Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is brought to you by the Star Quest production Network and is made possible by our many generous patrons if you'd like to support the podcast please visit sqpn [Music] tocom you're listening to episode 299 of Jimmy ain's Mysterious World where we look at mysteries from the Twin perspectives of faith and reason in this episode we're talking about the chronovisor I'm Dom banelli and joining me today is Jimmy Aken hey Jimmy ddy Dom in 1972 the Italian public was shocked when the respected newspaper La Domenica Del corera or the Sunday courier carried a story announcing the invention of a time machine this machine had been invented by a benedic and monk named father pelino ernetti and a team of scientists known as the chronovisor it allowed one to view any point in the history of the world and to prove it the paper carried a photograph of the face of Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross what should we make of this story was the chronovisor real and if so who has it now well that's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy ain's Mysterious World now Jimmy this isn't the first time that we've mentioned the chronovisor on the program is it no we mentioned it way back in episode 147 on the Vatican secret archives in uh that episode we read a list of 10 things that the Vatican is rumored to have in the secret archives now known as the Vatican Apostolic archives and one of them was the chronovisor as you said it's a machine that reportedly lets you view moments in the past like Doctor Who's SpaceTime visualizer from the TV story The Chase but it's basically a Time television that would let you see and hear what people did in the past at the time I dismissed the idea that it was in the Vatican secret archives for two reasons first because the secret archives is an archive for documents it's basically a library and thus not the place for storing inventions and secondly because I found the whole story so implausible that I never entertained the possibility that the chronovisor might be real I thought it was just a crazy internet rumor however it has come to my attention that it isn't simply a crazy internet rumor it actually predates the era of the internet and there's more to the story of the cronovisor than I was aware of so that's why we're discussing it today let's start by looking at the newspaper that announced it to the public Italy's Sunday Courier what kind of newspaper is this how credible is it is it just a tabloid paper or Italy's version of the former American Comedy parody newspaper the weekly world news no the Sunday Courier is quite respectable it ran between 1899 and 1989 and it was basically the Sunday edition of Courier deera or the evening Courier which is still in print the evening Courier is one of Italy's oldest newspapers and it's the most widely read paper in Italy it's considered one of Italy's newspapers of record kind of like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Babylon B here in America um so it's not a tabloid like the national Inquirer much less a parody paper like the weekly world news where you'd expect to for example read stories about bat boys latest escape and Adventures uh the Sunday Courier and the evening Courier was respected is respected center right newspaper which is not to say that everything in it is accurate because nobody's news media is always accurate and especially not italies but when the evening Courier or the Sunday Courier puts out a story on something it should not simply be dismissed then let's talk about the man who is the alleged inventor of the chronovisor who was he and what can you tell us about him well his name was uh father pelino ernetti he was born in 1925 and he passed on to his reward in 1994 at the age of 68 he reportedly entered the Benedictine order at age 16 which is quite young though I gather it was possible at least back then and he spent much of his monastic career in the Abbey of San Gregorio maior uh that's St George major to you and me um and that's located in Venice Italy you know the place where the streets are made out of water and the taxis are are gondolas according to an article by John Chambers in the 4an times a man of unusual Brilliance in learning father ernetti occupied an endowed chair in pre- polyphonic or archaic music music composed between 2000 BC and AD 1200 at venice's conservatorio benedetto marello his scholarly studies of such early pre polyphonic music had resulted in some 70 books and hundreds of Articles he directed the choir of the Benedict and Abbey of San Georgio major as well as others and recorded over 50 LPS of Gregorian chant and related music and his knowledge ranged far beyond the world of archaic music he held a degree in Quant and subatomic physics and had contributed to significant research in these areas he was also an exorcist of considerable Renown the most sought-after in Italy performing huge numbers of exorcisms at the height of his career and writing a book on the subject Satan's catechism in which he described in detail the symptoms and signs of demonic possession these achievements a lifetime's work for most people would have been remarkable enough but for ernetti they were entirely overshadowed by what he considered Ed to be his greatest success the cronovisor according to Father ernetti work on the device began in the 1950s and according to One account I've seen it took 13 years to develop according to an article by mimo polidoro in the skeptical Inquirer 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 in fact it involved a team of 12 other scientists including ones from Italy France and Germany father ernetti said that these individuals preferred to remain anonymous but he did give the names of two of them since they had already passed away one was the Italian physicist enrio fery he built the world's first nuclear reactor he won the Nobel Prize in 1938 and he worked on the Manhattan Project to build the nuclear bomb during World War II he was so self- assured as a scientist that other physicists nicknamed him the pope as if his pronouncements on physics were infallible which is interesting since fery himself was Catholic and he passed on to his reward in 1954 so 18 years before the chronovisor was announced to the public in 1972 the other individual ernetti named was German aerospace engineer verer Von braa uh he had been a member of the Nazi party and the SS uh and he had helped the Germans build the V2 rocket in World War II so he was a rocket scientist after the war he went to work for the Americans where he helped develop rocket technology for our space flight program although raised a nominal Lutheran in 1946 the year after the war ended he underwent a religious conversion and became an Evangelical Christian at Nasa he was the Chief Architect of the Saturn 5 rocket that took us to our sister Planet the moon uh he is sometimes referred to as the father of space travel and the father of rocket science and in 1975 he was given the national medal of science he passed on to his reward in 1977 which was after the chronovisor was revealed so I'm not entirely sure when Father ernetti revealed his name if those are the only two members of the team that father erned named did he drop any hints about other members at least a few uh for example he reportedly said that one of them was from Japan and and had won a Nobel Prize in physics uh that would most likely be a reference to Hideki yukawa who was a theoretical physicist that won the Nobel Prize in 1949 for predicting the existence of the P Mason subatomic particle there are also others who have been speculated to have been part of the team in fact I found a short book that was principally devoted to arguing that the the Italian physicist atore mayorana was also a member of the team atore mayorana was a really fascinating guy he was a theoretical physicist who did work on the problem of neutrino masses he was reportedly brilliant in fact enrio fery the pope said that murana was as smart as Galileo galile and Isaac Newton true Giants in the history of science but Mayana mysteriously van in 1938 at age 31 so we may be talking about him and his disappearance in a future episode of mysterious world the author of the book I found thinks that he deliberately disappeared and continued to live in hiding so he would have still been around to help with the chronovisor in the 1950s when Mayana would have been in his 40s however all of this is speculation what did the chronovisor itself looks like and I want want to take a moment to explain that the image on our episode art for this week is AI generated it is not a picture of the actual chronovisor but what did the chronovisor itself in real life look like according to masimo polidoro father ernetti said the chronovisor consisted of three components first a multitude of antenna which were able to pick up every conceivable wavelength of light and sound these antenna 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 once they had the chronovisor set up and working they of course wanted to test it and to see whether the images they were receiving by it were historically accurate or not according to paoro first of all we wanted to verify that what we saw was authentic erned told father franois Brun 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 melini's speeches bito musolini of course uh was known as Uche or the leader between 19 22 and 1943 he was the Prime Minister and leader of Italy uh he founded and led the national fascist party and we discussed the fascist movement uh back in episode 146 on the 1933 business plot which involved an attempt to Stage a coup and impose a fascist government here in America in 1943 musolini fell from power in Italy and was imprisoned but Hitler jail broke him and put him in charge of a Nazi puppet state called the Italian social Republic in April of 1945 this state was being overrun by the allies and was on the verge of collapsing and Italian Resistance Fighters caught and executed musolini so he passed on to his reward however because of his prominence in Italian politics just a few years earlier there were lots of news reels of musolini speaking and so it was possible to check the images coming from the chronovisor against the news to see if the images from the chronovisor were accurate they checked it against a speech that melini gave in Rome and it turned out that the chronovisor images corresponded to what they saw in the historical record afterward according to Father ernetti then we started to go backward and observe Napoleon giving the speech in which he proclaimed Italy a republic the French conqueror and Emperor Napoleon bonapart had conquered most of Italy in 1799 following the French reol reolution and he proclaimed a new Italian republic since it was imposed by a foreign power the the French the Italians weren't wild about it but since it had happened so recently just 150 years before the invention of the chronovisor you could check what the device revealed against the records of Napoleon's historic speech 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 Tran next a speech by cisero one of the most famous the first delivered against Catalina 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 Cicero was a famous Roman orator and in 63 BC he was one of the two consules of Rome the consules were elected to one-year terms and they were the chief magistrates During the period of the Roman Republic so they were in charge before Rome became an empire in 63 BC Cicero gave a series of speeches against a Roman Senator named Lucius Catalina also known as Cataline uh Cicero accused Cataline of leading a plot to overthrow the Roman senate and the speeches he gave against him are one of the most famous events from the Republic there's even a famous painting of Cicero denouncing Cataline but more importantly we have the text of the speeches so it was possible to check out the chronovisor recording against the historical text and it also checked out though ernetti did notice some differences in the pronunciation between what Cicero was saying and how Latin is taught today which is not surprising since there are several different proposals for how to pronounce Latin in fact even the name cisero sometimes gets pronounced kiaro and things like that according to the book father ern's chronovisor by Peter crossa father ernetti was quite impressed by Cicero's first speech against Cataline Cicero's speech was magnificent his gestures his intonation how powerful they were what flights of oratory that isn't surprising since Cicero was famed for his oratorical abilities but after verifying Cicero's speech against the historical record the chronovisor explorers continued to move backwards in time next the time travelers died as ernetti put it at a playlet the year was 169 BC they watched part of a tragedy thyestes written by the father of Latin poetry quintis anus it was a play explained ernetti that is now almost wholly lost to us only 25 fragments a line or so each have survived have you been able to reconstruct what you heard ask father Brun 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 thyestes is a real play that was written by the Roman playwright inas and it is as a whole lost though short fragments of it do survive and I gather they could use those short fragments to validate that the rest of the play that they were seeing was the actual thest days I won't bother summarizing the Greek myth of thest for you because it's gross and violent imagine edus wrecks with lashings of cannibalism added however I will note that when Christianity began Romans accused Christians of eating thasian Banquets because they said that uh they consumed the body and blood of Jesus and Romans misunderstood that as actual cannibalism in any event they were able to record the entire play that quentis Inus wrote and father ernetti was able to subsequently publish it though it doesn't seem to be available in English however important recovering a lost work of literature like that was what really caught the Public's attention and that of the Sunday Courier was something else polydoro explains on May 2nd 1972 the weekly Italian magazine the Sunday Courier 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 Ern to Brun 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 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 and understandably it was the picture of Christ's face as he was hanging on the cross that really got the attention of both the newspaper editors and the newspaper readers I mean who wouldn't be fascinated by what props to be an actual photograph of Christ and from the time of his passion yet so this picture features prominently in any story you read about the chronovisor unfortunately the photograph of Christ was the only piece of photographic evidence the team ever released that had been gathered by the chronovisor chambers explains the torious Christ photo is the only known example of the chronovisor acting as a camera capable of bringing back images or freeze frames from the infering vistas of the past to which it gave access in the Years leading up to his death in 1994 eret said less and less about his astonishing creation leaving little evidence to persuade the doubters but enough tantalizing hints to ensure the rumors about the time-traveling monk of Venice would continue to circulate in Italy for many years to come recently though there has been a further turn of the screw with claims of a Vatican coverup according to a recent book by a French Jesuit priest the Vatican not only ordered ernetti to keep silent about his Discovery but has also since his death in 1994 suppressed any material evidence of its existence father Francois Brun who knew ernetti personally and had numerous conversations with him up until ern's death is the author of a number of books on religion and paranor normal phenomena including a bestseller the dead speak to us now in new mystery of the Vatican he accuses the Vatican of suppressing ern's temporal research documents and construction plans for the chronovisor franois Brun first brought ern's account of the chronovisor before the general public in his 1994 book live from the Beyond written with Remy chauven Run's familiarity with the story arose from his accidental encounter with her in 1962 when Brun then a young Jesuit priest who had just completed graduate work in Rome was turning the grounds of venice's Basilica of San Georgio major adjacent to the monastery where father erned lived at that first meeting ernetti told an astonished Brun about the chronovisor afterward the two met regularly exchanging ideas on a wide variety of subjects in 1997 the viene journalist Peter CA Drew heavily on brunes book to retell ern's story in your Fus foretold CA added many new details and set the hole against a rich and colorful backdrop of esoteric Notions of time travel that included Madame lat's akashic records Edgar Casey and much more in 2000 new paradigm books published an English language translation of cr's book with changes and additions this new American Edition was entitled father ernetti chronog ADV visor the creation and disappearance of the world's first time machine father brunn's new mystery of the Vatican is in part a reaction to the new paradigm version which included the first translation from Latin of ernet thest fragment so there have actually been several books written involving the chronovisor and in several different languages including father brunn's earlier book live from the Beyond Peter crosses your fate is foretold which was republished and modified form in English as father ern's chronovisor and father Bru's more recent book new mystery of the Vatican one of the things that father Brun says is that the Vatican ordered father ernetti to shut up about the chronovisor and although I don't have an exact quote from him using the term cover up I do have stories reporting that father Brun has accused the Vatican of a cover up on the subject for example Chambers reports run goes on to hint at Sinister plots in the darker recesses of the Vatican eretes eventual laps into silence on the subject of his magnumopus may have been due to pressures from above pressures that made it extremely difficult for him to discuss his work defend himself as in the case of the Christ photo or to attend conferences at which he had been due to speak at their very last meeting according to Brun ernetti told him that 1 month earlier on 30 September 1993 he had been invited to the Vatican along with the two surviving scientists of the original chronovisor team we told them everything he said and these were the last words Brun ever heard him say even this might not be quite what it seems if there is a coverup Brun feels it is possibly a benevolent one I retain the very strong impression he writes precisely on account of all these Maneuvers that there was that there truly is something that the highest authorities are hiding from us perhaps for the good of humanity given the extent to which such an invention would run the risk of overturning all of our social structures the potential for the chronovisor to disrupt Society is something also discussed by paoro who says no trace of the chronovisor exists and father ernetti was very careful to explain that after its experimental runs it had been disassembled and hidden in a safe place but why hide such a discovery father Brun asked father ernetti replied this machine can tune in on everyone's past completely leaving nothing out with it there can be no more secrets no more State Secrets no more industrial Secrets no more private lives the door would be wide open for the most fearsome dictatorship the world has ever seen we ended up agreeing to dismantle our machine and you can see how people could regard the chronovisor is dangerous if it's true that you could tune in to any place on Earth at any time in history then you could find out about anything you could learn any secret government secrets military Secrets business Secrets personal secrets and you could use those to thwart other people's plans for example you could use government military and business secrets to outmaneuver people and beat them in competitions including Wars you could use personal secrets to Blackmail people and bend them to your will they wouldn't even have to be Secrets involving crime or criminality and we've all made mistakes in life and well some things are just personal um we all have moments that we wouldn't want others recording and then broadcasting to the world even moments that have nothing to do with sin or mistakes so you can see how extensive the potential for blackmail and extortion would be every new technology that gets developed is disruptive of the order of things in one way or another and the chronovisor could be extremely disruptive for society so it could be understandable that the decision could be made to keep the device Under Wraps as chamers States father ernetti reveals that there is only one person living who knows the full details of the device someone who had helped him build it a student not known to history he is a priest now and he will remain very silent so that's what we stand today with respect to the chronovisor and with that as background we can now turn to the faith and reason perspectives but before we do that we'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons who make this show possible including Thomas F Luke D John K Susan B and Isaac L their generous donations at sqpn tocom make it possible for us to continue Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World and all the shows at StarQuest and you can join them by by visiting sqpn tocom Jimmy yakin's Mysterious World is also brought to you by deliver contacts.com offering top brand contact lenses at always low prices with free delivery visit deliver contacts.com and by the Grady group a Catholic company bringing Financial Clarity to their clients across the United States using Safe Money options to produce reasonable rates of return for their clients learn more at grgroup in.com so Jimmy what theories are there about the chronovisor that we should look at well basically there are two either the story is substantially true that a device like this really was built or the story is false that no such device existed those are our two basic options all right so what can we say about the chronovisor from the faith perspective well there's nothing contrary to the faith in the idea of viewing the past in fact from his perspective in the Eternal now outside of time God constantly views all of history at once including the past if someone actually built a cronovisor there would be moral concerns about how it got used as we mentioned before the break but the idea of viewing the past is not intrinsically sinful it's what you choose to do with the information that you acquire by viewing it that would be problematic all right then what can we say about the chronovisor from the reason perspective where do you want to begin I want to begin by verifying that father ernetti existed uh there are lots of wild stories out there and when you look into them it sometimes turns out that the key players in the story never existed or at least that there's no evidence of them existing so I want to begin by seeing if father ernetti was even real how would you go about doing that by looking for evidence of him in different places uh one place that you might look is Wikipedia and father ernetti does have a Wikipedia page which we'll have a link to of course you can't take Wikipedia Pages at face value because anyone can edit Wikipedia so even if the story of the chronovisor was complete bunk someone could make up a Wikipedia page for father ernetti they might do so with malicious or comic intent knowing that it's a hoax or they might do so innocently for example they might read father brunn's book or Peter cross's book and write a Wikipedia article on about him on that basis nevertheless a Wikipedia article might contain links to other sources that could be used to verify his existence unfortunately it doesn't the article on him at the time of recording is just a stub and it cites only one Source the English version of Peter cross's book so it looks like the article is based exclusively on that source so what other ways would there be of verifying his existence one way is seeing if there are quotations from people who knew him and can thus effectively testify to his existence one such person would be father Brun who wrote two books about him uh father Brun reports meeting him and having conversations with him as we already heard however father Brun is just one guy and yes he's a priest but there are crazy priests and bad priests so father Brun could have made up the figure of father ernetti did you find anyone else who could confirm father annetti's existence yes uh the 40 and Times article on the chronovisor contained an interview with Peter CA in that interview we read this exchange interviewer did you ever meet ernetti in person Peter crossa in the early 1990s I corresponded with ernetti but his answers were rather vague I did not know then that the Vatican had already ordered him to keep silent because his earlier public statements came close to arousing the interest of the Espionage community so even though he apparently didn't meet him in person crossa says he did correspond with Father ernetti which would be additional evidence supporting his existence if the two men exchanged letters also I'd note that there is is some tension between Father Brun and Peter crossa in his book on the chronovisor crossa included a number of critical arguments and part of what father Bru's second book did was respond to these arguments to defend against them so we have two men who disagree with and critique each other both agreeing that father ernetti existed so that's significant significant evidence that he did exist but Peter cross had never met him in person this was all a hoax couldn't the letters he received from ernetti have been written by someone else yes they could have but even meeting him in person wouldn't prove that he really existed in a truly elaborate hoax someone else could have pretended to be father ernetti he could have been an actor so unless you know someone intimately you can never 100% rule out the possibility of a hoax that's one reason that I don't take the pictures of father ernetti that are on the internet as proof I found a number of such photographs however as we saw in episode 269 on Paul Amadeus Dino the man who allegedly saw the year ad 3906 pictures you find on the internet aren't always reliable all kinds of websites have a photograph of a man that is supposed to be Paul dinak we even used it in our artwork for that episode however as we pointed out if you check it out it turns out that the photograph is not din instead it's it's a photo of a criminal from New Zealand named Daniel towhill as we discussed in the episode and there is no good evidence that Paul Dino even existed so we can't trust photographs from the internet as a way of establishing someone's identity a photograph in a newspaper would be different and the photographs in the 40 and times a magazine have some value in my mind I actually did find what appears to be a picture of father and Eddie in the the Italian newspaper the Sunday Courier but the resolution of the photograph wasn't good enough for me to read the caption and make sure that it was father ernetti so I still wanted more proof that he really existed were you able to find something that satisfied you yes one of the things that the article about him mention is that father ernetti published a lot for example on Sacred Music uh most of his articles probably wouldn't be that easy to find they'd likely be an obscure Italian academic journals that may not even be on the web and he lived long enough ago that most of his books which would be in Italian are probably out of print but father ernetti was also reportedly a well-known Exorcist and he reportedly wrote a book about demons called the catechesis of Satan or in Italian La Kaki D satana well it turns out that's a real book I found images of of it and it has father ern's name right on the cover hypothetically the book itself could be a hoax however the odds of a publisher printing a book on a topic like this from an author who doesn't exist is quite low so I concluded I had reasonable evidence that father ernetti existed later I found more evidence I found an interview with the Italian Exorcist father Gabriel Amor in the magazine 30 days where he talks about meeting father ernetti and he says that father ernetti was quote a famous Exorcist from Venice close quote so that was more evidence if father ernetti existed what evidence would we have that could shed light on whether the story of the chronovisor is true some people might be inclined to look at the fact that he was both a priest and an exorcist as evidence of his truthfulness about the chronovisor and those facts could provide support in favor of a presumption of Truth fulness but they aren't conclusive as we've all learned in the last 20 years there are some priests a fairly small number who just can't be trusted and the same thing is true of exorcists uh recent years have seen a number of exorcists who fell from Ministry hard or who are crazy or otherwise untrustworthy as we saw in episode 123 on Father Michelle rodrig so we can't trust him just because he was a priest and an exorcist is there anything objective we could point to that could support the story of the chronovisor one thing is the script that he was reportedly able to publish of the play the Estes by the Latin author quentis inias uh when it comes to this one there is some controversy about whether or not it could be authentic according to paoro actually this one after close scrutiny by Katherine Owen Eldred who holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University provides reasons to doubt for one thing a number of words in the text do not appear in the Latin language until at least 250 years later than the time of enas also says Eldred there are certain words which are reused in this text too often clear sign of a limited Latin vocabulary which was certainly not the case with author Quinto Eno furthermore of the 24 fragments of anyo thyestes which have been preserved for us by later commentator such as Cicero nonius and stus more than half show up in the ernetti thyestes Beast since the ernetti thest playlit is only on10th the probable length of the complete Tragedy by enas it might have been expected that on the average about 10% of the fragments would show up here 65% of the fragments show up about seven times as many as you might reasonably expect however there's another side to this issue Chambers reports the the translation was made by Dr Katherine Owen eldrid of Princeton who tentatively suggests on the basis of internal linguistic evidence that the passage provided by ernetti is a fraud carefully pieced together from other texts by ernetti who was himself a noted latinist in his book father Francois Brun also an excellent latinist responds vigorously to this muted allegation he points out a number of errors in Dr eldred's translation which though minor in nature do serve as his father brunn's intention to undercut Dr eld's Authority and cast doubt on her hypothesis of fraud so we have different latinists disagreeing about whether the text of thyestes that ernetti copied from the chronovisor is a hoax or not Dr Eldred said that she found problems in the text that would point to fraud but father Brun disputed this ultimately I don't think that the thyestes transcript would have been a very persuasive a piece of evidence in the first place uh the reason is that the text does not display what in paranormal investigations is called vertical knowledge that is it doesn't contain information that is not presently known to be true that later turns out to be true yes Father ern's portion of the play contains quotations of fragments from the original play that have survived but these were already known which means that a classicist like Father ernetti could have looked up the fragments and then written the rest of the script to incorporate them so that doesn't offer us any proof that the script is real what would offer such proof is if he produced a script and then a new fragment of thyestes was discovered one that nobody knew about before and if that new fragment turned out to have also been in what he transcribed that would give us evidence for authenticity but that's not what happened so the script fragment really doesn't give us evidence that the chronovisor was real what about the photograph of Jesus suffering on the cross that the Sunday Courier printed does that provide evidence that the device was real well here again we encounter another issue supposedly the chronovisor team had captured motion picture images from the end of Christ's life on film but as polydoro reports NOA of this film however ever came to light the only objective proof that came out of this story was that picture a few months after its publication however the mystery was solved in the August 1972 issue of the Italian Journal of mysteries a letter and a photo were published a reader Alonso D Silva explained that he had purchased the photo for 100 l in the gift shop of the santuario deamore M Creek goroo that is the sanctuary of merciful love in the town of kalav valenza near toi and Perugia it was a photograph of the face of Christ on a wood carving adorning the sanctuary the wood carving was by a Spanish sculptor named kot Valera this photo and the one produced by father ernetti were identical except that one was the mirror image of the other no one could deny that they were identical not even father Brun who when the monk had less than a year to live asked his friend about this compromising photo now po Doro says that nobody could deny that the two images were identical with what D Silva found on the postcard just being a left right reversal of the image that father ernetti allegedly got from the chronovisor but this isn't accurate I'll deny that they are identical if you're watching the video version of the podcast we'll have an image of the two pictures side by side and yes they do look similar yes one has Jesus looking to the left and the other has him looking to the right but the one published by the Sunday Courier clearly is not just a mirror image reversal of the one from the postcard The Courier image is more close up than the postcard image it's taken from a different angle and the Shadows on Jesus's face are different so while they do look similar it isn't the case that one is just the mirror image of the other also there are subtle differences in the image in the two images like the crest of Jesus's nose and the shading around his eyes that make me at least suspect they might not be the same thing incidentally I also found other wider field images of the crucifix in its native setting in the sanctuary of merciful love but I didn't find any that appeared to be a mirror image of The Courier photograph still the photograph that ernetti published had now been challenged how did he respond uh in more than one way uh first Chambers reports during his lifetime ernetti had given conflicting accounts of his time viewer even claiming that the notorious photo of Christ's Agony on the cross was actually of his own face while he was watching Christ's crucifixion via the chronovisor I don't know if ernetti really said that but if he did it strikes me as very implausible uh sure ernetti could have been photographed while watching the crucifixion on the chronovisor and sure the Sunday Courier could have gotten mixed up and thought that it was an image of Christ when it was really an image of ernetti except for the fact that ernetti looks nothing like the man in the supposed photo of Christ so this doesn't look like a newspaper mixup later ernetti had another explanation you'll recall that palidoro reported that father Brun had asked father ernetti about the photo the year before he died which would have been 1993 well paoro continues ern's reply was was very disingenuous he explained that he was aware of the other photo aware that it was the work of a Spanish sculptor he also said he knew that the Spanish sculptor had carved his Christ according to the instruction of a certain Spanish nun that this Spanish nun had been a mistic who carried the Stigmata of Christ on her body and was consumed by ecstatic visions of Christ's passion ernetti seemed to have assumed that father Brun would understand the rest the Parisian priest does not dwell on this in his article but Peter CA author of father ern's chronovisor does and assumes that father ernetti is tendering the following explanation the ecstatic vision of Christ's passion which the mystical nun had enjoyed was a vision of Christ dying on the cross on golgatha this was the vision she had communicated to the Spanish sculptor following her instructions he had sculpted on the face of the Christ on the wooden cross the exact features the very expression of Christ that she had seen in her vision the fact that not only were the pictures identical in their subject but also in the Shadows and Light Reflections means that the two images were in fact the same picture I find this explanation extremely implausible uh first if a Spanish nun had visions of Christ on the cross it's quite unlikely that they were photorealistic of what the actual crucifixion would have looked like in his classic work teaching on the beatification of Servants of God and the Canon is a of blessed uh published in English as heroic virtue the future Pope Benedict the 14th Cardinal uh Prospero lambertini discussed this kind of issue there had been a controversy back in his day about whether Christ was crucified with three or four nails with some Mystics seeing visions of the crucifixion where Christ was pierced by three nails and other Mystics seeing him pierced by four so there was a controversy about which Mystics were right and the future Benedict I 14th said that we shouldn't look to Visions for details like this the point that God is trying to make by giving such Visions is not to teach us how many nails Christ was crucified with but to give us a vivid portrait of his suffering to help us appreciate him more and draw closer to him spiritually we thus shouldn't look to such Visions for historical details but if we shouldn't look to such Visions for big obvious details like the number of nails then we also shouldn't look at them for small level details like exact facial features so I think that any such Visions received by a Spanish nun would not be likely to be photorealistic of the actual historical crucifixion and second even if what she saw was photorealistic it's extraordinarily unlikely that the nun would be able to give instructions sufficient to allow a sculptor to produce a wood carving that exactly matched what she saw in her mind um you know just look at at um at illustrations made by uh police artists based on witness descriptions of what criminals look like they never look exactly right um and the same thing would apply here Visionaries in fact often have trouble communicating what they saw to artists reportedly uh St fosa kowala was never happy with the Divine Mercy images that were made and said that they didn't adequately correspond to what she had seen Jesus looking like so I think it's very unlikely that an exact down to the fine details portrait of the actual crucifixion would end up on a wood carving and that this would correspond to an actual image of the crucifixion from the chronovisor so what do you personally make of the image father ernetti published well it's a dramatic image but I don't think it gives us any kind of evidence that the chronovisor was real uh as we've just seen there are numerous images of the crucifixion people make them all the time sometimes with paint sometimes with wood carving and sometimes by photographing actors playing Jesus Christ having an image of Christ suffering face doesn't remotely establish that it's a real image captured by a time machine and even if it's an image of an actual human rather than a painting or a carving it could still just be an actor or model playing Jesus but in this case there's another problem which is that the face of the image in the Sunday Courier just does not look like a real person if you look at the brow line line especially the brow over Jesus's left eye which is in the right side of the image it is much too sharp it looks like a line carved in wood not an actual human brow and if you look at his eyes they are absolutely ginormous and much too large I thus think that it's possible that this is a photograph of the crucifix from the sanctuary of merciful love taken from a different angle Le than the image on the postcard but I think it's certain that it is not a picture of a real human and thus not a real picture of Jesus on the cross that would make it sound like the chronovisor was just a hoax then did any confirmation of that ever emerge well paoro had this to say near the end of The chronovisor Saga as in a classic mystery tale comes an unexpected surprise a confession in his book Crosser reproduced a letter from an unidentified distant relative of father ernetti who claimed he had met him on his deathbed ernetti wished to leave this world with a clear conscience and so he admitted that he had not really brought that play th Estes back on the chronovisor he said that he thought he had composed the play himself using many fragments that were preserved in the writings of other authors but he could only very obscurely remember doing that however before taking this as a True Confession one must know that a few sentences later father ernetti tells about another lifetime in which he was a contemporary of Nostradamus I knew him he said he was an alchemist and a physicist he too experimented with a chronovisor it was he who taught me that it might be possible another account of this is provided uh by John Chambers who was the publisher of new paradigm books which released Peter cross's book in English he says there is more in the new paradigm Edition ition to try the patience of Father Brun the Final Chapter consists of a hitherto unpublished deathbed confession sent anonymously to me as the publisher by a person claiming to be a distant relative of ernetti who attended his deathbed that although he was continually working on the cronovisor he had never perfected it and had never traveled with it through time this strange and gripping document also purports to explain the psychological roots of ern's obsession with th Estes ernetti said he remembered living in ancient Rome as a boy attending a performance of anas's play and being fascinated by its portrayal of cannibalism I cannot say for certain whether this confession is authentic but I have after some investigation reason to believe that it is in new mystery of the Vatican run examines his confession closely for it seems to contradict his basic assertion that ernetti was telling the truth he points out quite rightly a number of errors and contradictions in it for instance there would have been no nuns expressly mentioned by the supposed relative in the monastery of San Georgio major even if they were serving as nurses to ernetti in the confession ernetti says that it was only during a near-death experience in nde the previous night that he remembered obscurely that it was not quintis enus but himself who had composed the fragment of th Estes that he claimed to have brought back from the past Brun wonders how ernetti if he had committed this fraud could have so completely even pathologically put it out of his mind only to remember it obscurely in the throws of an nde again the chronovisor described by the dying ernetti is quite unlike the device he had previously described to Brun and others a sphere much like a diving device or oneman submarine open at eye level in all directions Brun writes it is like something someone would imagine who had never heard father ernetti talk about it it seems to me the author of The document has read a little bit too much science fiction perhaps there is a certain influence from the comic strips however the deathbed account also contains some fascinating original detail oretti reveals to the relative that during his nend Eve the night before he learned that he had tried to build the chronovisor in a number of previous lifetimes in one Nostradamus himself taught him that such a device might be possible ernetti is quoted as saying Nostradamus believed it could be done by changing the vaporous body that the body could be transformed in such a way that it could easily slip through time erned then swears that he will reincarnate once again to try to complete the chronovisor father Brun concludes that despite the sincerity of the editors of new paradigm books who admit that they don't know for sure the deathbed confession is a fraud it fails to change his conviction that the chronovisor actually existed on the contrary he believes that the confession is proof that someone has a rather serious interest in discrediting Father ern's claims it is a red herring he says meant to deflect us from the truth and to mask the suppression of all information concerning the chronovisor so Brun doesn't think that the deathbed confession is real what do you think about it I actually don't put a lot of weight in the alleged deathbed confession in the first place we don't know who this supposed relative was anybody could Forge a letter and send it in claiming to be a relative who heard ern's deathbed admission of Fraud and I don't know what if anything CA or Chambers did to verify that the person behind the letter was who he claimed to be also there are inconsistencies that father Brun identified between what father ernetti claimed on other occasions and what the deathbed confession said like the machine physically looking different uh then there's all this stuff about ernetti having lived past lives in ancient Rome and with Nostradamus who we discussed in episode 153 and then again the next week in episode 154 and ernetti vowed that he would return in a future life to continue work on the chronovisor well needless to say reincarnation is contrary to Catholic teaching and while there are some Catholics who believe it despite what the New Testament teaches it's somewhat un likely that a man who was a Catholic monk a Catholic priest and a Catholic Exorcist would believe in reincarnation not impossible especially in the confusion after Vatican 2 but not probable so there's enough reason for doubt here that I don't think we can say with any certainty that the deathbed confession was real even if the deathbed confession was a fake it's not looking good for the chronovisor did Father Brun acknowledge that there were problems with Father ernetti story yes but he also thought that father ernetti was telling the truth to a significant degree uh Chambers States father Brun cannot accept that father ernetti might not in the main be telling the truth about the chronovisor he points to ern's enormous scholarly output to support his belief Brun insists on his subject's respectability and Authority in the face of mounting confusion about ernet obsession with the chronovisor and is unable to completely dismiss ern's assertions not only is he over AED by ern's great learning and productivity as a scientist and a scholar he is convinced of ern's high personal Integrity which he was able to observe closely in the course of many conversations well aware of the Fantastic nature of ern's claim and the huge implications if it is true the French Jesuit remains unable to see how a man as learned and respected as ernetti could have been driven possibly by some uncontrollable mythomania to fabricate and lo or at least to delude himself and even though Peter cross's book was more critical of ernetti he also thought that ernetti was fundamentally honest in the interview with him that the forian times published he says ca I'm still convinced of ern's honesty even in the light of all the inconsistencies in his story interviewer what makes you believe he was telling the truth CA as a theologian he could not really expect any personal gain from a hoax and also he could not seriously hope to make a financial profit obviously the chronovisor itself would be the best evidence for his claims but shortly before he died from cancer ernetti had the machine disassembled and ordered the single parts to be sent to different locations over the world interviewer but it would certainly imply that he was unbalanced perhaps Visions or ideas that were incompatible with his scientific education haunted him the chronovisor might be a symbol of scientific reasoning a self-d delusional mental construct CA no I don't think that father ernetti was mentally ill nor do I believe that his account of the chronovisor is purely metaphorical just recently I read a newspaper article in which Professor jeppi morasa the teacher who claims to have seen father ern's recording of the Lost Roman Opera thest says he still possesses this most spectacular videotape I can hardly be a judge of ernet character as I never met him in person still from description by others I assume he was a very Charming Man even if the had moments where he was rather egocentric nor must we forget that he was a top-notch scientist and renowned academic an expert on archaic music who had studied Nuclear Physics he was also Italy's most sought-after Exorcist and one of the pioneer researchers in the field of electronic voice phenomena electronic voice phenomena or EVP P involves the use of electronic devices that reportedly capture the voices of ghosts saying things and we'll talk about it in a future episode I find it interesting that crossa says someone had a copy of videotape from the chronovisor of the play thees but this doesn't move the needle much for me since the newspaper article could have been inaccurate you know there are many tabloid style newspapers in Italy that aren't very reliable and the video tape has never emerged so it may be a hoax too still the people who knew ernetti thought he was sincere do you think that there's any possibility that the chronovisor was real I find it very difficult to believe this uh in the first place mainstream physics doesn't have any idea how to build something like the chronovisor we're not even close to being able to do so and if we aren't close to being able to do that today it's scarcely likely that they would have been successfully doing it more than 50 years ago in 1972 or even 70 years ago in the 1950s further scientific advances don't come out of nowhere even if they end up classified there is always preliminary research that gets published before a device gets built then the authorities take notice of the preliminary research and offer funding for doing classified work on the idea and it's that latter work that gets classified but the preliminary research is out there in public view such as in academic journals and as far as I know there is no preliminary research handing at something like the chronovisor in the mid 20th century there's even the fact that if we were able to build a chronovisor in the mid 20th century well it'd have to be a pretty simple thing to do uh because we didn't have the kind of tech back then that we do now it would have to be something you could do that does not require the techn ology we have now but if that were the case then other people should have independently figured out how to make their own chronovisor and we don't seem to have evidence of that happening finally there's a scientific issue here to be able to capture sights and sounds from the past you would either need to be able to tune in to the exact place in the universe you know the exact spot in space and time where they happened or these sites and S sound would have to be recorded on some kind of physical medium like an unknown layer of reality or something it would not be possible to reconstruct past sights and sounds by tracing backwards the path of light and sound waves today the number of variables and the raw computing power needed to do calculations like that would make it absolutely impossible so the sights and sounds would have to be recorded somewhere that the chronovisor could physically access and we don't have any idea what such a physically accessible layer of reality would be on the other hand if you're tuning in to the exact location in space and time of the events well there's another problem the Earth is moving in fact the solar system itself is moving through space at a speed of 124 m/s so if you wanted to just around the core of the Galaxy so if you wanted to view the crucifixion of Christ 2,000 years ago you would need to look at an event that occurred 7.8 trillion miles away that's 1.3 light years from the Earth's present location so how's that supposed to work if you're tuning in to the exact location in space and time you're gonna need a physically enormous and enormously precise tuning device with a huge range or unless there's an unknown medium recording the data that travels along with the solar system events in the distant past shouldn't be accessible even in the course of a single year we end up 196 Million Miles Away from where we were 6 months ago as we orbit the Sun so the memory medium would need to travel with the Earth itself but this doesn't behave like anything known in physics and information storage medium that's not made of normal matter yet travels along with the planet that is made out of normal matter so I find the and and this is a physically accessible uh medium because you can use a physical device like a chronovisor to to access it so I find the concept of the chronovisor and especially the idea that we could build one in the mid 20th century very implausible then what's your opinion of Father ernetti why would he make up such a story what's your bottom line on the chronovisor I don't know what to make of father ornetti in part that's because I have limited resources about him at present I I know he was real I know he was an exorcist and I know a few biographical facts about his life but the story he told is highly scientifically technologically implausible and the alleged material he retrieved from the chronovisor like the script of thyestes and the photograph of Christ is all shot through with problems uh the script has problems and is very questionable and the photograph of Christ isn't a photograph of a real human being yet father ernetti published it as if that's what it was so I don't know why he said what he did I don't know if he was pulling a deliberate hoax or if he was mentally ill and sincerely believed that he had built a chronovisor but I do know that his story isn't believable not to me anyway and that's my bottom line so Jimmy what further resources can we offer to The Listener and viewer well we'll have a link to Mimo colangelo's book on the tracks of Itor mayorana and the chronovisor also the article from the 40 and times that we've been discussing the one from the skeptical Inquirer uh the stub article on uh pelino ornetti on Wikipedia also information about franah Brun uh the father Gabriel amorth article from 30 days uh an article on St fosa on happiness with the Divine Mercy images and information about how fast the Earth is moving very good and now it's time to hear from you what are your theories about father ernetti and his amazing chronovisor you can let us know by visiting sqpn domcom or the Jimmy aens Mysterious World Facebook page sending us an email to feedback mysterious. FM sending a tweet to _ World visiting the StarQuest Discord community at sqpn docomo feedback line at 619 738 4515 that's 619 738 4515 and I want to say a special thanks to Oasis studi 7 for the video and animation work they did on this episode you can check out their work by going to my YouTube channel youtube.com/ jimy Aken it really adds to the experience of the audio version of the podcast to have video along with it and while you're there you can help me grow my channel if you like the video or comment on the video or subscribe to the channel that tells YouTube that you found the video engaging and that other people might find it engaging too so just by it and it'll show it to more people so just by liking commenting and subscribing you can help get the video out to more people and when you subscribe be sure and hit the Bell notification so that you always get notified whenever I have a new video out and whether it's Mysterious World or one of the other videos I now put out regularly so Jimmy what's our next episode going to be about next week is the 300th episode of mysterious world at least it's the 300 one in our regular numbering series besides the bonus episodes we also put out so because it's episode 300 we're going to be celebrating by hearing more of the mysterious experiences that listeners have sent in and I'll be giving you my thoughts on them and What might explain them so you won't want to miss that folks be sure to check out the Mysterious World bookstore at Mysterious World store.com for links to all the books and video that Jimmy mentions in the show you can find links to Jimmy's resources from our discussion on our show notes at mysterious. fm/ 299 and remember to help us continue to produce the podcast please visit sqpn [Music] docomo world is also brought to you by Great Lakes Customs law helping importers and individuals with seizures penalties and compliance with us Customs matters throughout the United States visit greatlakes customs law.com and by Rosary Army featuring award-winning Catholic podcasts Rosary resources videos and the school of Mary online community prayer and learning platform learn how to make them pray them and give them away while growing in your faith at rosary army.com and schoolof mar.com and by Tim chevlin Personal Fitness training for Catholic providing spiritual and physical wellness programs and daily accountability check-ins strengthen yourself to help further God's kingdom work out for the right reason with the right mindset learn more by visiting Fit catholic.com until next time Jimmy Aken thank you for exploring with us Our Mysterious World thanks Dom and once again I'm Dom banelli thank you for listening to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World on StarQuest [Music] [Music] e