67: The Vatican's Secret Time Machine | The Story of the Chronovisor
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

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Vatican City is an inspirational place. You don't need to be Catholic or even religious to appreciate the architecture, the art, and the city's historical significance. But there is a place within the Vatican that's rarely seen. Hidden beneath the city is an underground fortress.

inaccessible to the public and protected by armed guards and state-of-the-art security. The secret apostolic archives. Within the stone and steel reinforced walls are vaults, climate-controlled rooms, and over 50 miles of shelves. And on those shelves are countless texts, relics, and artifacts collected by the church for over a thousand years. And one of the most intriguing objects hidden in the archive is called the chronovisor.

A device that can view events anywhere and any time in history. And for years, its existence was just a rumor. No proof of the chrono visor was ever found. But a book released by a Vatican priest would change all that. Let's find out why.

Pellegrino Ernetti was a scientist, world-class authority on music, and a scholar. He spoke several languages. He dabbled in electronics, physics, and even the occult arts. He also happened to be a Benedictine monk. Now, whether by luck or by fate, Father Pellegrino Ernetti found himself in the company of Francois Brune, a priest from France.

and they were sharing a ferry ride down the Grand Canal in Venice. The water was calm and the trip was long, so the men struck up a conversation. They shared a love of languages, science, and history, and they were discussing different interpretations of the Bible when Ernetti interrupted. There's nothing to interpret, Ernetti said. It's possible to see what actually happened, to see the truth with your own eyes. Abruhm thought Ernetti was joking or being rhetorical,

He wasn't. Ernetti spoke of a device he had worked on hidden in the deepest, most secret levels of the Vatican archive, a device that allowed its operator to witness events anywhere and any time in the past. And it was called the chrono visor. You a time machine? Sort of. You can't travel anywhere with the chrono visor, but you can program it to show you certain events on a screen like a television. Well, you can stream anything these days.

Now, Francois Brune was stunned by the story. He knew Father Pellegrino Ernetti to be a serious man. Ernetti was well-read, well-educated, and well-respected in the church. He was not one for exaggeration. Yet, Ernetti claimed to have heard speeches by Napoleon and Mussolini. He visited ancient Rome, and Ernetti was amazed that Cicero was as captivating a speaker as history claimed. My name is Maximus Desmus Baridius, commander of the armies of the north,

General of the Felix Legions and loyal servant to the true Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance. In this life or the next. Are you not entertained? I'm not.

Anyway, Broome wanted to know about the events in the Bible. Did they really happen? It's all true, Ernetti said. He had seen the final days of Jesus, including his crucifixion. He saw the creation of the Ten Commandments, the Last Supper, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and everything in the Bible. Now, Broome was obviously skeptical. Even though Ernetti was intelligent and talented, he didn't have the skill and knowledge needed to build this kind of device. And Ernetti agreed that he couldn't build the chronovisor himself.

He had help. In 1952, Father Pellegrino Ernetti was working on a project at the Catholic University of Milan. And being an expert in early Christian music, he was studying and restoring tape recordings of Gregorian chants. And while listening to one of the tapes, the school's founder, Father Agostino Gemelli, was convinced he heard his father's voice, even though his father was dead at the time of the recording.

but what gemelli heard was not his dead father relaying some profound message to his son from beyond the grave what he heard was more mundane his father arguing with someone over the price of shoe wax gemelli's father was a cobbler who made and sold shoes and gemelli thought he'd been given a gift from god but ernetti wondered if there was a scientific reason for this that the sights and sounds of people in the past

somehow continue to exist long after they happened? And if they did, could they be detected? It sounds like EVPs. Well, it does. And this technology is not that different from what we now call EVPs or electronic voice phenomena. And since Gemelli was president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he was able to fund a project to explore the possibility of listening or seeing events from the past.

Ernetti assembled a team of 12 scientists, but he would only reveal the names of two. And one was Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize winning physicist known for Fermi's paradox and for creating the world's first nuclear reactor. The other scientist was Nazi rocket scientist turned director of NASA, Wernher von Braun.

Like sound waves can be pressed into vinyl to produce a recording, Ernetti said that his team had discovered that light and sound continue to exist as forms of energy. And using a series of antennas, the chronovisor could detect this residual electromagnetic radiation and translate it into image and sound. Operators of the chronovisor could designate a specific date and location. Then the scene was reconstructed on a large cathode ray tube.

Now, Francois Brune was obviously amazed by the story and asked Ernetti what happened to the device. Ernetti said that once the team realized what they had invented, they brought their discovery to the Pope. And since the chronovisor can tune into any place and time in the past, it could be used as a powerful weapon. It could reveal state secrets or be used for blackmail.

So Pope Pius XII worried that in the wrong hands, the chronovisor could launch a dictatorship unlike anything the world had ever seen. The Pope ordered the machine dismantled and forbid anyone from speaking of it. Ernetti said this was the first he's spoken of it in over 10 years.

And Brune understood and agreed that a machine like the chronovisor would be extremely dangerous, and it was probably best if it stayed hidden and dismantled. But Brune said to Ernetti, it's too bad there's no proof that the chronovisor actually worked. Ernetti said to Brune, my friend, I have proof.

Quintus Aeneas was a writer and poet who lived during the Roman Republic between 239 and 169 BC. He's often considered the father of Roman poetry. And during his lifetime, he wrote about 20 plays and an epic poem on the history of Rome called the Annals.

but only a few fragments of his work survive. His final play, "Thiestes," was produced shortly before his death in 169 BC, and scholars have wondered about this play for centuries. They knew the story was based on the writing of another author, Seneca, but the actual text of "Thiestes," except for a few lines, has been lost to history. Ernetti used the chronovisor to visit Rome in 169 BC, where he saw a performance of the play in a Roman square,

Ernetti, fluent in Latin, was able to transcribe and finally complete Ennis' play after 2,000 years. And that manuscript still exists. The story of the chronovisor remained hidden for another 12 years or so. Then in 1972, an article appeared in the Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere. Show off.

The headline of the article was, A machine that photographs the past has finally been invented. And some believe that the chronovisor was not dismantled, but was actually functional and being used by the church to maintain watch and control of the population. That theory makes sense. Oh, you believe that one, huh? What does the Pope s*** in the woods?

Soon, several photos were leaked, including this one taken by Ernetti himself. Ernetti used the chronovisor to view Jesus' entire final day, including his crucifixion. My favorite photo is this one, which shows Jesus walking and talking with his followers. And this photo is also pretty compelling. But again, the chronovisor fell out of the public eye. Or the information was suppressed by the church. Or that.

Well, then in 2002, Francois Bruun released his book called The New Mystery of the Vatican, which documents his relationship with Ernetti and includes more details of what Ernetti saw with the chrono visor and even includes blueprints for the machine.

Father Pellegrino Ernetti passed away in 1994, but until his dying day, he swore the chronovisor was real. He even published an open letter saying so. Father Francois Brune passed away in 2019. During his life, he published multiple books and papers on theology and its relationship to quantum physics. He gave talks on EVP phenomena, communicating with spirits, and many different aspects of parapsychology.

He too, until his last day, believed the chronovisor existed and possibly still exists today. Two highly regarded and well-respected clergymen insisted that the Vatican is in possession of the most important, most advanced, and most dangerous scientific invention ever created. The Vatican denies this claim as fantasy. So who's telling the truth? The chronovisor is a story that bothers me.

On one hand, there are a lot of details that are easily debunked. But on the other hand, the story comes from credible sources. Father Pellegrino Ernetti was well known and highly respected by his peers. He spent most of his life researching, teaching and writing, and his books are highly regarded. Father Francois Brune is also well known and respected. So why would these men of such high esteem risk their reputations on a lie of this magnitude?

What was there to gain? Their entire lives, both men said this device existed and possibly still exists. But the legend of the chronovisor does have a few problems.

First, anyone who can confirm that it existed in the first place is dead. When the story first emerged, Fermi had been gone a long time. And von Braun, while still alive, never mentioned it. Von Braun had a lot of secrets, though. He sure did. And it's fair to point out that both Fermi and von Braun worked on multiple top-secret projects during and after the war. Now, the photos associated with the chronovisor are fake.

The crucifixion photo is actually a picture of a statue from a church in central Italy. And the sculptor was Lorenzo Valera, a relatively famous Spanish artist who created the statue shortly before his death in 1931. When confronted about this, Brun said Valera took inspiration from a nun who had seen a vision of the crucifixion. And that's why the statue is so similar to the photo taken from the chronovisor.

But to me, they don't look similar. They look identical. But Father Bruhn said the photo was real. And there are other photos associated with the chronovisor, but these became attached to the story over the years. They don't come from Ernetti. This one is sometimes attributed to the chronovisor, but it shows up in other urban legends as well.

It's a photograph, but not one taken through a time machine. It's a photo of a painting by German artist Johannes Raphael Wehle. It's called Jesus Among the Wheatfields and was painted around the year 1900. And this photo is another that's become attached to the chronovisor. This is a photograph of a painting by Eugene Bernand called Peter and John Running to the Tomb, dated 1898. So what of Ernetti's transcription of the Estes? Well, it doesn't hold up.

Ernetti had written about 150 lines, which he said was the complete play. But experts are pretty sure the play would have been much longer than that, probably a thousand lines or more. And linguists aren't impressed with the transcription.

Scholars have said the Latin is clumsy and uses words that wouldn't appear in the language for at least 200 years. So whoever wrote it wasn't a native speaker. In 1994, just after Ernetti's death, a letter was published by someone who claimed to be a distant relative of his, but wanted to remain anonymous. This person said that on Ernetti's deathbed, he confessed that the photo and his writing of the Estes were fake.

and that Enrico Fermi had nothing to do with the machine, but he still claimed the chronovisor was real. Then another distant relative said Ernetti made the whole story up to get more people interested in the church. I don't trust when distant relatives suddenly crawl out of the woodwork. Well, Father Francois Brun didn't trust them either. He insisted that the chronovisor was real, and if Ernetti confessed, it was because he was coerced to do so by the church. Now that, I believe. Well, that brings up an interesting side note.

Now, obviously, the Catholic Church said the chronovisor wasn't real. But in 1988, the church issued a strange decree that said if anyone was caught using a machine like the chronovisor, they would immediately be excommunicated.

So if the chronovisor is fake, why bother releasing a statement like that at all? When I first heard the story of the chronovisor, it was one that I desperately wanted to be true. And many people believe it is true. Believers say the church keeps the chronovisor a secret, but does use it occasionally to influence world events. And that's something to think about.

If the technology exists that allows someone to view anyone, anywhere, and at any time in history, we wouldn't want any government to have such immense power. And the only worse institution to be the steward of this technology that I can think of is an organized religion. So with that in mind, I don't know if the chronovisor is real, but for all our sakes, I really hope it isn't.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish. This has been The Y Files. If you had fun or learned anything, do me a favor and like, subscribe, comment, and share. Those things really help a small channel. Now, I love the secrets of the Bible and the Vatican, so I'd like to do more of these. And if you want to hear those stories, let me know in the comments. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

Bye.