Raymond N. Rogers’s research while affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory and other places

In 1988, radiocarbon laboratories at Arizona, Cambridge, and Zurich determined the age of a sample from the Shroud of Turin. They reported that the date of the cloth's production lay between a.d. 1260 and 1390 with 95% confidence. This came as a surprise in view of the technology used to produce the cloth, its chemical composition, and the lack of vanillin in its lignin. The results prompted questions about the validity of the sample.Preliminary estimates of the kinetics constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin indicate a much older age for the cloth than the radiocarbon analyses. The radiocarbon sampling area is uniquely coated with a yellow–brown plant gum containing dye lakes. Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud.

The Shroud of Turin is a large piece of linen that shows the faint image of a man on its surface: it has been claimed to be the shroud of Jesus. Here we report evidences that colour can be produced by reactions between reducing sugars, left on the cloth by the manufacturing procedure, and amines deriving from the decomposition of a corpse. Treatment of a cloth prepared according to the ancient technology gave a distribution of colour on the thread fibres in good agreement with the Shroud features. Such a natural image-production process would support the hypothesis that the Shroud of Turin had been a real shroud. However, these observations do not prove how the image was formed or the "authenticity" of the Shroud.

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John Jackson has claimed that the only way all of the features observed on the Shroud of Turin could have been formed would involve the body becoming "mechanically transparent" concomitant with the appearance of a flux of vacuum-ultraviolet photons. The photons would produce the image as the cloth fell through the volume previously occupied by the body. This would explain the appearance of image on the back side of the cloth and the appearance of bones and teeth in the image. The "theory" is offered as proof of a miraculous resurrection. Unfortunately, the "theory" completely ignores some important contradictions and some important laws of nature. Introduction The primary postulates of Jackson's "theory" are the following: 1) The body becomes "mechanically transparent [at the instant of resurrection], and the cloth falls into the body." 2) "Jesus' body became 'a body of light.' The light only penetrates air a millimeter or two ("if at all"); i.e., the air is opaque to the radiation." 3) "The cloth falling into the body is a transitional event, not instantaneous." 4) "Only the fibers on the cloth that were fully exposed in the energy field were imaged ... Deeper fibers were protected from the energy field by the fiber lying on top of them and therefore not imaged." 5) "When the cloth has fallen completely through the energy field, the fibers on the other side become exposed and are imaged by the energy field, except where they are protected or shaded by other fibers." 6) "The dorsal image is a contact image." Jackson's postulates should be discussed one at a time, and much could be said about each; however, I will discuss only those for which I have first-hand observational information and evidence.