Chronovisor
What was it like when Alexander wept, seeing he had no more worlds to conquer? What went on in the Duke of Wellington’s tent, as he ordered the final charge which stopped Napoleon? Was Cleopatra really as attractive as they say, that day she met Julius Caesar?
Of course, we can read all about these historical events on the pages of many books, or see their reenactment through film. But we can’t actually experience them first-hand. We can’t see and hear the vivid details for ourselves, without the fog of historical translation.
Or can we?
Deep within the hidden halls and chambers of the Vatican, some believe there lies a device that allows exactly that – a way to view the past first-hand.
Just a conspiracy theory? Perhaps … Yet, modern science is beginning to explore unconventional ways the past can be recorded and viewed, moving beyond the confines of time and space as they do. And what they are finding is astonishing.
Could the ability to view the past for ourselves be a technological possibility sometime in the near future? Or perhaps it is already a possibility, one known about not only by the Vatican, but some of the greatest thinkers of our time…
Pellegrino Ernetti’s Chronovisor
“We saw everything. The agony in the garden, the betrayal of Judas, the trial, crucifixion.”
These were the shocking words of Father Pellegrino Ernetti, as recounted in the 2002 book Le Nouveau Mystere du Vatican – “The Vatican’s New Mystery” – written by Ernetti’s friend and colleague, Father Francois Brune.
It was the early-1960s, and the two men were sailing along the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, discussing various biblical interpretations, when abruptly, Ernetti proclaimed that interpretations were unnecessary, since it was possible to see for oneself what had actually happened.
But how, Brune asked, skeptical.
Ernetti explained that deep within the Vatican was a device that allowed its user to see and hear events from the past; not a time machine that sent a person back in time, but rather, a sort of time viewer which brought the past into the present, a device which could tune into specific events of the past and display them on a screen like some sort of “time-traveling television.”
It was called the Chronovisor, Ernetti declared, and with it he had seen not only the last days of the life of Jesus – the agony, the betrayal, the trial, crucifixion – but the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the creation of the Ten Commandments, and other biblical moments, as well as notable historical events, like a speech by famed Roman Senator Marcus Tullius Cicero, a performance of the lost tragedy Thyestes, and even events from the life of Napoleon.
It must be said, Pellegrino Ernetti was not an eccentric man by nature. He was a Benedictine monk, a scientist and author, a musicologist, and the chair of Prepoliphony at the prestigious Benedetto Marcello Conservatory of Music in Venice. In other words, he was not the type of man prone to telling fantastical stories.
Brune knew this, and thus he immediately began to question Ernetti about the mysterious Chronovisor.
Ernetti revealed that the idea had come to him many years earlier while working on a project with his colleague, Father Agostino Gemelli, at the Catholic University of Milan. While attempting to filter harmonics out of old Georgian chants, they had seemingly heard the voice of Gemelli’s dead father speaking through the recorder.
Intrigued, if not stunned, Ernetti began to wonder, what did happen to the sounds that people made after they ostensibly disappeared? Could it really be that voices from the past were being recorded somehow?
To answer his question, Ernetti brought together a team of scientists who began work immediately. The end result, according to Ernetti, was the Chronovisor.
Curiously, Ernetti would not reveal the members of his team, though surely Brune was eager to know, and, in fact, the identities of the scientists have remained secret to this day, but for two noteworthy names – Enrico Fermi, one of the designers of the first atomic bomb, and Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist and father of the Cold War space race.
Had these historical scientists, at the direction of Pellegrino Ernetti, really created a way to view the past?
Chronovisor Picture of Jesus Christ
Though Brune’s account of his incredible conversation with Ernetti did not appear until some 40 years later, when his book was published, eight years, in fact, after Ernetti’s death, this was not the first time the story had appeared.
In 1972, an Italian magazine called La Domenica del Corriere published an article which led with the headline, “A Machine that Photographs the Past has Finally Been Invented.” The article included Ernetti’s account of the Chronovisor, alongside, most astonishingly, a photograph of the face of Jesus at the moment of crucifixion, which Ernetti had purportedly taken using the device, proof, the article asserted, of the Chronovisor’s existence and function.
Despite the incredible nature of Ernetti’s proclamations, in the years that followed, the story mostly faded from view, never confirmed, but, equally, never fully invalidated. For his part, Ernetti said late in his life that the Chronovisor had eventually been dismantled to prevent it from ever falling into the wrong hands, which Ernetti believed could create “the scariest dictatorship the world has ever seen.”
There are those, however, who believe that somewhere deep inside the Vatican, the Chronovisor remains to this day, hidden, in-tact, functional.
Could the Chronovisor really still exist? Has it ever existed? Or is it all just a hoax?
Curiously, in 1988, the Vatican itself issued an official decree on the Chronovisor in which it warned that “anyone using an instrument of such characteristics would be excommunicated.” Why would the Vatican feel the need to publicly comment on the Chronovisor if it was nothing but a hoax? And moreover, why would they not deny its existence, but rather, instruct their followers not to use it?
For answers, we might start in the realm of science.
The Science behind the Chronovisor
The idea of a device able to view events from the past perhaps seems preposterous at first, except, “we actually use crude versions of chronovisors every day.”
A mirror, for one, is a sort of chronovisor – you don’t actually see your reflection in real-time, but rather, you see yourself a few millionths of a second before, the time it takes the light to travel from a person’s face to the mirror, and then reflect back to their eyes. Looking in a mirror is, in effect, viewing the past.
A telescope is another type of chronovisor – the distant galaxies a telescope views are not being viewed as they are now, but millions or billions of years ago when the light left them.
Of course, the Chronovisor of Ernetti was much more complex than that. While the effects of a mirror or telescope are based on distance, Ernetti’s Chronovisor could tune to specific times and places in the past as easily as one could change the channel on their television.
To conceptualize this, perhaps what is need is a reexamination of what is meant by time and space. Ernetti explained that his Chronovisor worked by detecting images and sounds that had been ‘created’ which were ‘floating‘ in space. This assertion is based on the principle that every light particle has its own unique ‘timestamp‘ which exists eternally, that is, each has its own unique key which relates to a specific point in time. In theory, by grouping, sorting, and filtering light particles according to a certain time period, it would be possible to view that time period, to, as Ernetti said, detect the images and sounds floating in space.
Of course, just because science can theorize its existence doesn’t mean the Chronovisor exists, or existed. Perhaps gathering timestamped light particles and arranging them into images is beyond the scope of mainstream modern science. However, it is mainstream science now proclaiming that, if not images, ancient sounds may actually be preserved in the environment, waiting to be unlocked and listened to.
The Scientists Behind the Chronovisor
Of the team of 12 scientists alleged to have been assembled by Pellegrino Ernetti to construct the Vatican’s Chronovisor, the names of only two have ever been released. But look closer at one of these two in particular – the infamous Wernher von Braun.
Von Braun was a Nazi scientist, one of the stars working on Hitler’s Wunderwaffe projects.
These Wunderwaffe, or “Miracle Weapons,” were said to include attempts at stealth fighters, acoustic canons, antigravity technology, and perhaps even time travel. Some accounts even said scientists like von Braun were working on a way to create a “window into the past.”
At the end of World War II, von Braun fled the losing side to the United States as part of the US government’s Project Paperclip, in which many high-level Nazi thinkers were quietly smuggled into the country and put to work for the US government. There, von Braun became an esteemed NASA scientist, the father of US rocketry, and a key player in the space race.
Is it possible that another project he continued to work on while in the United States was a “window into the past”? If it was, then von Braun would not have been the only employee of the US government working on such a thing …
CIA Experiments
Concealed within the archives on the website of the CIA, there exists an exceedingly strange document. It describes an experiment the CIA conducted in 1984, providing a seemingly unedited transcript which descends into the bizarre.
First, according to the transcript, the subject of the experiment is given a sealed envelope and instructed not to open it. Whomever is conducting the experiment then begins to give the subject instructions, directing him to investigate different random coordinates, while providing no other information as to what these coordinates mean.
As they do, the subject describes the incredible things he sees, an “obelisk” like the Washington Monument, “rounded bottom carved channels, like road beds,” a series of “pyramids.” Inside these pyramids, the subject describes coming across what he calls “an ancient people.”
“They’re dying, it’s past their time or age,” he exclaims.
As the experiment draws to an end, the subject is instructed to open the envelope he was given at the beginning. Inside, written on a 3-by-5-inch card, is the following:
The planet Mars.
Time of interest approximately
1 million years B.C
Titled “Mars Exploration: May 22, 1984,” it appears the document recounts an actual attempt by the CIA to use what is called ‘astral projection’ in order to visit the planet Mars one million years in the past.
What the subject had been describing then, were the vestiges of an ancient Martian civilization.
It may sound bizarre, but for the CIA it was decidedly not. In fact, the experiment was part of what was known as Project Stargate, an operation in which the CIA tested the possibility of all types of paranormal powers.
Publicly available documents reveal the project’s focus on “psychoenergetics,” defined as “the mental process[es] by which the individual perceives, communicates with, and/or perturbs characteristics of a designated target, person, or event remote in space and/or time from that individual.” Most specifically, Project Stargate was interested in “remote viewing,” that is, using the mind alone to see things which aren’t immediately present, whether they be in the present time, the past, or even the future.
Bizarre as they may be, there is no doubt the CIA was looking hard at these things. The only question is, how far did they get?
“White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars” the headlines blared in early 2012.
As far as proclamations go, the American government seeing fit to publicly deny that their then-President had been teleported to Mars is about as curious as the Vatican stating that those who used the Chronovisor would be “excommunicated.”
Why respond at all to such seemingly outlandish claims?
It all started with a man named Andrew Basiago, a Seattle attorney who came forward in the mid-2000s with the claim that he had been a part of a secret US government operation known as Project Pegasus. According to Basiago, he had been recruited as a child into the project, which was experimenting with highly advanced technologies like teleportation and holographic time travel, sending children like him to different planets and times in history.
One of the children who participated alongside him, Basiago claimed, was a young “Barry Soetero,” who would eventually become known as Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. According to Basiago, the young Obama had been teleported to Mars at least twice.
As for his own experiences, Basiago described watching Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and being in attendance at Ford’s Theater the night of his assassination; he had visited, he said, George Washington’s battlefield tent during the Revolutionary War, and even gone back to see Jesus.
One might note the similarity of these claims to Ernetti’s description of his use of the Chronovisor. Were Basiago and Ernetti’s accounts similar because they were using the same fundamental technology?
Could Project Pegasus merely represent the next generation of the Chronovisor project, from Wernher von Braun and his Wunderwaffe, to the Vatican, to the CIA and beyond?
Perhaps we will never know the answers.
Or perhaps modern science will tell us soon enough.