Imagine if you could watch the past as easily as you watch a show on TV. I’m not talking about home movies, either. Flip it on and check out a gladiator battle in ancient Rome, or the first flight of the Wright Brothers, or maybe a quick peek at the Cretaceous Period.
Personally, I think I’d tune into something like a mastodon hunt or maybe the first use of fire, if I could find it. Like that old mysterious time-traveling intro to Spaceship Earth at EPCOT*. It’s just wild!
As fun as that might be, though, it’s not possible. Not in any everyday corner of our universe. But according to one strange legend, such an unusual device does exist, and it was used to witness the crucifixion of Christ.
Okay, before you get too excited, I’ll tell you right here that it was all a hoax, and not even a very good one. But the story evokes our fascination with the idea of revisiting the past, and might even have its roots in a scifi short story. It’s also popular enough to have entered into the halls of classic time travel urban legends, so it’s worth a look.
The Time Viewer
The 2002 book The Vatican’s New Mystery (or Le Nouveau Mystère du Vatican in its native language) by Francois Brune contains the peculiar testament of Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti, a priest, exorcist, and scientist born in 1925.
According to Ernetti, in the mid-20th century the Vatican secretly commissioned the development of a strange machine of immense power. Ernetti himself helped construct it, he claimed, alongside scientists from around the world, including Enrico Fermi and Nikola Tesla.
This wasn’t any old device. It was a time machine, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. They called it a chronovisor, a type of “time viewer.” It was a large cabinet with a cathode ray tube, like an old television set, with dozens of buttons, levers, and switches. The machine would hum to life and its screen would glow, allowing its user to view events throughout history, or even focus on specific people, to watch them through time.
How did it work? Basically through the same concept as residual hauntings – allegedly, the machine would pick up on energy left over from past events, and turn it all into audio and visuals on its screen.
“…it worked by receiving, decoding, and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events…”
Ernetti claimed to have, himself, used the chronovisor to observe the crucifixion of Christ, and also to jot down the lost tragedy of Thyestes. But all good scifi tales must come to an end, right?
Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads
After Ernetti made his extraordinary claims, many believed him, but others began to ask for extraordinary evidence. No one’s ever seen the Chronovisor, and since it’s not a time traveling machine in the usual sense, the only evidence would be either producing the machine itself or, maybe, showing everyone a photo or video of the machine in action.
So Ernetti did the latter. He provided a photo of what he claimed was Jesus during the crucifixion, taken while using the time viewer. He also provided the text he had written, allegedly transcribing the lost play Thyestes. Neither piece of evidence stood up to scrutiny. In fact, it would turn out that the image of Jesus was actually that of a reversed postcard image from Santuario dell’Amore Misericordioso in Collevalenza, Italy.
Another potential scifi twist to this story comes from author Paul J. Nahin. In his book Holy Sci-Fi: Where Science Fiction and Religion Intersect, Nahin muses on the possibility that the story of Ernetti’s Chronovisor was actually inspired by the 1949 short story “The Biography Project” by Horace Gold. The timing certainly fits. According to Nahin, in that story Biotime Cameras are able to film the past, and are used to document famous figures throughout history.
And that’s the Chronovisor. I wonder how much power and control would be gained by simply viewing past events. Maybe a lot? In that context, I think the time viewer would fit right into an Indiana Jones story, maybe even better than the Antikythera Mechanism from Dial of Destiny. Imagine at the end, a large box with busted tubes and strange wires getting hauled into that old Raiders warehouse and plopped right down next to the Ark of the Covenant. Some of these legends are just made for that.
*Here’s that old intro to Spaceship Earth I was talking about. It’s hard to see, but, you know. Actually it’s pretty relevant to the discussion of the Chronovisor. On that ride, passengers climb aboard ‘time machines’ and are sent to the past to experience humanity’s advancements in communications throughout history.
