If you’ve clicked on this and are already thinking this story sounds like nonsense, then congratulations on your functional critical thinking skills. But, incredibly, the story of the Vatican‘s secret time travel device isn’t something I’m making up, but a genuine piece of bizarre history.
That said, by the end of this article, you can be the judge of whether the Pope really owns a pair of special time goggles that let him peer back in time and witness the crucifixion.
But that is indeed the story told by Benedictine monk Father Pellegrino Ernetti, who in 1972 laid it out in an article for the Italian publication La Domenica del Corriere in an article titled “Inventing the machine that photographs the past.”
This made the eyebrow-raising claim that somewhere deep in the Vatican’s hidden archives, there’s a device called the “Chronovisor”, which lets the user peer through time to see any historical event with their own eyes.
The Chronovisor was the creation of Benedictine monk Father Pellegrino Ernetti and a secret team of twelve genius scientists who came together after World War II. Ernetti was cagey about who all of them were, but said Nobel-prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun were involved.
Ernetti explained that the device has various antennas sprouting from it, made of “mysterious metals”. A “direction finder” knob on the side of the device let you tune it into the time period, and it would then capture “echoes from days long gone that had been floating in space” and display them on a TV screen.
The Pope steps in to shut this down
Ernetti said he’d witnessed Cicero’s famous 63 BC speech to the Roman senate: “His gestures, his intonation. How powerful they were! What flights of oratory!” and even Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, for which he provided photographic evidence!
actual image of Jesus Christ in Father Ernetti’s ‘chronoviser pic.twitter.com/B6gpf9wDBR
— Richard (@MyPetMonster) April 25, 2025
Ernetti died in 1994, still insisting that the Chronovisor was real, but that the Vatican had covered it up because it was too powerful. He said that the Pope had personally intervened:
“Pope Pius XII forbade us to disclose any details about this device because the machine was very dangerous. It can restrain the freedom of man.”
As many skeptics have pointed out, there are a lot of holes in his story. One is that by the time Ernetti told his story, both Fermi and Von Braun were conveniently dead, so they couldn’t call it nonsense. Others have pointed out that Ernetti’s “photographs” of Christ are suspiciously similar to existing artworks. Still others say that Chronovisor’s design seems rather reminiscent of a 1947 sci-fi novel…
But hey, who knows, maybe sitting in a dusty box in some locked room still sits the Chronovisor, and with it the key to unlocking the mysteries of history. I mean, it sounds like the twisted brainwrongs of an extremely mad monk to me, but I guess you never know.
