive. Al Adler was called upon, with good humour, as, “the little Jewish boy,” and therefore, presumably, with no conflict of interest towards the possibility of the supernatural being involved, and he was more forthright. “We haven’t ruled out projection mechanisms. The problem is that we can’t make them consistent with the chemistry. Projection mechanisms usually involve ionising radiation type mechanisms. That would not give us the chemistry of this thing.” That was the essence of the problem. “We know some good ideas about the physics, we know some good ideas about the chemistry. We don’t know how to put the two together in a simple way.”
Ray Rogers said that Joan Janney had apparently done numerous trials involving “different kinds of radiant energy, falling on various kinds of cloth under all kinds of circumstances, and what you find out, with these projection-type things is, as Al said, the chemistry is entirely different. When you hit a cloth with a highly energetic radiant energy flow, UV light, for example, in an intense burst, it blows the surface of the cloth off. It’s almost like you’ve detonated an explosive on the surface of the cloth; it puts a shockwave through the cloth and sort of powders it. Infrared causes it to pop like popcorn. Nothing that she tried, made the cloth colour the way the image appears. All she did was make it disappear.”
He went on to say that he thought he had heard, in the question, an implication that the scientists were ignoring the supernatural. “We can’t observe the supernatural. If you can give us a matched litter of volunteers, who will volunteer to be resurrected and let us do experiments on them, then we’ve got something to go on. Otherwise we don’t.”
Next: “Does microphotography show tiny traces of cotton in the crevices of the linen from the immediately previous run of the loom for thirty-eight inches of the total width, and no such traces for the remaining five inches of the width, indicating that the cloth as we have it, is composed of two pieces made at slightly different times and later put together?”
Reply (1): “It was reported elsewhere, elsewhen, back in 1973, that someone from the European centre stated that there were traces of cotton in the weave of the loom. We have not been able to observe this microscopically. Any cotton that we have seen is apparently accidental or superimposed. We have had conversations with several textile experts, one of whom is here, who is the Curator of Textiles with the Cleveland [?] Art Museum, who tells us that in ancient times there were linen weavers and there were cotton weavers and they never got their twine confused […] and an admixture was something that neither Sheena [?], nor any her colleagues had ever heard of.”
Reply (2): “We have evidence, first off, indeed there is cotton in the weave itself of the main body of the cloth. The reason I state this very emphatically is that we have one tiny, tiny little thread, the so-called Zina thread, from the heel area, about a quarter of an inch long, that was wrapped in polyethylene. […] This has been poked and prodded with a lot of maybe dissecting needles and things because lots of people were interested in it. What interested me most was, the thread [I think she means fibril] that had the most blood specks on it was cotton: it was not linen, and it was indeed twisted in with the linen […] We subsequently looked [at the whole thread] and I think we found that all the cotton on it [the thread] was not an accident.” Furthermore, by examining the X-ray radiographs, this commenter and her colleagues were pretty sure they could follow some Shroud threads across the seam from one side to the other. Besides which, the colour of the Shroud, which slightly varies along the length of the cloth, also seemed continuous across the seam.
Next was a man who began by saying he believed Christ was raised from the dead, and then denied the possibility of authenticity on the completely erroneous biblical grounds that a “sindon” was “strips of cloth about that wide.” Presumably he held his hands apart to show the width. He floundered for a bit but that was clearly his point. He agreed that the scientific evidence had been as objective as it could be, but in the end, as far as he was concerned, “I guess the bottom line of it all is, what are you going to believe in life? Is it going to be scientific data or the word of God?” Bill Mottern replied that he personally could believe in both.
Then came a question asking whether you could detect bodily decomposition on a Shroud, and what its absence might say about the Shroud. All Adler replied was that they could have found it if there was any, but there wasn’t.
Next a woman asked for a comment on the accuracy of radiocarbon dating, and was told by Bob Dinegar that scientists would “sign their names” to a date accurate to ±120 years, but that the data would usually suggest about ±50 years. “They just like to double it, just to be on the safe side.”
Finally a journalist asked if there were further investigations planned, and if so, where donations could be sent to help support the Project. John Jackson was not sure whether STuRP had a future, as it would depend on the interest the public showed in it. He gave an address in Amston, Connecticut, where donations could be sent.
Thanks were expressed to Connecticut College, and the meeting was closed.