I got involved with The Shroud in the mid 70s because I operated a photographic studio,
commercial studio, but mostly a lot of scientific, technical, medical,
technical things, a lot of product work.
And I operated that studio in Santa Barbara,
and I was contracted by one of the local companies,
a scientific company that was a contractor,
Los Alamos National Laboratories.
So they needed a photographic consultant
that had a dark room and knew how to use a dark room.
And of course I had several dark rooms
and knew how to use them all.
And so they contracted me for seven months.
It obviously had a lot to do with atomic bombs specifically.
And that's all I can pretty much say about it,
but we did that project for seven months.
And I worked with one guy who was an imaging scientist
and we finished that project.
And just a few weeks after that finished,
the phone rang and it was him again.
Now, you know, when you're self-employed
and the phone rings, you're always hoping, praying,
that's the next job.
So, this guy called me again, his name is Don Devan, may he rest in peace.
And he said, I said, Oh, what's up, Don?
You know, thinking another project and he said, Well, not exactly.
He said, What do you know about the Shroud of Turret?
I laughed and I said, but Don, I'm Jewish.
Don laughed and he said, so am I, remember?
He was one of the other Jewish guys on our team,
as was Dr. Alan Adler,
who was our blood chemist.
At any rate, he explained to me that he had
participated in an experiment at Sandia Laboratories,
a sister lab to Los Alamos,
also a weapons laboratory.
And the x-ray gentleman over there, the x-ray expert,
had purchased this piece of equipment to help better view
and see if he could get more information out of the x-rays
that he was making on a daily basis.
It's called a VP8 image analyzer.
Basically, it takes an image input
with a black and white video camera,
displays it on a green screen monitor,
and the instrument itself allows you
to take the lights and darks of the image
and stretch them into 3D space.
Proportionate to each other. So a normal photograph put in there, you get this jumble of shapes, you get something, but nothing realistic.
The shroud image yields the natural relief of a human form.
And that is unique.
And consequently, he said that the guys decided they were going to try and put a team together, see if they could get permission to examine the Shroud of Turin, and try and determine how that image formed on that cloth because it had some very unique properties.
the one I just described particularly. And so he said, so they're going to need a photographer.
He said, I told him about you because he and I just finished working. He said,
so would you like to be a part of this? And I said, no, I don't want to get involved.
with that because I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, and I didn't know much about Jesus.
I knew he was Jewish. I knew that, but I didn't have, you know, I had no emotional attachment,
obviously, the way any Christian certainly would.
And when I said that to him, he said, yeah, well, that's an advantage then, he says, because you're not going to come into this with any bias.
And I said, well, yeah, I actually do have a bias. It's probably an artwork. So I was biased against it.
And I even said somewhere along the line to somebody that, yeah, you know, we'll get to Turin, we'll give us five minutes, we'll find a paint, we'll come home, we'll be done.
Yeah, it's 44 years later, and there was no paint, and it's not a painting or an artwork, and I'm still involved.
So that's what ultimately got me involved with the project. Obviously, that image property hooked me, and I realized that that was really something special.
And I was also thinking, well, wait a minute, this also means a free trip to Italy. So, you know, so I, I'm very honest about that. I wasn't very deep in my thinking about this route of Turin, circa 1976 when that conversation took place.
Obviously I stayed on the team participated as the official documenting photographer.
The work has been published all over the world life and geographic and time and Newsweek and.
pretty much any documentary on the shroud that you've seen in the last 40 years we've participated
in at least providing images to them and of course then back in 1995 I finally became
convinced the shroud was authentic it took until 1995 17 years
And after that, shortly after I came to terms with it, the last of my questions have been answered.
I got a phone call from a friend who said, hey, you know that shroud thing you're involved with?
And I said, yeah, I know that shroud thing I'm involved with.
He says, you know, it turns out that's just a photo made by Leonardo da Vinci.
And I laughed because I thought he was joking at the time. This was 1995. And he said, no, no, I'm serious.
He says, I said, where did you get that information? And he said, well, my wife and I were checking out at the grocery store.
Obviously, I'm one of the tabloids.
And, and he said, I said, Look, I'm no expert, but the shroud was being publicly shown 100 years before Da Vinci was born.
He was a good artist, but it wasn't that good.
What was your reaction to the carbon testing in 1988?
Well, look, obviously, I'm not a physicist, so I'm not qualified to have any criticism from me to the guys who did the testing.
But I knew about something called the Hungarian Prey Codex.
which is an illuminated manuscript dated about 1195 so 70 years earlier than the earliest possible date given by the carbon dating guys.
And I knew about that and if you look at that illuminated manuscript you can find it on the website or on the internet in general.
There's an illustration there of Jesus being wrapped in the shroud,
a duplication in rather crude form of the herringbone weave that's distinguishable on the shroud.
Jesus' arms crossed across the torso and that naked Jesus at that, which is rare in any Christian art.
They always put a modesty cloth on because artistic license allows that.
But this manuscript is illuminated with Jesus' naked arms crossed across his torso like we see on the shroud.
And on the shroud are a series of four L-shaped burn holes that we know predate the fire 1532 that caused all the major damage we see.
And he included the L-shaped burn holes in his illuminated manuscript.
Now, one might say that's coincidence, but not when you include those L-shaped burn holes,
which have no other significance on that piece of cloth other than that's what's on the shroud.
And so it's obvious to us that that artist, at some point in time, had seen the shroud,
memorized what he saw and included that in his illuminated manuscript. And that's 70 years
earlier than possible, earliest carbon date. So right off the bat, we knew there was something
wrong. And for the next 12 years, people were...
coming up with all these ridiculous theories and there's a bioplastic coding that's given to dating and there was a conspiracy and there was this and there was that all of them either required me to accept some form of science that hadn't yet been invented or something supernatural or some criminal activity.
So all these theories were proposed over those 12 years and cast aside as being invalid.
Until 2000, when Joe Marino and Sue Benford, two non-scientists who had gotten photographs of some of the radiocarbon samples from the Zurich lab, took them to
textile experts in Ohio that didn't tell them it was a photograph of a sample of the shroud,
just said, what do you think? And the first textile expert looked at it and said, oh look,
this is an old piece of cloth, herringbone weave, and look, somebody's manipulated this.
So Benford and Marina went, okay, thank you. They went and found another textile expert, because that's good science anyway. That's following the scientific method by not just taking one person's opinion.
So they went to a second expert, again in Ohio.
Second expert says the same thing, independent of the first. Somebody's manipulated this. There's some evidence that somebody has done some manipulation.
So they felt that they needed to find the world's foremost authority.
So they went to Thomas Ferguson Irish linen in Ireland, and their chief researcher a woman took one look and said, ah, I believe this is an example of French invisible relieving.
Well, many people have never even heard of that, and it does exist, although the Turin authorities at the time when this first was released said, no, no such technique even exists.
Well, I have a book that's called The Friendway System, a French
invisible, relieving, preserving an ancient art form. So we know it existed. It was actually
pioneered at the court of France in the 1300s when the shroud happened to be in France.
What a coincidence. So, so they.
came up with a theory that has since been scientifically confirmed that that sample site,
the only single sample they took, did not represent anywhere else on that cloth because
it had been manipulated. In fact, when it was rewoven, somebody dyed it so that it would match
the color of the original cloth, and they used the gum arabic base with rose matter dye from the matter
root plant chemically found on that sample site.
And so the sample that was done, and we now know the most recent paper came out for 27 years the three labs and the rich museum, which was the caretaker of all the material for those 27 years every request for access to the raw data.
was denied or ignored. Now, if there's nothing suspicious going on, why are you afraid to release your raw data? This is normal in the scientific world.
It took 27 years, and the Freedom of Information Act, thanks to a French researcher who's also a law student at the same time,
a proud scholar and legal scholar.
He went to England used the Freedom of Information Act forced the British Museum to release the data which they did.
Then he brought on a team of experts in that field that analyzed the data and guess what they found the strip that was cut.
has one date at one end, and there's a gradient of dates going all the way to the other end of that strip, and it's not consistent or homogeneous anywhere along that strip.
So there is nowhere on that strip that can happen.
can serve as a date for anywhere else on that clock.
And now we know why they were hiding the raw data
because what they did, they claimed a 95% certainty
in their testing.
But as we looked at the raw data there did they did a lot of tests that they excluded because if they had kept them, they couldn't have reached 95%.
So, was that manipulation was that intentional.
Who knows. All I know is we now know that that sample could not yield an accurate date for anywhere else on that piece of cloth.
period. And that's five peer-reviewed journaled articles since the original one that tell us that and provide the evidence for that.
The VP8 image analyzer. I have trouble understanding that.
Okay, so here's the deal. So you take a normal photograph and a black and white camera and you input that into this box.
Kind of looks like an old stereo tuner. You might be old enough to know what that means.
I saw it, they have one.
They have one at the Museum of the Bible, but it's not turned on. They have one of my photographs
from the screen of it, the green background or the green image. So what it does is it takes that image
and it displays it on that green screen, and then all those numbers and dials on that device allow
you to turn up, based on the lights and darks of the image, turn it up into 3D vertical space.
Okay, it stretches it into 3D space proportionate to the density.
So that means that a normal image with a shadow under here, it's going to be low a highlight here.
It's going to be way high, but it's not going to be natural because it doesn't because this camera is not recording any depth information.
The image on the shroud was formed by interaction between the cloth and the body it covered, and where there was direct contact, the image is darkest, and up to about four centimeters, the image grows more faint until it reaches extinction.
That means it's encoding
depth or topographic information in the density of the image itself. So the VP8 reveals that
as a three-dimensional like image, normal photographs don't do that.
What else could do that?
Beats me. Can't think of another thing.
There's got to be some interaction between a cloth and the body.
There's a correlation in the lights and darks of the image on the shroud
and the distance that the cloth was in the body when it occurred.
Yeah, that's the property nobody can match, because all the efforts by skeptics to make something that looks like the shroud, sort of.
I mean, very cartoon-like in many cases.
And they have my photographs to use.
And Kelly, the famous Italian skeptic, wrote to me and I send him high resolution images to work from.
So we don't discriminate.
And he made something look like a cartoon. It did not have the properties of the image the shroud has.
It didn't account for the blood which was on the cloth before the image formed because there's no image under the blood stains on the shroud.
So it meant the forensically accurate blood stains had to get on the cloth before the image formed.
Yeah, even if you make these perfectly accurate replicas to the eye, they don't also replicate
the the chemistry and physics. Yeah, the chemical and physical properties of the clock
have been documented and published in a peer-reviewed literature.
So anybody who tells you it's a painting is ignoring the facts, period.
But like I said, they're not going to change their mind now.
Look, it's so much easier not to have to change your mind about things, to just keep it the way it is that's comfortable.
And when you're dealing with something as emotionally challenging as faith,
Let's face it, these skeptics aren't going to change their minds.
They've committed themselves.
Yeah.
Well, it's, it's easy. It's just easier to, to just not, to just kind of push aside.
say now I ignore this and to say that you know this the carbon testing was done let's get rid of it
so much else that's there. This is the most multidisciplinary object on the planet. I mean,
you've got people from every discipline you can think of and some you would never even dream of
involved in the study of this piece of cloth. And that's, but listen, if it were a painting,
you don't think we would have known that a century ago?
Come on. If it were a painting, how hard is it to identify when there's paint or pigment there?
Look, I knew it wasn't a painting within 15 minutes of it being put in front of us.
We photographers always have our 10x magnifier in this case on my Swiss Army knife,
but I whipped out my 10x magnifier and I started looking in the image areas. I was looking for paint.
Looking for pigment, looking for particulates, for binders, something that would hold pain.
It's nothing, not at all. And we did microscopy.
of the image photo microscopy look at the Mark Evans images there's nothing there it's just
some fibers at the tops are more yellow than the adjacent fibers and the concentration of those
yellow fibers much like a half tone is you know with dots the higher concentration of dots the
darker it appears the same thing with those same yellow fibers they're all the same color
But the quantity of fibers in the given area,
the concentration of those fibers,
gives the impression of lights and darks.
No artist could do that. I couldn't do it in Photoshop if I wanted to.
Oh, not even Da Vinci, right?
Hey, he was good, but he wasn't that good.