Audio Recordings of the Final STURP Team Meeting
New London, Connecticut - October 9-11, 1981

 John Jackson, John Heller and Prof. Luigi Gonella (Scientific advisor to the Archbishop of Turin)
All Photos ©1981 Barrie M. Schwortz Collection, STERA, Inc.

The STURP team held their final meeting on October 9-11, 1981, at the Palmer Auditorium at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. The event included a private STURP team meeting, a press conference and the presentation of their preliminary scientific papers by a number of team members. It was only in April of 2023 that we discovered that a set of audio cassette recordings of the press conference and paper presentations had been found. You might recall that there was a grand opening of a permanent Shroud exhibit at the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas, that same month. It was attended by three former STURP team members, Rudy Dichtl, Ken Stevenson and Barrie Schwortz. Parts of the exhibit came from the generous donation by Rudy of all of his Shroud materials to the museum. Those materials included a case holding the audio cassettes of that 1981 STURP meeting. It was then that Genevieve Keeney-Vazquez, Museum Curator, sent the tapes to her exhibit company to be digitized. She soon realized that they would contribute little to her exhibit and offered STERA, Inc. the opportunity to underwrite the cost of digitizing the tapes so they could be added to our permanent archives. Of course, we were happy to do so and that is what is now included on this page. It is a great opportunity to hear directly from some of the most prominent Shroud scholars of the past fifty years, many of whom are no longer with us.

All recordings are provided in .mp3 audio format. Audio quality varies from tape to tape so listening with headphones might be advisable. In a few cases, only one side of the tape was recorded. As an added bonus with this archive, I decided to include a selection of the best of my previously unpublished photographs of the 1981 meeting. Frankly, no one has ever seen any of these before! You will find them all in a separate pdf file named 1981 Meeting Photos.pdf. It is an opportunity to put faces on some of the speakers you will hear in the recordings.

 Bill Mottern, Roger Morris & Robert Dinegar
at the 1981 New London Meeting
(Link to Meeting Photos)

Editor's Note: There was no copyright information on any of the audio cassettes or the case they came in. Rudy Dichtl could not remember where or when he obtained the tapes or from whom. At this point in time we are attributing them to the Rudy Dichtl Collection unless the actual copyright owner steps forward with appropriate proof of ownership so they can be properly credited.


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