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May 1, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:16:19
Edition 722 - Turin Shroud-David Rolfe
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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, apart from the fact that there's a bit of drizzle on my window at the moment, it definitely looks like spring and it feels like it at the moment.
I've been able to turn off the central heating for once and thankfully after having used it way too much this year.
But it's either that or be cold, isn't it?
So it's pretty mild and I think the weather here in London is heading in the right direction.
Thank you very much for all of your emails and guest suggestions and things that you've said.
All of those things gratefully received.
You can always go to my website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me emails through the website.
They're always gratefully received and I personally get to see and read all of them.
If you require a reply or response, please put that in the subject line.
If you have a guest suggestion, please put that in the subject line too.
It just makes me, you know, it makes it a little easier for me to sort those things out.
So thank you for that.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing work and keeping the wheels of the unexplained regularly oiled.
Now, important note here, just to say that there will be no radio or television show on the 7th of May.
So the unexplained will not be on television and radio on the 7th of May.
I won't be there.
There'll be something different there.
So 7th of May, the coronation weekend, I am not on air on television or radio, just so that you know that.
But the podcast, of course, is always here for you to come to the website, theunexplained.tv, and there are 750 hours more or less of recorded material there, going all the way back to when I was a younger and less achy man back in 2006.
Long time ago and far away.
And I think I have said more or less everything that has to be said.
So let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, David Rolfe, the man who made international headlines and won a BAFTA award, kind of UK equivalent of an Oscar, for his documentary in 1978 about the Shroud of Turin, the garment, the cloth that is said to be the burial wrap, the shroud of Jesus Christ after crucifixion.
As you will know, if you're interested in the subjects we discuss here, it has been controversial for hundreds and hundreds of years.
I think it was first called a fake back in 1390.
So the history of this and the arguments and counter-arguments go back an awful long way.
David Rolfe made a huge contribution to those arguments with his documentary in 1978.
Now, of course, he makes a million-dollar challenge to anybody who can definitively prove that it is a fake.
He says he has a million dollars waiting.
On that challenge, we'll discuss how that works and the mechanics of that in this thing.
But David was on my TV show back in September, and we didn't have nearly enough time then, and I promised him that we would do it as a conversation without time limits on the podcast, and that we're going to do today.
I think that's everything.
So let's not hang about.
Let's get to the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, 20 miles across London from where I'm sitting at this minute on this spring day.
David Rolf is here.
We're going to talk about the Shroud of Turin.
David, thank you very much indeed for doing this.
This is a big topic, isn't it, to unpick.
And I wonder why, without going into the arguments that we're about to take a deep dive into in this next hour, I wonder why it is that every time I put a guest on about the Turin Shroud, and I've maybe had over the years I've been doing this podcast, which is 17, I've had upwards of five or six guests, including yourself, talking about it.
Why it is so controversial and why I will always get an email whoever I put on, and whatever their credentials and bona fides, somebody will say, you've got the wrong person there.
You needed to be talking to this person.
They really do know about this.
Why do you think that there is such differing opinion?
It's naturally a controversial subject because for many people, if the shroud is authentic, it changes everything.
Because the only explanation for the image is a miraculous one.
And that means de facto that the chances are that the biblical accounts are all correct.
And for many people, that's threatening because they like to live a secular life.
And the Shroud confronts that head on.
But whenever you put zealotry or religious dogma or just strong faith into the mix of any story, then of course you will always get some kind of conflict because those who have their beliefs and those who have their faith, and this is not to say anything at all against them, they are, of course, entitled to their faith and their beliefs.
But, you know, that will obviously mean that they will cling to one particular viewpoint perhaps a little more strongly.
Once you get those things involved, then does the debate not become skewed somewhat?
Well, the thing that makes the shroud different is it's tangible.
A lot of things by definition concerning faith are precisely that.
It's you either have you sort of weigh up evidence about something which you can't really examine closely and then develop either a faith or you don't.
But the shroud is a tangible object.
It can be examined.
In fact, there isn't an object that's been more scientifically examined than the shroud.
And the only conclusion that you can come to from it, if you accept the evidence objectively, is that it's miraculous.
It's actually a cloth encoded with three-dimensional information.
And if you've seen my film, my latest film, you'll see, I mean, the climax of the film is where two graphic artists have done nothing but take the data that's on the cloth and get rid of all of the detritus that's accumulated over the years and revealed the perfection of this three-dimensional image of this crucified man on the shroud.
Now, anybody who thinks that that's something that a medieval forger could have created is frankly a perverse.
It certainly looks incredibly impressive, and it's a fine and very impactful climax to the latest production, which I watched before we had our conversation on television, which, as you know, is always necessarily shorter than it needs to be because of the time constraints of TV.
But it was very, very impressive.
But there are many people who will say, well, that's not the whole story.
And of course, there will be people who will constantly and forever take you to task about this.
So we've established the fact that it's controversial.
Talk to me about you and your interest in this, because you have given decades of your life to it.
Well, it's been well reciprocated.
One of the reasons that I gave my life to it is, well, gave my life to it might be overstretching the point, but the reason I returned to it on several occasions is because when I first came across the subject, I was an atheist, but I was looking for a subject to make a film about back in the 1970s when there really wasn't much of an independent film industry.
In fact, there was no independent film industry to speak of.
And I advertised, and I said I advertised, I sent a press release out to all the regional newspapers saying that our independent producer was looking for ideas for films and I was deluged with material.
But the only thing that really stuck out to me was something sent to me by a chap called Ian Wilson, who was then working in publicity for a newspaper.
And he was an Oxford graduate who had majored in the history of art.
And he'd been intrigued by the fact that the image of Christ that has come down to us took a major change, which has been with us ever since in the sixth century.
Up until that time, artists depicted Christ like a Roman, beardless and so on.
But suddenly, from the sixth century onwards, we had the traditional image of Christ, which we now are familiar with.
The bearded image, which of course, as a Jew, he would have been back then, and unlike a Roman.
And that started the whole thing off.
And the more I then got into it, having received having advertised this from a historian, this particular fact, I then discovered that around the world, there were all sorts of disciplines that were studying it in their own particular discipline.
And that gave my first film, The Sign of Witness, such impact.
And because it won a BAFTA, and then it kicked off my life, my career in television, which I then enjoyed for another 20 years, I feel I owe the Shroud a lot.
And I also feel, and this is my main motivation, I was when the carbon dating was mooted, I got in very close early on and had a commission from the BBC to actually film the whole process.
But my pitch to the BBC was predicated on the fact that there was a series of protocols that would ensure that the test was done as accurately as it could be.
But I had to go back to the BBC when Michael Tite at the British Museum had allowed, for various political reasons, all of those protocols to be abandoned.
And at that point, my pitch to the BBC fell apart.
A film was made, but not by me.
And we know the results of that.
Because the protocols were abandoned, they ended up taking the test sample from the worst possible place that they could have taken it from, a repaired corner.
And that's something that I want to get into as we progress with this conversation, because that is one very large part of the controversy.
And it's why you are still in this story and you are still defending your work, yes, and propounding your work and also putting up this, is it a million dollar or a million pound challenge?
It's a million dollar challenge to the British Museum and all they've got to do, their verdict was that some medieval forger just faked it up and flogged it.
Well, if a medieval forger could produce an image like that, the British Museum ought to be able to.
And if they can, there's a million dollars waiting for them.
And so far, there's been a deafening silence from them.
Now, you say that the image of Christ as we know him changed mysteriously around that time.
And that is what principally sparked your interest in this.
I know there were other factors to it, too.
But are we saying that one image of one artifact could have gone round the world in this way and changed everybody's perceptions, remembering that there was no email, no Instagram, nothing like that then?
No, but what you did have was coins.
And in the sixth century, the shroud, it was known then as the image of Edessa.
And the emperor of Constantinople sent down his coin makers who actually then put the image of the emperor on one side and the image of Edessa, which we now know was the shroud, on the other side.
And so this image of Christ actually became common coinage all throughout the empire.
So that image became well known to everybody as the image of Christ from the sixth century onwards.
And you believe that that derives from the image on the shroud?
There's no doubt that it did.
We know that through the fact that the shroud was squirreled, was hurried away from after the crucifixion, was taken up to Edessa because that was the it was a relatively easy journey from Jerusalem and Christians knew, the few disciples knew that they were very controversial, but this shroud was clearly in their possession and they wanted to get it somewhere safe.
And the very first Christian Monarch was in Edessa, just across the border from Israel, and they took it there for safekeeping.
And the legend has it that once this, having been taken to the shroud, the king actually was cured and it became something of an icon for their culture too.
And they husbanded it right up until the sixth century.
And they became Christians, I should say, that they became the first Christians up in the desert in the first century.
But come the sixth century, the tradition changed back to Islam for political reasons.
And the remaining Christians hid the shroud away.
And it remained hidden for some time until it was discovered after an earthquake.
Wasn't it also caught in a fire?
Oh, yes, it survived that.
In the 16th century, there was a serious fire in, because by this time, it had found its way into the ownership of the Dukes of Savoy, who eventually went on to become the royal family of Italy, and that's why it's in Turin.
But there was a fire in their castle where it was kept.
Fortunately, it was kept in a silver casket, and that preserved it, except that the casket got so hot that part of it melted inside, and the shroud was kept inside the casket in a folded way, and it landed on one corner.
And that's why when the shroud is opened up, you can see the scars, this geometrical pattern of scars from that burn marks.
And of course, they've been patched very carefully by semstresses then.
But that's scars from a 16th century fire.
Miraculously, again, you might say, the actual image of the shroud itself lies within that pattern and remains virtually intact.
How do you know, David, that the object that has been reported through history is being the Shroud of Turian?
I know it disappeared for a while, and as you say, it had various ups and downs in its history, including that fire.
How do we know that this is the same object we are charting throughout?
Well, one really interesting fact is that when they did the carbon dating, they wanted to test.
They wanted to do comparisons to get hold of medieval cloths that they knew for certain were medieval, and they wanted to get hold of cloths that they were certain were from the time of Christ.
And they managed to do that.
However, what they failed to do was to get a cloth with the same weave of the shroud.
The shroud has a very complex weave.
It's a herringbone weave.
And it turns out that they could not find a medieval example of a herringbone weave because then it was all, it was, the weave was the conventional right-angle one.
But the only place that they could find examples of a herringbone weave in a linen cloth was back from the time of Christ.
Every single time you try to find the Achilles heel, if you like, of the shroud, you find that there's an explanation for everything.
And yet, down the centuries, there has been controversy about it whenever it's emerged.
The first time it was apparently denounced as being not what it appeared to be was in 1390, wasn't it?
And that was by somebody from the church.
Well, you have to remember also that it appeared then, as it were, out of nowhere, because the shroud, we now know that the shroud, when it went from Edessa, it went to Constantinople.
And during the Fourth Crusade, it was worshipped and it was well known and famous in Constantinople and a great prize for the Crusaders who went there.
And the order of Crusader that went there was a very secretive one.
And when it became into their possession, it was kept secret.
We can be pretty certain that, funny enough, England is down in Temple Coombe, which was a Templar commandery.
There is in the Templar church there a face which could only have been copied from the Shroud of Turin.
But they were a very secretive order and it was kept secret until such time as the remaining Templar, Jeffrois Deshani, his family, who also kept it secret, fell on hard times and his granddaughter had no way of sort of preserving the family fortune other than just putting it on display.
And it was very controversial then because suddenly in Lirais, this relatively small village in France, had this very spectacular relic apparently, which had no obvious track record because it had been kept secret for such a long time.
And naturally, the Bishop of Troy denounced it because suddenly it was attracting, this tiny village of Liraux was attracting vast numbers of pilgrims.
And he suspected the thing was a forgery and denounced it as such.
But we now know that it appeared out of nowhere because it had been kept hidden away By the Templars for about 200 years.
I think we know from modern history, from looking at things in our world and with our eyes, we know that things that are controversial, things that evoke emotions in people, sometimes there are those who want to steal, mutilate or destroy them.
As far as you know, have there been any of those attempts down the years?
They don't...
I can't...
I can't be absolutely certain that there's been no attempts to do it.
They'd have a hard job because since it became, apart from the natural disaster, there have been two natural disasters.
There was a fire in the 16th century and in relatively recent times, there was another fire at the chapel of the Guarini chapel that was built specially for it in Turin by the Italian royal family.
There was a fire there in the 90s.
And there is spectacular footage of the Turinese fire service going to the most amazing, dangerous lengths to save it, which thankfully they did.
I mean, it was kept in a very protective casket by this time, but it survived that.
Very dramatic footage of that fire is available and it saved that.
And now, of course, after that, the Italian, Turin, you know what Italian engineering is like?
I mean, they build Ferraris.
The same engineering skills have been used to create the most bomb-proof, atmospherically controlled catapult for this shroud now.
So it would take an atomic bomb, I think, to land on Turin for it to be damaged now, but it is so safe.
And in spite of the controversy down the years about it, we have to say that its position in that museum, as you say, is safe.
And vast numbers of people go to visit, don't they?
Absolutely.
It is an icon, as it were, of pilgrimage.
Having said that, of course, the problem that it finds itself in now, I mean, yes, there are pilgrimages to it, and there are people who go specifically to see it.
But basically, since the carbon-14 test was performed on it, it really is nowhere near what it was.
I mean, I recognize what it is and anyone who's ever studied it does.
But as far as the population at large is concerned, they've never heard of it.
I mean, you can mention to 99 people out of 100 about the Turing Child State, and they'll say, what's that?
Because the Carbon-14 test, which actually was done completely inaccurately, that carbon-14, but done by such an authoritative institution that nobody dares question it.
I mean, it was supervised ostensibly by the British Museum.
So because the British Museum is the institution it is and they declared that it was a fake, no one's ever dared to question it.
But the fact is, if you watch my film, you'll see just the evidence that they did get it wrong.
How many versions of the film have you made?
Well, my first film I made was released in 1978, and that was a film that miraculously got funded by He'd emigrated from Turin.
And he had taken his love of the Shroud with him and formed the Holy Shroud Guild of America.
And I contacted him and said, look, I've come across this object thanks to Ian Wilson, who thinks he's got an historical theory.
And I need to raise some money for a film.
And he said, come and see me.
This was in 1978.
I'd never been to America, but I'd got enough money together to fly out there.
And a kind of long story short, he greeted me in New York.
And within a couple of days, we flew up to Milwaukee, where there was a family, the surname was John.
They were one of the founders of one of the big beer companies in Milwaukee, famous for its beer.
Very, very wealthy family.
And the chap who I was put in front of was a chap called Harry John.
And I just pitched the idea of the film to him.
And I walked away with what will be the equivalent today of a million dollars.
You're telling me that one of the most important films of its kind on a subject of potential deep reverence by those who believe in it was actually funded by a beer company?
Yes.
I mean, the beer company gave the money to Father Rinaldi of the Holy Shrell Guild, and they gave the money to me.
So, yes, but the source of it was a scion of the, I think it's a famous brand of beer, which name escaped, I can't escape at the moment.
But they were German family, because they were German beer makers, and they were Catholic.
So it might have been a beer company, but their tradition was Catholic.
And that probably made it easier for them to donate such a large sum of money.
And I suppose you were so pleased to have the funding.
I mean, filmmakers struggle.
Even with the most amazing subjects as yours, one, it was they struggle to get the money together, and sometimes projects that should see the light of day don't see the light of day or don't get finished.
So, there you are, you get the money to do it.
Did the people who put up the money ever explain to you, did you have time to get that explanation, as to why they wanted to do this, why this was so important to them?
Well, there's a Harry John was the member of the family that had ended up having inherited all this incredible wealth.
And there was a tragedy in the family.
They owned an American football team.
And the family, and I think there was about seven or eight brothers, fathers and grandfathers, they got on their private plane to go and watch their team play and it crashed and they all died.
And Harry John, who was the one grandson that didn't go with him, because how can I put this in a nice way?
He was a bit odd and he'd been left behind, but he had inherited this vast fortune.
And he had minders who looked after him, but he held lunches on a periodic basis where people would come and pitch ideas to him and he would either finance it or not.
And it was done over lunch.
You visited his, he had a nice office and you went, you arrived at noon in a chapel.
There was a service first and then we'd go for lunch.
And at this lunch that I was at, luckily for me, there were two architects who were also pitching an idea and they went first and they laid out across the table in front of Harry John a map of South America with several markings on it.
And I sat there fascinated to hear, listen to what they would say.
And they explained that the markings, they asked Harry to observe the fact that this map of South America, they put marks and they actually, if you looked at the marks, they made the shape of a cross all the way down the length of South America.
There's just a plane going across now.
Let's just let that go.
And they said to Harry, these promoters are all on prometeries.
And if you notice, Harry, they make the shape of a cross down the whole length of South America.
And what we're going to do, Harry, we're going to take South American poor boys and they're going to become monks and they're all going to live in these places that we're going to build for them.
And they're going to pray for world peace.
And I sat there with, you know, listening to this.
And then Harry looked at them and said, well, how much is this going to cost?
And I can't remember the exact figure, but it was something in millions of dollars that this was going to cost.
And then Harry, he said, and then he turned to me.
He said, Mr. Rolf, what's your idea?
Well, having heard, I mean, I was going to pitch for something really quite modest, but I thought, you know, crumbs, if that's the order of things that is being considered here, I then decided, I was going to ask for about, I don't know, £150,000 that would have made a good film back in there.
But I trebled it and asked for half a million.
And it sounded quite a good value and I got it.
And this is, I mean, you had to pitch.
I hadn't heard you tell this story before.
You had to pitch like the dragon's den in the UK, where entrepreneurs who've got an idea sit in front of a bunch of people who've got money to invest and they decide whether they want to and whether it's wise to do so or not.
You had to go through that decades before that process.
Wow.
I did, but it wasn't a panel of experience.
Just Harry.
It was Harry who had ended up, because the rest of his family had pre-deceased him, had ended up with this huge fortune, which he had to do something with.
And I'm very glad that some of it came in the direction of the shroud.
You must have felt like the luckiest man alive.
I did, I can tell you.
And the money was in my bank by the time I got back to London.
Okay, before we talk about the process of making that first film, what about the revisions?
Have you had two or three versions of this out?
The film I finished in 1978.
The other thing, of course, is that by meeting with this father and Aldi in Italy, I'd started off because Ian Wilson, historian, had sent to me his ideas about the history of the shelf, and that was what the film was going to be about.
But it turns out that all around the world, there were different people.
And you've got to remember in that pre-internet age, they didn't know about each other.
But there were scientists in Colorado who were working on the image.
There was somebody from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
There were a whole group of different individuals, all with their own speciality, who were fascinated by it.
But most importantly, too, and when it came to the respectability, if you like, of the authority of the film, one of the most famous sceptics in England was a Cambridge scholar called Dr. John Robinson.
And he had written a book Called Honest to God.
And he was really the first Christian theologian that went through the Bible and said, We've really got to realize that the Bible is not, everything in it isn't historical truth.
It's a mixture.
We have to be very careful how we analyze it and have to accept that everything that you're liable to read in the Bible isn't necessarily so.
And he wrote this book, Honest to God, and he became really quite a controversial character because of that.
However, I actually took him, I went to see him in Cambridge, and with this money I now had, I flew him out to a conference that was held in Albuquerque in America of all the scientists around the world who were interested in the Shroud.
And he came back from that, having seen it, convinced that the Shroud was authentic.
And with John Robinson from Trinity College, Cambridge, in my, as it were, cast list, it really did get a kind of authority that it might otherwise have had.
And of course, he appears alongside those very same scientists who each demonstrated what they had discovered about this route.
And each one of those discoveries was incredible.
Probably the most amazing of all was the forensic pathologist in New York.
First of all, if you'd gone to central casting, you wouldn't have got somebody who looked apart.
But he was the chief forensic pathologist in New York.
When I first met him, he had been assigned a most gruesome task.
I mean, you may not want to use this in the interview, but there was something called snuff movies, and these were extreme pornographic movies.
Where people were, I mean, obviously, it's not a topic that I want to get into here, but it's well documented and well recorded in news and newspapers.
Yes, appalling things where people are actually killed in the process of making movies like that.
That's right.
And he had been assigned to actually view all of these things and from a forensic pathologist's point of view, come to a conclusion whether it was special effects or whether it was real.
And he had to conclude that there was a mixture of both.
Some of them were special effects, but some of them were undoubtedly real.
But he, as I say, if you'd gone to central casting, you would not have got somebody who looked a part of a forensic pathologist.
And he had, and I had these full-size, thanks to Rinaldi, these full-size images of the show, very high resolution.
And he carries out effectively an autopsy within the Los Angeles department that he was in charge of.
And it was so powerful that, I mean, for example, I mean, all the depictions of Christ we get show the nails going through the palms of the hands because medieval artists, because crucifixion died out, was banned from the fourth century onwards, medieval artists had no idea how it was done.
So they just assumed that the nails went through the palms of the hands.
Well, they just simply won't take the weight.
And the wounds on the shroud are the nails go through the wrists, where of course it will take the weight.
And something that actually has only been discovered relatively recently, the only archaeological discovery of a victim of crucifixion, the nails go through the wrists.
And anyway, every single detail that you would want to discover if you were a forensic pathologist looking at a victim of crucifixion, the shroud reveals it all in a way that artists and anyone else would never have imagined it.
So the closer you examine the shroud, the more it reveals to you.
John Robinson, the academic who you had as part of your team, the Cambridge man, you sent him to this conference in Albuquerque.
What was it that convinced him?
Oh, it was the caliber of the scientists.
These weren't amateurs.
They came from the Los Alamos department that was looking at analysing space images.
They were Air Force scientists.
They were very high caliber scientists, all presenting different papers.
And he was convinced and very glad to appear in the film.
And he does a short interview in which he says that, you know, I've heard about this shroud.
I disregarded it like I disregard all relics until I actually discovered what there is to say about it and how much scientific evidence there is.
And his conversion from being the arch-Christian sceptic to somebody who actually put the weight of his authority behind backing the authority of the shroud was a huge thing which made the church take an interest as well as the public in the film.
How did you get access to it?
Well, I told you about Rinaldi, the Italian priest who'd gone to New York, but he had been in Turin.
He was a Turinese and he came to Turin with me.
And the shroud's ownership was complex because it had been owned by the royal family of Italy.
But of course, the church was really in charge of it.
But you had to get permission from both the Italian royal family and the church.
Now, the Italian royal family Had actually ceded its control to the secular authority of Turin, which was basically the mayor of Turin, had to get permission from the mayor because the shroud was actually kept not in the cathedral, but behind a screen.
And on the other side of that screen belonged to the city.
And the actual shroud itself was in the city.
And I needed in the city part of it, but I needed permission for them to get the shroud out from there and film it where it was traditionally had been photographed.
Because I reconstructed the very first time it was photographed, which is at the turn of the very first camera, about a big box, about a meter in each direction.
And the first photography was done.
I reconstructed that sequence.
But in order to get permission to do that, I had to get permission both from the church and the city authorities.
And we had to film it at night, too, to be authentic.
And we did get permission.
But it was very difficult to get it.
But Rinaldi was with me when we pitched the idea to the lady who represented Turing Council.
And she was a bit hesitant about it.
And then she said, Rinaldi, that's a name that's familiar with me.
And it turned out that like most Italians, she was Catholic and religious.
Once she realized precisely who he was, she realized that in her handbag was a picture of Rinaldi's uncle, who'd also been a priest, and she prayed to him every day.
And she was very hesitant about giving me the extensive permission that I needed to film throughout the night in the cathedral.
I mean, it's full of priceless treasures and so on.
But when Fraldo Rinaldi showed her this picture of her uncle, she kind of gasped because that was the person who he was deceased, but he had become something before you become a saint, I can't remember what it is.
But anyway, she prayed to him every day.
And as soon as she realized that, she said, right, you can have whatever permissions you want.
Tremendously lucky.
Tremendously lucky.
There was a slight snag with this, and that is because we had access to, sorry, because we had access to everything in the cathedral throughout the night, I had to hire armed guards who were given strict instructions about what our limitations were.
And when it came to the filming, my lighting cameraman really wanted to get a light behind the Reredos to backlight something.
And he started going up there and I was with him.
And the people that I was hiring for protection took out their guns and pointed them at me and said, you can't go there.
And I was paying these people and I wanted to tell them that they were fired.
I kind of think they had the advantage over you there, David.
Yeah, I was literally staring down the barrel of a gun.
And so we had to rethink the way we shot it, but we made a decent compromise.
What did it feel like to be in the presence of the Shroud?
Now.
I mean, what I'm saying is, does it have an aura or mystique about it, if you're there?
Yes, coming actually face to face with the Shroud itself.
Let me leap forward to that.
When it actually came to it, in order to film this sequence, yes, they would let me film in the cathedral.
Yes, they would give me access to the casket in which the Shroud was kept.
But the Shroud itself, they would not take out for me.
I commissioned a graphic artist who I'd done a lot of work with on other films called John Weston.
I said, look, I've got to create something that looks like the Shroud of Turin.
And he actually made a rep.
I think he used T. Obviously, he didn't have to stand close examination because we only filmed it in long shot.
But he created on a linen cloth something that looked just like the Shroud.
We put it into the same frame that the Shroud was kept in for the expositions and set it up in the cathedral.
And for that filming, it was very impressive because a coachload of German tourists came into the cathedral where we were setting it up and they were convinced it was the Shroud of Turin and I didn't disabuse them.
It wasn't until the film that I made in 2008 that they actually got the Shroud out for me to film directly.
And that is the only time it was ever filmed in that way.
And it was quite remarkable.
I think in the new film, I include this footage.
And what's quite remarkable is just how the cloth itself has got a real amazing sheen to it.
We know from the Bible that it was the purchase of a rich man.
It's a beautiful cloth, entirely consistent with the weave from the time of Christ.
But it's in fantastic, apart from where it is scarred from burns, where hot things had fallen on it, the rest of the cloth is in beautiful condition.
And that was, although when you walk into the room, the image itself is faint.
And it takes a while to adjust your eyes in order to be able to see it.
A camera boosts contrast and therefore a camera reveals it much more readily.
But to the naked eye, it does take a while before you can actually get used to it to be able to see it as the camera does.
And of course, what made worldwide headlines, including the front cover of the Sunday Times magazine that I can still remember dropping through our front door all those years ago when I was a kid in Liverpool, was when you reversed the image, when you turned it from positive to negative.
Absolutely.
That is the remarkable aspect of the cloth is that it comes a lot.
It's almost as if the image on the cloth itself is a negative.
And when you reverse it, you see the positive.
And that was the image that appeared on the cover of the Sunday Times magazine.
And there's another lovely story, if I can tell you about that.
When it came to releasing the film, still nobody was interested in it.
Or put it this way, they weren't interested enough to pay me anywhere near what was necessary to repay all the money I'd raised and needed to be repaid on it.
And so I didn't know what to do, but I had just enough to put it on independently.
And I converted what was the banqueting suite of the Piccadilly Hotel.
There were no video projectors in those days.
I had to install a 35mm projection box in this thing, which is, you know, it had to be soundproof because it sounds like a motor, you know, the 35mm projector.
It used to sound like a motorbike.
Anyway, we got it set up in there.
But the only, I had no money for publicity, but the Sunday Times had agreed, they said, if you give us an exclusive, we will give it the cover of the Sunday Times magazine.
And by very good chance, this all coincided with Easter.
And the Easter Sunday edition was going to have the cover, on the cover was going to be the picture of the shroud and the story about the release of the film on Monday.
And all was good, except that Murdoch's press went on strike that weekend.
And when this happened, there was going to be no Sunday Times.
I thought I was abandoned.
But of course, it turns out that the magazine was printed out before.
It was printed before the paper.
So the magazine, that's right.
I remember the magazine came out through the news agent anyway.
And those of us who had, my parents used to have, I think they used to get the mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times.
So, you know, we covered the whole spectrum.
And I think that's right.
They bundled the magazine for the newspaper that hadn't been printed with the newspaper, with the other newspaper.
Absolutely.
And more people got the magazine than they otherwise would have done.
So another, there's another, there's three pieces of luck.
And absolutely.
And on Monday, when the film opened, the queue went 100 yards down Piccadilly.
And I'd only booked this suite for six weeks.
And it was sold out for the whole time.
And by the end of it, I had every TV station, including the BBC, knocking on my door.
Well, that is another story about the BBC, but every station around the world wanting to buy the film.
So it had the most miraculous release.
And now you asked me at the beginning, why am I doing?
I owe this shroud so much because it then went on to win a BAFTA.
And then I enjoyed a wonderfully enjoyable career working for BBC and ITV, making literally scores of documentaries.
And I've looked at your IMDB listing, and you've had an impressive career, and this seems to me to be at the very beginning of it.
And now it's at this stage of it as well.
So it's been a factor in your life.
Do you think, and some people may say to you, that because you owe this film so much and because it brought you a big award, a BAFTA in the United Kingdom, which is like we're sort of Oscar, because it brought you all that and the success and the notoriety and a career that followed, Do you think that you have to stay committed to this whatever?
In part, that's true.
But the other thing that drives me is the sense of injustice.
Because I know how deficient...
The film back in those days on VHS was in every school in the country.
It was well known.
And the Catholic Church wanted the icing on the cake.
And they knew that the Dead Sea Scrolls had been carbon dated in Israel.
And politically, this had been extremely valuable to Israel because the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the, you know, don't forget, the Israelis have real political problems between Israel and Palestine.
But the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered in the desert and which showed, and the Dead Sea Scrolls had been produced by the Essenes, who effectively were a Jewish sect.
And so the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was politically very, very valuable to Israel.
And I think that the Vatican, there were two things that happened.
First of all, Carbon 14 was what showed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were authentic.
The Vatican thought, well, we've got the Shroud of Turin.
But the only thing that had stopped them having it carbon dated was because there was many, many pages of Dead Sea Scrolls and they could get enough carbon by actually burning about two square feet of it to do a carbon-14 test.
But no one was going to take two square feet of the Shreiler Turin to get enough carbon.
But by the 1980s, the carbon-14 technology was such that they could get an accurate dating from a piece of material no bigger than your thumb fingernail.
And that convinced the church to go ahead with the carbon dating.
And they obviously didn't want to be seen to be supervising it because it might look as if they were not sufficiently independent.
So they turned to the British Museum to supervise the test.
And I, by the way, had pitched to the BBC to make another film about the whole testing process and I'd been commissioned to do it.
And that was predicated on the fact that there were a series of protocols that the British Museum had established, five in particular, to ensure the testing would be as accurate as possible.
And that was the basis of the pitch I put to the BBC.
It then transpired over the weeks and months for various political reasons each of those protocols was set to one side, at which point the British Museum should have said, well, look, we said these protocols had to be in place to get an accurate test.
And now they're not in place thanks to your politicking.
So we won't do the test.
But they didn't.
Because by that time, so much was at stake for the individuals involved that it wasn't that it had to go ahead.
Okay.
So you're saying that it shouldn't have gone ahead.
It did go ahead.
And when it did go ahead, the result came back that it wasn't what it was claimed to be.
Well, let me tell you one very simple example.
What one protocol was, there had to be a sample taken from at least seven different parts of the shroud.
You didn't need much, I told you.
It was only the size of a thumbnail.
But when it came to it, they only took a sample from one corner.
And the corners were where the shroud was held from with all the numerous expositions that were held right throughout the Middle Ages.
And it got worn.
And the corners were subject to repair and beautifully, invisibly repaired because it was such a sacred object.
You couldn't tell.
So the seamless repairs, you say, would have told a different story from the story that might have been told had a repair not been done in that portion.
Yes, or if they'd taken the sevens, you know, numerous samples from different parts of the show, they wouldn't have been mumbered with one sample, which we now know for absolute certain, was repaired in the Middle Ages.
That's why it came up with a medieval date.
In 2009, though, I mean, look, there is endless controversy about this.
In 2009, I've got a Daily Mail piece here in my hand.
It says, one of the scientists who first studied 12-foot-long sheet, the 12-foot-long sheet, has spoken from beyond the grave of how he came to believe that it could be genuine.
A video made shortly before Raymond Rogers died in 2005 has been discovered, this was back in 2009, in which the U.S. chemist reveals his own tests show the relic to be much older, dating back to between 1,300 and 3,000 years ago.
Dr. Rogers said, and I'm quoting from the mail still, I don't believe in miracles that defy the laws of nature.
After the 1988 investigation, I'd given up on the shroud.
But now I'm coming to the conclusion that it has a very good chance of being the piece of cloth that was used to bury the historic Jesus, his words.
So, you know, there's a note of support much later than 2009.
But of course, in 2018, there was a further analysis or further investigation.
And that once again came back to the notion that this was not the object that you and others had said that it was.
I'm not aware of anything in 2018.
What was that?
Okay, in 2018, I've got a piece from Live Science, which was again based on the 1988 Carbon-14 test, I think.
Quotes, for instance, two short rivulets of the blood on the back of the left hand of the shroud are only consistent with a person standing with their arms held at a 45-degree angle.
In contrast, the forearm bloodstains found, we're talking about the blood now, not the cloth.
The forearm bloodstains found on the shroud match a person standing with their arms held nearly vertically.
A person couldn't be in these two positions at once.
If you look at the bloodstains as a whole, just as you would with working at a crime scene, you realize they contradict each other.
And that was from a piece in 2018.
And where did that appear?
That was in Live Science, but I think it was in various other places too.
Well, I have to tell you that that doesn't resonate with me at all.
In researching this film, I didn't come across anything like that.
I think the point was, I'm sorry to jump in, the point was, and I've seen it in other things that I've looked at today while just going through internet, just to refresh my mind, internet postings and articles about it, the idea that the bloodstains appear to have been made by somebody adopting different poses, not a dead messiah.
I can tell you, absolutely categorically, that every authoritative forensic pathological examination has revealed that the wounds on the shroud are consistent with crucifixion and not as crucifixion was imagined in the Middle Ages, because no one was crucified in the Middle Ages.
We've only recently had archaeological discoveries of victims of crucifixions, one in Jerusalem in the last 50 years, which show the nail wounds going precisely where they go through in the shroud, which is through the heel.
And also the one place that you can't put a nail, which is where all artists depict them, is in the palms of the hands because that won't carry it either.
It has to go between the two wrist bones.
So, whatever you're citing there, I can tell you is not accurate.
Okay, well, I hear what you say, but that was about the specific trace or trace elements of blood on the cloth, and that was disputed.
Also disputed, something else that I found, and again, I'm quoting at you things that I found online, but a textile research institute, I'm sure you've seen this one.
This is an organization at Leiden in Holland, and the quote here is, I quickly realized, based on my knowledge of Roman period textiles from Egypt and the Levant, and armed with a hand lens, that the cloth was, quote, wrong for the Roman period, the spin of the threads, the type of the weave, the width of the cloth, and unlike the products of the Levantine looms from some 2,000 years ago, the cloth is perfectly attributable to medieval types of fabric.
Well, that flies in the face of the actual facts, because when the British Museum tried to, they wanted to find examples of medieval cloths and costs from that period in order to be able to do comparisons with,
they could not find, and if you look at the official film of it, which actually came out, which actually the BBC shot themselves because I withdrew from it, there's a shot of one of the Swiss scientists looking down the microscope, and he's looking at a cross stitch, which we know the shroud isn't.
The shroud is a herringbone weave.
And there's absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the actual herringbone weave was not made in the Middle Ages.
The only place you could find examples of a herringbone weave came from 2000 years ago, and it was from material found...
Its name escapes me at the moment, but that is the only other place where this herringbone weave has been discovered.
And we know, as I say, it's described as the purchase of a rich man.
It was a very, very expensive cloth.
And to this day, and as you know, I was finally given permission to film the shroud itself.
And it looks as if it could have been woven yesterday.
Does it amaze you that it survived like that?
I'm trying to think about in my own life examples where we've tried to preserve things.
I can tell you, my dad, before he joined the police, and this is decades and decades ago, he tried to preserve his army uniform, right?
He tried to keep it.
And of course, it was many sizes too small for him.
But occasionally I'd go into the garage or the shed, actually, to look at this thing in a box.
And over the decades, maybe this is a trivial example, it almost went to powder.
You know, the cloth that this army uniform disintegrated.
Does it amaze you that supposedly this thing survived for such a vast period of time, as well as you say it has?
Not at all, because there are many examples of these fine linens that have survived over the years.
Don't forget that Egyptian mummies go back for far longer, and those cloths still wrap the mummies to this day.
So it all depends on the conditions in which things have been kept.
You're offering a million dollars for those who might be able to prove that it is a fake, to come forward and show the evidence that definitively shows that this thing is not what it appears to be.
It wasn't created at the time we think it was or you think it was, and it didn't contain the body of Christ.
Do you have a million dollars?
Hang on, to be accurate, the offer is to the British Museum.
Right, so it's only to them, it's not for all comers in the scientific world.
Well, if they want to go to the British Museum and say, we think we can do it, then they do it in the name of the British Museum, yes, they would qualify.
So if there was a research institute somewhere who felt that they'd like to take it on, they could approach the British Museum, that the British Museum, if they so decided, could apply to you to take on the challenge to answer this question.
Is that how it would work?
Okay.
And they'd get a million dollars if they could.
Do you have a million dollars?
The financier of my film does, yes.
Right.
So if this happened, it's not an empty promise.
You would be able to deliver the money.
Absolutely.
And what would you do then?
What would you say?
I mean, look, I'm setting up a strongman argument here, I realize.
But if this proof was obtained that said definitively, this thing is not from the era it appears to be, and I'm sorry, you're wrong, would you put out a statement to or another film?
Well, as a hedge against that, which frankly would be unnecessary, I'm confident enough of that.
But as a hedge against it, if anybody did say they wanted to do that, I would have exclusive rights to film them doing it, and that would be worth a million dollars around the world.
So one way or another, it would pay for itself.
Right.
I'd never appreciated that.
Of course it would.
Yeah, if you think about it.
Okay, so what kinds of testing do you think now need to be done?
Because technology has advanced rapidly, exponentially almost since 1978 when you made the original film.
In this day and age, if you had a blank canvas and you had all the permissions that you needed, what testing would you like to have done on the cloth?
There's a very relevant quote from the Bible, which I think we have to remember.
Do not put the Lord thy God to the test.
Ultimately, religion depends on faith.
What's the point of a religion that doesn't require faith?
Are you saying that there don't need to be any more tests?
I'm saying that there could be as much study as you like to find, as we could possibly can, although it has been pretty well studied so that we know as much as there is to know about the composition of the class and so on.
But as much study of it, but when it comes to testing it, as I say, if, as seems likely, I mean, that the only explanation for the fact that this image is encoded with three-dimensional information is that it was the only thing that would have caused it is the release of energy equivalent to the bomb that destroyed most of Lebanon,
but for such an infinitesimal amount of time.
Now, no one could reproduce that.
And so there's no way that you could actually do something comparable to the shroud.
It is what it is.
I mean, that's what's always been said down the years, isn't it?
That this thing made an almost photographic imprint.
Well, a photographic imprint on the cloth.
And only a burst of some kind of energy that we don't understand could have achieved that.
But I think over the years, there have been people who've said that there are some natural processes that might do that.
There might make an impact like that.
You might visually be able to do something like that, but then you have got to also acknowledge the fact that what is what forms the image, it can only be measured in microns.
There is no penetration into the cloth.
The threads, each individual thread is only discolored on its surface.
Whatever you apply to the cloth to do it would be absorbed to some extent.
The image on the shroud is supremely superficial.
Nothing like it can exist anywhere else.
So whatever energy had to be applied for a microsecond?
Billionths of a microsecond.
Are you frustrated that in more recent years Pope Francis said, and I quote, that it's an icon of a man scourged and crucified, which doesn't call it a relic.
You know, that does not say this is something to be revered.
It's not a relic of the church, but it is an icon of a man scourged and crucified.
That sounds rather non-committal.
Well, the church had no alternative.
I mean, they put the test in place.
Don't forget the Pope's supposed to be infallible.
And if he said, well, actually, I made a mistake in getting the British Museum to do it because they made a right balls.
Excuse me.
I made a mistake in getting the British Museum to supervise it because they clearly were not up to the task and didn't do it properly.
The Pope's infallible.
So they're not going to come up and say, no, we made a mistake.
I suspect His Holiness would probably not use that terminology.
So we're in not a log jam, but the argument is paused, isn't it?
Yes, and there's so much more than I was able to squeeze into the 87 minutes of Who Can He Be, the film.
I had the privilege for a while of being the editor of the British Society for the Turin Shroud newsletter, and that has been published since the mid-70s.
And it's, any of your listeners might like to go to it.
The British Society for the Turin Shroud, twice yearly, it publishes papers by all sorts of scholars around the world.
And of course, all the archives of the British Society are available online too.
And it's a continuum different scholars are finding different aspects of the Shroud to research and it is continually revealing new information.
There is another aspect to this too, as well.
And it is controversial.
It has to be by its nature.
If we live in a dualist world, and it's a big leap for a lot of people to contemplate that Jesus was divine and there is a God and so on.
But don't forget, the other side of that coin is that there is evil too.
And evil exists in the world.
And there was a dimension operating behind the scenes when this carbon-14 test was done to try and ensure that the result of it that came out was as it was.
Now, you will find in detail, this individual is named.
He's deceased now, but it was a very troubled character for all sorts of reasons.
He was actually a priest himself.
So you're saying, and obviously I only have what you're telling me here, and this person is not alive to defend themselves, but I hear what you say.
So you're saying that perhaps some elements put a spanner in the works?
Yes, there was somebody operating behind the scenes in such a way as to bring about the result that they wanted to bring about, which was that the tribe was a fake.
And this person got themselves right into the heart of the whole process.
Wouldn't that be, in 2023, a really compelling film to make?
If you have the evidence for it?
I've written about it, and there is an article that Goes into some detail about it within the recent copies of the BSTS journal.
I didn't include it in this film, I didn't feel it was necessary.
But it is a fact.
There's some other rather interesting facts, too, about the show that a lot of people might not be aware of.
One of the most successful feature films recently has been The Life Story of Elvis.
One of the financiers who actually financed not the production of the film of The Silent Witness, but who financed its distribution in America was Priscilla Presley.
And she, you know, Priscilla Presley and Pat Boone.
And a lot of people of younger years won't remember people of those, but both the first pop stars.
Absolutely.
And I attended a meeting because once I'd finished the film, it was still difficult to get it distributed as an individual.
I'll tell you, interestingly, the BBC, who I'd originally pitched it to and turned it down, when the film was released, there was a series called Everyman, which it might still be running, I don't know.
But the BBC said, they said we'd like to show it.
And I said, yes, well, you can buy it.
And I told them how much it would cost them.
But they went off and said, no, we're going to make our own.
But fortunately, because I'd had such a decent budget, I'd signed up all the contributors on an exclusive basis.
So you had them stitched up.
Okay.
I mean, in the nicest possible way.
Absolutely.
And they came back to me and said, all right, okay.
Because by this time, it had so much publicity.
They paid me the full budget that they would pay for an Everyman documentary and also gave it the cover of the Radio Times.
You had tremendous luck, a lot of very good fortune and a fair wind behind you.
My last question, realistically hand on heart, and having been so close to this project for so long, do you think you'll ever be handing out the million dollars to anybody?
Do you think anybody will ever take it on?
Well, I hope somebody will attempt to take it on, but I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they'll fail.
Well, I think that's a very good point to park.
It will talk again, and I'm glad that I was able to have a relaxed conversation with you and not one where I had somebody counting fingers down to me for the number of seconds we had left before commercials.
So thank you, David, very much indeed.
If people want to read about you and know about the work that you've done on screen about this, where would they go?
Is there a good one-stop shop?
Well, I read a book about the making of the Silent Witness, which is which Futura published.
There are a few, it's not in print now.
But really the best thing to do, I think, is to first of all, make sure you go to the whocanhebe.com website, because that is produced in conjunction with Michael Kowalski, who made the definitive film that specifically concentrates on the carbon-14 test.
So I would ask anybody that really wants to get into this, they'll find my film there to stream.
It's now available on DVD, of course, now too.
But they'll also find all the information that they might wish to have about the Schrouder.
That's whocanhebe.com.
I think it's important that we keep the generation that's up and coming interested in this story.
Just as I was captivated, you know, as a very, very young person at my mum and dad's home when that magazine dropped through our letterbox on a Sunday morning.
I wish you luck, David, and thank you very much for telling me your story in full.
And thank you for taking the trouble to ask me.
Thank you, David.
Bye-bye.
David Rolf, check him out online.
Check his workout.
He is a man who is so committed to it and has done so much good research over the years.
But the ultimate decision has to be yours.
Please remember, no television show, radio show on the 7th of May.
Hopefully, I'll be able to return on the 14th of May.
But no TV show, radio show on the 7th of May.
And more great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the Unexplained Online.
So until we meet again, 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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