By Gretchen Keiser

In the movie "The Silent Witness," two scientists are shown manipulating photographs and transferring images onto a screen. When ordinary photographs are used, the faces look fine in the original, but emerge as caricatures on the screen, with twisted and distorted features.

When a photograph of the Shroud of Turin is used, however, the face of the man of the shroud emerges on the screen in correct proportion, with all the features as clear and recognizable as in the original picture.

They tell us, as the movie proceeds, that this is because somehow, there is "information" about proportion in the image. Somehow, in the shades of darkness and light that make up the image, there is also information about the distance between the cloth and the body. The scientists use it to summon up a three dimensional image.

The scientists are Dr. John Jackson and Dr. Eric Jumper, who were filmed from laboratories at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado. They looked scrubbed, earnest and excited, even though they cannot explain why this image on the Shroud of Turin has these properties that other images do not.

Drs. Jackson and Jumper are part of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc. (STURP), a team of scientists who were permitted, in October 1978, to conduct a series of nondestructive tests on the cloth believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. The Shroud has been kept in the Cathedral in Turin, Italy, since 1694 and only rarely made available for public display. It is only recently that scientists have been permitted to examine the Shroud and to begin to turn their skills, and the devices of space age technology, to the question of the Shroud's authenticity.

The STURP scientists gathered information, took photographs and conducted tests after the Shroud had been on display in 1978. Since then, they have continued to analyze enormous amount of data that was gathered and to see what it says, about this linen burial cloth and the image it bears of a crucified man.

One of the key phrases that has emerged from all their investigations is that the scientists themselves do not intend to draw conclusions about their research. The data, they say, must "speak for itself."

Looked at in that light, the data can never say explicitly that this piece of cloth was used to enfold the body of Jesus Christ. But the data can argue against the likelihood that the image is bogus, painted or somehow transferred to the cloth by a forger intent on deception.

Some of the qualities of the Shroud image that argue against the likelihood of a painting or transferred image are:

-- The three dimensional "information" found in the image;

-- The apparent lack of anything in the image that would indicate, to sophisticated technology, the directions of a painter's brush strokes or the changes that pigments would show as the result of a fire which damaged the cloth in 1532.

-A key test which scientists would like to perform, but for which permission has not yet been granted, is carbon-14 dating. The process could be used to show whether the cloth is 2,000 years old or a forgery of younger age.

From data already gathered, a clearer picture of the man of the Shroud has emerged. But there is also a mystery as to how the image came to be on the cloth. Scientific observations do not point to a single theory as to how the image of a crucified man, with all the unique properties they have found, came to be on the linen cloth. In fact, one theory is that the image is simply the contrast between some linen fibers and others that, somehow, were aged, perhaps by some kind of scorch.