The Shroud of Turin: The Image That Nobody Can Explain

An Essay on the Most Studied Artifact in the World

In 1976, two physicists at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs fed a photograph of the Shroud of Turin through a VP-8 Image Analyzer — a device built to map nuclear blast effects and translate satellite radar data into three-dimensional terrain. Normal photographs produce distorted, collapsed results on the VP-8, because a camera records light and shadow, not distance. But the Shroud photograph did something no other image had ever done. A properly proportioned, three-dimensional human form rose from the monitor. The nose ramped in relief. The facial contours were anatomically correct. The body emerged as though the varying shades on the cloth were not artistic effects but precise distance encodings — a topographic map of the space between a body and the linen draped over it.¹

Peter Schumacher, the VP-8’s inventor, was present when the machine was delivered. He had never heard of the Shroud of Turin. “The results are unlike anything I have processed through the VP-8 Image Analyzer, before or since,” he later recalled.²

That was nearly fifty years ago. In the decades since, more than a hundred scientific disciplines have studied this cloth.³ They have subjected it to X-ray fluorescence, infrared spectrometry, ultraviolet imaging, laser microprobe Raman spectroscopy, pyrolysis mass spectrometry, and microchemical analysis. They have photographed it in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. They have pulled fibers from it with sticky tape and examined them under electron microscopes. And the central finding, confirmed by every line of investigation, is this: nobody knows how the image got there.

Not how it was painted, because it was not painted. Not how it was dyed, because it was not dyed. Not how it was photographed, because photography would not be invented for another eighteen centuries after the cloth’s claimed provenance. The image simply is, and no known natural or artificial process can account for it.

This essay examines what the image on the Shroud of Turin actually is — its physical characteristics, its chemical properties, and the specific reasons it has defeated every attempt at explanation. It also addresses the single piece of evidence used to dismiss the Shroud as a medieval forgery — the 1988 radiocarbon dating — and why that evidence is considerably weaker than most people have been led to believe.

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What the Image Is Not

The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) was a team of thirty-three scientists, mostly American, who examined the Shroud over five continuous days in October 1978. They had 120 hours of direct access to the cloth, working around the clock in shifts at the Royal Palace adjoining Turin Cathedral.⁴ Their stated goal was straightforward: determine whether the image was a painting.

STURP chemist Ray Rogers arrived expecting to debunk the Shroud in fifteen minutes.⁵ Most of the team expected a free trip to Italy to expose a medieval hoax. None of them were saying that a few days later.

The team’s final report, issued in October 1981 after three years of laboratory analysis, was published across twenty peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. Its summary conclusion:

“No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils. X-ray fluorescence and microchemistry on the fibrils preclude the possibility of paint being used as a method for creating the image. Ultraviolet and infrared evaluation confirm these studies.”⁶

The testing behind that conclusion was exhaustive. STURP scientists applied concentrated hydrochloric and sulfuric acids to image-bearing fibers. The color did not change. Alkaline solutions failed to alter it. Hydrogen peroxide and ascorbate, which should have bleached the fibers white, had no effect. Organic solvents covering the entire range of solubility classes could not extract the color. If any organic stain or dye were present, at least one of these methods would have succeeded.⁷

Inorganic pigments were equally absent. Iron oxide exists on the Shroud, but it is evenly distributed across both image and non-image areas — a residue from the retting process used to prepare flax, not a deliberate application. The iron oxide concentration shows no correlation whatsoever with the image.⁸ Medieval artists who made copies of the Shroud sometimes laid their paintings directly on the cloth to “authenticate” them. This practice left scattered paint fragments, but these fragments bear no relationship to the image itself.

The 1532 fire that damaged the Shroud inadvertently provided a natural experiment. If the image had been created with iron oxide pigments, a gelatin binder, or any temperature-sensitive medium, the color should have darkened near the scorch marks. It did not. If it had been created with water-soluble dyes, the extensive water stains from the fire’s extinguishment should have caused the image to run or migrate. It did not.⁹ The image remained perfectly stable through both extreme heat and water exposure — behaviour inconsistent with any known artistic medium.

What the Image Is

The image on the Shroud is a chemical alteration of the linen fibers themselves. It is not a substance applied to the cloth. The topmost fibers of the threads have undergone a dehydration, oxidation, and conjugation reaction in their polysaccharide structure — the same type of chemical change that occurs when linen ages naturally or is scorched, but confined to a layer so thin it defies comprehension.¹⁰

The colored layer is approximately 0.2 micrometers thick — about one-fifth of a thousandth of a millimeter. It resides only on the outermost two or three fibers of each thread. Where two fibers cross, one over the other, the lower fiber shows a white spot at the point of contact, confirming that the mechanism responsible did not penetrate even to the next fiber down.¹¹ STURP member Alan Adler demonstrated that this ultra-thin colored layer could be chemically reduced with a diimide reagent, leaving behind colorless, undamaged fibers. In several cases, the STURP sticky-tape samples pulled the colored layer clean off the fibers, leaving what researchers called “ghosts” — the detached color shells of the fibers, stuck to the tape.¹²

Each image fiber is colored with the same uniform intensity. There are no darker or lighter individual fibers. What appears as variation in the image — the nose darker than the cheeks, the forehead more prominent than the recesses of the eyes — is produced solely by the number of colored fibers concentrated in a given area. More colored fibers mean a denser image. Fewer mean a lighter one.¹³ This is not how paint works. This is not how dye works. This is not how any known artistic technique works.

The implications for a forgery hypothesis are severe. The individual fibers of a linen thread are too fine to be distinguished by the unaided eye. To color them individually, a painter would need a microscope — which would not be invented for centuries. To color each fiber with the same uniform intensity, the painter would need a brush with a single bristle thinner than a linen fibril. The finest known paintbrushes are made of sable hair; a single sable hair is thicker than a linen fibril.¹⁴ And this painter would need to accomplish all of this while standing at least eight feet away from the cloth, because the image is invisible at close range.¹⁵

Fanti and colleagues at the University of Padua calculated what the task would demand: the hypothetical artist would need to apply an acid (not a pigment) with a single bristle of 0.01 mm diameter, coloring each of the millions of individual fibers uniformly around their circumference, penetrating only the outermost fraction of a micrometer, while simultaneously viewing the work from a distance of at least one meter — which, at the scale of individual fibers, is equivalent to working from 300 meters away.¹⁶ In 2005, a group of twenty-four scientists catalogued 187 distinct characteristics of the Shroud image that any forgery hypothesis would need to satisfy.¹⁷

No proposed method has satisfied them all.

The Three-Dimensional Puzzle

The VP-8 discovery was not a novelty. It was evidence of something with no parallel in any other image ever produced.

A photograph records how much light reaches the film from different parts of a scene. This has nothing to do with the actual distance between the camera and the object. A bright highlight on a nose and a bright highlight on a background wall will register the same way, despite being at very different distances. That is why photographs produce distorted nonsense when processed through equipment designed to read distance data.

The Shroud image does not behave like a photograph. Its intensity variations directly correlate with the distance between a draped cloth and the underlying body at each corresponding point. Jackson and his colleagues confirmed this by draping linen over volunteers of similar height and weight to the man in the Shroud, measuring the cloth-to-body distance at hundreds of points, and comparing those measurements to microdensitometer readings from original Shroud photographs. The correlation was definitive: closer to the body means a denser image, farther away means a lighter image, and this relationship holds consistently over the entire body.¹⁸ Independent teams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Turin confirmed the finding.¹⁹

This distance encoding is present even in areas where the cloth could not have been touching the body. The image formed through empty space.²⁰

The image-encoding mechanism also operated exclusively along vertical, straight-line paths. Computer modeling demonstrated that only a vertical directionality from body to cloth produces the undistorted, anatomically correct three-dimensional body observed in the VP-8 analysis. Any other encoding direction results in a blurred or warped image.²¹ The sides of the body are not imaged. The top of the head is not imaged. Only surfaces facing upward toward the draped cloth are represented — consistent with a mechanism that acted vertically, like gravity or vertically-directed radiation.²²

No painting contains three-dimensional distance information. No photograph contains it. No rubbing, no scorch, no chemical vapor diffusion contains it. The only known way to produce a true three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface is with a device that measures actual distance — radar, sonar, or a VP-8 Image Analyzer. The Shroud encodes this information natively, without any such device.

Blood Before Image

The bloodstains on the Shroud are not part of the image. They are actual blood, and they were on the cloth before the image formed.

STURP testing confirmed the presence of human hemoglobin through spectrophotometric analysis.²³ Drs. Heller and Adler identified human albumin and whole blood serum.²⁴ Working independently in Italy, Dr. Baima Bollone used fluorescent antibodies to demonstrate human blood and concluded it was type AB — a blood type found in approximately 3% of the world’s population.²⁵ In 1997, Dr. Victor Tryon of the University of Texas found human DNA with both X and Y chromosomes in blood samples from the back of the head, confirming the blood came from a human male. The DNA was severely degraded, consistent with ancient origin.²⁶

The blood on the Shroud remains reddish, which is anomalous. Blood normally turns brown within days as hemoglobin oxidizes to methemoglobin, then darkens further with age. Blood six hundred years old should be nearly black. The explanation lies in the pathology of the man whose blood it is. Crucifixion victims experience extreme difficulty breathing, causing oxygen depletion in the blood. The extreme pain triggers traumatic shock, which causes hemolysis — the breakdown of red blood cells. This releases hemoglobin into the surrounding plasma along with high levels of bilirubin, a breakdown product produced in large quantities during violent deaths. When blood with this specific chemistry clots and ages, it remains red rather than turning brown.²⁷ The blood chemistry on the Shroud is consistent with a man who was beaten, scourged, and crucified. It is not consistent with blood taken from a living donor or an animal and applied to cloth.

The critical detail: there is no image beneath the bloodstains. Wherever blood contacted the cloth first, the image-forming mechanism did not color the fibers underneath. The blood acted as a physical barrier.²⁸ This means the blood was on the cloth before the image was created — a sequence that eliminates any method involving an artist painting or pressing both blood and image onto the cloth in a single creative act. The blood transfers are forensically consistent with contact between cloth and wounded skin; the image is not a contact phenomenon at all.

Ultraviolet fluorescence photography revealed serum halos — rings of clear fluid — surrounding the wound marks. Every single blood wound on the Shroud shows a distinct serum clot retraction ring.²⁹ These rings are invisible to the naked eye. A medieval artist could not have seen them, could not have known to include them, and would have had no reason to try. Serum halos are a natural consequence of whole blood coagulating on skin. Their presence across more than 130 separate wounds is among the strongest evidence that the Shroud wrapped an actual human body.

The Forgery Problem

The medieval-forgery hypothesis requires an unknown artist, working with unknown materials, to have produced an object that twentieth-century science cannot explain and twenty-first-century technology cannot reproduce.

This artist would need to have:

Applied real human blood of the correct pathological type (traumatic shock victim, type AB) to the cloth first, in anatomically precise wound patterns with microscopically correct serum separation halos, in both pre-mortem and post-mortem configurations, with arterial and venous flows distinguishable under magnification.

Then somehow created an image with no paint, no dye, no pigment, and no known artistic medium — an image consisting of a chemical alteration of the outermost 0.2 micrometers of the linen fibers, with uniform color intensity on each individual fiber, encoding precise three-dimensional distance information along exclusively vertical paths, invisible at close range, appearing as a photographic negative five centuries before photography existed.

Andrea Nicolotti, the University of Turin historian who has written the most rigorous critical assessment of the Shroud’s history, acknowledges the difficulty. He notes that chemist Luigi Garlaschelli’s 2009 attempt to reproduce the Shroud — the most sophisticated to date — used an acid-bearing pigment rubbed onto cloth draped over a model and a bas-relief, then artificially aged in an oven. The result was, in Nicolotti’s careful phrasing, “more satisfactory than those previously undertaken,” but he adds that “no reproduction can claim to replicate the Shroud exactly down to the microscopic level.”³⁰ When Garlaschelli’s cloth was examined by Fanti and Heimburger, they found the color distribution on the fibers was different from the Shroud, the fiber surfaces appeared etched rather than chemically altered, and the three-dimensional characteristics did not match the original.³¹

Jackson’s research team at the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado systematically rated every proposed image-formation hypothesis — painting, dusting, bas-relief rubbing, frottage, proto-photography, shadow projection, direct contact, gas diffusion, corona discharge, and radiation fall-through — against the full list of observed image characteristics.³² The rating system was straightforward: consistent, questionable, or inconsistent. Every hypothesis involving artistic creation or known natural processes accumulated multiple fatal inconsistencies. The only hypothesis that achieved broad consistency with the observed characteristics was the “Fall-Through” radiation hypothesis proposed by physicist John Jackson — a model in which the cloth collapsed through a body that had become mechanically transparent, receiving a radiation dose inversely proportional to the initial cloth-to-body distance.³³

Jackson himself was explicit that this hypothesis cannot constitute a scientific “proof” of the Resurrection: “The Resurrection can never be scientifically ‘proven.’ This is fundamentally true because the philosophy of science includes the stipulation to work to ‘disprove’ rather than to ‘prove.’”³⁴ What he did argue is that no hypothesis can be dismissed if it offers the best working fit to the evidence, and that the competing naturalistic hypotheses — including corona discharge — “severely stress the boundary of what can be considered ‘natural’” and “border on the ‘impossible.’”³⁵

The Carbon Dating Question

In 1988, three laboratories — at the University of Arizona, the University of Oxford, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich — carbon-dated a sample from the Shroud. They concluded it dated from between 1260 and 1390 AD. The result was published in Nature and announced at a press conference at the British Museum, where Oxford physicist Edward Hall declared: “Someone just got a bit of linen, faked it up, and flogged it.”³⁶

For most of the world, that settled the matter. It should not have.

The original protocol, agreed upon by all parties, called for seven laboratories to test samples from multiple locations on the Shroud under blind conditions. What actually happened: three laboratories tested subsamples from a single piece cut from the upper left-hand corner of the cloth.³⁷ STURP scientists and textile experts had specifically warned against sampling from the edges, which had been handled, repaired, and contaminated over centuries. The upper left corner is visibly darker than the rest of the cloth — so contaminated that it is apparent to the naked eye.³⁸

No one has satisfactorily explained why the protocol was reduced from seven laboratories to three, why multiple sampling locations were reduced to one, and why the blind testing procedure was abandoned.

In 2017, a French researcher, Tristan Casabianca, obtained the laboratories’ raw data through a legal process equivalent to a freedom of information request. The British Museum had held this data for twenty-nine years.³⁹ When Casabianca and a team of statisticians — Marco Riani of the University of Parma, Anthony Atkinson of the London School of Economics, and Fabio Crosilla of the University of Udine — subjected the raw measurements to robust statistical analysis, they found the twelve individual measurements from the three laboratories showed “surprising heterogeneity.”⁴⁰ The data could not be treated as repeated measurements of a single unknown quantity. There was a statistically significant linear trend across the subsamples that correlated with their physical position on the strip — the kind of pattern produced by a non-uniform environmental contamination.⁴¹

The variation across just a few centimeters of fabric was 204 years — far exceeding the 130-year confidence interval published in Nature. If that rate of variation were extrapolated across the Shroud’s full four-meter length, the dating uncertainty would extend into millennia.⁴² The conclusion: the small piece of fabric taken from one corner of the Shroud cannot be considered representative of the whole cloth.

STURP chemist Ray Rogers independently found cotton fibers interwoven with the linen in samples from the same corner area. The rest of the Shroud is pure linen. Cotton interwoven with linen is consistent with a medieval invisible reweaving repair — exactly the kind of contamination that would produce a falsely young radiocarbon date.⁴³

Four alternative dating methods have been applied to the Shroud, none of them involving radiocarbon. Wide-angle X-ray scattering at the Institute of Crystallography in Rome compared the Shroud’s fiber degradation to a linen sample conclusively dated to AD 70 from Masada. Both cloths showed the same pattern of two thousand years of aging.⁴⁴ Chemical and mechanical fiber-testing at the University of Padua returned a date of 372 AD ± 400 years.⁴⁵ The absence of vanillin — a compound present in linen flax that degrades over centuries — is consistent with an age far greater than seven hundred years.⁴⁶

The 1988 carbon dating result is not nothing. It is a measurement that was made, and the laboratories presumably measured the carbon-14 ratio in their samples correctly. But what they measured was a single, contaminated corner of a cloth with a complex history of fire, water damage, handling, and repair. Jackson’s Turin Shroud Center accepts the validity of the measured ratio while rejecting that it represents the true age of the cloth, calling the 1988 test “tragic” — not because the measurement was dishonest, but because the radiocarbon testing was separated from the comprehensive scientific investigation that should have accompanied it, and then used to halt all further study.⁴⁷

What Remains

The Shroud of Turin sits in a sealed, argon-filled reliquary in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin. It has not been publicly displayed since 2015. No comprehensive scientific examination has been permitted since STURP’s five days in 1978.

Paolo Di Lazzaro and his team at the ENEA research center in Frascati, Italy, spent five years attempting to reproduce the Shroud’s image characteristics using excimer lasers emitting vacuum ultraviolet radiation. They succeeded in producing a superficial, Shroud-like coloration on small patches of linen — coloration that matched the chemical signature of the Shroud image. To reproduce the full-body image with a single pulse, they calculated, would require fourteen thousand lasers firing simultaneously, producing thirty-four trillion watts of peak power in less than fifty billionths of a second.⁴⁸

Di Lazzaro did not speculate about what natural event could produce such energy. He published the data and left the implications to others.

The image on the Shroud of Turin is not paint. It is not dye. It is not a scorch, a vapor print, a photograph, or any product of known medieval or modern technology. It is a 0.2-micrometer-deep chemical alteration of linen fibers that encodes three-dimensional spatial information, behaves as a photographic negative, formed after blood was already on the cloth, and resists every attempted reproduction. One hundred and two scientific disciplines have studied it. None have explained it.

The 1988 radiocarbon date assigned it to the medieval period. The raw data behind that date, suppressed for twenty-nine years, shows statistically significant heterogeneity that the published results concealed. Four independent dating methods point to the first century. The Catholic Church, custodian of the cloth, has shown no interest in authorizing the comprehensive testing that could settle the question.

These are documented facts. The scientists who studied the Shroud most closely — physicists, chemists, forensic pathologists, image analysts — arrived at a conclusion they did not expect and many did not welcome: the best-fit hypothesis for image formation involves a burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation emanating from within the body wrapped in the cloth. They reached this conclusion not through theological commitment but through systematic elimination of alternatives.

The Shroud does not ask anyone to believe anything. It asks to be explained. After nearly fifty years of trying, the explanation has not arrived.

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References

1. J.P. Jackson, E.J. Jumper, and W.R. Ercoline, “Correlation of Image Intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D Structure of a Human Body Shape,” Applied Optics 23, no. 14 (July 1984): 2244–2270; Wilson, The Shroud: Fresh Light on the 2,000-Year-Old Mystery (London: Bantam, 2010).

2. Wilson, The Shroud, quoting Peter Schumacher’s recollection of the VP-8 analysis.

3. Johnston, interview with Tucker Carlson, citing 102 scientific disciplines with peer-reviewed publications on the Shroud.

4. Jackson, The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Summary of Observations, Data, and Hypotheses (Colorado Springs: Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, 2017), Section 2.

5. Johnston interview; confirmed in Wilcox, The Truth About the Shroud of Turin (Washington: Regnery, 2010).

6. STURP official summary, October 1981, as reproduced in Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 2.

7. Antonacci, The Resurrection of the Shroud (New York: M. Evans, 2000), 53, citing Heller and Adler’s chemical investigation.

8. R.A. Morris, L.A. Schwalbe, and J.R. London, “X-ray Fluorescence Investigation of the Shroud of Turin,” X-Ray Spectrometry 9, no. 2 (April 1980): 40–47.

9. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 48–49.

10. Fanti, Malfi, and Conca, The Shroud of Turin: First Century After Christ! (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2016), 21–22; Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 4, Item C5.

11. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 36–37.

12. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 4, Items C2–C3, citing Rogers’ “ghost” photographs and Adler’s diimide experiments.

13. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 36; Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 4, Item C1.

14. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 37.

15. Johnston interview; Fanti et al., First Century After Christ!, 27.

16. Fanti et al., First Century After Christ!, 26–27.

17. G. Fanti, B. Schwortz, A. Accetta, J. Botella, et al., “Evidences for Testing Hypotheses about the Body Image Formation of the Turin Shroud,” Third International Conference on the Shroud of Turin, Dallas, Texas (September 2005).

18. Jackson, Jumper, and Ercoline, “Correlation of Image Intensity,” Applied Optics 23, no. 14 (1984): 2265.

19. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 40, citing independent confirmation by JPL researchers and the University of Turin.

20. Ibid.

21. J.P. Jackson, “The Vertical Alignment of the Frontal Image,” Shroud Spectrum International 32/33 (Sept/Dec 1989): 3–26.

22. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 4, Item B5.

23. E.J. Jumper, A.D. Adler, J.P. Jackson, et al., “A Comprehensive Examination of the Various Stains and Images on the Shroud of Turin,” American Chemical Society 22 (1984): 447–476.

24. J.H. Heller and A.D. Adler, “Blood on the Shroud of Turin,” Applied Optics 19, no. 16 (1980): 2742–2744.

25. P. Baima Bollone et al., as cited in Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 28–29; Fanti et al., First Century After Christ!, Section 10.4.

26. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 29, citing Dr. Victor Tryon’s DNA analysis.

27. Ibid., 28–29; C. Goldoni, “The Shroud of Turin and the Bilirubin Blood Stains,” International Conference on the Shroud of Turin, Columbus, Ohio (August 2008).

28. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 4, Item B8; Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 244.

29. A.D. Adler, “The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin” (1999), cited in Jackson, Critical Summary.

30. Nicolotti, The Shroud of Turin: The History and Legends of the World’s Most Famous Relic, trans. J.M. Hunt and R.A. Smith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020), 462.

31. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 6, Garlaschelli evaluation, Items C2, C5, B3; citing Fanti and Heimburger’s analysis.

32. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 6 and Appendix 2.

33. Ibid., Section 5, F9: “Fall-Through” hypothesis.

34. Ibid., Jackson’s concluding remarks on the Fall-Through hypothesis.

35. Ibid.

36. Wilson, The Shroud, quoting Professor Edward Hall at the British Museum press conference, 1988.

37. Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 172–173; Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 7.

38. Johnston interview; Antonacci, Resurrection of the Shroud, 173.

39. T. Casabianca, E. Marinelli, G. Pernagallo, and B. Torrisi, “Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data,” Archaeometry 61, no. 5 (2019): 1223–1231.

40. Fanti et al., First Century After Christ!, 159–160, citing Riani, Atkinson, and Crosilla’s robust statistical analysis.

41. Ibid., 158, Figure 4.5.

42. Ibid., 159.

43. R.N. Rogers, “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin,” Thermochimica Acta 425 (2005): 189–194; Johnston interview.

44. L. De Caro, C. Barta, G. Fanti, et al., “Long-Term Temperature Effects on the Natural Linen Aging of the Turin Shroud,” Information 13, no. 10 (2022): 458.

45. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 7, citing Fanti’s mechanical and chemical dating results of 372 AD ± 400 years.

46. Rogers, “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample,” Thermochimica Acta (2005); Johnston interview.

47. Jackson, Critical Summary, Section 7, TSC Comments.

48. P. Di Lazzaro, D. Murra, E. Nichelatti, A. Santoni, and G. Baldacchini, “Superficial and Shroud-like Coloration of Linen by Short Laser Pulses in the Vacuum Ultraviolet,” Applied Optics 51, no. 36 (December 2012): 8567–8578; Nicolotti, The Shroud of Turin, 473.