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Feb. 2, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:12:40
Edition 609 - Barrie Schwortz - Turin Shroud Investigator
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is the unexplained.
Well, I hope that life is treating you well.
It is the very beginning of February as we say these words and get them out to you.
I hope that life has treated you okay and I hope that you've got through, if you're in North America, some of the awful wintry storms that you've had.
I believe the wintry conditions have stretched down as far as the Carolinas.
So I hope that you're keeping okay in the midst of all of that.
We've had some stormy weather here too in the UK.
North of where I'm speaking to you, a few days ago we had back-to-back storms that have caused all kinds of damage.
Here in London, as quite often happens, the effects of it were not too great.
A couple of trees brought down, some strong winds, but nothing really life-threatening.
But in other parts of the UK, they've had that.
And that, as they say, is the weather report.
Now, as I record these words, it is the very start of February, but I'm sitting here with the heating off and a t-shirt recording this.
That's just a little part of the wacky weather that we're experiencing here in Her Majesty's United Kingdom, which is undergoing all kinds of political turmoil at the moment that I'm not even going to begin to touch upon because there lies madness, I think.
So, you know, we don't go there on this show because we have other things to talk about.
Thank you very much for all of your kind emails.
I'm really pleased to see those when they come.
Please keep those coming.
It's lovely to hear from people who value the show and have good ideas for it, too.
Always wanting to hear guests, suggestions, anything that you have for me.
Go to the website designed and created by Adam.
It is theunexplained.tv.
Please don't forget, if you want to know any news about this podcast, where it all started 16 years ago, or any news about the radio show that I've been doing for nearly six, please go to my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, and any updates on anything, if anything happens to or about the radio show, that is the place that you need to go, my Facebook page, and I will explain all if anything happens, okay?
One thing to run past you, and I know I've asked this before, from time to time I'm under a lot of pressure to be video.
And I know that an awful lot of podcasts and an awful lot of news style radio shows are in video.
And personally, I'm a voice guy, really.
I enjoy making audio material that people can listen to whatever they're doing and wherever they are.
If they're drifting off to sleep, a lot of people are listening in bed, or a lot of people driving trucks or doing their daily work or any kinds of activities that people are able to use sound.
My view has always been, if it's pictures, then that's got to take up all of your attention.
And sometimes there is a thing called theater of the mind, where it's actually better.
You know, they say the pictures are better when it's in your head.
Now, that's always been my view.
And, you know, I've no big objection to being seen, although I have been, you know, away from people for a long time.
You know, I don't exactly look like Brad Pitt, but I don't look like a gargoyle either.
So that's not the issue.
You know, I am though Brad Pitt, that's for sure.
But I still believe in the power of what we used to call radio.
It's a dying medium these days or a dying art.
Let's not say the medium is dying because radio as a medium will never die.
Maybe some of the art of it, though, is going.
So your thoughts about that, and you know where I stand on it all, but you know, I'm always happy to tell you that I may be wrong because I know what that feels like and I've been wrong many times in my life about a whole load of things.
So that's that.
If you haven't made a donation to the show, please do consider that.
And if you have made a donation recently, thank you very, very much, whether that's been, you know, a pound or the cost of a cup of coffee, two pounds, or something more, which a couple of people have done recently.
They know who they are.
Thank you so much for doing that.
It all allows this to continue and allows me to continue.
In an increasingly difficult world, you don't need me to tell you how bills are rising everywhere, the cost of everything.
Every time I go into the supermarket, everything's more expensive.
Every week, there seem to be rises.
I never noticed these things.
You know, my dad, I know I name check him a lot here.
He was a wonderful man, but he was much more methodical about money than I will ever be.
And he would say, do you know how much those things that you've just bought from whichever supermarket it might be cost?
And I'd say, dad, no, I just put them in the trolley and I buy them.
You need to be checking the price, he said.
Let me tell you, these days I check the price.
Everything's getting more expensive and I'm worried myself.
And I know an awful lot of other people are worried about how we're going to get through in the middle of all of this.
I think all of us are looking for solutions and turning to the people who lead us to try and help us through it.
Let's hope they might find some time in amongst everything else to actually do that.
But that is a vaguely political statement, and I don't do politics here because it ain't worth it.
Guest on this show, Barry Schwartz, world authority on the controversial subject of the Shroud of Turin.
Barry Schwartz has got a long track record in this.
He started his researches in this in the 1970s.
He is now 75 years of age and living in Colorado.
So that's the guest on this edition.
Like I say, thank you for your communications.
Please keep them coming.
Emails via the website theunexplained.tv.
Let's get to Frozen Colorado now.
Seven-hour time difference between myself sitting here in London in the evening and Colorado in the morning time and say, Barry Schwartz, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Truly my pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
Now, Barry, before we start talking, just before we began recording this, you told me a little bit about your location.
And if it's not going to be giving away any information that you don't want given away, just talk to me about where you are as we speak right now.
Okay, well, I'm in Colorado, and I live out in the country of Colorado.
I'm not in a city.
And as I've been telling my friends For the last two years, living on a dirt road like a hermit, high in the Rocky Mountains, where social distancing is the norm, comes in very handy during global pandemics.
So I'm out in the country about 55 miles from the largest city, which is Colorado Springs, the largest city nearest to me.
Okay, but these days, of course, anybody can be anywhere.
So you don't have to be in a big city in order to do the research that you do.
That's correct.
As a matter of fact, it's much more comfortable not having to, quote, go into work every day.
For me, going into work means walking from the bedroom over to my desk and sitting down.
Now I'm at work.
Okay.
Now, it's an icy cold.
I know Wednesday morning as we record this.
That's your time.
It's the evening here.
The sun is going down in London as I speak these words.
So that geographically and spatially positions the two of us.
I want to talk a little bit about you, if I may, first of all, because it seems to me that with a background in photography, nobody is better placed to do the research that you do than you, because for various reasons that we will go into as we chart the story of the Turin Shroud and get to where we're at today, this is a story very heavily connected with photography.
But talk to me first about yourself.
Well, I am a graduate of Brooks Institute of Photography.
And after about seven years, I wound up on the faculty of Brooks part-time and operated a photographic studio, a commercial studio in Santa Barbara, California.
It was during that period, about 1975, 70, yeah, about 1975, I was contracted by a local company that was an imaging company, and they were a contractor to Los Alamos National Laboratories, well known for, of course, the invention of the atomic bomb and other things.
I spent seven months as a photographic consultant on that project, which required darkroom work, and of course I had several darkrooms.
And at the end of that project, the gentleman I worked with, we completed the project.
It had to do with atomic bombs, of course, which is about all I can say about it.
And at the end of that period, you know, when you're self-employed and the phone rings, you're hoping that that's the next job.
Well, just a few weeks after we finished that, that gentleman called me again.
And so I'm thinking, perhaps another project.
And he said, well, not exactly.
And he said, what do you know about the Shroud of Turin?
And I kind of laughed and I said, but Don, I'm Jewish.
And Don laughed and he said, so am I, remember?
And Don was one of the other members of our team that was Jewish.
There were three of us, actually, Dr. Alan Adler, Don Devan, and myself.
So my initial response when he explained to me that they'd done some imaging testing on the shroud itself and determined that the shroud had a unique property and consequently they were going to put a team together to examine the shroud and they needed a photographer.
Was I interested?
And my answer was no.
I said no.
Okay.
Because I didn't feel comfortable with it.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home.
I lived in a neighborhood that was half Jewish, half Italian, so Catholics and Jews living side by side and never had any problems.
There was never any animus between us.
And so I didn't have any clear view of the kind of animus that might exist out there as a young lad.
At any rate, I was hesitant, but there was an image property of the shroud that was determined by this testing that they had done in early 76.
And at that point in time, I immediately knew that that kind of property could not be encoded into an image using photography.
And so that caught my interest.
How in the heck did spatial or dimensional or topographic data get encoded into the density of the image on the cloth?
And that's what caught my interest and ultimately had me say yes.
Right.
So that was the thing that made you overcome your natural reticence to get involved in this.
Absolutely, because I understood quickly that that was a unique property that I knew I could not duplicate that property using the photographic skills that I had acquired over the years.
And so that got my curiosity up, my scientific curiosity.
I always am clear about that, that my involvement from the beginning has not been about theology or religion or faith, but simply about the science of the image, which primarily was what our team was designed to do.
Our primary purpose was to go to Turin and determine how the image formed.
Was it a painting?
Was it a scorch?
Was it photographically made?
Those were the three prime kind of suggested ideas of how the image might have been created.
And so that was the purpose of the team that was formed, was to go to Turin and answer one question.
How is that image formed?
Now, religion, since you brought that up, and of course it is very much core to what we're talking about here, so we can't not mention religion.
Religion is seen variously by people, it seems to me.
It's either something that they view as being the bedrock of their lives that gives them focus and meaning, or it polarizes people.
You know, those are the two, it seems to me, divergent views of religion.
But when it comes to the Turin Shroud, because of what it is purported to be, it does seem to me that even today, it's never really died down.
This, of all things, makes people take a stand.
People take a view on this.
It's true.
And, you know, there are very few archaeological objects on the planet that evoke the kind of emotional response that the shroud does.
I mean, you know, we can look at the King Tut exhibit.
You know, they toured it here in the United States.
But no one except maybe somebody from Egypt would have had any emotional attachment to the objects.
Where in the case of the shroud, it's as much a symbol of faith as it is a question for science.
And because of that, it Puts any of us who are studying the shroud into a unique position of either being accused of being overtly religious or having some inherent underlying bias.
And that's why I decided to stay on that team because I'll share this with you at a few months into the project.
I was really feeling reticent again.
And I thought, well, maybe I should just drop out.
And I mentioned that to one of our newest team members at the time.
That was a man named Don Lin.
He was from the Jet Propulsion Lab and NASA.
He was head of imaging on Voyager and Viking and Mariner and Galileo projects.
He also happened to be Catholic.
And so I remember saying to Don, he was my hero on the team, a NASA imaging scientist, me being a photographer.
And I remember saying to him one day, gee, Don, what's a nice Jewish boy like me doing on this team?
And he looked at me and he said, well, apparently you've forgotten that the man in question was a Jew.
And I said, no, I knew that.
And he said, so you don't think God wants one of his chosen people on our team?
And I laughed.
I said, well, no, I never thought that.
And he said, look, he says, let me give you some advice.
Stop complaining.
Go to Turin.
Do the very best job you can do.
God doesn't tell us in advance what the plan is, but one day you'll know.
And those words kept me on the team.
So it wasn't so much a religious thing as much as just kind of an emotional statement that he made to me and pointed out to me that this was a scientific project.
This was something that we were going to do.
Our purpose was to determine how that image was formed, and that was it.
We weren't going to try and prove that it was Jesus.
We weren't going to try and prove the resurrection.
We were simply going to Turin to try and determine and characterize the image on that cloth, determine how it might have formed.
Right.
Let's give ourselves a definition here, and you can tell me if there's anything wrong in this one that I found.
Shrine of Turin, a length of linen that for centuries was purported to be the burial garment of Jesus Christ.
It's been preserved since 1578 in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista in Turin, Italy.
Measuring 4.3 meters, 14.3 inches long, 1.1 meters, 3.7 inches wide, it seems to portray two faint brownish images, those of the back and front of a gaunt, sunken-eyed, 5'7-inch man, as if a body had been laid lengthwise along one half of the shroud, while the other half had been doubled over the head to cover the whole front of the body from face to feet.
The image contain markings that allegedly correspond to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ, including thorn marks on the head, lacerations on the back, bruises on the shoulders, various stains of what is presumed to be blood, and that's been debated over the years.
And the shroud, it is said here in this definition, first emerged historically in 1354 when it's recorded in the hands of a famed knight, Geoffroy de Charnet, Seigneur de Ririe.
I'm sure I've mispronounced that.
In 1389, it went into an exhibition and was denounced as false.
So they've been decrying this thing for that many years by the local bishop of Troy.
Now, that's by no means the long and winding history, kind of paraphrase the peoples here, of this.
Is that a good grounding?
Well, I think generally it is.
There are a few details in there that I would argue are not quite accurate.
For example, the height of the man is probably a little more than five foot seven inches, perhaps five foot nine.
Remembering that the shroud is a piece of woven cloth that can be stretched in any direction by just tugging on it, pulling on it.
The other thing is it can change its dimensions based just on the relative humidity in which it's stored.
So accurate, precise measurements of the height, for example, are very difficult.
The other thing is this, if you've looked at a photograph of the shroud, you'll notice the image just fades out around the periphery.
There are no distinct edges the way an artist would start with an outline and then fill it in.
In this case, the image just literally fades out at its periphery.
And so where do you begin and end taking your measurements becomes an issue depending on the photograph that you might be using or whether you're actually on the shroud itself and doing measurements.
But in either case, of course, the image on the shroud is very faint, no more than about 20% darker than the background at its darkest point.
So to do precise measurements from the cloth as far as the height of the man is quite difficult, and it's difficult to be precise.
So what we've just said here is that even from something as fundamental and basic as how big this is, there are even disagreements about that.
So we've got to expect along this long and winding road a lot of controversy.
Who was it who first said, bearing in mind this was a piece of cloth with an apparent image on it, who was it who first said, that's Jesus?
You know, there in the historical record, and again, this is my weakest area.
I am not a historian.
I've been fortunate as the editor of Shroud.com to be able to pick up the phone and talk to real historians and professors of history, but I'll do my best.
There is evidence in the historic record going back well before the earliest dating of the cloth by the carbon dating that we'll probably talk about shortly.
But there's plenty of evidence in the historical record of a cloth known as either the Mandillion or something of that nature that existed well before the dates given by the carbon dating.
And we know that they claimed that that cloth bore an image of Jesus not made by human hands.
In other words, not an artwork.
Well, unfortunately, the record, the historic record has many gaps in it for the history of the shroud.
And as we know, anytime there's a gap, and especially when you're dealing with something as controversial as this object, you're Going to have people that are skeptical that take a different point of view.
And look, I have to be candid with you, I was a total skeptic at the beginning because, of course, I didn't have any emotional attachments to it.
And it took 17 years after we finished our examination before all the scientific evidence was in that ultimately convinced me that this is most likely, and I'm convinced now that it is, the cloth that wrapped the historic Jesus of Nazareth.
So that is not a commentary on whether or not he was the Messiah or whether this is a religious thing, but just strictly from a historical point of view.
And so we do have these gaps in the history, but there have been many efforts by historians and other experts to try and find and try and connect some of the dots from the historical record.
But, you know, I was very fortunate as being a member of the STERP team.
I had access to all of the science, which was all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
So the general public never had access to any of that.
A matter of fact, it was that point that ultimately led me to create Shroud.com because I felt that here I am, a guy to whom I don't have this emotional attachment to this object, but there are a billion or so people who do, and they don't have access to the same data that I did.
So I decided I would build a website and get that information out there so that anyone who had some interest in this cloth for whatever reason would have access to the science based on direct physical examination of the cloth, and that way they could make up their own minds.
Perhaps the smartest thing I ever wrote, Howard, is on the opening paragraph of that website.
There's a sentence in there.
It says that, I believe that given the facts, you have to make up your own mind about this.
And that's probably why the website's successful.
We're not preaching.
We're not pushing faith.
We're not pushing science.
We're saying, here's the evidence.
You decide.
Right.
Otherwise, you open yourself up.
As whenever I've talked about this on air or on podcasts, you open yourself up.
Whoever you talk to about the Shrouder Turin to getting flooded with emails from people who are telling you that you are wrong.
So this polarizes people.
People are divided by it.
And we have to start from that viewpoint.
From what I'm reading, the first attempt at systematically analyzing what this thing was was in 1920 or around 1920.
Is that correct?
Well, the first photograph of the shroud is what brought it to the world's attention.
That was 1898 by a lawyer who was also a...
And he made the first photographs, which were then published.
And that's what began to bring the attention on this object outside of northern Italy, where it had been stored since, as you mentioned, 1578.
And so those first photographs ultimately spawned interest in the cloth.
And I think by the 1920s, there were several French researchers who were digging into it and trying to learn more about it.
Pierre Barbet was a medical doctor who wrote a book called the, I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the title of the book.
A Doctor at Calvary, that's what it's called.
And that was one of the earlier books on the subject.
So yes, in the 20s and into the 30s, there was some interest in it.
But when Sekundo Pia made that first photograph and revealed that the shroud image itself is a negative, and on his glass plates that inverted the lights and darks, suddenly you have a much more plausible, realistic looking image.
When he presented that to the public, he was immediately accused of fraud.
And it wasn't until 1931 when the second photography was permitted of the shroud by Giuseppe Henriet that verified everything that Secundo Pia had claimed.
So we see 1898 as the beginning of the scientific era of study of the shroud because that's when it finally became available outside of northern Italy for other researchers and scholars to begin to study.
And you referenced a doctor at Calvary.
I've just been looking it up.
It was Pierre Barbet.
Barbet, correct.
And he was a medical doctor who did some experiments using cadavers and was able to determine that what's on that cloth was quite accurate forensically.
And since then, there have been a number of other forensic pathologists, including Dr. Robert Buckland, who was a member of our team.
And there used to be a television show called Quincy.
I'm sure it probably made it to the UK.
Klugman.
Yes.
And our doctor on our team was the advisor.
Dr. Buckland was the advisor to the production company on that program.
And he was the medical examiner in Los Angeles at the time, or the assistant medical examiner.
Also, since then, Dr. Frederick Zugabee, who was the forensic pathologist and medical examiner in Rockling County, New York, wrote a book called The Crucifixion of Jesus, a forensic inquiry.
And with great detail, these guys have shown that this is an accurate, forensically accurate image of a man.
This is not some artwork that somebody painted, but something that there was some interaction between a cloth and the body, and ultimately left that image there with great forensic accuracy, including the bloodstains, which both of those experts have said were realistic and came from direct contact with the body, were not painted on or added afterwards.
And of course, our team was able to verify that the blood was on the cloth before the image formed.
There's no image under the blood.
Right, and that's pretty crucial.
One question that just comes from me and is just a sidebar question, really, but I've often wondered about it and I haven't really seen much written about it.
What happened to the Shroud of Turin during World War II?
And of course, the Nazis were pillaging treasures, stealing treasures Everywhere.
And they were looking for the shroud.
Apparently, Hitler had this idea that he wanted the spear of destiny, which ostensibly was supposed to be the spear that stabbed Jesus when he was on the cross.
There is a spear wound in the side of the man of the shroud, by the way, with the darkest bloodstain on the cloth in that area.
So they took the shroud away from Turin and hid it in Saint-Vergine, and pardon my poor French pronunciation.
And it was there for five years, and only one person, the abbot, knew that it was hidden underneath the altar to protect it from Hitler or from potential bombing in Turin because Turin was an industrial city.
And so it could have been a target for Allied bombers during the war.
And so they felt that it was safest to remove the shroud and hide it.
And it was eventually brought back to Turin, of course, after the war ended.
Right.
And one other question that is a glaring omission from where we've got to, and it's my fault that it is.
This shroud pops up where it popped up.
All of a sudden, after such a long space of time, if we believe that it was transported or somehow moved from where it originated to where it was discovered and where it went on display, how did that process happen?
Well, you know, for one thing, it's not the kind of thing, just let's go right back to the earliest time.
Think about this.
First of all, the shroud breaks several Jewish laws right off the bat.
So at the moment when they reopened the tomb and that was all that they found in the tomb, they couldn't very well come running out of the tomb saying, look what we found, because there would have been iconoclasts looking to destroy it immediately.
So, you know, we have the problem of violating two Jewish laws.
Number one, it contains blood.
Jewish law requires it be buried with the body.
And number two, it bears an image which is forbidden by both Jews and Muslims to this day.
So it's not the kind of thing that they could have come out with.
It had to be hidden away.
And there's a period from the earliest centuries until about two, I think about 250, 275 AD where there's nothing about the shroud at all.
It was apparently either hidden away or whatever.
And then all of a sudden we have an illustration, a fresco in the tomb in one of the caves where they buried people.
I'm sorry, cutting toms.
Yeah, one of the catacombs.
Thank you.
I need all the help I can get this morning.
Yeah, it was in one of the catacombs, and it's an illustration of Jesus looking like the man of the shroud.
That's the first artwork indicating that somebody had obviously seen the shroud, and that was about 275 AD.
So where was it for that 250 years?
Well, there's several papers written on the subject by another professional photographer, Aldo Goreschi, an Italian photographer from Turin, that are on our website.
And he points out that some of the water stains on that cloth are indicative of it being rolled up and stood up in a tall clay jar where moisture accumulated in the bottom and caused some of the water stains that we still see on the shroud today.
And those papers are also on shroud.com.
And I think that's a very plausible explanation.
If you're going to hide something, you want to hide it in plain sight.
It's not obvious.
In a room full of tall clay jars, somewhere off in a corner somewhere, this thing was probably hidden away for perhaps as much as two centuries before it was either rediscovered or pulled out and revealed.
And then we start hearing about images on a cloth depicting Jesus at his crucifixion.
So I think that there's some evidence in the historical record, but it's not a complete record, which of course gives skeptics plenty of ammunition to argue about.
But the story that went with the shroud, the impressive thing is, because we're talking about such a large span of time and the fact that this thing had to be kept in a clandestine manner, it's impressive, isn't it, that the story that went along with that object stayed with that object?
Well, I'm not sure that you could.
If I had a great imagination, I'm not sure I could think up of another possibility, another plausible possibility, other than the cloth that wrapped this man's body.
Some people have said, oh, well, it's a medieval thing and they just crucified another guy and so that, you know, it can't be Jesus.
Well, that may be the case.
I guess that's a possibility, but it's unlikely that somebody would go through the crucifixion of another human being in the same manner as accorded to Jesus as documented in the Gospels in medieval times without somebody knowing about that.
You know, there are no secrets anymore.
And I just don't see that as plausible.
I think that this is legitimately what it's purported to be.
And I'm going to quickly share with you just a quick little aside here.
My little Jewish mother, born in Poland, not well educated, high school education, finally got to hear me give a lecture in person in Pittsburgh, my hometown, for my high school, one of my high school reunions.
And they invited me to give a Shroud talk.
The Archdiocese of Pittsburgh gave me a venue, put me in their bulletins, put me on the radio.
So my mother and family all came, and we had a very large turnout, and we had a wonderful presentation.
And driving home, my Jewish mother was silent.
And Howard, I have to tell you that when a Jewish mother is silent, be afraid.
That's not a good, you know.
Sure sign.
Driving home, she was silent, and I was concerned.
So I finally turned to her and I said, Mother, what do you think?
And she turned to me.
This is, remember her background?
She hadn't studied the shroud.
She was not a scholar.
And she said, well, of course it's authentic.
Now, here, it took me 17 years after leaving My own DNA on that cloth before I was convinced.
She hears one lecture and she's convinced.
And I said, Mother, what makes you say that?
And she looked at me and she said, Barry, they wouldn't have kept it for 2,000 years.
If it had belonged to anyone else, it wouldn't have mattered.
And when you think about it, this is not the kind of thing you want to hang on to.
This is a burial shroud with blood and fluid stains on it.
And not a pretty thing to have.
Why would somebody want to hold on to it?
The point that she made is, why would they keep it unless it had belonged to someone so important that it was worth the risk of keeping it and putting yourself literally in danger of owning this or of having this?
So her observation, I thought, was quite a profound observation.
A stunning piece of logic.
And I have to tell you that it's not only Jewish mothers.
I'm sure that my Liverpool mother would have said exactly this.
I'll bet you should.
Because that's the way I'm...
Exactly.
Why would it have been kept for so long if it wasn't important?
And that is probably the top and bottom of the whole thing.
Well done, your mother, is what I say.
And you know, that's why I tell that little anecdote, because her observation, remember, I spent five days and nights in the room with the cloth, but her observation just off from the, you know, kind of outside the whole thing, she saw something that I had never seen, which is the obvious thing you and I have just discussed.
And so I was profoundly impressed by my mother's observation.
Of course, it could have been kept for such a long time.
And here comes the cynic in me, the skeptic, not cynic, the skeptic in me.
Sure.
It could have been kept for such a long time because a very artful faker wove a narrative around it.
It could have, except for one problem.
Our team went there with one purpose, which was to determine how the image was formed, period.
Not to do anything else, not to prove who it was or what might have occurred resurrection-wise.
None of those things were on our agenda.
All of our tests were to determine and to characterize the physicality of what's on the cloth, the physics and chemistry of the cloth.
And we have been able to prove, and you won't hear me use that word very often, we've been able to prove that the image on the cloth is not the product of an artist.
It is not a painting, it is not a scorch, and it's not a photographically created image.
And our testing, because those were the three prominent theories of the day, our tests were all designed, all of our scientific tests were designed to test those particular theories.
And so we were looking for paint or pigment, and we found none that constitutes the image on the cloth.
And our testing included spectral analyses and pyrolysis mass spectrometry that could detect pigment or paints one part per billion.
We had with us the spectral characteristics of every paint and pigment known to man from medieval to modern times, and we found none of that on the shroud.
So we could eliminate painting as or artwork as one possibility.
The other possibility, that somebody had taken a metal statue and heated it up and scorched the image onto the cloth.
And that's a plausible idea because the image itself is about the same color as the documented scorches documented from a fire in 1532.
We know the exact date of the fire, so they're well documented.
And we have those properties.
And so we used ultraviolet fluorescence photography.
And all of the areas on the shroud documented as scorches from a high temperature event fluoresced in the red.
The image of the shroud, of the man himself, not only did not fluoresce, but quenched the fluorescence of the background, because the background of the cloth has a sort of a yellow-green fluorescence.
And so what we have here is an image on the cloth that is not the product of a high-temperature event.
And those tests excluded that as a possibility.
The other possibility was made photographically, perhaps.
Well, it takes a light-sensitive chemical or element to create a light-sensitive emulsion to create a photographic image, and that would normally be silver or silver nitrate or some salt of silver.
So we looked for that all over the shroud and found none, zero.
There is no trace of any silver anywhere on the cloth.
It was not made photographically.
So we were able to eliminate those things.
We can say it's not a painting, not a scorch, but we cannot tell you a mechanism that can create an image with those properties.
So in essence, we failed.
We could tell you what it's not, not a painting, scorch, or photograph, but we don't know of a mechanism, at least at this moment in time, that can create an image with the documented properties found on that cloth.
But you were convinced from what you saw that that image was somehow imprinted from the body to the cloth and was not somehow projected onto it from somewhere else or indeed painted on there by a faker.
Correct.
And that property that I mentioned at the beginning of our discussion here, that encoding of spatial data, now that's something that we photographers can imply in our photographic work by using highlights and shadow to imply depth.
But what we have on the shroud is a physical topographical encoded image.
In other words, where the cloth came in direct contact with the body, we have the darkest part of the image.
As the distance between cloth and body increased, for example, with the hands folded over the torso, the cloth would have been lifted away from the torso by the hands crossed over the body.
And the image around those hands is more faint because the cloth had been lifted further away.
So there's a definite correlation between the image density, darkness of the image, and the distance it would have been between the cloth and the body up to about four centimeters, and That ended it.
In other words, whatever the mechanism was only worked at a very short distance between three and four centimeters from the body.
Encoding that kind of information into the density of the image is not something we can do photographically.
So that is the property that got my interest at the very beginning.
That was the property that was discovered.
And it's commonly referred to as the 3D encoding.
It's not really fully 3D, but it does encode topographical information, which is something that could only have occurred by an interaction between cloth and body.
So again, sticking to the science, forgetting whatever else people might say from their hearts or from their spiritual points of view, the only way that can happen is by interaction between a cloth and a body.
What about the distorting effects that some people claim of a fire?
Apparently, the garment was caught, the robe was caught, the cloth was caught in a fire in the 16th century, and there have been claims that that may have fortuitously distorted the image to give you the findings that you got.
No way that could happen because the fire of 1532 is the one you're talking about, the well-documented one, that caused some severe damage to the cloth, and you can still see the burns, the burn holes that were burnt into the cloth at that time, and the scorches surrounding those burns.
And what we see there is definitely from the fire, but that wouldn't have impacted the spatial data encoded into the image elsewhere that would not have had any impact on that.
And as far as distortion goes, there are distortions in the shroud, but not the dramatic ones that some of the skeptics have portrayed, because they say, well, look, if you wrap a cloth around a face and you make a contact image, that face is going to be very broad and round and not look like a normal face.
That's assuming that the image on the shroud is strictly made by contact, but we know that there was imaging up to about four centimeters from the surface of the body.
So we know that whatever the mechanism was worked at a distance.
And so a direct contact image would have yielded a very distorted result, as many skeptics like to point out.
But what we have here is something that is not a direct contact image.
This is unpleasant to talk about, so I'll try and shroud it literally in milder language.
Could this have been, and this is just the layman in me talking here, not a scientific perspective at all, could this have been something to do with we know that when somebody dies, the changes within the body, the corpse, begin fairly quickly, very quickly.
Almost immediately.
Could this not have been the result of some kind of outgassing, outpouring from the body?
I consider that to be the most plausible possibility that exists.
Right.
But we can't.
Absolutely.
100%.
In other words, if you look at, and again, this is, like you said, it's not the most pleasant topic, but if you read Zagabe's book, you'll know that the outgassing begins almost immediately.
It starts with ammonia gas out of the nose and mouth from the lungs.
Shortly thereafter, it begins to permeate out of the pores of the cells of the body.
And that outgassing over time, as the body begins to decompose, becomes the heavier amines, putrescine and cadaverine, that create the horrible smell of death.
And so, but remember, the man was in this cloth, whoever this man was, was only in this cloth about 36 hours from Friday at sundown until Sunday morning.
It's only about 36 hours on the clock.
So he wasn't in there long enough for any of the severe liquefaction that would happen over decomposition over a period of time.
He wasn't in there long enough for that to happen.
But the outgassing from his pores would have been occurring in that 36 hours.
And I believe, and frankly, not just my belief, but Ray Rogers, the chemist on our team, the lead chemist on the STERP team from Los Alamos National Labs, he started looking using that basis for what might have caused it.
And he determined that in the manufacture of the cloth, they used starch when they were putting it together and weaving it.
And that starch would have left a surface coating, a microscopic surface coating, that would have been impacted by those gases outgassing from the body.
And there was something called a Mayard reaction, which is commonly known in the world of chemistry.
It's what makes beer, it's golden color, bread, it's golden color.
And we have a similar color on the Shroud.
And Rogers published a paper on that subject, which again is on shroud.com, that talks about a Mayard reaction possibly being the mechanism by which the image formed.
And interestingly enough, you know, it would have encoded the distance that we talked about a moment ago, that the darker the image would be closer to the body.
And as the distance increased, the image grows more faint, which is why we don't have a sharp, detailed outline of the image, and it just fades out at the periphery.
So that's the only theory that's been proposed by either pro-Shroud or anti-Shroud people.
That's the only theory that would allow for the encoding of spatial data that we absolutely have on the Shroud.
So we have got to the conclusion where our best guess might be, and I know there are people poised to start writing emails immediately, but bear with us.
Any moment now.
Any second.
Bear with us, please.
This outgassing imprints an image of that kind, which might explain it and kind of rules out the prospect that maybe this body was very special and was capable of irradiating the cloth around it in some way that we would regard as paranormal.
That rules that out.
Well, here's the thing.
And this is something because I deal with this literally every day.
I cannot exclude the possibility of resurrection because no one knows what the mechanism of resurrection is.
And I have to remind everyone that the scientific method says you cannot use one unknown to prove another unknown.
So the mechanism of resurrection is unknown, and consequently we can't use that to prove the mechanism of image formation on the shroud, not within the scientific method.
On the other hand, people of faith look at it and say, no, that's the resurrection did that.
Well, remember that all the experts and medical experts and forensic experts say the man is dead.
So if this has got anything to do with the resurrection, it's got to be a pre-resurrection image because otherwise he would appear alive.
And so, but I don't exclude that as a possibility.
People of faith, I've always said, look, if your faith is strong, why do you need the science?
Forget the science and believe what you believe.
And yet if you're looking for an explanation, well, perhaps the problem is with your faith.
You should go back and re-examine your faith.
Because what we documented is taken from direct instrumentation, directly from that cloth.
That's the starting point.
And the papers that our team published back from 78 through 81 and a few even after that, that's the basis of scientific evidence that's published in the peer-reviewed literature.
And what I consider the foundation or starting point for any research on the shroud.
You need to go back and look at what we found physically on that cloth and then go ahead and prepare your hypothesis of what might have occurred to create that image.
But you've got to be based on what we documented on the cloth.
Then came the radiocarbon dating.
The technology was there for that in 1988.
And that was pretty conclusive at the time, I think.
They said that there was no way that that cloth could be as old as it was purported to be.
I think that was the result of it.
But then in subsequent years, that was cast into doubt.
Talk to me about that.
Sure.
Well, as you probably are well aware, one of the three laboratories that did the radiocarbon dating was Oxford, right in your neck of the woods there.
Another was in Switzerland, and the third was in the United States at the University of Arizona.
Interestingly enough, they appointed a gentleman who was the chief scientist at the British Museum to be the overseer of the three laboratories.
And that's Dr. Michael Tite, and I think it's perfectly okay for me to mention his name.
Dr. Michael Tite was then overseeing the three labs to make sure that everybody followed the protocols, which, by the way, they stopped following right from the get-go.
They never did any chemical analysis of the samples, the one sample that was taken, which was in their own protocol that they were to do chemical analysis.
They ignored that and didn't do that.
Okay, so now you are not convinced that the radiocarbon dating was something that we could be too convinced by?
Yep.
Okay, let me start by saying that typically, if you're going to radiocarbon date something as large as the Shroud of Turin, you would naturally, and I think any good scientist would tell you, you would take samples from several different areas.
So you would have control samples.
That was not done with the Shroud.
They took one little strip from right next to a seam down in one corner, and that was I mean, it's an important artifact.
I think that had their protocols been followed, they would have taken at least one sample from somewhere else on that cloth, but instead they didn't.
So I'm not sure if they were allowed or not allowed, but if you're developing a protocol and you want it to be credible, then you have to establish a protocol that works scientifically, and one sample site would never have been enough.
Now, let's talk about that sample site for a moment.
When they dated that sample, they took that strip, cut it in half, put half aside, and kept the other half and divided it in thirds for the three laboratories.
If you look at the results of the three laboratories and the reported results in their paper, you'll see that there was a range of dates going from one end of the strip to the other, so that nowhere on that strip was there anything consistent.
So one end of the strip had one date, and the other end had a date hundreds of years in a different direction.
Consequently, how can any point on that sample give you an accurate date for anywhere else on the cloth?
If that sample had been continuous and homogeneous, in other words, if it had been the same from one end to the other, then it would be much harder to argue the date that was achieved.
But because it varied from one end of the sample to the other, that's where a second sample from another site, from another corner, or far away from the image that would have had no impact on the image itself, that would have been very helpful and perhaps eliminated the controversy.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.
They only took one sample.
And here's the other thing, and this is factual based on the accurate information.
For 27 years, the British Museum, which was the caretaker of all the data from the three labs and the three labs themselves, refused to release their raw data.
Now, that's pretty much unheard of.
It's typically once you've published your work in a highly qualified peer-reviewed journal like Nature.
Then you release your raw data because the scientific method asks that your work be repeatable.
And so you release the raw data so that other researchers might want to follow up and repeat your experiments.
They refused for 27 years.
And it finally took a French researcher who also happens to be a law student, went to the UK, used the Freedom of Information Act, and forced the British Museum to release the raw data.
Then he brought on board several experts on this.
They evaluated the raw data and determined, as I mentioned earlier, that that strip, which was inhomogeneous, which means it was not consistent from one end to the other, could never have been used to accurately date anywhere else on the cloth.
And perhaps that's why they didn't want the raw data released in the first place.
Many of the people involved now.
They're not here to answer themselves, but I hear what you say about that.
So you think that we need to edit out that portion of the research history because you don't think that's family.
Is that so?
I would say this, that based on what the real experts, and I'm certainly not an expert in radiocarbon dating, and I don't claim to be, but those who are experts in that field have said the same thing, that because of the inhomogeneity of that sample and the fact that it was not consistent from one end to the other, there's no way it could be used to date anywhere else on that cloth.
I will take their word for it because they're the experts in this area.
And so I have to say that the radiocarbon dating done on the shroud of Turin, for all of the above reasons and several others that we haven't talked about, did not yield an accurate result that could give us a date for anywhere else on that cloth except for the little strip they dated.
Where does that leave us?
That leaves us, as many people have written to me and complained, why haven't they done another carbon dating?
Well, look, it was such a fiasco the first time and questionable.
It's not up to us.
I mean, I would love to see another round of testing.
Let me point out to you that the reason I'm not willing to accept something supernatural, the shroud in its entire history has had one in-depth scientific examination in all the years that it's been around, and that was the one we did in 1978.
That's 44 years ago.
We intended to go back and do a second set of tests.
We prepared and sent to then Cardinal Ratzinger, who eventually became Pope Benedict, a second test plan for a follow-up set of tests, 25 tests plus radiocarbon dating.
And we submitted that to Cardinal Ratzinger.
He reviewed it and gave it to Pope John Paul II.
And then politics entered into it, and several researchers from the Pontifical Scientific Academy cautioned the Pope not to allow the Americans to touch it again because we might cause it harm.
And so they eliminated those 25 tests and only kept the last one, radiocarbon dating, which we've been talking about.
The sadness is this.
When we came back, remembering we went to collect data to answer one question, how's the image formed, we brought back all this data, spent three years refining that and reducing that data and publishing our work into journals so that all of that data is readily available to the public.
But we also brought back with us 1,000 new questions based on the data we collected.
So our hope was to go back with a follow-up series of tests to help answer some of the new questions raised and to further the research that we had begun with the first go-round.
So it would be great, and I don't think there's any Shroud scholars out there who would argue the point that another round of testing, comprehensive testing using 21st century technology, would be ideal.
We should do that.
Unfortunately, that's not up to us.
That's up to the legal owner of the Shroud who happens to be at this moment in time, Pope Francis.
And I have been told by my sources, both in Rome and Turin, that Pope Francis has decided not to do anything with the Shroud.
So everyone is hoping that whoever his successor might be in the future might be more willing to allow work to be done on the Shroud.
And so I feel there is not enough data yet to exclude a natural explanation for the image on the Shroud, although many people, people of faith, they're happy with it just the way it is.
To them, it's proof of the resurrection.
And look, I understand that, and they're certainly free to believe what they believe.
I would like to see another round of science to help possibly get to the mechanism that actually created that image.
Right.
In 2015, this Pope described it as an icon of love, the Shroud.
Quotes, the icon of this love is the Shroud that even now has attracted so many people here to Turin, Pope Francis said.
I'm quoting here from the Guardian newspaper, the shroud draws people to the tormented face and body of Jesus and at the same time directs people toward the face of every suffering and unjustly persecuted person.
Effectively, that was more or less his last word on the subject, isn't it?
Yep.
And as I said, my sources have said that if something crosses his desk relative to the shroud, he'll pass that on to someone else to handle at some future point in time.
And so, you know, as much as I would like to see another round of testing, I don't expect to see that necessarily even in my lifetime.
But I would love to see 21st century technology applied because that could certainly help to answer some of the questions raised by our first go-round back in 1978.
So whether or not that happens, it's not up to me, but I do believe that there is adequate evidence right now published in the scientific literature for me to be comfortable in the position I've taken that this has got to be an item that wrapped the body of the historic Jesus of Nazareth.
Which will always be a contentious item until, as you say.
Of course.
There is further scientific testing.
Yeah, it took me 17 years to reach that conclusion.
So I didn't rush.
I didn't have an opinion.
I was a total skeptic at the beginning.
But of course, I had access to all of the data that our team had collected.
And so I'm sitting and reading all this.
And it took till 1995 before the final evidence came in and the final questions that I had had been answered by other qualified scholars.
And that left me with no other place to go but to accept that, look, as my mother pointed out, why would somebody keep something as horrible as a burial shroud unless it was of someone of such importance that it was worth the risk?
And so I have to accept that, And I have done so, and I've been, you know, called every name in the book, and then some.
I've been criticized.
My Jewish friends kind of give me the questionable look of why are you doing this?
And the answer is simply this: I was given the privilege of being on that team and spending five days and nights in the room with that piece of cloth.
No one in its history has ever had that privilege before.
And I felt an obligation as a member of that team and as the official documenting photographer to begin with to become the archivist, to collect that data and to ultimately put it all in one place so that everyone had full access to it.
And if you've been to Shroud.com, Howard, you'll know that we have no advertising.
We are self-supported as a nonprofit.
There's nothing there to push people in any direction to buy anything.
Our purpose is to give people access to the same data that I had so they can study it and make up their own minds.
Look, I have said this publicly, I'll say it here publicly on your show, that the answer to faith isn't going to be on a piece of cloth, but in the eyes and hearts of those who look upon it.
So the shroud is there, and each person can respond to it or react to it in their own way, in whatever's meaningful to them.
And I see that as a positive thing.
And so in my role, my job is simple.
Simply tell the truth based on the data that we have, and that's what I've done.
So I'm not trying to convince people to believe anything.
Here's the evidence.
You decide.
That's true.
The truth, although people think it's an absolute, the truth is often what people, not often, is always what people believe it is at that particular time in the light of the evidence that they have.
And that's where we're at.
Let's leave the science out of it just for two seconds.
When you were within the presence of this shroud, when you were actually researching it, what was your gut telling you?
What were you feeling about it?
Well, you know, that's a good question.
And I know that I did not have the same emotional reaction to being in the room with that cloth that perhaps a few of the other team members did who were Christians or Catholics.
But I will say this, that within about the first 10 or 15 minutes of it being unveiled before us in that room in the Royal Palace, being a professional photographer, I always have a 10X magnifier in my pocket.
And of course, I whipped out my 10X magnifier as soon as the shroud was laid before us.
And I started at the image, started to look for paint or pigment or indications of particulates that might form the image.
And within the first 10 or 15 minutes, I could see right away, whatever this was, it was not a painting.
It didn't take an expert, although all of our testing proved what my gut feeling was.
My gut feeling was, well, this is more of a mystery than I ever expected it to be, because I had said publicly, you know, give us five minutes and we'll find the paint and the brushstrokes and we'll come home.
Well, that didn't happen.
There is no paint.
There are no brushstrokes.
And I knew that in the first 10 or 15 minutes.
Now, that doesn't mean that that was a definitive answer, but my first initial observation was, wait a minute, there's nothing here.
The closer you get and you start magnifying, you'll see that the image areas are just the surface fibers slightly yellower or discolored more than the background fibers.
And what makes it look darker is the accumulation of those fibers in a given area, much like a halftone reproduction in a newspaper or magazine, which is made of little dots.
And the concentration of dots indicates the darkness or lightness of that area.
And that's what we have on the shroud.
In other words, the discolored yellowed fibers at the surface are in more, wherever the image is darker, there's a higher quantity of those than areas where the image is more faint.
And so when you see those things, you realize, well, there's no way an artist could have done that.
No way.
Here comes a dumb question, but it won't be the first one, and it won't be the last one that I've asked in my lifetime, so I think it's okay.
I have microphones.
I love microphones, okay?
Yes.
And microphones, I've had a collection of some of these things over some years, more than 15, to be exact.
Some of them contain foam, okay?
And that foam perishes and deteriorates to little beads of dust over the space of about a decade or so.
The very microphone, well, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The very microphone that I'm speaking into right now has had to be what they call refoamed, and now it's a thing of great beauty.
But the foam in this thing that kept it working properly just perished to dust after, I think I've had it for 13, 14 years.
And one day I opened the box, even though the conditions in my flat are as good as they can be, it had deteriorated.
So the question, you know what question's coming now.
How has this thing stayed intact and not completely perished to nothing?
Well, number one, I should add that I, being a video producer, I have many microphones, shotgun microphones with those phone covers that have had to been replaced.
Sennheiser 416, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Sennheiser's, exactly.
Anyway, look, this piece of cloth has been protected and cared for in a manner unlike most any other artifact you would find.
Remember, it was not buried in the ground inside of a container.
You know, when you dig up an Egyptian tomb that's been sealed for several thousand years, you're going to find what's in there pretty much untouched, assuming the tomb hasn't been pilfered.
And the same is true with the shroud.
It's been carefully cared for and preserved throughout its years.
And linen is a very strong fiber, too.
It's stronger than cotton or wool.
And again, it's organic comes from the flax plant.
But it's a very hardy fiber.
And I think that the fact that it's been cared for the way it has been, because I agree with you that I was a little bit surprised at its condition when I first saw it.
I thought, well, This is pretty well preserved for something ostensibly as old as it's claimed to be.
But I have since, over the years, studied it and found that the fact that it's been protected, kept out of moisture, out of the sun, although it was at times displayed by the Savoy family that owned it for about 550 years, they would hang it from balconies at times.
So it does have some deterioration.
It's just not as deteriorated as something that would have been exposed to the elements for 2,000 years.
It has been carefully preserved over that time.
So I think that explains why.
But it's not in perfect shape.
I mean, there are places where it's deteriorated.
And of course, especially where the holes were burnt into it.
But they had done a repair to it back in 1534.
And the poor Clare sisters were given that task.
And they sewed it onto a backing cloth to add stability to it.
And so I think in part that helped to preserve it by minimizing the stresses placed on the cloth.
But then they also used to roll it up on a dowel, which isn't very good and could definitely cause some harm to the cloth.
So it's a little miracle in itself that we still have it in the condition that it's in.
I would say it's, you could, I guess you could call it that.
In my opinion, I think it's just the fact that it's been cared for the way it has been, that it was strengthened after the fire by the poor Claire sisters.
And nowadays, of course, people have talked about it, you know, there was a fire in 1997 that practically could have destroyed it.
So they stopped keeping it rolled up in a wooden box the way they did for centuries.
And they built a special 25 million pounds, I think they spent, or Euro, cabinet that's fireproof, waterproof, that it's in a nitrogen-argon atmosphere, temperature and humidity controlled by computers.
It's kept flat, no longer rolled up.
It's in a light-tight and again, fireproof cabinet.
So today it's better preserved than it's ever been.
Excuse me.
There's concern because all linen, like old newspapers, yellow with age.
They oxidize.
And so the concern was that the background would continue to darken the way linen normally does, ultimately causing the image to become less and less visible as the background darkened to become the same tonal value as the image itself.
What they have done now in preserving it the way they have, in eliminating it from being in the atmosphere and having this nitrogen argon, is they've minimized or eliminated the possibility of oxidation, which would cause further yellowing of the cloth.
So today the shroud is better preserved than it's ever been in its history.
And I'm looking at a picture of it online as we speak.
It's made from an aeronautical alloy.
It looks like something from the space program.
It certainly does, doesn't it?
Okay, last question.
Important one.
This is 2022.
You have given such a lot of yourself and your life to this study, and I can understand why it absorbs and involves you in the way that it does.
You know, it's quite understandable that you have been drawn into it in the way that you've been drawn into it.
If you got a papal email when we finished this conversation, and it was the Pope himself saying, we would like to give you the chance to do a couple of tests on the Shroud of Turin, just a one-off opportunity.
You've got a couple of months to put this together, and we will welcome you in Italy when you're ready to do this.
What tests would you do?
Boy, that's a tough one.
Well, certainly I would go back and want to do spectral analyses again because the instrumentation today is far more sophisticated and can yield far more detailed data than what we might have had in 1978.
Although what we had in 1978 was state of the art in 1978.
So that would be certainly one of the tests.
And again, I'm not sure that photography, there are some new types of photography that might be applied.
But if that letter came to me from the Pope, the first thing I would do is start calling up some of the real scientists, physicists, and imaging experts that are out there and get them to put their heads together because they might be aware of more modern technology than even I am.
You know, I'm retired now and sort of sitting here doing websites and nonprofit things.
And so there's new technology that has advanced dramatically.
And so I would want to grab some people that are current in the newest technologies and get them to participate.
Presumably you're always interested and willing to hear from such people.
Absolutely.
Wow.
Absolutely.
I'm looking at your website, shroud.com, and it's telling me that I am visitor 10,660,875.
That's pretty remarkable.
Well, actually, it's even more remarkable than what it appears because that counter only counts people that come through the front page.
And many people have bookmarked internal pages or click on links to articles within the website, so they're not even counted.
That represents 35 or 40% of our visitors over 26 years.
Right.
I think we've probably covered this, but let's just tie it into a neat sentence if we can then.
Sure.
There are many people who take many different views about this.
I'm sure I'm going to get emails about these things.
And I recommend those people to contact you if they have points to raise about your work rather than contact me because it's going to be much more comprehensive and much better for them to contact you if you don't mind that.
But those who do not believe and those who say that you've spent the thick end of 50 years on your life essentially wasting your time, what would you say to them?
I would say to them that to each his own, that if they feel that this has nothing, no bearing on their lives or no impact for them, then they should walk away and be quiet and leave me alone.
If people are people of faith and they feel that this has somehow strengthened their Faith, then I say good on them too.
That the shroud is there, and each of us has to decide for themselves or for themselves what it might mean to them.
It's not something that came with a book of instructions.
And as I said before, the answer to faith isn't going to be on a piece of cloth, but in the eyes and hearts of those who look upon it.
Congratulations on your diligence and longevity in all of this, Barry.
Thank you for talking with me.
Truly my pleasure, Howard.
Thank you so much for having me on the program.
Barry Schwartz at a 2022 update on the Shroud of Turin.
Your thoughts, welcome.
And of course, don't forget if you have specific technical points about what Barry Schwartz said that you personally would like to have explored more deeply or you want to run past an expert, please don't email me with those.
Barry is always happy to get your emails and communications.
His website is shroud.com.
Thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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