Guys I was curious about some of my old research on the late Sue Benford.
She was the first one who thought that the c14 dating was on a reweave, and her and Joseph Marino together pushed Ray Rogers to do the chemical analysis on the shroud.
This article was back in 2002 (3 years before Rogers got published in thermochimica acta.
The freaky part is that she claimed that she was receiving visions from Jesus about that piece. Now there is no way to scientifically verify a vision, but is it a coincidence that her their was proven correct 3 years later?
http://www.rense.com/general28/breaktr.htm
Breakthrough Effort
Authenticate The Shroud
By Randy Boswell
The Ottawa Citizen and Citizen News Services
8-30-2
The Ohio woman who appears to have discovered a critical flaw in the 1988 carbon dating of cloth samples from the Shroud of Turin says her insights into the controversial Christian relic were communicated to her by Jesus Christ himself.
Sue Benford, who co-authored a research paper in 2000 with her partner Joseph Marino, a respected shroud scholar, told the Citizen yesterday she's "excited" that their findings could help refute the 1988 tests that have led most experts to conclude the shroud was a medieval forgery and not the burial cloth of Christ.
Roman Catholic officials in Italy have confirmed that new experiments are being performed by a Swiss textile expert, apparently to test the Benford-Marino theory: that the cloth sample chosen in 1988 - and which yielded a date of origin between 1260 and 1390 A.D - was actually a blend of original material almost 2,000 years old and newer threads woven into the shroud as recently as 400 years ago to repair damaged or pilfered portions of the sacred object. Ms. Benford, a former nurse who now runs a nonprofit educational organization near Columbus, said it was a "divine revelation" in March 1997 - followed by months of arduous research with Mr. Marino - that produced their theory that the 1988 study was fundamentally flawed.
"I was working at my computer when a voice told me to go watch TV," said Ms. Benford, 45, who began flipping channels until she happened upon a show about the Shroud of Turin. "I was just stunned," she said, because she instantly recognized that the face on the shroud belonged to the same man whose voice had instructed her to watch television, and which later explained to her why scientists had mistakenly concluded the shroud was a fake. "I don't want to sound like a nut case, but that's what happened," she said. "I was given the answer."
The couple's theory was presented at a conference in Italy in August 2000, around the same time the Vatican announced there would be no further testing on the age of the shroud in the immediate future. But members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero that testing has begun again.
They said that the cloth's backing and about 30 triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire have been removed in a "secret experiment." They added that the committee as a whole has not been consulted and instead the testing has been authorized by a small number of church "insiders." Officials in Turin also confirmed that the shroud has been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said the operation is being conducted by Swiss textile expert Mechtild Flury-Lemberg.
As startling as Ms. Benford's story might seem, the central argument she and Mr. Marino have advanced has also been embraced by a prominent U.S. scientist who first studied the shroud in 1978 and still possesses samples of the cloth. Ray Rogers was part of an international team 20 years ago that performed a chemical analysis of shroud fibres and determined that the image on the cloth was not painted.
That finding ruled out an obvious hoax and left open the possibility that the shroud was authentic. But most of the scientific community - including Mr. Rogers himself - were later convinced by the 1988 carbon dating that the cloth was a fake after all.
Mr. Rogers, a retired chemist living in Los Alamos, New Mexico, told the Citizen yesterday that he dismisses Ms. Benford's story about speaking with Jesus. But the observation itself - that old and new fibres had been mistakenly mixed in the 1988 experiments - is valid, he says.
"When I first saw Benford and Marino's study, I said they're full of it," recalls Mr. Rogers, who re-analysed his shroud threads based on the Ohio couple's hypothesis. "But I have to agree with what they're proposing. The 1988 radio-carbon analysis was probably the very best ever done, but it was done on the worst, most stupidly selected sample of cloth."
The 1988 sample, explains Mr. Rogers, comes from the lower left corner of the shroud which, it appears, has been "cleverly rewoven" over the centuries to disguise the fact that cuttings have been taken from the outer edge of the cloth from time to time.
But several threads studied by Mr. Rogers in 1978 came from a section of the shroud slightly closer to the famous image of a crucified man that appears in the middle of the cloth. Some of those threads had been expertly "spliced" to connect older and newer fibres. In 1982, says Mr. Rogers, one of the threads from his samples was carbon dated - unbenownst to himself and against the wishes of Roman Catholic officials who had authorized the chemical analysis. Nevertheless, that test showed an age difference of more than 1,000 years between the newer and older fibres - and suggested the original portions of the shroud dated from around the year 200 A.D.
"I have not been able to find any information on the accuracy and precision for the dating method used," says Mr. Roges. "However, the dates determined are so different that I could believe a real difference between the ends of the threads." The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37-metre-by-1.11-metre cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century.
(First published 8-21-02)
1988 Carbon-Dating Of The Shroud Questioned
By Orazio Petrosillo Il Messaggero
8-9-02