Researcher Recalls When Technology Developed To Map The Earth Was Applied To The Shroud Of Turin

Interesting article in today's Lawrence Journal-World on how equipment that was designed to map geographic and geological formations was used to study the Shroud of Turin. You may recall that the shroud is believed by some to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

Back in the mid 70's, Pete Schumacher was working for a company created from Kansas University research that had developed the VP-8 image analyzer. The machine converts lights and darks in photographs into a vertical relief “map” that shows shadows and highlights. Schumacher was contacted by two researchers affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory who were studying the shroud. They thought the analyzer would be able to distinguish between shades on different parts of the cloth, giving a better picture of the imprint.

The Journal-World reports:

...what Schumacher saw when the researchers put a slide of the shroud under the image analyzer changed his life.

Instead of the usual two-dimensional reading, the shroud produced a three-dimensional view that looked something like a mask of a bearded man. Despite multiple attempts through the years to reproduce the results using other images, Schumacher says the results haven’t been duplicated with anything other than the shroud.