Speaker 1: Picture this. You know, the year is sixteen eleven.
Speaker 2: Okay, setting the scene right.
Speaker 1: You are a senior librarian working under Pope Paul the Fifth,
Speaker 1: and you have just been handed what might actually be
Speaker 1: the single most daunting administrative task in the history of
Speaker 1: the Western world.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, You are implementing a comprehensive top to bottom catalog
Speaker 1: reform in the Vatican Library. And you have to realize,
Speaker 1: for you listening, this is not like organizing a local
Speaker 1: university's special collections, you know.
Speaker 2: Not at all. I mean, the sheer scale of what
Speaker 2: we were talking about in sixteen eleven is just mind.
Speaker 1: Bending, it really is. You are standing in the middle
Speaker 1: of holdings that span the entirety of the ancient world.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with papyrus scrolls from Egypt, right.
Speaker 2: And kudises from the Byzantine Empire, astronomical tables from the
Speaker 2: Islamic Golden Age, yeah.
Speaker 1: And theological texts from traditions that pre date Christianity entirely.
Speaker 1: There are histories in a dozen different languages, some of
Speaker 1: which maybe only three people on Earth can even still read.
Speaker 2: And your job is to assign every single room, every shelf,
Speaker 2: every display case a standardized reference number. The goal is
Speaker 2: absolute mathematical.
Speaker 1: Precision, which sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 2: Honestly, oh, a total nightmare. You are creating a system
Speaker 2: so robust that any item can be located, retrieved, and
Speaker 2: returned without any ambiguity whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Right, So you work systematically, You count, you measure, you
Speaker 1: number each room. But then, right at the very end
Speaker 1: of your survey, deep in the oldest section of the archives,
Speaker 1: you encounter a room that completely defies the logic of
Speaker 1: your new catalog.
Speaker 2: Because it appears to contain absolutely.
Speaker 1: Nothing exactly small shelves, totally empty, the stone floor is
Speaker 1: swept completely clean, but the air inside it just stops
Speaker 1: you in your tracks.
Speaker 2: You actually make a specific note in your official memo
Speaker 2: to the Pope's Prefect about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you write that the air in this room is
Speaker 1: quote slightly different from the adjacent corridors.
Speaker 2: It's cooler, stiller like, it has a quality that you,
Speaker 2: a master of languages and ancient texts, simply do not
Speaker 2: have a technical word for.
Speaker 1: Right. And because your catalog and convention begins at room one,
Speaker 1: in this space SIT's completely outside the logic of your
Speaker 1: meticulously planned system, you designate it room zero. You write
Speaker 1: down empty storage, you lock the heavy wooden door, and
Speaker 1: you move on.
Speaker 2: And if the story ended right there in sixteen eleven,
Speaker 2: it would just be a quirky, you know, slightly atmospheric
Speaker 2: footnote in an old Renaissance ledger.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't end there, No, it doesn't.
Speaker 2: That exact catalog entry Room zero, empty Storage reappears in
Speaker 2: every single annual Vatican Library Catalog update from sixteen to eleven,
Speaker 2: all the way to the present day.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. I am so incredibly fired up
Speaker 1: about today's exploration because we are unpacking a staggering stack
Speaker 1: of historical sources.
Speaker 2: We really are. We've got internal memos, unmailed letters from Monsignior's,
Speaker 2: diaries of archivists, structural engineering surveys, and even declassified diplomatic records.
Speaker 1: It's massive. And our mission today, you guys, is to
Speaker 1: look closely at ten high classified, physically sealed spaces within
Speaker 1: the walls of the Vatican.
Speaker 2: But we do need to establish some ground rules for
Speaker 2: how we are looking at this material, because when you
Speaker 2: talk about secret rooms in the Vatican, it's very easy
Speaker 2: to veer into Internet conspiracy theories or sensationalism. Oh for sure,
Speaker 2: and we are not doing that. This is a profound,
Speaker 2: strictly documented look into the architecture of institutional secrecy. It's
Speaker 2: about what happens when the most meticulously documented institution in
Speaker 2: human history, an institution that literally keeps expense receipts from
Speaker 2: the Renaissance, encounters anomalies.
Speaker 1: Anomalies that completely shatter our understanding of physics, biology, and history, right.
Speaker 2: And their response isn't to study it publicly. Their response
Speaker 2: is to lock the door, lose the key, or in
Speaker 2: some of the cases we're going to discuss today, literally
Speaker 2: pour industrial concrete over it.
Speaker 1: I also want to mention right up front for you
Speaker 1: listening that our sources today we'll touch on some highly
Speaker 1: sensitive historical periods. Eat Sample will be discussing materials acquired
Speaker 1: during Mussolini's Ethiopian campaign, which.
Speaker 2: Is obviously a very dark period.
Speaker 1: Exactly, we want to state explicitly that our role here
Speaker 1: is simply to relay the historical record impartially. We are
Speaker 1: examining the source material exactly as it exists in the archives,
Speaker 1: without taking political sides, inserting modern ethical debates, or endorsing
Speaker 1: the actions of the eras we're discussing.
Speaker 2: Right, We are here for the data, the anomalies, and
Speaker 2: the history. We are acting as historical detectives, reading the
Speaker 2: bureaucratic footprints left behind by people who were frankly terrified
Speaker 2: of what they found.
Speaker 1: So let's jump right back into room zero in the
Speaker 1: Vatican Apostolic Library. We are starting our exploration today by
Speaker 1: looking at spaces where the fundamental laws of physics, things
Speaker 1: like thermodynamics, light and gravity, seem to just well break.
Speaker 2: They just stop working.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I need to wrap my head around this four
Speaker 1: hundred and fourteen year surveillance of an empty room, because
Speaker 1: I mean, if I have an empty closet in my house,
Speaker 1: I'm not checking at every discement to make sure the
Speaker 1: emptiness hasn't done something weird.
Speaker 2: You've hit on the exact anomaly in the bureaucratic language there.
Speaker 2: An empty room does not require annual confirmation of its emptiness.
Speaker 1: Especially not in a place like the Vatican.
Speaker 2: Exactly, especially not in an institution that measures space at
Speaker 2: an absolute premium. A room that is formally documented twelve
Speaker 2: months at a time for four hundred and fourteen consecutive
Speaker 2: years is not being passively recorded. It is being actively monitored.
Speaker 2: That annual notation is not an administrative habit. It is
Speaker 2: active surveillance written in the language of institutional record keeping.
Speaker 2: It means that something in Room zero requires.
Speaker 1: Checking on, like something about its status is not stable
Speaker 1: enough to be left completely alone. Precisely, okay, so clearly
Speaker 1: people on the inside. No, it's not just a dusty closet,
Speaker 1: because between nineteen hundred and twenty twenty three, there have
Speaker 1: been twenty three formal research access requests submitted to the
Speaker 1: Vatican Apostolic Library specifically for Room zero.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the disciplines of the people
Speaker 2: asking to get in, it makes zero sense none.
Speaker 1: We aren't just talking about Catholic theologians looking for lost Bibles.
Speaker 1: These are paleographers, archaeologists, material historians, a biologist, a theoretical physicist.
Speaker 1: And this is the one that really gets me, A
Speaker 1: specialist in Acadian writing systems.
Speaker 2: It's the lack of adjacency in those disciplines that should
Speaker 2: really raise the hairs on your arms. There is no
Speaker 2: obvious academic three line connecting an Acadian script specialist someone
Speaker 2: who studies the cuneiform languages of ancient Mesopotamia, to a
Speaker 2: modern theoretical physicist. No, not all they don't attend the
Speaker 2: same conferences, they don't read the same journals.
Speaker 1: Right, It's like pinging a disconnected computer server every day
Speaker 1: for four centuries just to make sure the ghost of
Speaker 1: the machine has it moved. If you have a physicist
Speaker 1: and a linguist both obsessed with the same quote unquote
Speaker 1: empty room, it means whatever is in there operates on
Speaker 1: a level that bridges ancient human history and fundamental physical laws.
Speaker 2: And all twenty three of those requests have been denied.
Speaker 2: The most recent one on record was actually in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, really recently.
Speaker 2: Yeah. It came from a Cambridge University researcher specializing in
Speaker 2: ancient script systems that pre date any known writing. The
Speaker 2: Vatican Library sent a very polite, standard bureaucratic reply, thanking
Speaker 2: her for her interest, but stating that Room zero was unavailable.
Speaker 1: Because the contents were under ongoing assessment.
Speaker 2: Four hundred and fourteen years of ongoing assessment.
Speaker 1: I love the absolute audacity of Vatican bureaucracy. Just incredible.
Speaker 1: But you know someone did get in. The system isn't perfect.
Speaker 1: One person is known to have access to Room zero
Speaker 1: outside of the formal request process, and his account is
Speaker 1: what blows this wide open.
Speaker 2: Ah, Brother Jakomoventi.
Speaker 1: Yes, in nineteen forty seven, this Vatican archivist named brother
Speaker 1: Jacka Moventi used a master key to enter the room. Now,
Speaker 1: just for context, nineteen forty seven is right after World War.
Speaker 2: Two, right, Rome is recovering, the Vatican is dealing with
Speaker 2: a massive influx of refugees and displaced archives.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and administrative security protocols are frankly a total mess.
Speaker 2: It's a windows of vulnerability in an otherwise impenetrable system,
Speaker 2: and Jacoaaventi takes full advantage of it. He goes in,
Speaker 2: and he is so deeply disturbed by what he finds
Speaker 2: that he tells a colleague about it the very next morning.
Speaker 1: I'm mon, signior turo Kletti.
Speaker 2: Yes, and Cletti was a meticulous diarist. He wrote the
Speaker 2: entire conversation down word for word. That diary actually sat
Speaker 2: in a private collection until it was digitized by a
Speaker 2: Roman historical society in twenty fourteen, which is how this
Speaker 2: leaked into the historical record in the first place.
Speaker 1: So what did Jakamaventi see Because he told Keltti the
Speaker 1: room was absolutely, unequivocally not empty, he saw three objects,
Speaker 1: three of them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He described them as spherical, metallic in appearance, and positioned
Speaker 1: slightly above shoulder height from the floor.
Speaker 2: And crucially positioned above the floor with no pedestals, no wires,
Speaker 2: and no visible means of support.
Speaker 1: They were floating, which is just wild to even picture.
Speaker 1: But I have to push back here for a second.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen forty seven magnets exist. Could this just be
Speaker 1: some elaborate trick of men magnetic levitation left over from
Speaker 1: some eccentric nineteenth century cardinal.
Speaker 2: It's a fair question, it really is. But if we
Speaker 2: look at the physics of magnetic levitation, it requires either
Speaker 2: a superconducting material chilled to extreme temperatures, which didn't exist
Speaker 2: in that form, let alone in sixteen eleven, or an
Speaker 2: active powered electromagnet.
Speaker 1: Which they wouldn't have had running for centuries exactly.
Speaker 2: But to commeavent, he noted something else. While he stood
Speaker 2: frozen in the doorway. The objects actually moved slowly but perceptibly,
Speaker 2: and they produced a distinct.
Speaker 1: Sound, a low, persistent humming.
Speaker 2: Yes. When he finally lost his nerve, stepped out and
Speaker 2: locked the heavy wooding door behind him, he told Cletty.
Speaker 2: He could still hear that sound faintly vibrating through the
Speaker 2: wood for approximately four minutes before it finally stopped.
Speaker 1: See that four minute detail is what convinces me this
Speaker 1: isn't just a ghost story. It's too specific. If these
Speaker 1: things have been in there since sixteen eleven, what kind
Speaker 1: of energy source allows an object to float, move, and
Speaker 1: hum for centuries?
Speaker 2: It entirely violates the conservation of energy, at least under
Speaker 2: our standard models. To maintain levitation without aerodynamic lift or
Speaker 2: electromagnetic suspension requires a massive constant energy.
Speaker 1: Output, right, doesn't just happen for free.
Speaker 2: And for an acoustic wave to be generated that hum,
Speaker 2: something has to be vibrating and physically displacing the air
Speaker 2: in the room. What likely happen is that Jacamoventi disrupted
Speaker 2: whatever delicate atmospheric equilibrium existed in that room just by
Speaker 2: opening the door.
Speaker 1: Oh, because he changed the air pressure and the thermal
Speaker 1: gradient exactly.
Speaker 2: The spheres reacted to that change, which is why they
Speaker 2: moved and hummed, and it took four minutes for the
Speaker 2: room to return to its baseline state after he closed
Speaker 2: the door.
Speaker 1: You know, it reminds me of that sixteen to eleven.
Speaker 1: Note the air being quote unquote different cooler stiller. Whatever
Speaker 1: those spheres are doing, they are manipulating the local environment
Speaker 1: to maintain their state.
Speaker 2: It's a localized physical anomaly.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to another room that completely defies reality,
Speaker 1: but in a totally different way. If Room zero is
Speaker 1: about manipulating gravity and energy, our next s base is
Speaker 1: about light and matter. We are moving from the Library
Speaker 1: to the Archive of Apostolicum.
Speaker 2: The Vatican Secret Archives. This transition is fascinating because the
Speaker 2: Secret Archives have a very different operational mandate than the Library.
Speaker 2: Ohso well, the library is for books and manuscripts, right,
Speaker 2: but the Archive is for the official correspondence, state papers,
Speaker 2: and legal documents of the papacy. It is arguably the
Speaker 2: most secure paper trail on Earth.
Speaker 1: And in eighteen eighty one, Popelio the thirteenth does something
Speaker 1: absolutely unprecedented. He unlocks the archive to non ecclesiastical scholars
Speaker 1: for the first time since it was centralized in sixteen twelve.
Speaker 2: A huge moment for historians.
Speaker 1: Imagine being a German or French historian in eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: finally getting access to this mythical place you're working through
Speaker 1: the new finding aids methodically. The physical rooms are numbered
Speaker 1: in sequence down a massive corridor. You walk past room one,
Speaker 1: room two, all the way down to room twelve, and
Speaker 1: the next door is room fourteen.
Speaker 2: The catalog sequence cleanly, deliberately skips room thirteen, just skips it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there is no erata printed in the front of the book.
Speaker 2: There is no administrative note explaining that two rooms were
Speaker 2: consolidated into one. The numbers just jumped from twelve to fourteen.
Speaker 1: And if you were a researcher who asked a cataloger
Speaker 1: about it, the historical accounts say the clerks would look
Speaker 1: at you completely blankly and flatley state there is no
Speaker 1: Room thirteen, total denial, But the physical architecture of the
Speaker 1: building tells a completely different story. Fast forward to nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven. A Vatican archivist named Monsignor Petro Fini is
Speaker 1: consulting an old, dusty cross reference ledger for an entirely
Speaker 1: unrelated project, like he was probating some old estate.
Speaker 2: Right, a very mundane task.
Speaker 1: And he notices reference codes in the margins that explicitly
Speaker 1: point to a thirteenth room. Being a diligent archivist, he
Speaker 1: submits an internal request for clarification to his.
Speaker 2: Superiors, which is exactly what you'd expect a bureaucrat to do.
Speaker 2: He thinks it's a simple filing error, but ks later
Speaker 2: a senior prefect responds directly to Feeni, confirming that the
Speaker 2: room designation had been quote retired and its contents transferred.
Speaker 1: But the prefect conveniently leaves out exactly where they were
Speaker 1: transferred to. And here's where it gets absolutely wild. Fieni
Speaker 1: didn't just see a ledger entry. He actually saw the ring.
Speaker 2: He did. In his private correspondence yeah.
Speaker 1: A letter to his brother that was recovered decades after
Speaker 1: Foeni's death, he wrote about a specific incident. A cataloger's
Speaker 1: key ring was misplaced. A heavy door at the end
Speaker 1: of the room twelve corridor, disguised to look like a
Speaker 1: solid wall panel, was opened by accident for just a
Speaker 1: fraction of a second by a maintenance worker and then
Speaker 1: immediately slam shut. Feeni was standing right there, and what
Speaker 1: did Phoene see in that fraction of a second?
Speaker 2: He described two very specific things. First, he saw light,
Speaker 2: but he explicitly noted it had no.
Speaker 1: Visible source, no candles, no lanterns.
Speaker 2: No windows, just ambient self generating light in a room
Speaker 2: that had been sealed in darkness. Second, he saw a
Speaker 2: surface or an object in the center of the and
Speaker 2: he described it using a very specific, improvised Latin phrase lapis.
Speaker 1: Non natis lapist non natas stone not born. Let's really
Speaker 1: analyze the linguistic gymnastics happening here. FEEDI was a man
Speaker 1: who spent his entire professional life handling medieval manuscripts.
Speaker 2: Right, he knew his Latin. He was fluent in standard
Speaker 2: liturgical Latin, academic Latin, and legal Latin. His vocabulary was massive,
Speaker 2: Yet when confronted with this object, his vast linguistic toolkit
Speaker 2: just failed him. He had to invent a phrase, stone
Speaker 2: not born. It implies that he recognized the material as
Speaker 2: sharing the visual and perhaps textural characteristics of stone, but
Speaker 2: his brain immediately registered that it lacked the geological history
Speaker 2: of formation, like.
Speaker 1: It wasn't carved, it wasn't quarry exactly.
Speaker 2: It didn't belong to the natural geology of Earth.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have to stop and ask you, though, how
Speaker 1: reliable is a fraction of a second glimpse. Human's memory
Speaker 1: is notoriously terrible, especially when we're surprised could the sourceless
Speaker 1: light just be a trick of his eyes adjusting. Could
Speaker 1: the stone not born just be a weirdly polished piece
Speaker 1: of marble.
Speaker 2: If it were just Finey's letter, you could absolutely write
Speaker 2: it off as a trick of the light or an
Speaker 2: overact of imagination. But it's the institutional response to Feoeni
Speaker 2: that validates his sighting.
Speaker 1: The cover up right.
Speaker 2: Shortly after Phoene submitted his questions and had this accidental sighting,
Speaker 2: that specific closs reference ledger he'd been using was permanently
Speaker 2: removed from circulation. It just vanished.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, jump ahead to the modern era. Between twenty eight
Speaker 2: and twenty fourteen, three independent researchers found the exact same
Speaker 2: gap in the published catalog. They filed formal.
Speaker 1: Access requests and let me guess denied.
Speaker 2: The Vatican told them the material from Room thirteen had
Speaker 2: been moved to the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, But
Speaker 2: when those researchers followed up with that commission, the commission
Speaker 2: confirmed in writing that no such transfer ever happened.
Speaker 1: It's an institutional shell game. They're pointing at different departments
Speaker 1: to exhaust the researchers but the physical building betrays them again,
Speaker 1: doesn't it It does.
Speaker 2: In nineteen fifty three, the Vatican brought in outside structural
Speaker 2: engineers to reinforce that specific wing of the Archive building, and.
Speaker 1: The municipal survey drawn up by those engineers shows a
Speaker 1: large void, a physical room adjacent to the Room twelve
Speaker 1: corridor that does not correspond to any catalog space on
Speaker 1: the Vatican's official blueprints. When the lead engineer asked the
Speaker 1: Prefect about it, he was brusquely told.
Speaker 2: It was an obsolete utility chamber, and then the Prefect
Speaker 2: gave a highly unusual order. He told the engineers to
Speaker 2: encapsulate the room entirely in masonry.
Speaker 1: Wait, like, completely seal it.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were instructed to strengthen the load bearing walls
Speaker 2: from the outside and to literally lay brick and mortar
Speaker 2: over the sealed door, entombing it within the architecture of
Speaker 2: the building.
Speaker 1: This is what drives me crazy. If the Vatican really
Speaker 1: wanted this stone not born hidden, why not just put
Speaker 1: it in a box, loaded onto a track at three
Speaker 1: am and buried in a cave in the Alps. Why
Speaker 1: go through the incredibly suspicious trouble of Britain picking up
Speaker 1: a room in the middle of your active daily use archive.
Speaker 2: That is the pivotal question, and it speaks to the
Speaker 2: physical nature of the anomaly. The most logical, albeit unsettling,
Speaker 2: theoretical answer is that whatever is inside Room thirteen physically cannot.
Speaker 1: Be moved because it's too heavy, or.
Speaker 2: Because it is intrinsically integrated into the localized space, or
Speaker 2: perhaps most terrifyingly, the danger of interacting with it is
Speaker 2: so profoundly high that the safest course of action was
Speaker 2: to treat the room itself as a containment vessel.
Speaker 1: A containment vessel.
Speaker 2: You don't strengthen walls from the outside unless you are
Speaker 2: trying to ensure that no one can ever get in,
Speaker 2: or from a structural engineering standpoint, that whatever energy or
Speaker 2: phenomenon is occurring inside cannot breach the rest of the building.
Speaker 1: That phrase gives me chills. Containment vessel, and it leads
Speaker 1: us perfectly into our next space, where containment actually failed
Speaker 1: to suppress a fundamental law of physics dermodynamics. We are
Speaker 1: leaving the archives and heading to the Borgia apartments on
Speaker 1: the first floor of the Apostolic Palace.
Speaker 2: The Borgia apartments are stunning. They were built for Pope Alexander,
Speaker 2: the sixth Rodrigo Borgia in the late fifteenth century. They
Speaker 2: are heavily frescoed, incredibly ornate, and steeped in the infamous
Speaker 2: history of the Borgia family.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand and one they are undergoing a massive,
Speaker 1: highly technical restoration. A master conservator is working out a
Speaker 1: fresco paided in the fourteen nineties. She is running a
Speaker 1: sonic probe along the wall to check for moisture damage
Speaker 1: and plaster.
Speaker 2: Detachment, a very standard procedure for restorations, right.
Speaker 1: But the probe's feedback isn't behaving normally. She realizes the
Speaker 1: plaster isn't just thick, there is a constructed, sealed void
Speaker 1: behind the fresco. She reports the anomaly to her supervisor,
Speaker 1: and the Vatican's response is immediate and draconian.
Speaker 2: They instantly suspend the entire multimillion dollar restoration project.
Speaker 1: Unidentified officials in dark suits arrive and they actually breach
Speaker 1: the void, cutting through the five hundred year old fresco wall, and.
Speaker 2: The restoration team is ordered to wait in the adjacent
Speaker 2: room and absolutely not to look.
Speaker 1: But you know, as anyone who has ever been in
Speaker 1: an old building knows heavy wooden doors are rarely airtight
Speaker 1: when it comes to sound. The conservatives standing near the door,
Speaker 1: and she overhears the officials talking in Italian inside the void.
Speaker 2: What did you hear?
Speaker 1: One official notes that the ceiling of the hidden inner
Speaker 1: room is painted. Another asks with what is it biblical?
Speaker 1: And the first person says, taking a very long, heavy pause,
Speaker 1: the stars but not ours.
Speaker 2: Not ours a star chart showing constellations, planetary alignment, or
Speaker 2: celestial bodies from a vantage point that is fundamentally not
Speaker 2: Earth exactly.
Speaker 1: And I know what you're thinking listening to this. Maybe
Speaker 1: it was just a heavily stylized Renaissance zodiac that the
Speaker 1: official didn't recognize. But it's what happens next that elevates
Speaker 1: this from a weird painting to a physical impossibility.
Speaker 2: To non disclosure agreements.
Speaker 1: Yes, five members of the restoration team were pulled aside
Speaker 1: and asked to sign severe, legally binding non disclosure agreements.
Speaker 1: Two of them refused. One of those two, risking our
Speaker 1: gave a veiled interview to a small, obscure Italian architectural
Speaker 1: journal in two thousand and six.
Speaker 2: It's amazing she went on the record at all considering
Speaker 2: the pressure, she was careful.
Speaker 1: She said. She never went inside the room itself, but
Speaker 1: she was in the hallway when the officials emerged carrying
Speaker 1: the objects they had removed from the void. She watched
Speaker 1: them place these objects into padded transit cases.
Speaker 2: And she noted two things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, First, the objects were covered in a dense notation,
Speaker 1: an engraving that wasn't Latin, Greek, Arabic or any script
Speaker 1: she had encountered in twenty years of studying ancient art history.
Speaker 1: But the second detail, she was absolutely adamant about this.
Speaker 1: She said the objects were warm.
Speaker 2: Not just room temperature, warm, warmer than objects sealed in
Speaker 2: a cold stone room for five centuries should be, I believe,
Speaker 2: was her exact phrasing.
Speaker 1: Yes, And she clarified that she didn't just mean they
Speaker 1: felt warm to the touch because one of the officials
Speaker 1: had been holding them with their body heat. She said,
Speaker 1: you could feel the heat radiating off them as they
Speaker 1: passed by. They were warm from themselves.
Speaker 2: I get thermodynamics of that statement. It is staggering. Let's
Speaker 2: think about this. Logically, an object sealed in a dark, unventilated,
Speaker 2: thick stone room in Rome in fourteen ninety four should
Speaker 2: reach thermal equilibrium with its environment relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: Stone is a massive heat sink, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, For an object to remain perceptibly warm to the
Speaker 2: human sensus for five hundred and seven years, it must
Speaker 2: have an internal active mechanism for generating heat. It is
Speaker 2: actively radiating thermal energy. This entirely violates the basic physics
Speaker 2: of cold sealed storage.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you bury a hot brick in a
Speaker 1: stone wall, it's cold by Tuesday. This thing was hot
Speaker 1: half a millennium later. The Borges were notorious obsessive record keepers.
Speaker 1: They tracked every ounce of gold, every drop of wine,
Speaker 1: every political favor, but no inventorialist this room.
Speaker 2: Which means whatever was put back there was placed before
Speaker 2: the fresco is painted over it, intentionally sealing it out
Speaker 2: of history.
Speaker 1: It just makes you wonder, what kind of battery last
Speaker 1: five hundred years.
Speaker 2: Or moving away from the concept of a mechanical battery,
Speaker 2: what kind of material naturally decays at a rate that
Speaker 2: produces a steady, safe, but palpable heat for five centuries
Speaker 2: without fatally irradiating the rest of the Apostolic palace.
Speaker 1: That's a terrifying thought.
Speaker 2: The psychological weight of the Restorer's' observation is profound. She
Speaker 2: was an expert in historical materials. She knew how wood,
Speaker 2: stone and metal behave over centuries. She recognized instantly that
Speaker 2: she was looking at an absolute impossibility.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've looked at anomalous physics metallic spheres that float
Speaker 1: and hum, sourceless light, illuminating stone that wasn't born, and
Speaker 1: objects generating endless heat behind a fifteenth century wall. But
Speaker 1: if the Vatican is hiding objects that defy thermodynamics, what
Speaker 1: happens when they unearth the technology that simply shouldn't exist
Speaker 1: in human history?
Speaker 2: We are transitioning now from impossible physics to impossible engineering.
Speaker 1: Yes, we are heading to the tower of winds, specifically
Speaker 1: the intervalt in the year fifteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: This is a brilliant pivot because fifteen eighty two is
Speaker 2: arguably one of the most monumental years for humanity's relationship
Speaker 2: with time itself. Pope Gregory the thirteenth is implementing the
Speaker 2: Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar every single one of
Speaker 2: us still uses today.
Speaker 1: Right because the old Julian calendar, which was instituted by
Speaker 1: Julius Caesar, was slightly off, it miscalculated the solar year
Speaker 1: by about eleven minutes. Over fifteen centuries, those eleven minutes
Speaker 1: compounded and the calendar had drifted by ten full days.
Speaker 2: It was a huge problem.
Speaker 1: The spring equinox was happening on the wrong date, which
Speaker 1: meant Easter was being celebrated on the wrong day, which
Speaker 1: was a massive theological crisis for the church. They needed
Speaker 1: to fix time itself, and the Tower Winds was built
Speaker 1: specifically as the laboratory for this fix.
Speaker 2: It was an architectural marvel of its time. It had
Speaker 2: a precision hole drilled in the southern wall that let
Speaker 2: a single focused beam of sunlight trace a line across
Speaker 2: a marble floor the meridian line like.
Speaker 1: A giant sundial.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, this allowed the Papal astronomers to track the
Speaker 2: exact length of the solar year with mind boggs accuracy.
Speaker 1: But during the installation of that incredibly precise marble floor,
Speaker 1: the Stonemasons broke through the substrate into a hidden chamber below.
Speaker 2: A subterranean trapdoor leading to an older, deeper chamber that
Speaker 2: the tower's own Renaissance architects didn't even know existed when
Speaker 2: they built the tower. Over it.
Speaker 1: We only know what they found down there because of
Speaker 1: two obscure, fragmented documents that escape the archives. One is
Speaker 1: a mundane construction receipt for plaster and stone, but a
Speaker 1: foreman wrote a frantic margin note in Latin that translates
Speaker 1: to found a room below sealed per order of his holiness.
Speaker 1: Instruments therein not of known type.
Speaker 2: The second piece of evidence is much more damning. It's
Speaker 2: a personal letter from the lead Papal astronomer, Ignatio Dante,
Speaker 2: to a trusted mathematician colleague in Florence.
Speaker 1: And this letter was lost to history until it was
Speaker 1: discovered in the nineteen thirties misfiled in the Galileo collection.
Speaker 2: Dante was a genius. He was the man who essentially
Speaker 2: finalized the math for our modern calendar, and.
Speaker 1: He writes in this letter that he was permitted to
Speaker 1: climb down into the void and examine the instruments for
Speaker 1: exactly one afternoon. He stated they were clearly astronomical in nature,
Speaker 1: designed to track celestial bodies, but they operated on mechanical
Speaker 1: principles he couldn't even begin to determine.
Speaker 2: He described one device as a complex model of planetary
Speaker 2: motion that completely exceeded anything his century, or any century
Speaker 2: he knew of could produce.
Speaker 1: We really need to grasp the heavy irony here. The
Speaker 1: Gregorian calendar governs our modern lives down to the very microsecond.
Speaker 1: Every international flight departure, every stock market algorithm, every digital
Speaker 1: time stamp on your phone is based on the calculations
Speaker 1: finalized in that room.
Speaker 2: And yet that room was constructed directly above an astronomical
Speaker 2: instrument that terrified the smartest astronomer of the Renaissance era.
Speaker 1: Now I try to look at this logically. I keep
Speaker 1: thinking about the anti thea mechanism that ancient Greek analog
Speaker 1: computer found in a shipwreck that was used to predict
Speaker 1: astronomical positions. We know the Greeks had advanced clockwork. Could
Speaker 1: this just be a lost Greek device that ended up
Speaker 1: in Rome.
Speaker 2: It's a solid hypothesis, but we have to look at
Speaker 2: the observer. Dante knew his history. He was a master
Speaker 2: of the classical Greek and Roman texts. He knew what
Speaker 2: a water clock was. He understood ptolemaic astrolabes.
Speaker 1: So he would have recognized it exactly.
Speaker 2: He didn't write to his colleague saying I found a
Speaker 2: marvelous lost artifact of antiquity. He explicitly stated it was
Speaker 2: beyond anything human civilization had built or understood. He couldn't
Speaker 2: even identify the metals used in the gears.
Speaker 1: And what's deeply unsettling is the Vatican's immediate, ruthless response. Dante,
Speaker 1: the most important scientist in the Catholic world at that moment,
Speaker 1: was permitted to look for one afternoon. He was explicitly
Speaker 1: forbidden to sketch the devices. He was not allowed to
Speaker 1: return never again. That subterranean chamber has never been opened again.
Speaker 1: The incredibly precise marble floor of the Meridian Room was
Speaker 1: laid over the track door and has never been disturbed
Speaker 1: since fifteen eighty two. Think about that.
Speaker 2: It's incredible.
Speaker 1: The most precise calendar in human history was finalized literally
Speaker 1: on top of a mechanism that mapped the heavens better
Speaker 1: than the Renaissance masters could, and the Pope's reaction was
Speaker 1: to bury it forever.
Speaker 2: It suggests that the device didn't just track the Sun
Speaker 2: in the moon. It likely tracks celestial bodies or conceptualized
Speaker 2: the universe in a way that directly threatened the geocentric,
Speaker 2: Earth centered theology of the sixteenth century church. It wasn't
Speaker 2: just advanced, it was heretical by its very existence.
Speaker 1: That brings us to another buried machine, but this one
Speaker 1: was found much more recently under entirely different geopolitical circumstances.
Speaker 1: Let's jump forward to the year nineteen forty three. World
Speaker 1: War two is raging.
Speaker 2: Rome is under intense German military occupation.
Speaker 1: The Vatican is officially a neutral micro state, but behind
Speaker 1: the walls, they are panicking. They are terrified of being
Speaker 1: bombed by the Allies or raided by the Nazis, so
Speaker 1: they are rapidly extending a network of underground bunker passages
Speaker 1: beneath the Apostolic Palace to protect the Pope and key assets.
Speaker 2: It's a high stress, fast paced construction environment, entirely hidden
Speaker 2: from the outside world.
Speaker 1: A civilian construction worker named Aldo Raaldy is part of
Speaker 1: this tunneling crew. Roaldy kept a personal journal of his
Speaker 1: daily life, which his family preserved and later donated to
Speaker 1: a Roman heritage organization in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 2: According to Roaldy, his crew is digging a new lateral
Speaker 2: tunnel when their pickaxes break through a masonry wall into
Speaker 2: a pre existing completely undocumented chamber.
Speaker 1: This wasn't on any of the Vatican's master blueprints for
Speaker 1: the subterranean levels.
Speaker 2: Right and Raaldy actually gets a clear look inside with
Speaker 2: his flashlight before the Swiss Guard and Vatican personnel swarm
Speaker 2: the area and violently kick the civilian workers out.
Speaker 1: Roaldy wrote that the room wasn't just an empty Roman cistern.
Speaker 1: There were large heavy cases stacked neatly along one wall,
Speaker 1: and in the dead center of the floor, sitting in
Speaker 1: a plinth was a device. He described it as looking
Speaker 1: like a large clock, but with.
Speaker 2: No hands, a clock with no hands.
Speaker 1: That the visual isn't the weirdest part. He said, it
Speaker 1: was making a sound, a quiet, rhythmic, mechanical sound, like
Speaker 1: heavy gears turning flawlessly. But there was no visible power source.
Speaker 2: No electrical cables, no steam pipes, no water wheel, no
Speaker 2: mainspring being wound.
Speaker 1: Let's contextualize this. It is nineteen forty three, an underground
Speaker 1: chamber of unknown age, sealed off from the world, and
Speaker 1: a device is turning by itself in the dark.
Speaker 2: The imagery is just chilling.
Speaker 1: Imagine being in your basement knocking down a wall and
Speaker 1: fighting a machine that has been ticking since before you
Speaker 1: were born, with no plug, a machine endlessly ticking in
Speaker 1: the dark while World War II rages in the skies above.
Speaker 1: It ticking through the Cold War, ticking right now as
Speaker 1: we speak.
Speaker 2: Because the Vatican didn't dismantle it, they sealed it up,
Speaker 2: designated it Room B, and separated it from the new
Speaker 2: bunker network with a massive reinforced interior wall.
Speaker 1: And this is where the Vatticson's assertion of international sovereignty
Speaker 1: transitions from a political shield into a weapon of total secrecy.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty five, the War ends Allied intelligence agencies
Speaker 1: American and British asked to inspect portions of the Vatican's
Speaker 1: wartime shelter.
Speaker 2: Network, ostensibly for post war security assessments and to ensure
Speaker 2: no high level fascists are hiding down there.
Speaker 1: The Vatican outright declines the request for the roomb sector aggressively,
Speaker 1: citing their status as sovereign territory. They refused to look
Speaker 1: Allied engineers anywhere near a room that officially wasn't even
Speaker 1: on their own architectural blueprints.
Speaker 2: And we know for a fact that it is still there.
Speaker 1: Yes, a leak of Vatican facilities maintenance records in twenty
Speaker 1: twelve showed periodic structural and environmental checks for the Bunker
Speaker 1: network spanning from nineteen forty five to the present day.
Speaker 1: For eighty two consecutive years, the Ledger notation for roombe
Speaker 1: has remained exactly the same utility storage, stable, interior contents
Speaker 1: per original classification. Access strictly restricted.
Speaker 2: It has been turning for eighty two years. If you
Speaker 2: are an engineer, how do you explain a machine that
Speaker 2: produces a mechanical sound which requires kinetic friction for eight
Speaker 2: decades with no power source.
Speaker 1: I mean, I can't even get my Bluetooth headphones to
Speaker 1: hold a charge for a week, let alone eighty years.
Speaker 2: That is the textbook definition of impossible engineering. You are
Speaker 2: looking at either a literal perpetual motion mechanism which violates
Speaker 2: the laws of thermodynamics, or a power source so incredibly dense, efficient,
Speaker 2: and frictionless that it mimics perpetual motion to the human eye.
Speaker 1: Both options are mind blowing.
Speaker 2: But I also want to draw attention to this specific
Speaker 2: phrasing of Raaldy's observation a clock with no hands. If
Speaker 2: a mechanical device is turning rhythmically, it is keeping time
Speaker 2: or it is measuring a cyclical function, right, But if
Speaker 2: there are no hands, no dials, no output display, it
Speaker 2: isn't meant to communicate that measurement to a human observer.
Speaker 2: It's not a clock for us, it's keeping time for itself.
Speaker 2: Or it's counting down.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is a profoundly terrifying thought. A machine measuring
Speaker 1: an epoch we don't understand, counting down to who knows what,
Speaker 1: and speaking of things absolutely not meant for human hands.
Speaker 1: Let's look at it different kind of impossible technology. In
Speaker 1: nineteen oh three, a senior papal archaeologist is granted unprecedented,
Speaker 1: highly controversial access to survey the subcrypt beneath the Sancta Sanctorum.
Speaker 2: You have to explain the gravity of the Sanctus Sanctorum.
Speaker 2: It translates to the Holy of Holies. It is the
Speaker 2: private chapel of the medieval popes, located in the Lateran Palace,
Speaker 2: not the main Vatican complex.
Speaker 1: It's super exclusive.
Speaker 2: Oh. It contains relics so revered that for centuries only
Speaker 2: the pope could enter. Most famously, it houses an icon
Speaker 2: of Christ that Catholic tradition claims was painted by no
Speaker 2: human hand. The Achiropoietin It is quite literally one of
Speaker 2: the most spiritually restricted spaces in the history of Christendom.
Speaker 1: The nineteen oh three survey team gets permission to examine
Speaker 1: the foundations. They find a set of steep, worn stone
Speaker 1: stairs descending from the chapel floor into the bedrock, blocked
Speaker 1: by a massive ancient iron grate. But the grate isn't
Speaker 1: locked with the padlock, it's completely fused to its stone
Speaker 1: frame by centuries of intense calcium and iron deposits.
Speaker 2: The team has to spend four grueling days with chisels
Speaker 2: and acid just to cut the iron free.
Speaker 1: When they finally breach it and get down there, they
Speaker 1: find a chamber roughly twenty by thirty feet, and the
Speaker 1: very first thing the lead archaeologist notes is that the
Speaker 1: air in the room is dry.
Speaker 2: Which, to anyone who understands the hydrology of Rome is
Speaker 2: an absolute screaming anomaly.
Speaker 1: Explain why for everyone listening.
Speaker 2: Rome is a city built on a floodplain intersected by
Speaker 2: the Tiber River, sitting on top of thousands of years
Speaker 2: of porous ruins and aquifers. It is an incredibly wet,
Speaker 2: humid city. Basements, crips, and catacombs in Rome inevitably fill
Speaker 2: with water, dampness, and intense moisture over centuries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a weird old basement in my house
Speaker 1: and it's always damp, so I get how crazy that is.
Speaker 2: It's a nightmare for preservation. But this room hasn't. The
Speaker 2: air is dry, crisp, and stable, like a heavily controlled
Speaker 2: modern museum climate environment.
Speaker 1: Exactly. It implies that whatever mechanism or material property is
Speaker 1: maintaining the stability of that air has been operating flawlessly
Speaker 1: for the entire period. The iron grate was fusing to
Speaker 1: the rock, which is at minimums several centuries.
Speaker 2: But the dry air isn't the reason the team stops
Speaker 2: dead in their tracks.
Speaker 1: No, it's what they find sitting in carved niches along
Speaker 1: the walls, containers. But the nineteen oh three survey notes
Speaker 1: don't call them urns or boxes. They describe them using
Speaker 1: the specific Latin phrase materia incognita unknown material.
Speaker 2: The visual properties they describe are fascinating. They look metallic,
Speaker 2: possessing achine in a rigidity. But the archaeologists who are
Speaker 2: experts in antiquities test them and determine they aren't iron bronze, copper, silver, lead,
Speaker 2: or gold.
Speaker 1: They don't match anything.
Speaker 2: No, they don't match the thermal conductivity, the texture, the color,
Speaker 2: or the density of any known metal on the periodic
Speaker 2: table of the time.
Speaker 1: And most importantly, they show absolutely zero corrosion. None.
Speaker 2: Every other material in that crypt, the stone walls, the
Speaker 2: ancient mortar, the organic dust debris showed expected heavy signs
Speaker 2: of massive age and decay, but the containers were pristine.
Speaker 2: No oxidation, no rust, no discolouration, no pitting.
Speaker 1: It's like wandering into a moldy, crumbling medieval dungeon and
Speaker 1: finding a perfectly preserved, futuristic, seamless, stainless steel thermos just
Speaker 1: sitting on a rock, and that's the healthy. They couldn't
Speaker 1: even open them. The notes explicitly state there were no
Speaker 1: visible seams, no hinges, no rivets, no fasteners, and no lids.
Speaker 2: They appeared to be continuous, solid objects formed whole, meaning
Speaker 2: whatever is inside them was sealed without any evidence of
Speaker 2: how the ceiling was physically accomplished.
Speaker 1: The zineteen oh three teen was baffled. They spent six
Speaker 1: full days in that crypt trying to analyze the material
Speaker 1: with every chemical and physical method available to turn to
Speaker 1: the century science. They tried to scratch it. They applied acid,
Speaker 1: they weighed, they completely failed to make a dent.
Speaker 2: They compiled their report and informed Pulpious the tenth. The result,
Speaker 2: the Vatican didn't fund a deeper scientific inquirity. Instead, the
Speaker 2: subcrypt was abruptly resealed. In nineteen oh four. It was
Speaker 2: declared off limits forever, ostensibly to preserve the chapel's structural integrity.
Speaker 1: But we know they're still there. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: a Vatican Archaeological Commission report released a heavily vetted partial
Speaker 1: catalog of historical surveys. It included a tiny, almost missible
Speaker 1: footnote about the nineteen oh three survey that simply read
Speaker 1: Subcrypt examination discontinued materials in situ in.
Speaker 2: Situ meaning in their original place.
Speaker 1: Sixty five years later, the Vatican quietly confirms in a
Speaker 1: footnote that the containers are still exactly where they were left.
Speaker 1: They haven't opened them because they physically can't open them.
Speaker 2: I want you to think about the poetic resonance of
Speaker 2: this location. It's breathtaking. The chapel above is world famous
Speaker 2: for an icon supposedly not painted by human hands. It's
Speaker 2: a miracle of divine creation, and underneath the crypt directly
Speaker 2: below contains physical, tangible vessels manufactured by no metallurgical method.
Speaker 2: Humans possess made of a material that defies earthly decay,
Speaker 2: somehow maintaining a localized perfect climate in a damp, subterranean ruin.
Speaker 1: The Vatican's strategy here isn't just basic secrecy. It's quarantined
Speaker 1: by architectural mandate. They are using the holiest spaces as
Speaker 1: buffer zones against the inexplicable.
Speaker 2: Oh exactly, Okay.
Speaker 1: We have escalated from anomalous physics in the archives to
Speaker 1: impossible machines in the bunkers. Now we are moving to
Speaker 1: the third category of our deep dive today, and honestly,
Speaker 1: this is the most unsettling part of our exploration. We're
Speaker 1: moving away from objects and entering the realm of biology.
Speaker 2: We are talking about encounters with the other evidence of entities, biology,
Speaker 2: and sentience that fundamentally challenge the human centric view of
Speaker 2: history and theology.
Speaker 1: This is where the stakes reach their absolute peak. When
Speaker 1: an institution built entirely on the premise of human spiritual primacy,
Speaker 1: the idea that humans are the unique central creation of
Speaker 1: the universe encounters something definitively biological and definitively non human.
Speaker 1: That cognitive dissonance is staggering.
Speaker 2: It's an existential threat.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the Ethiopian scriptoring incident. In nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: Three massive, heavily secured wooden crates arrive at the Vatican
Speaker 1: Apostolic Life Library, shipped directly from Addis Ababa. Now context
Speaker 1: is key here. This is during Mussolini's brutal Ethiopian campaign.
Speaker 2: The Italian fascist occupation is tearing through the country, looting
Speaker 2: and disrupting ancient, incredibly isolated monastery networks. These specific crates
Speaker 2: came from a site in Lallabella.
Speaker 1: And Lallabella is crucial to understanding what happens next. It
Speaker 1: is one of the oldest, most mysterious monastic sites in
Speaker 1: the world. The famous churches there aren't built from the
Speaker 1: ground up. They are carved downward out of solid living bedrock,
Speaker 1: straight into the earth.
Speaker 2: The religious traditions preserved in Lallabella pre date Western European
Speaker 2: Christianity by a massive margin. They have texts and histories
Speaker 2: that the rest of the Christian world lost or destroyed
Speaker 2: centuries ago.
Speaker 1: So these crates arrive in Rome, a junior Vatican cataloger,
Speaker 1: starts unpacking the manuscripts and immediately realizes he's out of
Speaker 1: his depth. The texts are written in Gaya's, the classical
Speaker 1: ancient Ethiopian script, but the vocabulary and syntags are being
Speaker 1: used to describe something the language wasn't designed for.
Speaker 2: He correctly flags it and calls in father Aurelio Marchetti.
Speaker 2: Marchetti is the library's senior expert in Semitic scripts. He's
Speaker 2: a man with forty years of academic theology and linguistic experience.
Speaker 2: He has read everything.
Speaker 1: Marchetti looks at the texts, turns pale, and asks for
Speaker 1: three days alone with the crates in a secure reading room.
Speaker 1: On the fourth day, he emerges and demands an immediate
Speaker 1: meeting with the library prefect.
Speaker 2: And whatever Marchetti said to the Prefect in that room
Speaker 2: isn't recorded in the official minutes, but the resulting action
Speaker 2: is explosive.
Speaker 1: Explosive is right. The Prefect immediately writes a high priority
Speaker 1: memo to the Vatican Secretary of State restricting the Lalla
Speaker 1: Bella documents from all research permanently, and Marchetti. Marchetti, a
Speaker 1: man who had dedicated four decades to the Vatican library,
Speaker 1: is quickly quietly transferred to a minor teaching post in Bologna.
Speaker 1: He never sets foot in the Vatican again.
Speaker 2: He essentially gets exiled. It's a classic bureaucratic neutralization. But
Speaker 2: what did he read that was so dangerous?
Speaker 1: We only know because when Marchetti died in nineteen teen
Speaker 1: sixty one, his family found an unmailed letter to his
Speaker 1: brother hidden in the false bottom of his personal desk.
Speaker 1: A German historian managed to view this letter and quoted
Speaker 1: one single chilling line from it in a two thousand
Speaker 1: and three academic volume on Vatican's censorship.
Speaker 2: What did he write?
Speaker 1: Marchetti wrote about the Lalla Bella texts. What the text
Speaker 1: described as existing before the first day is not allegorical.
Speaker 1: The measurements given are precise, The entities described are not angels.
Speaker 2: If you are listening to this, I need you to
Speaker 2: sit with the sheer weight of that word precise. Marchetti
Speaker 2: was a master theologian. He spent his entire life reading allegories, parables,
Speaker 2: and spiritual metaphors. If an ancient text says a giant
Speaker 2: stood as Paul's a mountain, a scholar like Marchetti knows
Speaker 2: that's poetry, it's symbolic. But Marchetti was horrified precisely because
Speaker 2: the text wasn't poetry. It was technical. It provided exact
Speaker 2: mathematical physical dimensions for entities that existed before the First Day,
Speaker 2: meaning before the biblical creation of her.
Speaker 1: It's not a myth, it's an engineering or biological schematic
Speaker 1: of pre biblical entities. A forty year theologians worldview was
Speaker 1: so utterly shattered by reading precise measurements of non angelic
Speaker 1: beings that he hit a letter in his desk and
Speaker 1: spent the remaining twenty four years of his life in
Speaker 1: complete silence.
Speaker 2: And the Vatican. In twenty eleven, a consortium of Ethiopian
Speaker 2: scholars petitioned the Vatican requesting access to those specific crates
Speaker 2: to reclaim their cultural heritage. The Vatican responded with a
Speaker 2: one sentenced denial stating that the materials were restricted pending review.
Speaker 1: Pending review for eighty eight years. Unbelievable, and Marchidi wasn't
Speaker 1: the only one finding evidence of things from before the
Speaker 1: first Let's jump to nineteen thirty nine. Pope Pious the
Speaker 1: twelfth authorizes a highly secretive, deeply symbolic excavation directly beneath
Speaker 1: the floor of Saint Peter's Basilica.
Speaker 2: The explicit goal is to dig down and find the
Speaker 2: actual tomb of Saint Peter himself in the Vatican Necropolis,
Speaker 2: a buried street of first century Roman mausoleums that the
Speaker 2: modern Basilica was built over.
Speaker 1: Three months into the delicate dig, a worker's pickaxe breaks
Speaker 1: through a stone floor that shouldn't be there, opening a
Speaker 1: hole into a massive, unmapped void below the Necropolis.
Speaker 2: The archaeologists are thrilled at first. They lower a lantern
Speaker 2: into the darkness. The walls of this deep chamber are
Speaker 2: heavily covered in markings and in grievings, but crucially, when
Speaker 2: you read the field notes of the four Pontifical Academy
Speaker 2: archaeologists on site, none of them will describe those markings
Speaker 2: as either Christian or Roman.
Speaker 1: The excavation team widens the hole and descends. According to
Speaker 1: the shift logs, they spend exactly forty seven minutes in
Speaker 1: this deep, sub level chamber. We only know the number
Speaker 1: forty seven because a meticulous formant noted the duration in
Speaker 1: the margin. But what the team actually did down there
Speaker 1: or what they saw in the lantern light was entirely
Speaker 1: omitted from the official excavation reports.
Speaker 2: However, the team leader's private journal was donated to a
Speaker 2: Roman university archive by his widow in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 2: The university researchers eagerly opened it, only to find that
Speaker 2: the entire passage describing the forty seven minute to disas
Speaker 2: is heavily redacted.
Speaker 1: But it's not just neatly crossed out. Someone took a
Speaker 1: thick black pen and scribbled over the words so violently,
Speaker 1: pressing so hard that the paper itself is deeply indented
Speaker 1: and torn in places.
Speaker 2: But modern forensic archival techniques are incredible. Under strong angled
Speaker 2: raking light, researchers were able to read a few fragmented
Speaker 2: words pressed into the paper beneath the ink. The legible
Speaker 2: phrases included not from here and echoing Father Marquette's Ethiopian manuscripts,
Speaker 2: the exact phrase before the first.
Speaker 1: Pope, Pious the twelfth, was informed of the discovery that
Speaker 1: very evening in his private apartments. Within seventy two hours,
Speaker 1: the sub level access point was completely sealed with hundreds
Speaker 1: of gallons of poored industrial concrete.
Speaker 2: I want to analyze the timeline and logistics of that
Speaker 2: decision because it reviews everything the Vatican bureaucracy historically moves
Speaker 2: at a glacial centuries long pace. To authorize the logistical
Speaker 2: nightmare of mixing and pouring massive amounts of wet concrete
Speaker 2: inside the holiest Basilica and Christendom over an active archaeological
Speaker 2: site within three days implies absolute unadulterated panic at the
Speaker 2: highest level of the church.
Speaker 1: What could make a pope poor concrete over part of
Speaker 1: his own church in a single evening exactly?
Speaker 2: And the workers on the crew knew something was profoundly wrong.
Speaker 2: Decades later, long after the pope had died, four surviving
Speaker 2: members of that original twelve percon digging crew gave separate
Speaker 2: interviews to different historians. Two of them, questioned in different
Speaker 2: cities twenty years apart, with absolutely no known contact between them,
Speaker 2: used almost identical chilling phrasing to describe what they saw
Speaker 2: in the lantern light.
Speaker 1: What they say.
Speaker 2: One said there were things down there that hadn't been
Speaker 2: placed by human hands. The other said the markings on
Speaker 2: those walls were not made by people.
Speaker 1: It entirely resists coincidence. You have a forensic redaction saying
Speaker 1: not from here, unconnected labors saying not made by people,
Speaker 1: and a sitting pope panic pouring concrete and devalidate at all.
Speaker 1: Modern ground penetrating radars s conducted in the early two
Speaker 1: thousands for structural assessments of the Basilica clearly show a massive,
Speaker 1: anomalous void exactly where this chamber is supposed to be.
Speaker 2: It exists in engineering records as a void, it exists
Speaker 2: in construction logs as a massive concrete pore, and it
Speaker 2: exists in official archaeological publications as completely non existent, the.
Speaker 1: Little quarantine of reality. But what if they don't just
Speaker 1: find ancient texts or weird markings on a wall. What
Speaker 1: if they find bodies? This brings us to nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six and a restoration worker inside the Casino po the fourth.
Speaker 2: This is a stunning, incredibly beautiful Renaissance villa tucked away
Speaker 2: in the lush Vatican gardens. Popius the eleventh had just
Speaker 2: designated this specific building as the permanent prestigious home for
Speaker 2: the Pontifical Academy of.
Speaker 1: Sciences, which is incredibly ironic as the scientific method is
Speaker 1: about to collide violently with something it cannot categorize. During
Speaker 1: structural reinforcement work in the basement, the masonry team breaks
Speaker 1: through the Roman Era foundation into a much older, low
Speaker 1: ceiling perfectly circular void cut directly into the bedrock of
Speaker 1: the Vatican Hill.
Speaker 2: Along the curved walls of this void are carved stone shelves,
Speaker 2: and sitting on those shelves are more than thirty heavy
Speaker 2: ceramic containers. They are completely sealed with a hardened dark
Speaker 2: stone like resin.
Speaker 1: But over the centuries the bedrock had shifted slightly and
Speaker 1: some of the resin seals on a few containers had
Speaker 1: cracked open. Inside the cracked containers were biological specimens.
Speaker 2: The official restoration documentation for the villa shows a blatant
Speaker 2: two page break in the daily records for the three
Speaker 2: days following this discovery. It's just blank. Then on the
Speaker 2: fourth day, a terse administrative note simply says subfloor void
Speaker 2: assessed contents secured per prefect instruction.
Speaker 1: But the restoration supervisor was a prolific letter writer. He
Speaker 1: wrote letters to his wife almost every day, and these
Speaker 1: letters were recovered from his family estate in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: He wrote to her about the day they breached the void,
Speaker 1: he looked through the cracked resin seals with his flashlight.
Speaker 2: Described seeing skeletal elements in a state of preservation that
Speaker 2: made absolutely no sense for their subterranean age. But it
Speaker 2: wasn't the preservation that broke him. It was the physical proportions.
Speaker 1: He specifically described a cranial structure, a skull visible inside
Speaker 1: one of the cracked containers. He wrote to his wife,
Speaker 1: and I am quoting the translation exactly. It is not
Speaker 1: a human skull, and it is not an animal skull.
Speaker 1: And I have no third category.
Speaker 2: No third category. That is the exact language of a
Speaker 2: rational mind encountering a total taxonomic failure. Think about the
Speaker 2: sheer terror of that moment.
Speaker 1: It's just wild to imagine being in issues.
Speaker 2: He is looking at a biological reality, a physical skull
Speaker 2: with eye sockets and bone structure that fundamentally does not
Speaker 2: fit into the established binary dichotomy of life on Earth
Speaker 2: as he understands it. It breaks the tree of life.
Speaker 1: And here is the dark, almost comedic poetry of it all.
Speaker 1: The Pontifical Academy of Sciences moved into that villa in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six for ninety years some of the most
Speaker 1: brilliant scientist minds of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.
Speaker 1: Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists have been meeting
Speaker 1: in that villa, sitting in ornate chairs, advising the Pope
Speaker 1: on the origins of life and the nature of the cosmos,
Speaker 1: And directly beneath their Italian leather shoes, sealed in the
Speaker 1: bedrock is a room containing thirty skulls that defy the
Speaker 1: very taxonomy of life on Earth. The Vatican's top scientists
Speaker 1: have been philosophizing about the boundaries of science directly on
Speaker 1: top of the physical evidence that shatters those boundaries, and
Speaker 1: the Vatican knows it's there.
Speaker 2: Eleaked two thousand and nine Facilities Maintenance circular confirms the
Speaker 2: sub basement room is still sealed, still classified under the
Speaker 2: original nineteen thirty six directive, with strictly no acxis allowed,
Speaker 2: even to the scientists working upstairs.
Speaker 1: It's astounding, But I want to end our deep dive
Speaker 1: into these ten rooms with one final space, because this
Speaker 1: last room brings everything we've talked about today, the physics,
Speaker 1: the engineering, the biology, and the entities into one unifying,
Speaker 1: terrifying concept.
Speaker 2: We are going to the Pall, the sixth Audience Hall,
Speaker 2: and the year is nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: The Pall, the sixth Audience Hall, is an architectural masterpiece.
Speaker 1: It's the massive, sweeping, modern assembly space designed for papal
Speaker 1: general audiences. It seats thousands.
Speaker 2: It was designed by pure Luigi Nervi, who was a
Speaker 2: brilliant world renowned structural engineer known for his work with
Speaker 2: reinforced concrete.
Speaker 1: During the initial excavation for the hall's massive deep foundations,
Speaker 1: a drilling team breaks into a finished ancient stone room
Speaker 1: very deep in the Vatican Earth. A brave or foolish
Speaker 1: worker goes down into the hole on a rope before
Speaker 1: the Vatican officials arrive on site.
Speaker 2: He later tells his crew what he saw in the darkness.
Speaker 2: He says the room was surprisingly empty except for a
Speaker 2: free standing, complex geometric object resting in the center, roughly
Speaker 2: at chest height. He couldn't tell if it was stone
Speaker 2: or metal.
Speaker 1: But he said that when he stepped off the rope
Speaker 1: and his boots hit the floor of the room, the
Speaker 1: object's surface shifted.
Speaker 2: And we need to be clear about what he meant
Speaker 2: by shifted. It wasn't a dramatic mechanical unfolding like a
Speaker 2: clockwork toy. No.
Speaker 1: He described it as a subtle fluid change across the
Speaker 1: surface geometry that he couldn't rationally explain. He said it
Speaker 1: was as if something inside the object recognized that someone
Speaker 1: had entered.
Speaker 2: Sentience, not just kinetic motion like the spheres and Room zero,
Speaker 2: but a responsive, localized awareness to human presence.
Speaker 1: The Vatican officials finally arrive, order everyone back and go
Speaker 1: down into the hole. They come back up twenty minutes later,
Speaker 1: completely silent, and the foundation plans for the multimillion dollar
Speaker 1: building are literally redrawn on the spot.
Speaker 2: Nerve's original master blueprints, which are preserved in his family's
Speaker 2: architectural archive, show a frantic, irregular mid construction adjustment. They
Speaker 2: are ordered to route the thousands of tons of foundation
Speaker 2: concrete entirely around this underground space, leaving the chamber intact
Speaker 2: but permanently entombed within the foundation of the modern building.
Speaker 1: But the story of the audience Hall doesn't end with
Speaker 1: the concrete foundation. The architecture above ground reflects what is
Speaker 1: buried below. We have to look at the stage sculpture
Speaker 1: inside the hall.
Speaker 2: Yes, if you've ever seen a photo of the Pope
Speaker 2: speaking in this hall, you've seen the stage behind the
Speaker 2: papal throne is a massive, incredibly intense bronze sculpture by
Speaker 2: the artist Pericle Fitzini.
Speaker 1: It's called The Resurrection. It depicts Christ's rising, but not peacefully.
Speaker 1: He is rising from a chaotic, twisted blast cloud that
Speaker 1: looks like a nuclear explosion or a meteor strike. It
Speaker 1: is a deeply unsettling piece of art.
Speaker 2: Fatcini worked on it obsessively for twelve years. In a
Speaker 2: rare nineteen eighty five interview near the end of his life,
Speaker 2: Fazeni admitted his core inspiration didn't come from theology. It
Speaker 2: came from a VIP visit to the construction site before
Speaker 2: the hall was finished.
Speaker 1: He was shown the excavation void. He saw something in
Speaker 1: the foundation that gave him, in his exact words, a
Speaker 1: precise image of emergence, of something dormant becoming present.
Speaker 2: He saw the geometric object, He felt that sentience, that awareness,
Speaker 2: and he spent over a decade channeling the terror and
Speaker 2: awe of a dormant entity waking up into a sixty
Speaker 2: six foot wide bronze sculpture.
Speaker 1: Every single week the Pope holds general audiences for thousands
Speaker 1: of smiling tourists and pilgrims. In that hall, he sits
Speaker 1: on a stage directly beneath Fazini's screening sculpture of emergents,
Speaker 1: and directly above a sealed utility void containing a geometric
Speaker 1: artifact that actively responds to human presence.
Speaker 2: If we pull all these threads together from today's exploration,
Speaker 2: the implications are staggering. We've looked at ten rooms spanning
Speaker 2: seventeen centuries of Vatican history.
Speaker 1: We have metallic spheres that float and hum uncorrodable metals
Speaker 1: maintaining dry microclimates in wet ruins, star charts from alien
Speaker 1: vantage points generating half a millennium of heat, pre biblical
Speaker 1: manuscripts detailing the exact measurements of non angelic entities, an
Speaker 1: endorment reactive artifact entombed beneath the Pope's chair.
Speaker 2: It all circles right back to that exhausted librarian in
Speaker 2: sixteen eleven, standing in front of an empty room, feeling
Speaker 2: the cold, still air of something that fundamentally does not
Speaker 2: belong in our world, and deciding to just write down
Speaker 2: room zero and walk.
Speaker 1: What an institution chooses to keep locked away, speaks volumes
Speaker 1: about what they believe humanity is unequipped to handle. The
Speaker 1: Vatican is not just passively hoarding cool historical artifacts. They're
Speaker 1: actively continuously managing anomalies that threaten the foundational narratives of physics, biology, history,
Speaker 1: and theology. They're performing ongoing containment.
Speaker 2: Which brings me to a lingering, provocative thought for you
Speaker 2: to chew on as we wrap up.
Speaker 1: Let's hear it.
Speaker 2: What if the Vatican's intense multi century secrecy isn't just
Speaker 2: a cynical act of hoarding power and knowledge. What if
Speaker 2: it's an act of necessary quarantine. What if these ten
Speaker 2: rooms aren't just holding weird objects, but are actually load
Speaker 2: bearing pillars of our reality.
Speaker 1: If you knew that opening a door would unequivocally prove
Speaker 1: that we are not alone, that we are not the
Speaker 1: center of the universe, and that we are not even
Speaker 1: the masters of our own physical laws, would you turn
Speaker 1: the key?
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate philosophical question of whether humanity is
Speaker 2: entitled to the truth, even if that truth is fundamentally
Speaker 2: in compatible with our sanity and our societal structures.
Speaker 1: We've unpacked a massive stack of historical anomalies today on
Speaker 1: thrilling threads. But now we want to turn it over
Speaker 1: to you. Which of these ten forbidden rings would you
Speaker 1: open first? And why do you want to see? The
Speaker 1: floating spheres, the alien star chart, the machine that ticks
Speaker 1: without power or the skulls with no category. What's your
Speaker 1: stand on whether humanity deserves to know or if some
Speaker 1: doors should absolutely remain sealed for our own good. Drop
Speaker 1: a comment to answer, and don't forget to tell us
Speaker 1: where you're tuning in from until next time. Keep pulling
Speaker 1: at those threads