In 1976 two American scientists, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, wondered what would happen if they put a photo of the Shroud under a VP-8 image analyzer. So they did—and to their surprise, the 2-D photograph turned into a 3-D image.

How did this happen? To understand how a VP-8 Image Analyzer works, think of a normal photograph. The picture is flat, with a mix of light and dark areas. A VP-8 takes those light and dark areas and turns them into height and depth—almost like making a pop-up version of the image.

When you put a normal photo into a VP-8, it looks completely distorted. But when Jackson and Jumper put a photo of the Shroud into the VP-8, something amazing happened. The image turned into a three-dimensional relief of a human body. The shape was anatomically accurate down to the tiny facial details.

This wasn’t an artistic illusion. Further studies of the Shroud image revealed that the darker areas of the image line up with where the cloth would have been closest to the body (like the nose and forehead) while lighter areas match the places where the cloth would have been farther away (like the eye sockets and neck).

This means the Shroud image contains 3-D information, as if the cloth had “recorded” the shape of a human body.

The 3-D information “encoded” in the image suggests it was not the work of an artist. No artistic technique we know of could encode this kind of 3-D property into a flat image.

Intrigued by their findings, Jackson and Jumper assembled a team of experts from top scientific institutions to study the Shroud. Their mission: to determine how this extraordinary image was made.