✝
THE SHROUD Scientific Authenticity
World-Class Researchers

The Scientists Behind the Discovery

The Shroud of Turin was not analyzed by amateur enthusiasts, but by premier physicists, nuclear chemists, and optical engineers from America's top national laboratories and European research institutes.

STURP Research Team in Turin, 1978
72 Crates / 8 Tons of Equipment
The Historic Expedition

The 1978 STURP Investigation

120 Continuous Hours of Non-Destructive Testing

In October 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) was granted unprecedented 24-hour access to the cloth for five consecutive days.

The team comprised approximately 40 scientists from institutions including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the US Air Force Weapons Laboratory, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Lockheed Martin.

  • Transported 72 crates containing 8 tons of state-of-the-art optical and spectroscopic equipment.
  • Employed X-ray fluorescence, infrared thermography, ultraviolet reflectance, and high-resolution micro-spectroscopy.
  • Most entered the project as agnostics, Jews, or skeptics expecting to quickly unmask a medieval pigment. They left unanimously concluding the image is non-artistic and unresolved by classical physics.
Leading Minds

Key Scientists & Investigators

Click on any researcher profile below to understand their key findings and institutional background.

Barrie Schwortz

STURP Official Documenting Photographer
Founder of Shroud.com & CSST

An Orthodox Jewish commercial and scientific photographer who joined the 1978 STURP team fully expecting to prove the Shroud was a medieval painting. After examining the chemical, optical, and photographic evidence for decades, he spent the rest of his life as the world's leading educator on the Shroud's authenticity.

"I went in as a skeptic, expecting to photograph paint. But there was no paint. Today, I am convinced the Shroud is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth."

Dr. Raymond N. Rogers

Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory
STURP Director of Chemical Research

World-renowned thermal chemist at Los Alamos who initially defended the 1988 C-14 dating. When presented with evidence of a repair, he conducted chemical micro-analyses on authentic 1988 sample threads and discovered cotton fibers, gum mordant, and madder root dye—proving the sample was a 16th-century reweave.

"The radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is much older than the radiocarbon date."

Dr. Liberato De Caro

Senior Physicist, CNR Institute of Crystallography
Pioneer of WAXS Linen Dating

Utilized Wide-Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) to measure the natural aging and crystalline degradation of flax cellulose fibers. After calibrating against ancient Egyptian and Masada textiles, his team tested the Shroud and established that its structural degradation directly fits a 1st-century AD origin.

"Our X-ray measurements show that the Turin Shroud sample is compatible with a 2000-year-old fabric, perfectly matching ancient linen from Masada."

Dr. John P. Jackson

Professor of Physics & Co-Founder of STURP
Turin Shroud Center of Colorado

Former US Air Force Weapons Laboratory physicist who first discovered the Shroud's 3D relief data using the NASA VP-8 Image Analyzer in 1976. Jackson spearheaded the 1978 STURP expedition and continues cutting-edge radiation and image-formation research.

"The Shroud image contains spatial information that no known photographic, artistic, or chemical technique can produce."

Dr. Alan D. Adler & Dr. John H. Heller

Biophysicist & Medical Pathologist
STURP Blood & Spectroscopy Analysts

Porphyrin and blood chemistry specialists who proved that the red stains are genuine human blood, rich in bilirubin (consistent with severe traumatic torture) and serum albumin, rather than iron oxide or medieval pigments.

"The blood stains on the Shroud are indeed human blood. Iron oxide was present only in trace background amounts indistinguishable from ancient retting processes."

Prof. Avinoam Danin

Professor of Botany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
World Authority on Middle Eastern Flora

Foremost Israeli botanist who verified the presence of pollen and flower silhouettes on the Shroud, proving that plants such as Gundelia tournefortii and Zygophyllum dumosum must have been gathered around Jerusalem in March-April.

"This combination of plants can be found in only one micro-region on Earth: the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea."
An Unlikely Defender

The Testimony of Barrie Schwortz (1946–2024)

"I was an Orthodox Jew who took the assignment because I thought we'd find paint within ten minutes."

Barrie Schwortz served as the official documenting photographer for STURP. Throughout the 5 days in Turin, he processed thousands of scientific photographs under strict laboratory controls.

When colleague Don Lynn asked him to look at the photos of the blood under high magnification, Barrie realized: "Wait a minute, there's no capillary action. If somebody painted this with paint or dye, the fibers would absorb it. The blood is sitting on top, but the image itself has no liquid vehicle."

In 1996, Barrie founded Shroud.com, building the world's most extensive, peer-reviewed, free archive of scientific papers on the Shroud. He spent the remaining three decades of his life lecturing across the globe, stating:

"The Shroud of Turin is the only relic in the world whose authenticity is established not by church dogma, but by the stubborn refusal of empirical science to explain it away."