Turin Shroud carbon-dating flawed

LONDON, April 11 (UPI) -- A prominent U.S. chemist who pronounced the Turin Shroud a fake came to believe it could have been the burial cloth of Jesus, a television documentary says.

Ray Rogers, a chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, helped lead the Shroud of Turin Research Project in 1988.

Radio carbon-dating conducted in 1988 on threads of the shroud dated the making of the cloth to hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.

Those threads, however, proved to be part of a repair made to the shroud in the 16th century, Rogers said in a video made shortly before his death of cancer in March 2005.

"The worst possible sample for carbon dating was taken," Rogers said. "It consisted of different materials than were used in the shroud itself, so the age we produced was inaccurate."

Rogers said he continued investigating the shroud and began to believe it was genuine, The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

"I came very close to proving the shroud was used to bury the historic Jesus," Rogers said in the video.