A similar, inexplicable image is that of the Blessed Mother on the tilma of Juan Diego.
1. It has qualities that are humanly impossible to replicate.
What’s more, experts in infrared photography, studying the tilma in the late 1970s, determined that there were no brush strokes, as if the image was slapped onto the surface all at once.
2. People say it’s just a painting, yet the tilma has outlived them all, in time and in quality.
One of the first things skeptics say about the image is that it somehow has to be a forgery or a fraud. Yet in every attempt to replicate the image, while the original never seems to fade, the duplicates have deteriorated over a short time. No scientific explanation is possible for the fact that, “the original tilma was exposed for approximately 116 years without any kind of protection, receiving all the infrared and ultraviolet radiation from the tens of thousands of candles near it and exposed to the humid and salty air around the temple.”
3. The tilma has shown characteristics startlingly like a living human body.
In 1979, when Callahan, the Florida biophysicist, was analyzing the tilma using infrared technology, he apparently also discovered that the tilma maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the same as that of a living person.When Jose Aste Tonsmann, a Peruvian ophthalmologist, conducted a study, one of his tests involved examining the eyes on the tilma at 2,500 times magnification. With the images of the magnified eyes, the scientist was reportedly able to identify as many as 13 individuals in both eyes at different proportions, just as the human eye would reflect an image.
It appeared to be a snapshot of the very moment Juan Diego unfurled the tilma before the archbishop.
4. It appears to be virtually indestructible.
In 1785, a worker was cleaning the glass encasement of the image when he accidentally spilled strong nitric acid solvent onto a large portion of the image itself.The image and the rest of the tilma, which should have been eaten away almost instantly by the spill, reportedly self-restored over the next 30 days, and it remains unscathed to this day, aside from small stains on the parts not bearing the image.
It also survived a bomb blast