The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [103]
Bucholtz grabbed an ordinary credit card she had placed on the table in front of her for this demonstration. “You have all seen holograms, typically on the security elements built into credit cards that show you flying birds or some other three-dimensional object when you hold the credit card at varying angles to the light. When you rotate the card, it looks like you are seeing the three-dimensional image from different angles, even though the credit card itself remains two-dimensional, completely flat, other than the raised letters and numbers imprinted into the card’s face.”
At that point, Bucholtz turned on her laser machine and an image of the man of Turin appeared as if floating in space in front of them, as a three-dimensional hologram. Without saying a word, Bucholtz manipulated the hologram so it rotated 360 degrees, permitting Castle and his guests to see the full frontal and dorsal images of the man in the Shroud. Then Bucholtz adjusted some more gears, and the image appeared to jump right into the room, rotating in front of them as if a holographic Jesus Christ had suddenly come alive in their presence.
Fernando Ferrar had never seen anything like this, unless it was at a theme park back in the United States. He went back to his camera crew to make sure they were capturing the hologram, as best they could, on video. Looking through the lens himself, he was thrilled. The camera captured the hologram floating in space in front of them. It looked almost like Bucholtz had made the man in the Shroud come alive.
“As you can see,” she said, “I have gone one step further from the earlier demonstration on the VP-8 Image Analyzer that established the information on the Shroud was three-dimensional. What I have proved by this demonstration is that the information on the Shroud is holographic, such that you see the results right here before your very eyes. In other words, holographic information is encoded within the image of the Shroud. Until very recently, our technology did not allow us to read this information and interpret it—”
Father Middagh interrupted. “One question, please. The image of the man in the Shroud is lined by the burn marks and the triangle repairs the nuns sowed onto the cloth several hundred years ago. The burn areas destroyed parts of the image, such that we have lost the shoulders of the man in the Shroud and the forearms. Why is it that we see those parts of the body reconstructed in the hologram?”
“An excellent question,” Bucholtz said. “Without giving you the technical explanation, just accept that one of the more interesting characteristics of a hologram is that each part of the holographic image contains information about the whole image. My team here at CERN and I have learned how to take a partial holographic image, such as the Shroud, and reconstruct the whole from the parts that survived.”
“Very impressive,” Middagh said.
“Professor Gabrielli, you will have to be sure your next two-dimensional shroud contains enough information properly coded so that I can lift a three-dimensional holographic image off it.” Dr. Bucholtz made her suggestion gently, careful to mask her skepticism. She seriously doubted Gabrielli would ever be able to produce that result, especially if he was serious about limiting himself to materials and methods available to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century artists.
“So noted,” said Gabrielli, showing no sign of having taken any offense at the suggestion. Gabrielli indeed believed he could do it and his mind was already calculating several possible methodologies he might use in the effort to re-create what he was now seeing for the first time.
“My next challenge was to explain how the image might have been placed on the Shroud,” Bucholtz went on. “I began by noticing an important characteristic of the Shroud image. While the bloodstains on the Shroud may have resulted from direct contact with the body, the body image we see on the