Primary source for this video is the excellent “Father Ernetti’s Chronovisor” by Peter Krassa. Purcahse it from this link to help support our site (same price for you, but we receive a small payment from Amazon):
On May 2nd, 1972, an Italian news magazine published an article titled, “A Machine That Photographs the Past Has Been Invented.” A Benedictine monk by the name of Father Pellegrino Ernetti claimed to have assembled a team of world-class scientists in order to produce the Chronovisor: a television-like device which could peek into any moment from history. Among the evidence he presented was a text from a lost Roman play by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius, and a photograph of Jesus Christ dying on the cross. Of the latter, he stated, “We saw everything. The agony in the garden, the betrayal of Judas, the trial.”
The rumored, star-studded team of scientists responsible for this miraculous device included Wernher Von Braun, the inventor of the rocket ship, and Enrico Fermi, one of the creators of the atom bomb.
Ernetti claimed the machine worked by decoding extremely subtle electromagnetic radiation left behind by past events. Due to the radioactive nature of the device, several members of the team were said to have caught radiation poisoning, causing their eventual leave from the project. But for Ernetti, there was a far greater danger which led him to destroy the Chronovisor, along with any evidence of how it was constructed.
Perhaps influenced by his partner Enrico Fermi’s work on the atom bomb, Ernetti did not believe mankind could be trusted with the power of the Chronovisor. He refused to give too many details of the machine, believing that if it fell into the wrong hands, it could create the greatest tyranny the world has ever known.
By the end of his life, all of his evidence for this machine had been debunked- and in a deathbed confession, the monk claimed he had never built the Chronovisor at all. Yet there are those who insist Ernetti was coerced into these statements- that the Chronovisor was in fact still in operation, and those who possessed it were intent on dissuading others from believing the fabulous device might in fact exist.
Few have been convinced by the evidence for the Chronivisor. Father Francois Brune, a French Catholic priest who first spoke with Ernetti about his fantastic creation in the 1960s, was one of those few. In 2002, Brune published an account of his various discussions with Ernetti entitled, “The Vatican’s New Mystery.”
Brune outlines the creation and destruction of the Chronovisor- referencing his decades of conversations with its inventor- the title of his book refers to a meeting Ernetti claimed to have with the Vatican shortly before his death. Brune believes that Ernetti may have had constant contact with the Vatican on this matter, influencing him to stay quiet about the Chronovisor out of respect for proper bureaucratic authority.
As Brune writes: “when a Benedictine monk makes revelations of such magnitude, he must have the authorization not only of the father superior of his monastery, but very often he needs the direct authorization of the Vatican.” This might explain the monk’s reluctance to discuss the Chronovisor in any public forum after the article was published in 1972.
In his very last meeting with Brune, shortly before his death, Ernetti told of a meeting on September 30, 1993 in which he and the two other surviving scientists from the Chronovisor team were invited to the Vatican to present their work. “We told them everything,” said Ernetti. Brune was convinced the Vatican continued work on the Chronovisor, and indeed, that they maintain the secret technology to this day.
Ernetti was notoriously secretive when it came to the details of his machine, citing the dangers of such a device getting into the wrong hands- yet some basic operational procedures have been revealed: Built into a large cabinet, the machine consists of three parts: first, an array of extremely sensitive antennae are tuned to pick up minute wavelengths of light and sound. The second part of the machine acts as a navigator, allowing the user to dial in a given place, date, and even a specific person to view. Lastly there is a complex array of recording devices, which capture the sounds and images of the past.
So how might the Chronovisor work? Traveling through time in our human bodies, as illustrated in many popular novels and movies, would present a number of physical and biological challenges. Simply viewing the past presents fewer obstacles, and there are a variety of plausible hypotheses for the concept.
One related field of study is known as EVP, short for Electronic Voice Phenomena. Tens of thousands of cases have been documented in which a familiar voice, often of a departed love one, appears in a radio or television transmission.
In fact, Father Ernetti himself witnessed such an event in 1952, and the experience was instrumental to his inspiration for the Chronovisor. In addition to his study of advanced physics, Ernetti was a noted scholar of archaic music, publishing several authoritative volumes on the topic. One night, he was working alongside Father Agostino Gemelli, a fellow musicologist, in a sophisticated electronic sound laboratory. The two men were attempting to record a Gregorian chant but their tape recorder refused to cooperate, frequently jamming, frustrating the two men.
When Ernetti played the tape back, Father Gemelli was shocked to find a familiar voice recorded on the tape: it was his father, clearly stating, “Of course I shall help you. I’m always with you.” Gemelli was shocked and broke out in a sweat; but Ernetti was intrigued, and insisted on trying the experiment again. After another attempted recording, and another malfunction of the recording device, playing back the tape revealed a new message: “Zucchini, it is clear, don’t you know it is I?”
Gemelli could not think of anyone alive who would know Zucchini was his father’s nickname for him. The two men were convinced they had made contact with the dead.
For Ernetti, the experience was profound- leading to his hypothesis that all events from the past leave behind some trace residue, which can be recorded here in the present with suitably precise instrumentation.
If the Chronovisor did in fact exist, it most likely functioned by decoding these subtle recordings of past events. As to the question of where and how these impressions were recorded, Ernetti was typically silent. And while direct explanations from the Benedictine monk are rare, those who knew him well have proposed a number of theories.
One idea revolves around the concept that sense impressions can be stored on the surfaces of inanimate objects, similar to the way a vinyl record stores sound in its grooves. Variations of this hypothesis have existed for at least 200 years, and while mainstream scientists have always been quick to scoff, the basic premise is logical, if currently unprovable by the scientific method.
One popular iteration of this concept is the Stone Tape Theory– which attempts to explain hauntings and other paranormal occurancess by suggesting that physical impressions of past events are recorded on the surfaces of objects and replayed under certain, precise conditions.
Father Luigi Borello was a priest and physics professor who became obsessed with building his own Chronovisor after hearing about the device. He came to know Father Ernetti quite well, and was obviously influenced by his beliefs. In a 1974 article entitled “Matter Speaks”, Borello states, “Each time the sounds or images of an event strike matter, they are transformed into a static energy which, under certain conditions, may be retrieved. The problem is to learn how to decipher these messages which have been stored in a structure that has neither eyes nor a mouth.”
To complicate matters further, the precise nature of memory is still a mystery- even when it comes to our own brains. How can we possibly understand the memory of a stone when we can barely describe how human memory works?
Ernetti once said when speaking at a conference: “Every human being traces from birth to death a double furrow of light and sound. The same applies to an event, to music, to movement. The antennae in our laboratory enable us to ‘tune in’ on these furrows: picture and sound. With the help of such a hypothetical document, one could reconstruct every human in all his deeds and speech.”
The “hypothetical document” referred to here by Ernetti is known to believers of new-age spirituality as the akashic record. In her book, Light of the Soul, new-age pioneer Alice A. Bailey describes it as such: “The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of our planet. Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon: The life experiences of every human being since time began”
Though not named as such, the idea of the akashic record was first introduced to modern thought by Helena Blavatsky, the towering matriarch of contemporary new age spirituality. According to Blavatsky, a psychic ether, which she called Akasha, permeates the entire universe- psychics and clairvoyants are able to perform miraculous feats by tapping into this etheric field- and all human activity is recorded here as well. Blavatsky herself was often witnessed accurately translating long passages from extremely rare books by simply staring into empty space- according to her, she was able to view these texts through the Akasha.
The concept of a universal ether has actually been accepted by science at various times throughout Western history- appearing early in Ancient Greece and continuing off and on up through Einstein and even today. In the mid-19th century, at the same time Blavatsky was writing her seminal texts, physicists were perfectly convinced that an etheric field with unique physical properties must exist.
In 1920, Einstein wrote: “According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable… this ether may not be thought of as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time.”
Over the past century, ideas of the quantum vacuum and quantum entanglement seem to be resurrecting the ether- increasing our scientific understanding that time and space may be less limiting than we once imagined.
While it is difficult to make a strong case for the existence of the Chronovisor, the fundamental principles of such a device do not appear outside the realm of possibility. If some substance like the ether does exist, perhaps the akashic record is inscribed within it somehow. Or could it be recorded in the surfaces of inanimate objects- sense impressions from long forgotten eras simply requiring a sensitive enough decoder to reveal their hidden messages? And just maybe, somewhere in the deep archives of the Vatican, Father Ernetti’s time-traveling machine continues to reveal the lost sounds and images of the past.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jun/09/farout
https://www.gaia.com/article/the-chronovisor-the-vaticans-mysterious-time-travel-device
https://www.ufoinsight.com/the-chronovisor-the-vaticans-secret-time-seeing-device/