Another List of Hoaxes: The Cult called STURP

For some reason people keep making lists of the top five, seven or ten greatest mysteries, wonders of the world and hoaxes. And the shroud is almost always included. Sabotage Times online magazine has just compiled a list of ten best hoaxes. I don’t know what order they are in or if they are in any sort of order. Here is the list: 1) The Shroud of Turin, 2) War Of The Worlds, 3) Hitler Dairies (sic), 4) Panorama Spaghetti Harvest, 5) Sans Serriffe, 6) Monty’s Double, 7) Belgium Disappearing, 8) The Left-Handed Whopper, 9) The Roswell Alien Autopsy, 10) Piltdown Man

That’s right they mean Hitler Diaries. The comparison one to the other is astounding. Some are modern day April Fools Day style hoaxes like the spaghetti harvest, intended to last a few minutes and invoke a foolish laugh. Belgium disappearing was simply ludicrous. The Hitler Diaries and the Piltdown Man were money making scams. The War of the Worlds was a radio drama that was not meant to be a hoax that frightened people, but it did.

Here is what they have to say about the shroud. Seems that the joke is on them if they believe half of what they wrote:

The Shroud of Turin

As the Great Plague swept across Europe in the 14th Century the medieval world wallowed in a sea of religious hysteria and while some took to self flagellation the infinitely more clued up took to faking religious body parts such as the brain of St Peter, the foreskin of St. Gregory and the milk of the Virgin Mary. The most persistent of all these fakes has been the famed Shroud of Turin. Supposedly the burial shroud of Jesus, it was acquired, possibly from Constantinople, by the French knight, Geoffroy de Charny, who built a church to house it in 1355 only for it  to be  judged to be a fake by Pope Clement VII in 1390. Of course many a saintly dick and digit were regarded with suspicion but the validity of the shroud was reassessed when in 1898 Italian amateur photographer Secondo Pia discovered that the photographic negatives of the cloth exposed the image of a face that was otherwise invisible without such technology.  Ipso facto a cult was born.  In 1982 a group calling itself the Shroud of Turin Research Project declared it to be genuine, however in 1988 carbon dating placed the cloth to the mid 14th Century. More recently in 2005, Doctor Jacques di Costanzo and historian Paul-Eric Blanrue proved that such an image might easily have been achieved in the middle ages by simply rubbing an iron oxide mixed with gelatine onto cloth and yet the argument still rages as die hard believers drowning in their own ignorance refuse to accept the facts.

They didn’t actually call STURP a cult. But it reads that way. See Ten Best Hoaxes | Life | Sabotage Times