So what did Rogers think? That maybe the alleged splicing and dyeing had been done on or after 1988 in an attempt to contaminate Shroud samples with modern carbon? Was Rogers deliberately trying to implant the idea of a dark conspiracy to discredit the Shroud? Or was Rogers just an honest foot soldier, dutifully reporting what he saw, or thought he saw, leaving others to make what they wanted of his alarmist findings? If the latter, then who’s to say that the real conspiracy, if there was one, was to discredit the radiocarbon dating retroactively by slipping some post-88 doctored threads into the public domain, i.e. onto a respected scientist not given to suspecting, far less entertaining conspiracy theories, such that the entire 88 sample then becomes discredited on a guilt-by-association basis.
I have a hunch – just that – that Raymond Rogers may have been used, and that he was too trusting to realize that he was being used. But he was culpable in one respect – he should never have submitted his extracurricular homework on a few donated threads to his own professional journal, such that 8 years later folk on this site still crow about his work having appeared in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal, the Latinized title of which is invariably mispelled!