Chronovisor

The chronovisor was allegedly a functional time viewer described by Father François Brune in his 2002 book Le nouveau mystère du Vatican ("The Vatican’s New Mystery"). Brune is the author of several books on the paranormal and religion.

In the book, Brune relates that the chronovisor was built by Pellegrino Ernetti (1925–1994), an Italian priest and scientist. Although Father Ernetti was a real person, the existence or functionality of the chronovisor has never been confirmed; its alleged capabilities are strongly reminiscent of the fictional time viewer which features in T. L. Sherred's 1947 science fiction novella, E for Effort.

In the early 1960s, Father Ernetti began to study the writings of François Brune, himself a Roman Catholic priest and author. Ernetti allegedly ended up helping Father Brune construct the machine as members of a team which included twelve world-famous scientists. He identified two of them as Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. The chronovisor was described as a large cabinet with a cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. It could also locate and track specific individuals. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events. It could also pick up the audio component or sound waves emitted by these same events.

Ernetti lacked hard evidence for these claims. He said that he had observed, among other historical events, Christ's crucifixion and photographed it as well. A copy of this image, Ernetti said, appeared in the 2 May 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, an Italian weekly news magazine. A near-identical (mirror-image) photograph, however, of a wood carving by the sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera turned up and succeeded in casting doubt upon Ernetti's statement.

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