The Chronovisor

(from Wikipedia)

Chronovisor was the name given to a machine that was said to be capable of viewing past and future events. Its existence was alleged by François Brune, author of several books on paranormal phenomena and religion. In his book The Vatican’s New Mystery he claimed that the device had been built by the Italian priest and scientist Father Pellegrino Maria Ernetti (1925-1994). While Father Ernetti was a real person, the existence (much less the functionality) of the chronovisor has never been confirmed.

In the early 1960s Ernetti stated to François Brune, himself a Roman Catholic priest and author, that Ernetti helped to construct the machine as part of a team which included twelve world-famous scientists, of whom he named two, Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun. The chronovisor was portrayed as a large cabinet with a normal 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 focus and track specific people. According to its inventor, it worked by receiving, decoding and reproducing the electromagnetic radiation left behind from past events, though it could also pick up sound waves.

Ernetti lacked hard evidence for these claims. He said that he observed, among other historical events, Christ's crucifixion and photographed it. A photo of this, Ernetti said, appeared in the May 2, 1972 issue of La Domenica del Corriere, an Italian weekly news magazine. However, a near-identical (though mirrored left to right) photograph of a wood carving by the sculptor Cullot Valera, turned up, casting doubt upon Ernetti's statement.

Through the chronovisor, Ernetti said that he had witnessed, among other scenes, a performance in Rome in 169 BC of the lost tragedy, Thyestes, by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius. Dr. Katherine Owen Eldred of Princeton University, the translator of an English rendition of the text, included as an appendix to the American printing of Peter Krassa's book on the Chronovisor (see below), believes that Ernetti wrote the play himself. According to the alleged "confession" (purportedly kept anonymous on the request of the person, said to be a relative of Ernetti's) included in the American edition, on his deathbed had Ernetti confessed that he had written the text of the play himself, and that the "photo" of Christ was indeed a "lie". According to the same "source", however, Ernetti also affirmed that the machine was workable.