Welcome to this month’s Time Travel Nexus Investigates! At TTNI, we’re playing detective, hunting the TTTs (time-travelling tourists), and attempting to solve some much-talked-about cases of real-life time travel.
So… did the Catholic Church invent a machine that could see into the past?
Origin of the claim
This claim can be traced back to an article in the May 2nd 1972 issue of Italian news magazine La Domenica del Corriere. The article was called A machine that photographs the past has been invented and talked of a team of scientists led by Father Pellegrino Ernetti, an Italian physicist who later became a priest, having invented a ‘chronovisor’ or ‘time viewer’. Several sources say that Ernetti was talking publicly about the chronovisor during the 1960s, but this article is the first published source I can find.
The claims were repeated by Austrian author Peter Krassa called Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor: The Creation and Disappearance of the World’s First Time Machine, originally published in 1997 and published with additional material in the US in 2000. In this book Krassa reported that he’d had a personal encounter with Father Ernetti before his death in 1994 and gave more details about the machine and Ernetti’s claims.
The additional material in the US version of Father Ernett’s Chronovisor included details from a deathbed confession by Father Ernetti, sent by letter to the book’s editors by an anonymous relative. Dr Katherine Eldred of Princeton University also contributed an English translation of Roman play Thyestes that Ernetti produced as evidence of his claims, which is contained in the US version’s appendix.
The claims turned up again in a 2002 book called The Vatican’s New Mystery by Father François Brune, a French Catholic priest. According to Brune, he and Ernetti met in the 1960s and Ernetti told Brune all about the Chronovisor that he and his collaborators had invented.
Nature of the claim
According to Ernetti, the chronovisor device looked a bit like a television and was capable of tuning into the past and allowing the viewer to see and hear events that occurred years or even centuries earlier. It worked by detecting and reproducing residual electromagnetic radiation and sound waves left behind by past events. In other words, the device was able to lock onto sights and sounds humanity had made in the past that continued to float through space.
Using the chronovisor, Ernetti claimed to have observed French conqueror Napoleon, the Roman philosopher Cicero, a performance of the lost play Thyestes by Roman poet Quintus Ennius and, perhaps not surprisingly, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
“We saw everything. The agony in the garden, the betrayal of Judas, the trial — Cavalry.”
Ernetti got the idea for the chronovisor when he heard a recording of a fellow priest’s late father and started wondering about all the sights and sounds that humans make. Do they disappear or do they continue to exist in some way? He approached some world-famous scientists and put together a team to build the chronovisor. Ernetti named two members of this team as German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and one of the designers of the first atomic bomb, Enrico Fermi.
Ernetti said that the team eventually decided to dismantle the device because of how dangerous it could be if it ended up in the wrong hands. Ernetti said that the chronovisor could create the “most fearsome dictatorship the world has ever seen”.
Although Ernetti never produced any part of the machine itself, he was persuaded to provide other forms of proof. One was the complete text of the play Thyestes, which Ernetti said he had transcribed while watching the play through the chronovisor, and a photograph Ernetti had taken of Jesus on the cross. This photograph was published in the 1972 article.
Today, conspiracy theorists claim that Ernetti never actually dismantled the chronovisor. Rather, the device was seized by the Vatican and is still being used to secretly control governments and their economies all over the world. Ernetti’s “fearsome dictatorship” is the Vatican itself.
The evidence
Thyestes
Quintus Ennius, the “father of Latin poetry”, wrote the play Thyestes shortly before his death in circa 169 BC. Scholars know what the story of Thyestes was about based on the writings of first century author Seneca, but the actual text of the play—bar a few lines—has been lost to history. That is, until Father Ernetti produced his text of it, transcribed using the chronovisor.
Dr Katherine Eldred, an expert on the play, studied the text and produced an English translation for the 2000 US edition of Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor. However, she suspects that Father Ernetti’s manuscript is not authentic. For starters it’s too short. It’s only 120 lines long and most plays of that type would’ve been ten times that length. More tellingly, many of the words used in Ernetti’s manuscript didn’t appear in the Latin language till more than two centuries after the play was first performed, and the types of words used and repetitions of them suggested that the writer had limited skills in Latin. Since Quintus Ennius was using his native language to write the play, this doesn’t add up. Eldred believes, therefore, that the text was fabricated by Father Ernetti himself.
The Jesus photo
The other piece of evidence that Father Ernetti produced was the photograph he’d taken through the chronovisor of Jesus on the cross. The photo is of a bearded man’s face, his eyes looking up, and first appeared in the May 2nd 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere.
However, someone soon turned up a near-identical photograph—apart from being reversed left to right—being sold at the Sanctuary of Merciful Love in Collevalenza, Italy. This photograph was of a wood carving of Jesus on the cross by Spanish sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera. The revelation immediately cast doubt on Ernetti’s story.
However, Father Brune believes that the reason the two photos are so similar is because Lorenzo Coullaut Valera sculpted the wood carving under the direction of a nun who’d had a vision of Jesus on the cross. Brune believes that the nun described her vision of Jesus’s face in precise detail and Valera translated her exact description into the sculpture. According to Brune, the sculpture and Ernetti’s photo look the same because they are both true representations of Jesus’s face on the cross.
However, I can’t find any evidence of this unnamed nun or her vision or that Lorenzo Coullaut Valera carved the work under her direction—beyond Brune’s assertions.
The deathbed confession
The deathbed confession letter sent to the editors of Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor by an anonymous relative claimed that Father Ernetti admitted to making up the Thyestes transcript and falsifying the Jesus photo. Meanwhile Ernetti continued to insist that the chronovisor was real.
Father Brune, however, doesn’t believe Ernetti’s confession. He thinks he was pressured by the authorities to say that he’d falsified the photo and the play.
The science behind the chronovisor
To address whether Father Ernetti’s chronovisor actually existed, it’s also worth looking at whether such a device is scientifically possible.
Without going into attention span-testing levels of detail, it’s not. Computers were in their infancy in the 1960s and even the most advanced computers today cannot reassemble the remnants of electromagnetic radiation into a coherent image. Scientists have speculated that we may be able to find and recover sounds preserved in an environment, however no instruments or computers yet exist that are able to do this. Plus, even if scientists are one day successful in bringing back sounds from the ancient past, this is a far cry from a machine that’s able to tune into the past at any place or time at the flick of a switch.
Conclusion
It takes a truly hardened and paranoid conspiracy theorist to decide that a person who admits to hoaxing something is, in fact, lying about lying. Such is the case with Father Brune, who clearly sees deception everywhere and thinks Ernetti was coerced by the mysterious “them” into making his deathbed confession. It’s a line of reasoning that makes a conspiracy theory impossible to disprove. It’s like when Flat Earthers are presented with real scientific evidence that the world is a sphere, they argue that the evidence is a fabrication and the people who promote it are liars. Even if you try and counter that argument with further corroborative evidence, they will say that that evidence, too, has been tampered with.
Being of unknown origin and authorship, there’s no telling whether this deathbed confession letter is legit anyway. But even if it is, Ernetti admitting to hoaxing the photo and the play but insisting that the chronovisor was real is not surprising. Everybody already suspected he was lying about the photo and the play. So by admitting these particular porkies without coming clean that, in fact, he’s been scamming everyone 100%, he’s attempting to be reasonable and maintain some credibility. He doesn’t want people to know he’s a total fraud.
This makes sense. Father Brune’s argument doesn’t. Brune is saying that Ernetti was forced to say that the photo and the transcript were fake, but if that were true, why would he continue to maintain that the chronovisor was real? Surely Ernetti’s ‘manipulators’ would want him to confess to the falsity of the chronovisor itself if they’re trying to protect it. Indeed, if Ernetti had admitted that the chronovisor itself was a hoax, Brune’s argument that his confession had been coerced would make more sense (albeit still the product of an ultra-paranoid mind).
I do love the idea that the Vatican has a secret television that can tune into the past. It’s a solid science fiction concept. But I’m afraid that’s all this one is, folks. Science fiction.
Next month: the time traveller who passed a lie detector test
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