If you had the chance to, would you go backwards… or forwards, in time? What would you do? Where
would you go? And who would you want to see? Of all the speculative daydream (but also serious
science) topics out there, perhaps none is quite so well debated as time travel. But,
shockingly, could it be that time technology is already here, that it has been here for decades…
and is being kept from the rest of the world by the headquarters of the Catholic Church?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at
some allegedly top secret time travel power that’s hidden at the Vatican.
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Vatican City is an interesting enough place even without the time travel theories to
boot. An independent nation state entirely surrounded by the Italian capital, Rome, it’s the
smallest country in the world - by both size and population. You could walk across it in minutes,
and yet it’s still one of the most influential locations on the planet. As a cultural,
historical and political center point, it’s a focus for the largest denomination, Catholicism,
of the most followed wider religion on Earth, Christianity. It’s also famous for housing some
of the art world’s most iconic masterpieces, and many of the oldest books and records in
existence. Parts of the libraries and stores within the Vatican are entirely closed off to
the rest of the world, though… and here is where some conspiracy theories have gradually grown.
Given that so much of Christianity revolves around stories of what the Bible says happened
two thousand years ago, or more, it perhaps makes sense that if time travel were possible… then the
Church would want in. Its traditions may be sacred, and the having of Faith may be vital,
but the chance to actually visit Biblical figures? Or the opportunity to get a head start on whenever
Judgment Day comes in the future? It would surely be extremely hard to pass that up.
But, still, the most popular time travel conspiracy about the Vatican doesn’t
actually involve high-ranking Catholics literally going backwards or forwards in time themselves,
in a physical sense. Instead, it’s more about opening (and maintaining) a window through
which time can be viewed as one. The alleged technology at its heart is called the Chronovisor.
At the center of this story is Father Pellegrino
Ernetti, a Benedictine Monk who claimed to have developed the Chronovisor sometime in the
mid-twentieth century, before using it multiple times prior to his death in the early 1990s.
According to the claims, the Chronovisor was like a television to the past. Ernetti was
allegedly able to tune it to history, to watch live historical events through it,
as they happened. Among the sights that Ernetti claimed to have seen via the Chronovisor are a
performance of an otherwise-lost Roman play, “Thyestes”, various significant
speeches made in front of the Roman Senate… and the actual crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The details surrounding Ernetti’s life and the alleged Chronovisor are sparse, but most of what’s
been left to history comes via the writings of French Catholic priest, François Brune.
Ernetti supposedly entrusted his story to Brune, who himself died more than twenty years after
Ernetti, in 2019. It’s said that there are (or were) more people than just Ernetti involved,
though. In the build-up to (and at the point of) the Chronovisor’s apparent invention,
it’s claimed that there was a small team of top scientists working on the
project - and among them were the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Enrico Fermi,
and the Nazi scientist turned NASA bigwig, Wernher Von Braun. Other top scientists of the
time - around the 1950s - were rumored to have been involved, but wished to remain anonymous.
Frustratingly, regarding how it all works, there are even fewer details to be found. It’s variously
said that the Chronovisor ran off of the light and sound data collected by multiple antennae
that were projecting out of it… but that’s about all we have. Indeed, perhaps the biggest criticism
of the Chronovisor claims is that they are almost entirely unsubstantiated by physical
evidence. There are some alleged blueprints… but they’re very basic for such an apparently
advanced machine. For the most part, then, we’re asked to simply take Ernetti at his word.
Nevertheless, and despite it never publicly referencing the Chronovisor via official
lines - to confirm or deny - the Vatican has failed to fully shrug off the theory that it
is hiding time travel tech. As per most conspiracies surrounding the Chronovisor,
it’s said that Ernetti may have been strongly pressured throughout his life to keep quiet about
what he knew and had seen. While counter-arguments claim that Ernetti admitted on his deathbed that
the entire thing had been a hoax, others say that this false confession had been forced out
of him… to allegedly allow the Vatican to more easily hush up the Chronovisor from thereon out.
Indeed, in the modern world, the direct links to the alleged Chronovisor are disappearing.
Ernetti and Brune have both passed away. Fermi and Von Braun were already dead by the time
Ernetti named them as two of his colleagues during the Chronovisor’s development. The story,
as spectacular as it is, is getting more and more difficult to trace. And,
in recent times, the finer points have been increasingly questioned. For instance, when
Ernetti first went public with the claim that he had witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ,
the news had been accompanied by an apparent image of Jesus’s face while
he was dying on the cross. But that image has now been called out as a possible fake,
with claims that it’s simply a flipped image taken from an unrelated Italian postcard.
More than anything else, though, the lack of anything even close to a technical explanation
on how the Chronovisor worked… is what really trips this tale up. Beyond vague mutterings of
antennae collecting light signals, and unverified descriptions of turning dials to move through time
at the user’s will, there’s nothing more than the story itself to keep this legend alive.
But still, what if it were true? And what if you were given the Chronovisor controls? Would you do
the same and revisit Jesus’s death, or return to the past to witness a Roman politician delivering
an ancient manifesto? Or would there be other, different sights that you’d more wish to see?
A curious consistency around all the Chronovisor claims so far is that they all do head to the
past rather than the future. Father Pellegrino Ernetti was seemingly far less concerned with
what was coming over the horizon. And far more concerned with returning to what had
already happened, to see it with his own eyes. Bizarrely, then, if the Chronovisor were real,
its presence could actually destroy Faith on Earth as a general concept - something which
most religions do rely on. With a working machine ready to dial back to any time,
place or event anywhere in history, there’d be no need to believe in anything anymore… because
we could just go back and verify it, instead. Similarly, from a scientific point of view,
there’d be less need to thoroughly investigate the past via records, fossils or artifacts…
because we could just re-enter the past, to confirm or quash our theories at source.
There’s no doubt, then, that a true Chronovisor could well become the greatest and single most
important invention ever to take place. Today, we all live our lives apparently following the
arrow of time in just one direction, because that’s all that makes physical sense to us.
But a Chronovisor would break that reality open, and usher us into a new age of temporal
fluidity. Everything that had ever happened prior to this very point could be brought
back before our very eyes… for rewatching, reanalysis, and re-immersion. We could live
again what’s already been lived, and perhaps even live prematurely what’s still to come.
What there is major doubt about, though, is whether any of this is true, at all. Ernetti’s
claims about time are increasingly struggling to stand the test of time. The howls of “hoax”
are growing louder, but for those who still insist that the Chronovisor is real… that’s all just part
of the coverup. The coverup of top secret time travel that’s allegedly hidden at the Vatican.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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