Faking a Fake Shroud of Turin and Faking Out Television News

[liveoaktx]

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/03-24-2005/0003246554&EDATE=

**thought this was interesting in showing how shallow corporate news media is, even for those with a special interest

NEW YORK, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Over the years there have been numerous attempts to create images like those on the Shroud of Turin. Someone suggested that they might have been painted with lemon juice to create a reverse bleaching effect. Others have suggested that the images might have been formed by draping a cloth over a scorching hot statue, by painting them with pigment dust or by photographing a corpse using some unknown medieval photographic
process. The latest such attempt to explain the images was recently proposed by Nathan Wilson, a 26-year-old English professor at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson created an image by painting a picture on a pane of glass positioned over a piece of linen that he left in the sun for several days. The resulting image, caused by sun-bleaching away the background while leaving darker color where the painted picture on the glass masked out the sun, is called a shadow shroud. The image Wilson produced is similar in a few ways to the Shroud of Turin images.
ABC World News Tonight reported the story on March 22, 2005. In a segment entitled, "Shrouded in Mystery No More," anchor Peter Jennings stated, "The Shroud of Turin has mystified scientists for years. Now a literature professor from Idaho says he can prove it's a fake."
"I was amazed at the national television coverage," said shroud researcher Dan Porter in a letter to eighty Shroud of Turin researchers. "Neither Peter Jennings nor ABC's Bill Blakemore, who reported the story, seemed aware of any substantive facts about the shroud. It seems as though they did not do any research and did not consult any scientists to see if the shadow shroud made any sense. It does not."
Porter explains his rationale on the Shroud Story website at
http://www.shroudstory.com.
Anthropologist William Meacham, a Research Fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, added, "I would like to know how this unscientific idea could possibly get such major coverage, when it so clearly and obviously does not fit the known facts about the Shroud image.