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I remember doing the time warp: The incredible story of Father Ernetti's Chronovisor - Notes on a Strange World - Father Pellegrino Ernetti

Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 2003 by Massimo Polidoro

Marco Tullio Cicero, the great lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, gave a speech to the Roman senate in 63 B.C. and an observer noted: "His gestures, his intonation; how powerful they were! What flights of oratory!"

These comments, however, are not from a contemporary of Cicero but instead from Father Pellegrino Ernetti, an Italian Benedictine monk born in 1925 and who died in 1992. Logically, similar appreciations on gestures and intonations could only be possible by observing the said orator in action; this is exactly what Father Ernetti claimed he had done. Not only that, the monk was also apparently able to witness one of Napoleon's speeches, a Latin tragedy of 169 B.C., and even the passion of Christ on the cross.

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Just another mystic visionary? Not at all. Father Ernetti was a musician, a celebrated historian of archaic music at Venice's Conservatorio di Stato Benedetto Marcello, a philosopher, and a physics studies graduate. It was thanks to his scientific interest that, in the 1950s, he was able to build the "Chronovisor," a true time machine!

Unlike the fantastic one imagined by H.G. Wells, however, the Chronovisor could not transport people back and forth in time but was said to allow the user to see historical events in the exact moment they took place, like a sort of tridimensional television.

As Time Goes By

Father Ernetti, who was also an exorcist of considerable renown, claimed that the Chronovisor was the result of many years of study by a team of scientists that, apart from himself, included twelve famous people who, he said, preferred to be anonymous. The only names he let slip were those of physicist and Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi and of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

"First of all we wanted to verify that what we saw was authentic," Ernetti told Father Francois Brune, a French theologian and author who had befriended the Italian monk. "So we started off with a relatively recent scene of which we had much documentation and footage. We tuned the machine on one of Mussolini's speeches. Then we started to go backward and observed Napoleon giving the speech in which he prodaimed Italy a republic. We then traveled much further back in time, to ancient Rome. First, there was a bustling fruit and vegetable market in the time of Emperor Trajan. Next, a speech by Cicero, one of the most famous, the first delivered against Catilina." Ernetti said that he had noticed slight differences in the Latin pronunciation of Cicero's time as compared to the Latin taught in schools today.

Next, the time-travelers "dallied," as Ernetti put it, "at a playlet." The year was 169 B.C.; they watched part of a tragedy, Thyestes, written by the "father of Latin poetry," Quintus Ennius. It was a play, explained Ernetti, that is now almost wholly lost to us; only twenty-five fragments, a line or so each, have survived.

"Have you been able to reconstruct what you heard?" asked Father Brune. "Yes," replied Father Ernetti enthusiastically. "Since we heard and saw everything, text, choruses, music, I've been able to publish the entire text of the tragedy."

Ernetti appeared to be very reticent to give details about the machine's invention. "It happened virtually by accident.... The basic idea was very simple. It was just a matter of stumbling upon it."

And who exactly invented it? "No one person" replied Ernetti. It had been a joint creation, where Fermi played a seminal role.

Father Ernetti said the Chronovisor consisted of three components. First, a multitude of antennae, which were able to pick up every conceivable wavelength of light and sound. These antennae were made of alloys consisting of three mysterious metals. The second component was a type of direction finder, activated and driven by the wavelengths of light and sound which it received. You could set it to a given place, date, and even person of your choice. The third component was an extremely complex array of recording devices, which made possible the recording of sound--and particularly of images--from any time and any place (Brune and Chauvin 1993).

Jesus Christ Superstar!

Aside from these engaging tales, however, the only solid fact was that nobody had ever seen the Chronovisor; the only proof of its existence was Father Ernetti's words.

On May 2, 1972, the weekly Italian magazine La Domenica del Corriere (Courier's Sunday) published a picture which Father Ernetti claimed was obtained through the Chronovisor: the image showed Christ's face in agony on the cross.

"At first," explained Father Ernetti to Brune, "we tried to recapture the images of the day of Christ's crucifixion. But we had a problem. Crucifixions, as awful as they were, were commonplace in Christ's time. People were nailed to the cross every day. It also didn't help that Christ wore a crown of thorns, because, contrary to popular belief, it wasn't unusual to be punished by having a crown of thorns put on your head."

They were thus obliged to go a few days further back in time, to the last supper of Christ. "We saw everything" said Father Ernetti simply. "The agony in the garden, the betrayal of Judas, the trial--Calvary." The Chronovisor team brought back a record of this experience: "We filmed it--losing the fine details, of course, but filming it was the only way to preserve it."

I remember doing the time warp: The incredible story of Father Ernetti's Chronovisor - Notes on a Strange World - Father Pellegrino Ernetti

Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 2003 by Massimo Polidoro

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