imageA reader from Chicago writes:

We are not dealing with trade secrets. Why not allow unfettered access to the HAL 9000 images? What is the Archdiocese of Turin afraid of? Is there something that can be seen on those images that we don’t know about? Are they afraid of loosing control of research and information dissemination as they did with STURP in 1978? Look at how they tried to keep Bill Meacham from asking questions at Dallas 2005. They lost control in 2008 when the organizers of the Ohio State conference kept them out of the loop. That was a good thing. In response they didn’t even send a representative as though that somehow didn’t give the conference legitimacy.

There isn’t going to be a STURP 2 as someone suggested there should be. There isn’t going to be access to the cloth unless Turin is running the show, authorizing examination and controlling the release of results. That kind of control will never be acceptable to legitimate scientists.

Release the images. Fortunately, chemical analysis by SSG continues on existing bits of fibers that Turin doesn’t control.

As for the fear that people will see imaginary things on the better images, so what? They will anyway with old inferior images. What about the man in Australia who sees torn away toes when he re-photographs regular photographs of the Shroud with a cheap webcam. And what about the man who sees miracle images by scanning a lenticular blinky shroud souvenir. These folks don’t need high definition images, just wild imaginations and any old image.

There are a lot of people who can discern real scientific information from the HAL 9000 images. Dr. Schneider’s Ohio paper says it all. I say free the HAL 9000.

Ray Schneider’s paper can be found here.