The case of the Holy Fraudster - Notes On A Strange World

After this episode, he returned to Moscow, but began to lose the confidence of his former supporters. The corpus of his publications connected with the Shroud and published in qualified scientific journals amounts to ten papers, all coauthored with his friend Andrey Ivanov. Nine of the papers were produced during several months in 1994. Actually, they are just three papers, cloned to nine by multiple publication. Rinaldi carefully examined each one, every single quotation, reference, publication, and affiliation given in them.

All papers are experimental studies of chemical modifications in the cellulose of linen textiles: a natural modification (alkylation) simply due to aging (groups 1 and 4, as listed in the references), or an induced modification due to ventilation (that is, to microorganisms brought on the textile from the atmosphere) (group 2), or to heating (group 3). The chemical modification of cellulose is the requisite to his thesis that the carbon isotopes composition of the shroud has changed as a consequence of aging, of microbial action, and of beating (due to a fire that nearly burned the shroud in 1532). The thesis sounds unrealistic and the results of his experiments look very odd. Rinaldi's suspicions of fraud, however, are based on indirect dues, independent of the claimed experimental results.

On the Tracks of a Fraudster

In all of the papers, the author's affiliation is to "E.A. [or S.A.] Sedov Biopolymer Research Laboratories" in Moscow. According to Kouznetsov himself, this was a private laboratory--of which he was the director--that was active between 1992 and 1998. It appears that no other research papers with this affiliation have ever been published in chemical literature. But things get darker.

Kouznetsov's last paper (4) is a report of an experimental study on four ancient samples, of various ages, of burial linen of Irish provenance. Kouznetsov claims that the four samples were donated to him by a private foundation and by two private individuals in Ireland, and mentions two Irish consultants. For three pieces of the burial linen, he mentions the names of historical people who were buried in the tombs.

With the collaboration of a number of people in Ireland (among them archaeologists and local historians), Rinaldi has collected strong evidence that Kouznetsov has never been supplied with any of the samples. The Irish donors and consultants do not exist, and the sites and tombs have not been excavated or do not exist anymore. Since the paper is a report of experiments on just those four samples, then if the samples do not exist, it becomes clear that Kouznetsov has never done any experiments and has fabricated the whole report out of his own imagination.

In an independent inquiry, the officers of the Antiquities Division of the National Museum of Ireland, in Dublin, whom Rinaldi had alerted, reached the same conclusions: Kouznetsov could not possibly have obtained the samples of ancient Irish textiles.

In the acknowledgements to his paper, Kouznetsov thanks eleven people from eight American universities. At least six of these universities have never had the claimed persons on their staff. Two of the universities have not yet answered, but in both cases their Web sites list all the names of their staff and the names listed by Kouznetsov are not present.