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A CLANDESTINE SAMPLE
As Orazio Petrosillo is to give the inaugural
speech at the Congress of Orvieto, on Sunday 27 August 2000 at 5 pm, at the Palazzo
del Popolo, we take the opportunity to remind of an article he had
published in Il messaggero on Easter Sunday, 26 March 1989. Ten years
on, it has lost none of its truth1.
«All the elements
of a scientific “detective novel” are present and “the case of the Holy
Shroud” could very well be re-opened in a big way despite the verdict of the
prestigious laboratories of Oxford, Tucson (Arizona) and Zurich, which dated
the shroud of Turin between 1260 and 1390 using the carbon 14 method. A number
of sindonologists have raised suspicions about the regularity of the procedure
which led to the conclusion that the Shroud, this burial cloth of Christ's,
is not authentic. In particular, the French scholar Bruno Bonnet-Eymard has
made a formal accusation, adding new details to the far from reassuring
information to have already reached the Vatican.
«What is the cause
of this perplexity? It is a semi-clandestine control sample that was added to
the two officially passed to the three laboratories so that they might
verify the correctness of their tests on the shroud cloth. The addition of this
third sample would not have aroused suspicion had it not been accompanied by a number of
other factors which suggest that the test may not have been
carried out correctly. This sample was not provided for in the test protocol and it was passed to the laboratories outside the strict procedures
established for the two other samples. But what is even more intriguing is that this
cloth had an age (1263-1283) which coincided perfectly with that attributed to the
Shroud, the age usually put forward by the opponents of its authenticity.»
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| Fig. 2o: Willy Wölfli, director of the Zurich laboratory,
with the three tubes containing the samples Z1, Z2 and Z3. The envelope on the
left contains the fourth sample, a clandestine one. |
Here, Petrosillo emphasises the similarity between
the weave of the cope of Saint Louis d’Anjou († 1297), from which this
sample originated, and the weave of the Holy Shroud. To this Tite calmly
replied that any confusion, and therefore substitution, was impossible since
the sample from the cope consisted of a handful of linen threads and not of a
strip of cloth. Now, as the rest of the story will show, the fact that this
fourth sample had been unravelled made it much more suitable for Tite’s
purposes: because these «threads» were of linen and had been very precisely dated within
the period attributed to the linen of the Holy Shroud by the opponents of its
authenticity, from the perspective of nuclear physics they effectively made a double of the Holy Shroud available for
dating.2
But let us not get ahead of ourselves...
Petrosillo then refers to the comedy of the
sample-taking on 21 April 1988, a comedy that was played out in order to have
us believe that the dating was carried out «blindly». He then goes on:
«This affair has a
hidden side to it which places Michael Tite in the firing line, he who was the
curator of the British Museum and the guarantor of the operation’s
transparency. It is he who sought a clandestine sample outside of the
protocol, requesting that it be identical in every way to the Holy Shroud and
of the age “desired” by the opponents of the Turin Shroud’s
authenticity: 13th - 14th century. The facts have proved him right. The procedure
has been entirely reconstituted from the documents by the sindonologist
Bonnet-Eymard.
«We shall restrict
ourselves here to the crucial events. One month before the sample-taking, Tite
wrote a letter to the review Nature, officially announcing the test protocol for the radiocarbon dating of the Holy Shroud. In particular, he
specified that two control samples would be supplied as complete pieces of
cloth, without being unravelled or shredded, and that the test would be
carried out
“blind”, though he admitted that the sample from the Shroud would be
recognisable even if it were unravelled. Tite let it be known that the three
laboratories had agreed not to discuss their results with each other until
after they had passed their findings to the British Museum and the “G
Colonetti” Institute of Metrology in Turin for statistical analysis. Just at
the time that he was publishing these conditions, Tite wrote to Jacques Évin,
director of the Radiocarbon Laboratory at the University of Lyons, requesting
a sample of mediaeval cloth from the 13th-14th century, one that resembled the
Holy Shroud as closely as possible.»
Then Orazio Petrosillo cautiously concluded:
«The accusation
formulated against Tite by Bonnet-Eymard is so grave that we dare not answer
for it ourselves on the basis of these procedural anomalies alone. According
to the French sindonologist, Tite wanted to obtain a clandestine sample in
order to make a hasty substitution of it for the fragments of the Shroud
during the “mescolamento” of the tubes. If this were not the case,
one fails to understand this performance of the samples being sealed in a
little room apart when Tite had already admitted the impossibility of carrying
out a “blind” test.
«This matter of the
“added” sample is not the only irregularity in the procedure. Similar
puzzlement has been caused by the behaviour of the three laboratories who
failed to abide by their agreement to be discreet and who, according to
Bonnet-Eymard, carried out their tests while consulting with one another. The
results which appeared prematurely in the English press last summer are
confirmation of this. The “leaks” were the work of David Sox, Tite’s
friend, who two weeks before the official publication by Ballestrero on 13
October last, had finished printing his book tellingly entitled: “THE
SHROUD UNMASKED. UNCOVERING THE GREATEST FORGERY OF ALL TIME”. Protests
from Ballestrero’s scientific adviser, Luigi Gonella, concerning these “grave
improprieties” were to no avail.»
What is the point of speaking about “improprieties”
when there is a crime to be denounced3?
TWO WEIGHTS, TWO MEASUREMENTS
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| Fig. 21: Photographic enlargement of one of the four
subsamples dated by the laboratory of Tucson (Arizona), sent by Professor
Donahue on 5 December 1989. It has no scale, date or laboratory stamp. In his accompanying letter, Donahue specified that the
«real dimensions of this piece are about ½ x 1 cm». |
On 7 September 1989, seventeen months after the
event, the Italian Franco Testore set out for the first time the weight of the
samples weighed by him at each stage of the sample-removal process carried out
on the Holy Shroud on 21 April 1988: a strip of cloth measuring 81 mm x 16 mm
had been divided into three pieces which were handed under seal to the
representatives of the laboratories assisting at the sample-removal
process. These figures differed considerably from the official dimensions
specified in February by the “twenty-one” co-authors of the account
published in the review Nature: «a strip or around 10 mm x 70 mm»,
divided into «three samples, each weighing around 50 mg». The difference is
almost double! What a revelation!
«Because the laboratories had asked for a sample
of at least 50 mg, Testore continues, this piece was re-divided into
two more or less equal parts, whose respective weights were 154.9 mg for the
first and 144.8 mg for the second, with a loss of about 0.3 mg.» A new
surprise, revealing the substitution plan! For what can be more can also be
less. Since the laboratories had asked for at least 50 mg, why were
they not given everything?
For a very simple reason: the samples originating
from the cloth from the “13th-14th
century”, included by Tite as substitutes for those taken from the Shroud,
had been «prepared from a strip of cloth measuring 7 x 1 cm.» To effect the
intended substitution, it was absolutely vital to reduce this difference in
size, otherwise the whole plan could be exposed. So we are dealing with two
cloths. The first, a substitute for the Holy Shroud, was a strip
of cloth measuring 70 mm x 10 mm which has never been seen and which has left
no trace. The laboratories dated it as 14th
century. All of it has disappeared. The second, the true, the authentic
cloth, cut on 21 April 1988, was a strip of cloth measuring 81 mm x 16
mm. It was divided into three parts which were sent under seal to the
laboratories who testify to having received them and took photographs of them
(figs. 21, 22, 23).
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| Fig. 22: Sample of the Holy Shroud provided to the
laboratory of Zurich, labelled “Z1”, from a photograph passed to us by
Professor Wölfli on 2 November 1990. There is no date on this photograph and
it bears no laboratory stamp. |
Fig. 23: Sample of the Holy Shroud provided to the
laboratory of Oxford, labelled “O1”, from a photograph passed to us by Dr
Hedges on 16 November 1990 at Oxford. This photograph has no scale, date or laboratory stamp. |
THE CLINCHING PROOF
What became of the samples of the Holy Shroud?
«The carbon 14 plotters, under the pressure of our attacks, writes the Abbé de Nantes, no longer
know what is Dr Tite’s official truth and what is the
hidden truth. So they passed shamelessly from one version to another, getting themselves entangled in enormous contradictions and
incoherence.1» One
has only to listen to them viva voce in the audiovisual recording of
our conversations with them, taken with their authorisation2.
 Fig. 24:
Detail from a “souvenir photo” (!) taken at the laboratory of Tucson
(Arizona) on Sunday 24 April 1988, sent to us by Professor Donahue on 3
January 1991. Our explanation:
•
THE ARCHBISHOP OF TURIN’S RED WAX SEAL. It was not broken and will be
replaced after the substitution, so that on Monday morning, the day of the
official opening of the tube, Damon and Donahue, Jull and Toolin will certify
that it was intact.
•
THE STEEL TUBE MARKED “A1”, the initial of the laboratory
(Arizona) and the number of the sample which Tite inserted on 21 April
in Turin, in the presence of Cardinal Ballestrero.
•
THE ALUMINIUM PAPER IN WHICH THE SAMPLE WAS WRAPPED.
• THE HOLY SHROUD SAMPLE. It is in two pieces. The large piece weighs
40 mg; the small piece 14 mg.
Damon and Donahue are going to
keep the small piece secret, and place the large piece in the tube marked “A3”,
after having previously taken from this tube no 3 the sample officially
labelled «Linen associated with the Cleopatra mummy dating
from the beginning of the 2nd century AD, originating from Thebes (EA 6707).»
In reality: Linen from the Bock collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum
(14th-15th century), which is going to be placed in the tube marked “A1”.
Unfortunately for the hoaxers, this nocturnal transition from a sample made up of two pieces to a sample made up of only
one piece is a proven fact which lays the crime bare, despite all the efforts
to disguise it.
Through all these coded messages, we advance
laboriously but sure-footedly towards... the discovery of the clinching proof!
By driving into a corner both Riggi who cut the samples and Testore who
weighed them, we learned that one of the three laboratories had received a
sample of the Holy Shroud in two pieces. However, in their official reports,
the two experts had taken pains to conceal this incident: «As luck would have
it, each of the three pieces was identical to the others, wrote Riggi without
batting an eyelid, and the weight of the tree pieces, weighed on an electronic
scale, varied by about a thousandth of a gram for each piece.»
Testore shows the same cool assurance: «The three
parts were almost completely identical: one weighed 52.0 mg, the second 52.8,
and the third 53.7 mg.3»
As for the report of the co-ordinator Tite,
published by Nature in February 1989 with the backing of twenty other
collaborators in the dating, it gives us to believe that the cloth taken from
the Holy Shroud was divided straightforwardly and without hitch into three
equal samples of the same shape, size and weight: «The shroud was separated
from the backing-cloth along its bottom left-hand edge, and a strip (~ 10 mm x
70mm) was cut from just above the place where a sample was previously removed
in 1973 for examination. The strip came from a single site on the main body of
the shroud, away from any patches or charred areas. Three samples, each ~ 50
mg in weight, were prepared from this strip.1»
Pressed to answer our awkward questions, Testore
was forced to reveal an entirely different version of the facts2.
Riggi’s cutting was so clumsy that it resulted in three samples respectively
weighing 52.0 mg, 52.8 mg and... 39.6 mg. «To obtain the minimum weight
required for the third sample», it was necessary to add «a thin strip
weighing 14.1 mg», Testore finally admitted. «Consequently, one of the three
laboratories received two small rectangles from the Holy Shroud whose combined
weight was 53.7 mg.»
Fig. 25: In the study of Douglas Donahue (seen
in the background, crossing his knees), at Tucson (Arizona), on 26 October
1990. Jull (on the right) points out, in the laboratory notebook, the
signatures of the «witnesses» to the opening of the containers, affirming
that the seals had not been broken. To the left, Toolin can be seen extracting
from an envelope a plastic container and looking in vain for the «red silk
thread» taken from sample no 1, said to be that «of the Shroud».
On making some discreet enquiries, Zurich and
Oxford replied that it was not them. It was therefore Arizona. As was to be expected, Tite
had sent the awkward evidence which could have exposed everything to the most
distant place possible, confident that no one would go to Tucson to make enquiries!
Therefore we set off for Arizona: a journey of nineteen thousand kilometres
there and back3.
Although received courteously, we obtained nothing other than: No record!
«We have no records!» Nothing except for the weights noted in a school
exercise book (fig. 25). At the bottom of the list of figures were four
signatures confirming that the cardinal’s seals were intact on reception of
the samples. The signatures are those of Damon the Quaker, the laboratory
manager, who was absent on the day of our visit, Toolin, who along with Damon
proceeded with the chemical cleaning of the samples, Donahue and Jull, the two
Catholics on the team.
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| Fig 26: TIMOTHY W LINICK, from the laboratory of Tucson
(Arizona), was one of the “twenty-one” signatories of the Nature
report (16 February 1989) on the dating of the Holy Shroud. He was known for
the scrupulous rigour that he brought to the mathematical analysis of results
obtained by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). He died at the age of
forty-two on 4 June 1989, in very unclear circumstances, shortly after the
campaign of the Italian press reporting our accusations. |
Our enquiry will go on to show that two of these
signatures constitute false testimonies. For Jull and Toolin were not present
on Sunday 24 April when Damon and Donahue opened the sealed tubes in order
assure themselves, as Damon says, that the Holy Shroud was among the three
samples, for they were afraid that «if we did come out first century, the
sceptics would say that we didn’t get the Turin Shroud to analyse». The
seals had already been broken, therefore, when the two others, Jull and
Toolin, took part in the official opening the next day, Monday4.
Paul Damon states that he immediately recognised the characteristic weave of
the Holy Shroud when taking out the piece of cloth contained in tube “A1”
(fig. 21). Was it in one or two pieces? He no longer knows, but, he explains:
«We kept a piece of the sample so that, if there were any controversy, it
could be shown to the Church authorities.»
Damon is telling the truth: surprised and put out
at receiving a 14 mg fragment with the sample, they both decided to put this
unwanted and rather too revealing fragment in their safe as a “reserve”.
Then they carefully stuck back the threads which they had cut and put the
seals back in place in readiness for the official opening fixed for the
following day, Monday 25 April.
That day, the two accomplices of the previous day
perhaps left Jull and Toolin with the task of opening tubes 2 and 4 whose seals
were still intact; but what they did not tell them is that they had swapped
samples 1 and 3 around: the “mummy”, or at least what Tite had placed in
tube 3 under this name, which was none other than the substitute from a 14th-15th
century cloth, had now taken the place of the Holy Shroud, and vice-versa.
Was the substitute really from the 14th-15th
century? Yes. This is revealed by the details of the measurements taken by the
laboratories and their statistical analysis. There is a gap of one hundred
years from the date “expected” by the carbonari. It is this which
lays bare the substitution, making any denial impossible.
Page 30
(2) Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 9.
Father Dubarle’s convictions are subjective. He writes a history of the Holy
Shroud, «which I personally take, he says, to be an authentic relic of Christ»,
in which he «deliberately leaves aside the study of the gospel accounts of the
burial of the crucified» – him, a biblicist by profession! – as well as the
«the presentation of recent scientific tests» (ibid.). Truly a
paradigm of the modernist mind!
Page 31
(1) Full translation in Eng CRC no 219, p. 34-35. – (2) SS II,
p. 95. – (3) If Gonella attacks the «carbon 14 mafia»
with such vehemence, as he claims, it is so that no one can suspect him of
being their accomplice. But he works for them all the same, since he accepts the “mediaeval
dating”.
Page 33
(1) Eng CRC no 238, p. 11. – (2) Video B 24. Cf. In pursuit
of the forgers, in Eng CRC no 238, p. 1-11. – (3) SS II, p. 138; cf.
Eng CRC no 238, p. 1-2.
Page 34
(1) Eng CRC no 238, p. 16. – (2) Ibid.,
p. 1-2. – (3) Ibid., p. 2-3. – (4) Ibid.,
p. 3-4, 38-39.
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Fig. 19: PRESS CONFERENCE AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM, FRIDAY
14 OCTOBER 1988. The exclamation mark on the blackboard expresses the
jubilation disguised beneath the British phlegm of Tite and Hall. Dr Michael
Tite is in the centre, regarding whom Ian Wilson considers it «unthinkable»
for anyone who knows him to attribute any underhand scheme to him. It was Tite
who asked Jacques Évin, two months before the samples were taken at Turin, to
provide him with a piece of cloth reliably dated, within fifty or one hundred
years, in the 13th or 14th century after Jesus Christ, «preferably in the
14th century». Tite insisted that this sample be «as similar as
possible, both in weave and colour, to the Shroud» (full text of this
letter in the English CRC no 238, p. 35). On his right is Professor Edward Hall,
director of the Oxford dating laboratory. On his left is the physicist Robert
Hedges who carried out the test. In an interview published by The Tablet
in January 1989, Hall did not not deny the presence of bloodstains on «the
Shroud», but then he added: «But whether it’s human or pig’s
blood, who knows?» (full article in the English CRC no 221, July 1989, p. 28-31).
On Good Friday, 24 March 1989, the honourable Professor Hall received from a group of generous
donators one million pounds sterling as payment for
his services, a sum which was immediately invested in creating a new chair of
archaeology at Oxford for the benefit of... the honourable Dr Tite (cf. SS II,
p. 116).