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The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous supposed relic in existence. It is a 4.4-meter-long linen shroud bearing the image of a crucified man. Supporters of the shroud claim that it is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and that the image on the shroud is the true image of Jesus, created at the moment of his resurrection.It is easy to see why this idea is so appealing. If the shroud were authentic, it would be a remarkable source of information about Jesus the human being. Unfortunately, we can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam.We know this primarily because there is no definitive record of the shroud prior to the fourteenth century and the earliest definitive record of the shroud is a letter recording that the forger who made it had confessed, but also because of a wide array of other factors. For instance, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in the Judaea in the first-century AD or the specific description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. The fabric of the shroud has also been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages.Additionally, the proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, but they closely match the proportions of figures in Gothic art of the fourteenth-century. The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. Finally, the fabric of the shroud was made using a complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus.Evidence #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century.If the actual burial shroud of Jesus had survived and it really had a spectacular image of Jesus himself miraculously imprinted on it, we would expect to find mentions of it all over the place in early Christian writings. Instead, we have absolutely no mention of any object identifiable as being the Shroud of Turin in any surviving early Christian text and the earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin comes from fourteenth-century France.Supporters of the shroud have tried very hard to invent a provenance for it. For instance, some supporters of the shroud have tried to give the Shroud of Turin a history by identifying it with the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa, a small, rectangular piece of cloth that was held in the city of Edessa in the Byzantine Empire that was said to bear the miraculous image of Jesus’s face.The earliest surviving source that mentions the Image of Edessa as having ever existed is the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac Christian text written in around the late fourth century AD or early fifth century AD, which says that the Image of Edessa was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus while he was alive by King Abgar of Edessa. The text claims that the artist painted a portrait of Jesus’s face and brought it back to show to King Abgar. This text, however, says nothing about the Image of Edessa still existing in the author’s own time or about anyone alive in the author’s own time having seen it.The earliest surviving mention of the Mandylion as having existed in the author’s own time comes from the early Christian historian Evagrios Scholastikos (lived c. 539 – c. 594 AD). The fact that we have no record of the Mandylion having ever been created at all until the late fourth century AD at the earliest and we have no mention of anyone alive having seen the Mandylion until the late sixth century casts serious doubts on the Mandylion’s own authenticity.It doesn’t really matter for our purposes, though, whether the Mandylion was authentic or not because the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are certainly not the same object. According to virtually all accounts, the Mandylion was a much smaller piece of cloth than the Shroud of Turin and it only had Jesus’s face on it—not any other part of his body. Also, it did not depict Jesus as beaten and bloody, but rather alive and healthy.We know all of this because we have surviving descriptions of the Mandylion and even surviving depictions of it in art. For instance, there is a surviving tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting, which clearly shows the Mandylion as a small piece of cloth bearing only Jesus’s face.ABOVE: Tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting from Saint Catharine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, depicting King Abgar bearing the Mandylion of Edessa with the face of Jesus on itSome supporters of the Shroud of Turin have tried to claim that the Mandylion must have been the Shroud of Turin folded in such a way so that only Jesus’s face was visible and the rest of his body was hidden. In support of this view, supporters of the shroud like to cite Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69, a tenth-century codex currently held in the Vatican Library that contains an eighth-century Latin account claiming that the Mandylion of Edessa bore not only the image of Jesus’s face, but the image of Jesus’s entire body.This is, however, the only surviving account that describes the Mandylion of Edessa as bearing the image of Jesus’s whole body. It is far more likely that the author of this account never saw the Mandylion personally and simply imagined that it showed Jesus’s entire body than it is that the Mandylion was actually the Shroud of Turin folded so as to hide the rest of the body from view.Furthermore, this explanation fails to account for the fact that surviving depictions of the Mandylion all show it depicting a clear image of a living and healthy Jesus with his eyes open—not a ghostly image of a dead and bloody Jesus with his eyes closed. Also, surviving depictions of the Mandylion, such as the encaustic painting of King Abgar receiving it, show it with simply a blank space beneath Jesus’s neck and no continuation.Finally, the Mandylion is never described in any surviving source as having ever been viewed by anyone as having been Jesus’s burial shroud. There are several different stories about exactly how the Mandylion originated. The earliest version of the story, found in the Doctrine of Addai, holds that it was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus by King Abgar of Edessa.The most popular version of the story in later times, though, held that Jesus himself pressed his face against the cloth and the image was miraculously created. This version of the story claims that Jesus sent the cloth to King Abgar of Edessa as a miraculous cure for illness.In other words, the only things that the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion have in common is that they are both pieces of cloth said to bear some form of miraculous image of Jesus.ABOVE: Anonymous twelfth-century icon of the Mandylion of Edessa from NovgorodNow, supporters of the Shroud of Turin also like to cite a report from Robert de Clari, a knight from Picardy who participated in the Fourth Crusade, as well as the Crusaders’ brutal sack of the city of Constantinople in 1204. Robert de Clari wrote a detailed account in Old French of the sack of Constantinople titled The Conquest of Constantinople.In his account, Robert de Clari mentions that, before the city was sacked, the Church of Blachernai contained a piece of cloth that was claimed to be the very burial shroud of Jesus Christ himself. Robert further claims that this shroud miraculously elevated every Friday to reveal the image of Jesus. Robert says that no one knows what happened to the shroud after the city was sacked.Robert de Clari, however, is the only existing source that claims that there was a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, so we have no way of independently confirming his story. Furthermore, even if Robert de Clari really did see a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, there is no good reason to suppose that the shroud he saw was the Turin Shroud at all, since there have been many other shrouds that have been claimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus, many of which have borne images on them, and there is nothing about Robert’s account to indicate that the shroud he saw is the same one now held in Turin.Finally, even if the shroud allegedly seen by Robert de Clari in Constantinople was really the Shroud of Turin, that certainly wouldn’t make the Shroud of Turin authentic; Robert de Clari was writing nearly 1,100 years after Jesus’s death, but only around 150 years before the first definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin. In other words, he was writing far closer to the time when the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record than he was to the time of Jesus.If Robert de Clari really saw the Shroud of Turin in Constantinople in around 1203 AD, that would only make the shroud about 150 years older than it is otherwise known to have been; it certainly wouldn’t prove the shroud authentic by any stretch of the imagination.ABOVE: The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, painted in 1840 by the French Romantic painter Eugène DelacroixEvidence #2: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.The earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin in any written document is a letter written in 1389 by Pierre d’Arcis, the bishop of the city of Troyes to the Avignon Antipope Clement VII. In the letter, Pierre states that the shroud was being used as part of an elaborate faith-healing scam. He reports that the local experts on theology easily recognized the shroud as a hoax because none of the gospels made any mention of the image of Jesus being imprinted on his shroud.Pierre describes how his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, set out on a mission to find out where the shroud had come from. After much inquiry, Henri managed to track down the original forger who had made the shroud, who confessed to him that he had created the shroud as a deliberate hoax and even showed Henri exactly how he had done it. Henri, having obtained this confession, ordered that the shroud be put away and that no one be permitted to venerate it.Here is the relevant portion of Pierre d’Arcis’s actual letter, as translated from Latin into English by Reverend Herbert Thurston:“The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.”“This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to the shroud of our Lord. The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prudent persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter.”“For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour's likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time. Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”“Accordingly, after taking mature counsel with wise theologians and men of the law, seeing that he neither ought nor could allow the matter to pass, he began to institute formal proceedings against the said Dean and his accomplices in order to root out this false persuasion. They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”The forger himself literally confessed. You can’t get any better proof than that.ABOVE: Manuscript illustration dating to 1379, depicting Antipope Clement VII, the addressee of Pierre d’Arcis’s letter describing how his predecessor Henri de Pontiers had obtained the confession of the original forger who made the Shroud of TurinEvidence #3: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of shrouds that were actually used in Judaea during Jesus’s time or the description of Jesus’s shroud given in the Gospel of John.Maybe, even though we have a confession, you’re still not convinced that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax. Well, that’s fine, because we have even more evidence that it is a hoax aside from just the confession. Even if we ignore the confession altogether and just look at the shroud itself, it is evident that it is a fourteenth-century forgery. The evidence is written all over the shroud itself.Quite simply, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in Judaea in Jesus’s time. In Judaea during the first century AD, people did not normally wrap whole bodies in a single rectangular piece of linen; instead, people wrapped the body in strips of linen and wrapped the head separately from the body using its own piece of linen. The Gospel of John 20:6–7 actually explicitly describes Jesus’s head and body having been wrapped separately in precisely this manner. The Greek text of the gospel reads:“ἔρχεται οὗν καὶ σίμων πέτρος ἀκολουθῶν αὐτῶ, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸ μνημεῖον· καὶ θεωρεῖ τὰ ὀθόνια κείμενα, καὶ τὸ σουδάριον, ὃ ἦν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ, οὐ μετὰ τῶν ὀθονίων κείμενον ἀλλὰ χωρὶς ἐντετυλιγμένον εἰς ἕνα τόπον.”Here is the same passage, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):“Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.”The Greek word that is used to describe the wrappings that covered Jesus’s body in this passage is ὀθόνια (othónia), which means “bandages made of fine linen.” The word used to describe the cloth that covered Jesus’s face is σουδάριον (soudárion), which means “a headcloth for the deceased.” No matter how you interpret this passage, it is definitely not describing a single-piece, full-body shroud like the Shroud of Turin.There are other passages in the gospels that reference Jesus’s body having been wrapped in linen, but none of them give anywhere near as much detail as that passage I just quoted from the Gospel of John. For instance, the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark 15:46 reads as follows:“καὶ ἀγοράσας σινδόνα καθελὼν αὐτὸν ἐνείλησεν τῇ σινδόνι καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὸν ἐν μνημείῳ ὃ ἦν λελατομημένον ἐκ πέτρας, καὶ προσεκύλισεν λίθον ἐπὶ τὴν θύραν τοῦ μνημείου.”Here is the same passage, as translated in the NRSV:“So Joseph [of Arimathea] bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”The Greek word in this passage that the NRSV translates as “linen cloth” is σινδών (sindṓn). Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin claim that this word actually refers to a single, full-body shroud. The NRSV’s translation, however, is completely correct in this case; σινδών just means “fine linen cloth,” without any implication of this cloth being in the specific form of a full-body shroud.At the very least, the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings is an accurate description of how bodies in Judaea in the first century AD were normally wrapped. Nonetheless, because single shrouds for both the head and the body became common in western Europe during the Middle Ages, most western depictions of Jesus’s shroud depict it as a single piece of cloth covering both the head and the body.ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox mosaic from near the Stone of the Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem depicting Jesus being borne into his tomb, correctly showing his head not wrapped in the same cloth as his bodyEvidence #4: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390.In 1988, three teams of scientists working independently in three different laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson, and Zürich conducted radiocarbon dating tests on three different samples of the linen from the Shroud of Turin. All three teams of researchers found that the cloth dated to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD. These estimates correspond exactly to the time when the Turin Shroud first enters the historical record.Defenders of the Turin Shroud have tried to insist that, maybe, the corner of the shroud that the samples that the experts conducted radiocarbon dating tests on came from had been “invisibly” repaired in the Middle Ages and that the rest of the Turin Shroud might be much older.There is, however, currently absolutely no evidence to suggest that the corner of the shroud that the samples were taken from had been repaired at a later date. If the samples had been repaired, the researchers would have been able to detect signs of the repairs when they examined the fabric under a microscope, but they didn’t detect any such signs of repairs.Furthermore, before the researchers in the Oxford team conducted the radiocarbon dating tests, they consulted textile experts from a laboratory in Derbyshire, England, who did their own examinations of the cloth to make sure they weren’t testing using material that had been added to the shroud later.The textile experts identified a few stray bits of cotton fiber mixed in with the linen. They concluded that either the loom used to make the linen had been previously used for cotton and the fibers had been introduced when the shroud was woven or that the cotton fibers had been introduced to the shroud at a later date. The cotton fibers of unknown origin were sorted out and only the linen fibers making up the bulk of the shroud were used for testing.In other words, not only is there no evidence that the parts of the shroud being tested had been introduced due to later repairs, but the researchers were consciously making efforts to ensure that the material they were testing was original to the shroud itself. For a more thorough debunking of the claim that the Shroud of Turin might have been repaired, you can read this article, written by Dr. Steven D. Schafersman, which debunks claims made on the subject.ABOVE: Newspaper photograph taken on 13 October 1988 of Edward T. Hall, Michael Tite, and R. E. M. Hedges at a press conference at the British Museum announcing that the Turin Shroud had been radiocarbon dated to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 ADEvidence #5: The image on the Turin Shroud has unrealistic anatomical features that are consistent with Gothic artwork, but not with real human anatomy.The figure depicted in the Turin Shroud doesn’t have realistic human anatomical features. Let’s start by looking at the face. The forehead is too small and the lower part of the face too large. On a living human human, the forehead (i.e. the space from the top of the head to the eyes) normally takes up about half the face; on the Turin Shroud, though, the forehead takes up just a little over a third of the face.To illustrate just how weird the proportions are on the face from the Turin Shroud, below is a comparison of the face from the Turin Shroud with the face of Diogo Morgado, the real, human actor who played Jesus in the 2013 History Channel television series The Bible as well the 2014 film Son of God.The comparison is obviously imperfect because the top of Diogo’s head is cropped in the image that I found on the internet, but you can still see very clearly that Diogo’s forehead occupies a vastly greater proportion of his face than the forehead of the face on the Turin Shroud.ABOVE: A comparison of the proportions of the negative of the face from the Turin Shroud (left) with the proportions of the face of Diogo Morgado, a real, human actor who portrayed Jesus in the 2014 film Son of GodIf we assume that the image on the Turin Shroud is an accurate representation of how Jesus really looked, we are at a loss to explain why his forehead was so tiny. Instead of coming up excuses, like that maybe Jesus had a deformity, I think we should look at works of Gothic art that were made around the time the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record.It was common for Gothic artists in France in the fourteenth century to portray humans with unrealistically small foreheads and unrealistically long lower faces. The proportions of the face on the Turin Shroud, then, are more consistent with the proportions of faces in Gothic art than the proportions of a real human being. This strongly suggests that the Turin Shroud was created by a Gothic artist.Now let’s look at the body of the figure. We immediately notice that the body itself is disproportionately elongated. The legs and torso are all unnaturally long and thin. This tall, thin quality is highly characteristic of how figures were normally represented in the Gothic art style. Gothic artists intentionally made their figures look this way in effort to make them seem more imposing.If we look at the figure’s arms, we find that, just like the legs and torso, the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are too long to be realistic. Once again, though, we find that figures in Gothic art often have disproportionately long arms—just like the figure on the Turin Shroud.The exact same thing is true for the fingers of the figure; they’re too long and thin to be natural, but they align exactly with the way figures were portrayed in Gothic art. Indeed, everything about the proportions of the figure on the Shroud of Turin points to the conclusion that it was created by a Gothic artist.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Gothic figures from the western portal of Chartres Cathedral, dating to c. 1145. Notice the small foreheads, long lower faces, long arms, and long bodies—all features of Gothic art that are found in the Turin Shroud.What’s even more interesting is that the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are also different lengths. The right forearm is noticeably longer than the left forearm. The fact that the arms aren’t the same length is almost a dead giveaway that we’re looking at an image created by an artist and not the exact likeness of a real human being. Real human beings virtually always have arms of the same length, but it is really easy for an artist to mess up and make arms that aren’t the same length.Finally, we have a smoking gun: the front side of the figure on the shroud doesn’t match the back side of the figure. In fact, the two figures aren’t even the same length; the front side of the figure on the shroud is 1.95 meters long, but the figure on the back of the shroud is 2.02 meters long!This is absolutely a dead giveaway that we’re looking at the work of an artist. It’s easy to see how an artist could have painted the figures separately and accidentally made the back side of the figure longer than the front side, but it is hard to see how, if the shroud were authentic, Jesus’s back could have been longer than his front. That in itself would take some kind of miracle.ABOVE: The full-length negatives of the front and back of the Turin Shroud. Pay attention to the arms, which are of differing lengths and too long to be anatomical. Also notice that the image on the back is longer than the one on the front.Evidence #6: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on.Researchers have repeatedly conducted experiments and found that the bloodstains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows. In 2018, a group of researchers conducted experiments in which they applied blood to a live volunteer and to a mannequin to mimic the wounds sustained by Jesus on the cross in order to see how the blood would run on human bodies in various positions. They then compared the actual blood patterns with the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin.Two short trails of blood on the back of the left hand of the figure on the Shroud of Turin were found to be only plausible if the man was holding his arms at a forty-five degree angle, but bloodstains on the forearm were only plausible if the man was holding his arms vertically or nearly vertically. Since a man can’t hold his arms in both positions at once, clearly the bloodstains weren’t natural.The bloodstains on the front chest of the figure were consistent with the pattern one would expect from a spear wound in the side, but the bloodstains on the back, which supposedly came from the same spear wound, weren’t consistent with the supposed injury. In other words, this is another case of the back side of the figure on the shroud not matching the front.Matteo Borrini, the leader of the research team and a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, stated in an interview with LiveScience, “…these cannot be real bloodstains from a person who was crucified and then put into a grave, but actually handmade by the artist that created the shroud.” In other words, the bloodstains were painted on.ABOVE: Christ Crucified, painted c. 1632 by the Spanish painter Diego VelázquezEvidence #7: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin uses a herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles, but is not known to have been used for burial shrouds in the first century AD.The Shroud of Turin is made of linen fibers woven using a three-to-one herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of highly complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles. Although the herringbone twill weave did exist in the ancient Roman world, we have no evidence that it was ever used for burial shrouds.Fragments of a number of burial shrouds have been recovered from tombs near Jerusalem dating to the same time period as Jesus and all of them use a plain two-way weave; none of them use a herringbone twill weave.Even if we imagine that the herringbone twill weave was used for burial shrouds in Roman Judaea and we just don’t have any evidence for this, it almost certainly would not have been used for the burial shroud of a crucified Jewish criminal, since it is a very complex weave that takes much greater skill and effort to produce than a plain weave. As such, any fabric made using this weave in Jesus’s time would have certainly been very expensive.The burial shroud fragments that have been recovered from the tombs near Jerusalem, however, include fragments from shrouds that certainly belonged to extremely elite individuals and all of them use the much simpler two-way weave. It is hard to imagine that a high priest or wealthy aristocrat would have been buried with a relatively cheap shroud made with a simple weave, but a crucified criminal would have been buried with a more expensive herringbone twill shroud.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons depicting a modern example of herringbone twill weave. This kind of weave was used for expensive fabrics in the Late Middle Ages, but not for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.ConclusionSo, here’s the evidence I have presented for why the Shroud of Turin is clearly a hoax:We have no reliable documentation of the Shroud of Turin’s existence until the fourteenth century.The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession.The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John.The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium after Jesus’s death.The figure on the Shroud of Turin does not have anatomically correct proportions and much more closely resembles figures in fourteenth-century Gothic art than a real human being.The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are not consistent with how blood actually flows naturally and they instead appear to have been painted on.The fabric of the Shroud of Turin is made with a kind of weave that is known to have been commonly used during the Late Middle Ages, but does not seem to have been used for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.All the evidence points to the inexorable conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is a late medieval hoax.The fact that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax doesn’t make it any less interesting as a historical artifact; it may be a hoax, but it is still an extremely famous hoax that is probably around seven hundred years old and that can reveal a lot about the nature of religious hoaxes in late medieval France. The Shroud of Turin is worth studying, then, not as an authentic ancient relic, but rather as an authentic medieval religious artifact. It has historical value, just not the particular kind of historical value that some people think it has.Since I’m debunking misconceptions about Jesus, I should probably also note that Jesus almost certainly wasn’t married to Mary Magdalene, he definitely wasn’t copied off the Egyptian god Horus or the Greek god Dionysos, and he almost certainly wasn’t really born on December 25th either.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Sorry, the Shroud of Turin Is Definitely a Hoax.” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

I entered the US Army in 1967, at the age of 19. During a formation while at B-3–3, may Basic Training Company, at Fort Ord, California, we were addressed by Sergeant First Class Davis. He wore a Green Beret, so we were all holy-s—t! We knew the song quite well, by golly, so we were all fairly impressed. The most famous John Wayne movie had not yet been released, but thanks to that song we all knew what a Green Beret was.Anyway, he gave a brief address to out company, after which anyone interested in becoming a Green Beret could sign-up after our formation was dismissed. I was not interested, but two of my buddies were, and the physically pulled me out of formation to sigh-up along with them.Davis, whom I would run into again, a couple of years later in Vietnam, seemed to me to be both professional and a bit jovial; not a joker, just jovial. We weren’t used to this at all, due to the fact that everyone over the rank of Private First Class had been rather unfriendly, to put it lightly. Davis told us that we would be scheduled for testing.At the appointed time, one of the Drill Sergeants drove us to the the building we would be given a battery of tests, all of which were multiple choice. The building was of the World War Two era, constructed of wood. I don’t recall how many test stations there were, but the room was packed with individuals from all of the different companies that Davis had visited.I am not certain how many tests there were, but the general test flow was: Math, Psych, Observation and Interpretation of such, Ability to learn Mores Code, and What Will You Do? After each test, we took a short break while the tests were graded. After grading, Davis would call out the names of those who failed. Those who failed left the room, and waited for transportation back to their companies.[NOTE: During this period at Fort Ord, all basic trainees were under quarantine. Each trainee wore a blank white strip sewn above their name strip. Those under quarantine were not permitted outside the company area unless escorted by Company Cadre. This was all due to Meningitis, of which had been traced back to Basic Training Companies.]Math dealt with basic algebra. I was actually weak in that area, but I passed. I was more surprised about the outcome of this test than any of the others.Stanine Test came up with some sort of psychological profile of an individual. There were supposedly no wrong answers (so how come a lot of guys failed?). Each question required an answer, as the testee was not permitted to skip over any question no matter how objectionable the question was. Skip one question, you’re out! There were a series of about five or six questions which were asked over, and over, and over, sometimes slightly re-worded. Each question provided about four different responses. There were no None of the above choices.Sample of the Stanine Questions: You would kill your mother using a: Gun, Knife, Bare hands, Rope. Your favorite activity is: Tiger taming, P.T, Watching movies… I do not recall all of the questions, but those two I do remember. I wrestled with how I would kill my mother because I wouldn’t, and I don’t even remember what I answered. Now the Tiger taming question had a Rumor Control aspect to it, that I learned only after it took the test, during a BS session when back in the company area. Supposedly, if you liked tiger taming it meant that you were homosexual. Then I heard another time that if you answered PT it meant you were homosexual. Rumor Control often contradicts itself.Mores Code was designed to test our ability to learn code by listening to dits, and dahs at ever increasing speed. This test was called the RIMik test. This was because the the letters K (dah-di-dah), R (di-dah-dit), I (di-dit), and M (dah-dah) were the letters we had to learn, thus the name RIMiK. I excelled at this test, as it was a matter of learning the rhythm of the dits and dahs as they sounded from a record player at ever increasing speeds.Observational Skills: We were each given some large glossy photographs. The questions were played over a phonograph (record player). The question would be asked, and we would have until a ding sounded until the next question was asked. Each photo had a symbol which represented North. One question was What time of day is it? Another would have been What are the two men staining by the train doing.What Would You Do? These questions were similar to those you would get if you were playing one of those 1980s era interactive computer adventure games, such as Zork. The exception was that the questions were asked by the record player. The scenario—set up—might include the use of the pictures handed out earlier. You are in a safe-house. You are told by your counterpart that you must stay up in the attic. While hidden you observe you counterpart talking to someone on the street. The person he is talking to looks up in the direction of your attic window. What should you do? The following answer choices might be do what your counterpart told you to do, kill your counterpart then escape and evade, or just simply escape and evade. I believe that of all the questions, I killed my counterpart only one time.That is the gist of the initial selection process, and my buddies and I passed where most of the others failed. Before I forget, another requirement was that to qualify for further training, a man had to be twenty-one years old at the time of graduation.We were all required to qualify under two MOSs (Military Occupational Skills). Mine would be Light Weapons, and Communications. I received Light Weapons during AIT (Advanced Infantry Training), still at Fort Ord—H-2–3 Company. The company area was in the old WWII buildings, very close to the bowling alley which was pretty cool, because we were no longer under quarantine.After AIT, I went to Fort Benning, Georgia for Jump School. I am not naming my company, because this is a got-tcha kind of question. People claiming to have been airborne always give the wrong answer. Alright! Airborne! What company did you train? Phonies always give the wrong answer.Once at Training Group we were all given the same tests that we had taken way back during Basic Training. Some failed the second round of testing. We were given physicals, then finally assigned to what would be our permanent dorm area while training.Unlike today, Special Forces Training was divided into three parts: Phase I, MOS, Phase II. After graduation, we would be assigned to Group. I went to 6th Group before finally ending up with 5th Group in Vietnam.Phase I, MOS, and Phase II each were divided into two parts. Part one was classroom, and part two was FTX (Field Training Exercise). Phase one and two FTX all began with a night parachute jump. Those who broke their leg were either given the option to do office work, then recycle, or they went to a regular unit based upon their overall performance. A trainee could be washed out during any part of training. During Phase II you would likely be captured and tortured—yes, tortured.It was mild torture, mostly making life very difficult for the period of time you were a POW Trainee which was roughly twelve or so hours. The trainee would be stripped naked, and hands always bound, and some times hands and legs and torso bound to something and you are blind folded. There was the field telephone shock, the snake pit and the rack. Medics were on hand to monitor vitals during the ordeal. The object was to get you to quit Special Forces Training. The average guy would think initially that they would be asked about the mission they were on when captured. NOPE! While you are tied to the rack, being zipped by the phone, or in a water pit with snakes slithering against your body, some asshole is screaming in your ear to QUIT MOTHER FUCKER! QUIT! Voices would make fun of the size of your manhood. All you had to do was to quit and punishment would stop and you would be clothed and fed, and live the next few hours in comfort while waiting to be cycled back to admin for reassignment to a regular unit. While most did go to an airborne unit, there was no guarantee.Finally after all of the fun, you are lead to a small area where an officer sits, and presents you with a document that reads that you have been treated well. The document was double spaced. If you signed that document, the form would be reinserted into a typewriter, and the blank lines would be filled with words that said that you agreed to terminate from Special Forces. If you did not sign, you were threatened with more punishment. When it was my turn, I was all but totally broken. I refused, the officer told my wards to take him away. I was led to a door, and thinking about quitting, when suddenly it was over. I was covered by blanket, ate a good C-Rat meal, then after a short time taken back out to the field to finish the exercise.Everybody who experienced being captured came away a different man. For the longest time afterward, I was not the strong guy I had thought I was. I could barely recognize the person I saw in the mirror. I got over it though, as it was time to go on to the next challenge.After graduation, we were assembled and our first assignments were issued. Most went to active Groups and Companies, but not Vietnam—yet. If you had language skills appropriate to Cold War Missions, you were assigned Europe. One of my buddies drew Thailand. Don Shue: Missing Laos. His remains were finally identified and returned some time in 2011.If you read this, it likely took awhile, as I have a lot of stuff swirling around in my mind that for some reason I am compelled to release.In conclusion, Special Forces Training during the Vietnam Era evolved as the needs to full-fill a Worldwide Mission evolved. Parts of the training were indeed hard to pass through. I have described what it was like during the months I was in training.I have had the great fortune to know Green Berets who served in Afghanistan, and Africa. They were all Sergeant First Class or higher, and their training was a lot more rigorous, and longer than mine. These guys are great, without doubt.

“The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of other hacker words, most notably random”Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.An important secondary meaning of hack is ‘a creative practical joke’. This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures; see the lexicon entries for pseudo and kgbvax. But here are some examples of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit:In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and ‘interviewed’ the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the ‘Fiendish Fourteen’) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts — large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of ‘WASHINGTON’, the word ‘CALTECH’ was flashed. Another stunt showed the word ‘HUSKIES’, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver — nature's engineer — as a mascot.)After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: “Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant.” The Washington student body president remarked: “No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed.”This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the direction sheets constituted a form of programming.Here is another classic hack:On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters ‘MIT’ appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.The Boston Globe later reported: “If you want to know the truth, MIT won The Game.”The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise, publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected). The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and contained no explosives.Harvard president Derek Bok commented: “They have an awful lot of clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again.” President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: “There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there were.”The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have happened. Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere, though retold as history, have the characteristics of what Jan Brunvand has called ‘urban folklore’ (see FOAF). Perhaps the best known of these is the legend of the infamous trolley-car hack, an alleged incident in which engineering students are said to have welded a trolley car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions of this have been recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but at least one very detailed version set at CMU.Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical extensively; the interested reader is referred to his delightful pictorial compendium The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery, and Pranks (MIT Museum, 1990; ISBN 0-917027-03-5). The Institute has a World Wide Web page athttp://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html. There is a sequel entitled Is This The Way To Baker House?. The Caltech Alumni Association has published two similar books titled Legends of Caltech and More Legends of Caltech.Here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks:Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in ‘master mode’ (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its ‘privilege level’ byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open.Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official ‘level 1 SIDR’ (a bug report with an intended urgency of ‘needs to be fixed yesterday’). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as ‘Security SIDR’, and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch.Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted.They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘Friar Tuck’. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as ‘ghost jobs’ (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following:Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job.Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking drives).The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a ‘lace card’ (card with all positions punched). These would usually jam in the punch.The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually.Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and killed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:!X id1  id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted)  id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff  of Nottingham's men!  id1: Thank you, my good fellow! Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash the system.Finally, the system programmers did the latter — only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS image (the kernel file, in Unix terms) and had added themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at boot time (this is similar to the way Windows viruses propagate).The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a patch for this problem.It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken against either of them.Finally, here is a wonderful hack story for the new millennium:1990's addition to the hallowed tradition of April Fool RFCs was RFC 1149, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. This sketched a method for transmitting IP packets via carrier pigeons.Eleven years later, on 28 April 2001, the Bergen Linux User's Group successfully demonstrated CPIP (Carrier Pigeon IP) between two Linux machines running on opposite sides of a small mountain in Bergen, Norway. Their network stack used printers to hex-dump packets onto paper, pigeons to transport the paper, and OCR software to read the dumps at the other end and feed them to the receiving machine's network layer.Here is the actual log of the ping command they successfully executed. Note the exceptional packet times.Script started on Sat Apr 28 11:24:09 2001 vegard@gyversalen:~$ /sbin/ifconfig tun0 tun0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol   inet addr:10.0.3.2 P-t-P:10.0.3.1 Mask:255.255.255.255  UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:150 Metric:1  RX packets:1 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0  TX packets:2 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0  collisions:0   RX bytes:88 (88.0 b) TX bytes:168 (168.0 b)  vegard@gyversalen:~$ ping -i 450 10.0.3.1 PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms 64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms  — 10.0.3.1 ping statistics — 9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms vegard@gyversalen:~$ exit  Script done on Sat Apr 28 14:14:28 2001 A web page documenting the event, with pictures, is athttp://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/. In the finest Internet tradition, all software involved was open-source; the custom parts are available for download from the site.While all acknowledged the magnitude of this achievement, some debate ensued over whether BLUG's implementation was properly conformant to the RFC. It seems they had not used the duct tape specified in 1149 to attach messages to pigeon legs, but instead employed other methods less objectionable to the pigeons. The debate was properly resolved when it was pointed out that the duct-tape specification was not prefixed by a MUST, and was thus a recommendation rather than a requirement.The perpetrators finished their preliminary writeup in this wise: “Now, we're waiting for someone to write other implementations, so that we can do interoperability tests, and maybe we finally can get the RFC into the standards track... ”.The logical next step should be an implementation of RFC2549.Source: Catb , Google